“Hey, it’s time for a flashback.”

“What do you mean flashback? You can’t just drop a bomb like that and then go back to joking Aaron!”

“Typhon, there is a time and place for everything. We can freak out after this flashback detailing how I escaped and killed Toy Maker.”

“Aaron that makes no sense, you’re looking into space but there is nothing there! Are you still unstable?”

“Typhon, try and think about what you just said, and recall that I acted nearly the same since I met you.”

“Oh god… you were always unstable.”

“Hey!”

Odysseus felt it. The ability which made him a Lord was on one side, unnecessary at current, but there for his use… No, he was focusing on his other one.

Odyssey of Victory. The ability was, despite its seemingly omnipotent nature, very limited in scope, as it required prior information for its use.

If Odysseus wanted to make a goal ‘turn lead into gold’ it wouldn’t work because it was impossible. Likewise, if he wanted to make a goal ‘amass one ton of gold without buying or stealing processed gold’ it would likewise not work because he had no knowledge of a gold mine.

Odyssey of Victory was, to put it in simple terms, a kind of a search engine. He inputted a search topic, included filters to get specific answers, but he needed to know what filters to include and what he was searching for, or else it wouldn’t work.

Luckily for him, he had enough information for it to trigger his currently placed goal.

Escape the Ascension Chamber. With a secondary goal of ‘find my friends’.

The secondary goal was added in with one of his rare moments of clarity, as he faded in and out of consciousness, moments away from insanity, and occasionally slipping into it. The Doctor occasionally mentioned to the White Lady that he’d eventually recover, like the other Lords, but he was quite a bit away from that…

“Okay, we’re really doing this… fine, have a flashback without us, but what are you thinking about?”

“How I escaped… and how I killed Toy Maker… I explained that just a moment ago.”

“Aaron, explain the story to the rest of us instead of just thinking about it.”

“I understood it though?”

“Medusa, shut up.”

Anyway, his Odyssey stated that he had to escape at exactly this moment… which he did.

It was very difficult, admittedly, but only because his lock pick had long since been found and taken from him, so he had needed to procure a new one…

It was ironic then, that his keepers were the ones to provide him with the ultimate, and most boring, lock pick of all.

A shape memory alloy which would form into any necessary shape for his purposes… aka, Nano-bots. With assistance from Nano-bots, he could create any key necessary with his knowledge of basic locks, but more complicated ones needed more tools or finesse…

Both of which he had, seeing as Nano-bots could turn into just about anything and he was the greatest lock picker in the world.

That last bit was something his mind refused to forget… that, and the recipe for Coca-Cola for some reason?

“…Even tortured for ten months, that joke still gets used?”

“Hey, everyone needs a ‘they always use that’ joke.”

Whatever that last bit was, it wasn’t as important as the rest. Using his Nano-bots, and feeling irritation that the pin nail ‘lock pick’ he had used since entering Tartarus was taken from him, Odysseus managed to break out of the restraints holding him in the centre of the room.

He usually had much more people watching him, but for now, they were busy… they had gotten lax over the months as Odysseus had gotten quieter and quieter… they hadn’t suspected a thing.

Oh they were idiots.

“And that’s how I escaped in a nut shell. Not literally, but still.”

“No one thought you actually escaped in a nut shell. Only the Triplets would fall for that.”

“They would, wouldn’t they?”

It had taken a while, obviously, but he had broken free of his restraints, and was escaping. The alarm was blaring, but it would still take the enemy about ten seconds or so to realize where he was… ten seconds was a long time in a fight, or an escape, despite how short it felt otherwise.

It was all the time he needed to break out of the Ascension Chamber and witness a few guards… who notably stayed out of his way once he summoned Aspis and Xiphos, realizing their enemy was an Ascended/Chained and therefore dangerous and out of their league.

“Why are you so particular about getting those names exactly? Shield and sword would have worked you know?”

“Shush, ha baba, for an Aspis and Xiphos is different from your idea of a shield and sword, as you now know.”

“…Ha baba?”

“It’s something a… friend of mine added to her ‘shushes’ so that they made the person being shushed into a childish character.”

“Right… I’ll stab you later for implying that I’m childish.”

After scaring the prison guards, what few there were, he moved with purpose to the nearest ‘entrance’ to Tartarus.

