Kronos was called the crooked one for good reason.
Assaulting Olympus when a prophecy, despite what the Fates say, was rigged against him? Merely a ruse to something greater.
No, with Gaea rising and the emperors of old waiting in the wings, it was...
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Knight would like to think that he knew every sort of being that called Tartarus home. Maybe not as intimately as Queen and especially not Jack, but if Brontes and Steropes tested him with flashcards he believed he could at least name them after a few moments. From telekhines, to his mentor's former jailer-turned-chief-librarian, Kampe. Harpies, to Echidna, the Mother of All Monsters, whose twenty-five hundredth party he attended (and was still trying to determine that family tree), there wasn't a type of creature he didn't know.
But the hulking, black four-eyed being steadily approaching destroyed his hypothesis.
It was unlike anything he had ever seen before, a mass of seemingly endless tentacles rapidly weaving themselves together into a bipedal shape that grew larger with each step. A pair of leathery bat-like wings on its back that were so small they made the karpoi's seem appropriately proportional in comparison. A squarish head with four glowing violet eyes that scanned the surrounding warehouse in quick thorough sweeps, while its mouth hung open, revealing dozens of equally dark, long fangs.
And yet it wasn't its composition that held his attention, but the three claws that emerged from each of its hands instead of fingers.
Long and curved like a scythe, they were made of a glowing violet crystalline material that seemed at odds with the rest of its composition- save for perhaps its eyes. They loosely swung with each step the growing titan took, missing the smooth cement floor by millimeters. However, as the purple pendulums reached the bottom of their swing, the floor beneath turned molten; momentarily taking on the same eerie color before changing to white and then yellow as it cooled. It was a horrifying detail that he was sure most would overlook, but the melting point of cement was approximately sixteen-hundred degrees Celsius- nearly a fifth of the surface temperature of the sun -and yet nothing else its immediate area was melting or even bursting into flames.
"Friend of yours?" Annabeth gulped beside him, her newly forged dagger drawn and invisibility cap in hand.
"I-"
A Celestial Bronze hellhound appeared from between a stack of O.S.I. shipping containers, a lightning cannon rising from a panel on it back as it drifted around the corner- placing itself in the unknown creature's path. The mass-produced canine hunched down as the air around its weapon arced with divine generated electricity. It barked once and opened its mechanical jaws again- only for it to fall to the floor in pieces as a blur of purple and black flashed above it. The automaton cut laterally from snout to tail in five molten pieces by an attack he could barely perceive.
"NOPE!" The Son of Kronos cried as he placed both his hands on Shatter's hilt and held the blade perpendicular to his chest. With hardly a thought, his weapon's weight dropped to virtually nothing as its blade rapidly grew in length, crossing the distance separating them from the intruder faster than the blink of an eye and piercing impaling the center of the creature's chest. It was a risky, sloppy move both Krios and Hyperion chided him time and time again as it left him off balance, but if used to strike a vital point it was worth the risk- especially if it meant sparing someone he cared about from conflict.
