Dean, inheritor of Hermes's swiftness and cunning legacy, pressed down on the severed arm of a guild-mate who had passed out from shock and blood loss, his face contorted in a grimace of shock. A dark-red stain bloomed on the dusty ground as blood poured out from the severed limb, creating a gruesome scene.
"We're never gonna win against those shits…" he muttered with a shaky voice, his pale face reflecting the hopelessness that gripped them all. His words mirrored Kael's darkest fear, a grim acknowledgement of their inevitable defeat.
"...and those were only their avatars," added Savitri, heir of the Goddess Ganga's calming, healing power. Her voice cracked, almost breaking under the weight of the truth.
She knelt, her hands glowing with a gentle, otherworldly green glow as she worked to repair the gruesome wound, the member's intestines spilling out in a grotesque display.
Everyone went quiet. They lowered their heads, only the ragged gasps for air and the sound of Savitri's quiet, focused murmurs as she worked to save their companion's life.
They knew, with grim certainty, that they'd have to fight the outer gods' avatars again soon.
And the harsh reality tightened around Kael's heart like a vise. His own lack of power, his inability to truly contribute, felt like a constant, burning shame.
He, still crouching nearby, could only watch bitterly, a knot if impotent rage tightening in his gut. If he had more power, if his Soul Sea was more vast, if he were anything more than a low-ranked Awakened, he would have helped.
He would've charged without needing to be asked, without a thought for his own insignificant life. But the brutal truth was, he couldn't even reach Rank Two, despite years of desperate effort.
He was weak, useless.
This guild was one of the few remaining bastions of humanity that had survived while fighting the outer gods and their infernal armies. Even though all of them had already reached the Transcendent rank, wielding powers that had once belonged to the gods, they still couldn't beat the cosmic horrors who had invaded Earth decades ago.
The gods had been replaced by something far worse, and humanity was being slowly agonizingly devoured.
To survive, Kael had learned, he had to join one of these guilds. It was the only way to avoid becoming a literal meal for the roaming horrors.
But joining them meant becoming their punching bag, their personal free servant, enduring their constant mockery and disdain. He hated it.
Suddenly, one of the members, Risha, the heir of the Oracle of Delphi, began to float in the air, her legs crossed in a serene, meditative pose that seemed utterly out of place amidst the ruin. Her eyes, normally a bright, vibrant green, had turned completely white, glowing with an eerie light.
The whole guild looked at her in surprise, then with a flicker of desperate hope, a fleeting, almost pathetic wish that she'd give a prophecy that could somehow help them win against the outer gods. They were gasping at straws, drowning in their own helplessness.
"You must use the Amrita's power to defeat all the outer gods…" she said, her voice hollow and ancient, a single, chilling line that seemed to echo from the abyss of time itself.
Then, her ethereal glow faded, and she collapsed, falling back to the earth, unconscious, her body a limp, broken rag doll amidst the debris.
The others looked at each other, their faces etched with a bitter, defeated understanding.
"Amrita was destroyed by that stupid bastard, the heir of Loki, a long time ago. He desecrated the sacred vessel holding the Amrita, spilling it into the void," said Tobias, heir of Promotheus's defiant spirit, his voice utterly devoid of hope, his expression blank. "Fucking idiot."
His words were followed by a suffocating silence. No one knew what to do after hearing Risha's prophecy, offering no clear path forward. They were trapped.
"We can go back to the past to retrieve it before it was destroyed…" Harry, heir of Kronos' power, suggested, his voice low. "It's a long shot, but what else have we got?"
A spark of hope flickered to life within the team, momentarily lifting their exhaustion. They started discussing who should go, their voices rising in a sudden, desperate fervor.
"Who's stable enough?"
"Can we even pinpoint a time?"
They were debating as well that the power of time was a treacherous thing, unstable and chaotic, capable of sending any of them to a wrong place, potentially annihilating their very existence.
But Harry's next words, spoken with a strained, pained effort, shut everyone up. "I think I can only send one person. This place is unstable for me to use the power properly…"
His voice trailed off, lost in the slight shimmers that distorted the air around him. "One person only. That's all I can manage. One shot, that's it."
Everyone fell silent again , the flicker of hope extinguished. They were thinking the same problem they had faced when using their powers during the chaotic battle—their abilities, though immense, were unstable, constantly fluctuating under the oppressive influence of the outer gods' avatars.
"So… who's going back?" Dean asked, his eyes sweeping from one member to the next, a grim question that weighed by the implicit danger of the mission.
No one volunteered. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating, punctuated only by their ragged breaths and the distant roars of the monsters.
No one wanted to face the unknown terrors of the past, to step into a temporal labyrinth from which there might be no return.
"I can go get it" a voice said from the back. It was Kael.
The team's laughter erupted, a harsh mockery that scraped against Kael's emotions.
"You? Go back in time? Ha! You're barely holding on to your own existence, let alone navigating the timestream," Dean sneered, his voice dripping with disdain.
Savitri's laughter was tinged with a patronizing smile. "Kael, sweetie, you're not even Rank Two yet. What makes you think you can handle a mission like this?"
The others chimed in, their voices overlapping in a cacophony of ridicule.
"He'd get lost in his own thoughts, let alone the past!"
"Yeah, and he'd probably end up in the Stone Age!"
Kael's face burned with humiliation, his eyes stinging from the verbal barrage. He knew he wasn't capable, but he'd spoken out of desperation, out of a longing to prove himself. The team's mockery cut deep, leaving him feeling even more insignificant than before.