Getting off of Tartarus as it was would be impossible for him, so he needed to go further in and not only that, escaping even if it was possible was not his goal.

So he moved to the closest ‘entrance’ using his memories of the layout of Tartarus… well, not exactly memories, considering all Lords had a map of Tartarus uploaded into their cranium.

But he looked to the Area number and frowned, witnessing the number twelve and knowing that meant he’d be very close to Area eleven…

From what little his distorted memories told him, his friends would be hiding there. He couldn’t leave and immediately rush there, as that would bring attention to that Area, not to mention that Odysseus had been captured there.

So no, he had to go somewhere else, and find a way to message them, to find him… before his sanity began to slip again. He needed to do something big.

In Tartarus, that meant something involving Chained. A well-known Chained at that. Not only that, but the Chained would have to be a noticeable presence in whatever Area they were in.

Leviathan went missing, Jormungand and Behemoth didn’t leave Area twelve so they weren’t worth going after, and he didn’t know where Baal or Charon was…

Ah… there was that one guy, no one liked him, he worked alone, he was a disgusting being that no one would miss due to his necrophilia, techno-sexuality and the fact that he raped women until they died, reanimated their corpses into his sick dolls, then raped them again, yeah… no one would miss Toy Maker.

He was in Area four… so Odysseus would need to move five Area’s over from area twelve, to one, then two, until he reached Area four. Then he needed to find Toy Maker…

Ordinarily, he’d offer Toy Maker a ‘deal’ to join him in fighting for freedom in Tartarus. That was obviously not going to happen. He could accept his friends, what little he recalled of them said that while some did less than nice things, none of them truly enjoyed what they did.

Toy Maker got sick satisfaction from the twisted things he did, and so Odysseus knew that he was worthless.

Not to mention that he was a Babylonian Ascended. Toy Maker would work for her and that was something he couldn’t risk.

“…What does that mean?”

“Ascended, or Chained, are split into four groups… originally we thought it was only three, but it’s four.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“It has to do with everything. A Lord matches a Mythology. Why do you think we’re called Lords?”

“…I don’t know.”

“…Well, we’re flashbacking. When I’m done with that, I’ll explain.”

No, Toy Maker had to be taken out… permanently… despite the wishes of Dawn that he be a peaceful person, Odysseus was quick to realize that he would once more need to bloody his hands…

At least it wasn’t like he was killing more than one person. Everyone else around Toy Maker was simply one of his puppets, therefore dead.

So to get to Area four… he’d need to evade detection for… let’s see, the Australian Coast had a perimeter of about thirty six thousand kilometres, divided by twelve that was three thousand kilometres per Area, so he’d need to travel around twelve thousand kilometres… maybe fifteen thousand.

Despite the accuracy of his math, he wasn’t quite sane in the moment so he was thinking of odd things like this occasionally…

Anyway, he could travel maybe five kilometres an hour if he walked, probably a bit more if he walked faster. He was an Ascended now though. He had quite a large amount of stamina for not having had proper food in months, he’d probably be able to run faster than the human limit for anywhere between ten to fifteen hours.

So Odysseus could go faster than sixty five kilometres per hour and if he took shortcuts, or got transport he could go even faster… maybe.

It would still take him maybe eight whole days if he just ran at full speed though… transport it was.

“What was the point of all that calculation then?”

“Hey, I was thinking weird! Normally I’d ignore that stuff, even if I knew it, but for some reason I needed thoughts to anchor to, relevant thoughts.”

“Why did you specify the word relevant?”

“Because thinking about Medusa in her skin-tight assassination attire wouldn’t help beyond making my pants tight?”

“…”

“…”

“…”

“…Did I say something wrong?”

“I think you still aren’t thinking right.”

“I never did. I just thought simpler.”

So transport… how did they move around in this place anyway? They wanted to walk him to here from Area seven? Didn’t make sense… Odysseus found the answer to his questions in a hover vehicle.

To be precise, it was extremely stupid and old for a hover vehicle, but that didn’t matter. Even old hover vehicles could go around three hundred to three fifty kilometres an hour.

This current model Odysseus found was a Z Bolt, the first of the ‘Bolt’ line of cars. It was basically the Ancestor of the world’s fastest car, and it clocked about four hundred and twenty seven kilometres per hour.

By his calculations-

“Oh please skip the calculating and just give us the result.”

