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The battle was spectacular, and it was amazing to see Elyse fight. She moved with a renewed speed, her ax slicing through the air with precision, and she flicked her chain out at X as if it were a sword. When she aimed it right, the chain twisted itself around X’s arm, and she yanked him closer. As soon as he was within range, she hit him with the back of the ax, using the staff as a lance of sorts, fighting as she had with the lance she had been training with in the beginning.
All her training was paying off. She wielded her weapons with skill and ease.
And it didn’t take long before X appeared worried. I could see the dread in his eyes. When we’d arrived, X’s eyes had glowed a deep red, the pits of an eternal flame burning in hell. But as I watched, the color changed. The red grew brighter, shallower, and eventually, fear overtook them completely. His eyes didn’t only lose their hue, but they changed color completely. Before long, his eyes looked like ice.
And he was busy losing. Elyse spun around him, moving back and forth, catching him with her chain and hitting him in the face or the back of the head with either the back of her ax or the lance. And he couldn’t do anything but try to parry her blows.
She was too strong for him, too fast. It looked like every single soul X had devoured still hadn’t given him the force he needed.
“Elyse, let’s work something out,” he pleaded.
How pathetic, he was trying to make a deal.
“Don’t you understand how it works?” Elyse snapped. “There are no deals to be had. You deserve the same fate you offered every soul you devoured.”
X’s eyes widened when he understood what she was saying. There would be no forgiveness. He’d stepped out of line and murdered so many people, and now he’d be punished for his deeds. He was immortal, as were the rest of us, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t be condemned to an eternal hell himself.
It was where he’d escaped from, after all. And I was pretty sure it was the one place he never wanted to go back to. Why else would he have broken free from Hades and stayed on Earth otherwise?
“No!” he bellowed when Elyse’s words sunk in, and there was nothing he could do about it. Not even plead, beg, or bargain.
X reached down deep to find the core of his power and threw so much darkness at Elyse that the world around us went black. None of us could see anything.
Panic curled in my gut, my muscles flexed, and I readied to step forward to intervene.
“Elyse!” I yelled.
But a moment later, at the center of the blackness, a bright light shone. The light came from Elyse herself, as she glowed from inside, and she radiated with energy the way all the gods did when they were at Mount Olympus. When Heracles had redeemed himself and gained entrance to Mount Olympus, he hadn’t shone as brightly as Elyse. A feeling of breathlessness filled me at how proud I was of her achievements.
“Go back to where you came from,” she cried, swinging her ax over her head and looking at X with steely, determined eyes.
“Please, don’t send me back there,” he begged, and it sickened me to see his pitiful state.
But Elyse wasn’t listening to his pleading. Not only had he killed so many of the people whom she protected, but he’d hurt her personally, too. He’d kidnapped her best friend, and he tried to kill Elyse so many times. Not to mention the innocents who never received an afterlife.
For the wicked, there would be no rest.
She swung the ax over her head, the blade whistling through the air as she whirled it faster and faster and then she brought it down on X. He turned to run, but she was faster than he was, stronger. The blade sliced him from the crown of his head right through the middle of his body to his feet.
I cringed at how much that would hurt.
“Fucking ouch,” Ares muttered.
Instead of splitting in two, as I half-expected, X fell to the ground and his whole body trembled. Black fog poured through the split Elyse had created down his middle, as if it were all X consisted of.
He grabbed at himself, clutching his chest and his stomach as if he could keep himself physically together. His whimpers sickened me. When he looked at us, his eyes locked on Hades and they stared at each other as X melted into the ground. Hades’s face tightened, and he stiffened as if sensing the descent of X back to his rightful place. The Earth drew Death into its embrace.
It didn’t take long before he seeped through the Earth completely, and X was gone.
I prayed to my brother this was the end, and he’d remain gone.
The five of us stood in a group, staring at Elyse, who glowed, her weapons vanishing. She stood with a wide stance, her fists on her hips, her elbows wide. The triumphant look on her face was possibly the most beautiful thing about her. And my heart thumped in my chest for her, for everything she fought for, and how she was mine.
Until now, she believed herself to be a failure. But she’d just succeeded in her mission, fulfilling her calling as a demigoddess, and she’d defeated X once and for all.