“And that’s how I got here.”

“That’s too far ahead man.”

About two days of travel at max. He could live with that, the prison was huge, and one of the faults was that while it was difficult to get into the walls, as long as one was there one could play chicken with the guards and Lords for quite a while.

Again, Odysseus couldn’t stay there though, so he got into the Bolt… which he was apparently unable to manually drive, something that depressed him, but he accepted it by inputting his co-ordinates to be the ‘Area four gate’ and he basically sat back.

Two days later, he found himself in Area four, and it was a disgusting place. Only one hour there and he had already seen too much for even a thirty year old to say they were comfortable with, let alone the eighteen year old Odysseus.

Area four was the sector relating to sexual crimes, with a sub-category of human trafficking/slavery. Within the hour he had found a few slave traders, quite a few alley doctors and quite a few scenes of rape.

Needless to say that he wanted to stop it… but he didn’t. He didn’t stop it because even if he did, it wasn’t a solution.

He could stop a rapist from raping a girl. But when he left, would the girl be safe? Would the rapist stop going after girls? And even if he killed the rapist and got the girl to a safe place, they would only be two people out of the large amounts that existed in the Area.

He could help, but he couldn’t fix the problem at the source. Some might say that a small bit of help can go a long way, but not when a problem perpetuated itself like this.

Everyone who entered Area 4 was a rapist, or a human trafficker; they had little regard for human rights to do what they did. Every, every, other Area had criminals just the same, but they didn’t completely ignore human rights in the same sick way.

Really, not one sought to torture another human being in such a manner. Sure, torture for information, torture because you hate a person, but sexually, emotionally, telling them they aren’t even considered human?

Odysseus was of half a mind to raze Area 4 into the ground, and the other half oh so desperately wanted to agree… but he couldn’t.

After destroying Tartarus, he would, but not before… he wasn’t capable of doing it before.

“So… Area four is horrible… what did you see?”

“I honestly don’t want to say what I saw… but I can say this. When we destroy Tartarus as a whole? I’m razing that place to the ground. Even my stance against meaningless murder says they should all die. For most, it is required. For the rest, it would be a mercy after what they endured.”

Luckily for Odysseus, he was in need of information, so he could actually spare enough time to help out someone.

“What the hell man! We just doin’ business, business I tell ya!” honestly the stereotypical accent was annoying, but Odysseus felt the ‘slave trader’ was not going to be worth much after this.

“And I think your business is disgusting. That’s not why I stopped you though. Toy Maker lives around here… where exactly?” The trader seemed to pale at his words…

Well, the trader was already pale, considering Odysseus had beaten up any of his guards easily and had broken the legs of the man.

One good thing about becoming Odysseus, in his opinion, was that even as the second weakest Lord in combat, he still overwhelmed normal humans at least.

And yes, busting a slave trader was easier than stopping a lust induced attack on a woman. He was next to the first while the latter was usually inside other buildings huddled away… even if the women screamed…

This place needed to burn.

Odysseus was certain that he could get the men and women of Area 2 to do it for him; they pretty much burnt out their own Area over and over again from what little he could recall.

“The hospital, you’ll find him at the hospital!” The trader screamed as Odysseus applied some pressure on the waste of space’s arm…

Oh he was so glad he found someone who wore size eight boots before he got here, boots just added that pressure that sneakers wouldn’t have.

“Thank you for the information. I hope you die in a blaze of fire someday.” Odysseus was still a bit loopy, sometimes he thoughts straight, other times he didn’t. Sometimes he got really emotional and his face remained passive, or he got violent and said something as if discussing the weather.

“You did those things before too…”

“Yeah I did those things, but not against my will. There is a big difference.”

Soon after, Odysseus found himself by the Hospital… it was a disgusting place, considering he could smell the rot even from outside the building, thanks to his enhanced senses… not only that, but as he attempted to get near, something walked out of the hospital.

It had only the general shape of a human woman, but it clearly wasn’t, not when its chest was open for all to see, with no skin covering it, metal prongs sticking out here and there, the skin a pasty green and flies buzzing around the disgusting, and moving, corpse.

“Greetings. You come to the Toy Maker’s abode. Leave your sacrifice and vacate the premises.” Odysseus just stared at the Doll, for it was one of Toy Maker’s prided creations that no one wanted to deal with… the voice was so clearly false, not matching up to the body, considering it changed pitch at different sounds, sounding like someone stitched together the larynx of a few different people and just accepted the results.

“…You… no… that person is long dead… now be put to rest.” Odysseus found himself disgusted with the defilement of this corpse, not to mention that the Doll wore a nurse outfit… and there was a cloudy liquid flowing down the inside thigh of the Doll that once more affirmed that yes, Toy Maker was disgusting, and a sick fuck who deserved to die.

“And from there it was a bit of a blur really, I only remember parts of it.”

“…Even that small bit sounds horrible…”

“Oh it was… I do remember that the Dolls were all surprisingly dangerous, I’d put them just at around Sphinx’s strength with none of his skill.”

“Well without the skill Sphinx honestly isn’t that strong… his ability isn’t even suited for fighting either.”

“Oh, what was it?”

“Lie Detecting.”

“…Kind of boring… plus, he never called us out on lies…”

“We rarely if ever lied, and if we did he probably just didn’t care.”

“Makes sense… anyway, so this is how I found Toy Maker-”

The sounds of flesh hitting flesh was not the first thing that warned Odysseus where Toy Maker was, but instead the smell of rotting flesh-

“No, just skip that, skip that. The idea, oh that’s disgusting… look, my sister is vomiting because of what you suggested!”

“Aaron, please, you don’t need explain that. Just… ignore the scenery and explain the interaction itself.”

“Okay, sorry…”

“…are you going to continue the story?”

“Oh right.”

“Who the hell are you? The sacrifice for this week? Where is the Doll that was supposed to bring you? Ah, whatever, go bring him here.” Toy Maker… did not look like Aaron expected. To be honest, he didn’t know what to expect.

He didn’t expect an ‘Adonis’ though. All streamlined Muscle with a capital M, cropped blonde hair and electric blue eyes, he looked like the wrong side of World War two.

Odysseus didn’t even bother speaking at this point, deciding that Toy Maker deserved to die, and so set it as a ‘minor goal’ within his Odyssey of Victory… so why was it telling him that killing this man would not solve the goal?

Solution, this man wasn’t Toy Maker, but another Doll. A very recent one, or well maintained, considering keeping a ‘Doll’ looking normal should be possible with technology as it is.

So they were all Dolls, and they would all fall victim to Xiphos and Aspis as they charged at him, some had weapons… um, ‘built in’ so to speak, and the Adonis Doll just lay there watching with a bored look as Odysseus blocked the heavy attacks of the Dolls, still unused to fighting despite suddenly being kind of good at it.

His attacks could not disable the Dolls, much to his annoyance, as like any bad zombie movie, he had to remove their heads. With missing limbs, they’d still come for him, and with just a torso and head he had freaked out to see one try to do the worm after him.

That dance move was now the stuff of nightmares.

Worse was that some of them were actually quite dangerous, each was a bit different from the others. That first nurse-like Doll seemed to come straight from that horror game about a quiet town involved with purgatory, but was much faster than those things.

And as Odysseus killed the four female Dolls-

“Four?”

“I was impressed myself; one is enough for most men after all.”

“Ugh, men.”

The last male stood with a sigh as he spoke in a weary voice, looking at the dismembered heads of his previous bed partners, dead as they were then, only now silent.

“Those were my newest batch you know? It’s difficult getting the right blend of discolouration, stench, and rot while keeping them capable of moving you know?” The voice, that was nice. The words were most certainly not nice. No, the words were disgusting as hell for what it spoke of the sexual preferences of the Toy Maker.

“You’re a Doll. Where is the Toy Maker?” Odysseus asked, not daring to let down his guards as the Adonis seemed to look to the floor… then raised a hand and moved his skull.

Really, the Doll lifted the entire top part of his skull off. It was some Frankenstein level stuff when he saw the glass encased brain there… oh…

The body was dead, he could ‘kill’ the body, but the Brain was the source of all Toy Maker shenanigans.

“That sounds like the plot to a bad movie, zombies, a mad scientist, body swapping?”

“It does, doesn’t it? Whoever thought about that must not have been thinking straight.”

“Toy Maker?”

“Who else, the scientists, the people who built Tartarus, God, take your pick?”

“I’m here. Always have been… the original parts I had were sub-par.” Toy Maker seemed irritated before lifting his hand to the blonde hair.

“This body is nice, nice and superior.” Oh, if he started talking about Nazi’s…

“I always wanted blonde hair. Nice colour.” Oh, it was just a simple like of the colour, not too bad.

“There’s dye for that, you sick bastard. Anyway, I’m here to kill you.” Odysseus stated as Toy Maker blinked, as if he couldn’t believe that was a possibility… then he shrugged.

“Try.” Was all Toy Maker said as he raised his fingers to his lips and whistled… and suddenly the arms of the dead Dolls detached.

Yes, it was freaky. No, it was not necessary… it did have the makings of a good shock and awe tactic though.

The arms, all eight of them, moved as if crawling towards Toy Maker who looked at them… then he turned, revealing-

“White butt cheeks.”

“Damn it Aaron, tell the story as if he had pants, stop bringing up things like that!”

“I’m not sorry Empusa. Your reaction makes my words justified.”

“Argh!”

Eight red spots with skin removed, surprisingly Odysseus hadn’t noticed them until now, as Toy Maker moved the arms onto those spots on his back… and they stuck.

Odysseus guessed that it was possible with ‘connectible’ nerves, much like prosthetic arms but way more advanced… much flimsier too.

“Controlling multiple limbs like this is annoying, so let’s finish this quickly. I’ll need to order more sacrifices or look around for some spare parts.” The Toy Maker looked bored, but the arms on his back seemed to be reaching over as if urging to rip something out.

“Can I skip the fight?”

“Why?”

“You said I should talk like he wasn’t naked, but you go fight a naked person and try telling the story.”

“…right… um… we’re interested in this though, was he difficult to kill?”

“Surprisingly yes, he had more Dolls around, and if I ripped any false arm off him they’d have a replacement ready… honestly, it felt like an annoyingly long boss fight… not too difficult, but not worth the time.”

“So that’s how you killed him?” Typhon asked as Aaron shrugged, admitting that he ended the fight by removing Toy Maker’s head; just like the other Dolls… the problem was getting to the neck, when two of the eight arms were constantly around his neck like some form of armoured scarf.

“Yeah… if it weren’t for the fact that his junk was waving around during the fight, I’d explain the story, but I don’t do rated eighteen. Mature in the sense of gore and traumatizing content maybe, but not that.” The words felt strange for some reason…

“Alright, alright… we’ll accept this story… for now… but what was that thing you mentioned about Babylonian Ascended? And Lords having two Abilities instead of one?” Echidna recalled that, and Medusa nodded in agreement, having also been wondering on that point as Aaron frowned.

“The Ascended, or Chained as we call them, fit into four Categories, Greek, Chinese, Babylonian, and the Ars Goetia, or Solomon’s Key.” That name at the end caught a few widened eyes as Aaron’s words were beginning to paint a picture.

“Lords are called that because that’s what they are. Lords each have the exact same ability, though it only works on certain groups each.” Aaron held out his hand as if grasping onto something that couldn’t be seen.

“Imperial Privilege is what it is called, the ‘Right of the Rulers’ basically. We are literally the ‘rulers’ of the Chained… we each ‘rule’ a different group… What Imperial Privilege does, is make those Chained we rule incapable of fighting us, at least properly.” Aaron’s words made the eyes of everyone in his group widen as he continued.

“It’s… it’s messed up, and I don’t want to explain it right now, rather when our group is in contact so I can explain it once, but suffice to say that all Chained have a sort of backdoor in their ‘programming’ of some kind, and Lords are the key to those doors.” Aaron explained, and Typhon just sighed, uncertain of how to take it…

So Lords could basically mind-control people, to an extent from what it sounded like… how great…

Beyond that though, Aaron had another thing to explain, something that Typhon wouldn’t let him just casually ignore.

“Aaron… you said something, before that retarded flashback business, explain, now.” Aaron really didn’t want to though.

“Explain about the deaths that will occur within the Key?” Aaron asked despite knowing that it was exactly what Typhon was talking about. Typhon caught onto his ‘acting dumb’ and just glared until Aaron sighed.

“Remember… Odyssey of Victory works like a search engine under very specific rules, using a ninety nine point nine per cent correct prediction system. When I made my goal to break out of Tartarus, no matter what was allowed, it was impossible.” Aaron’s words of ‘allowed’ was because of the filters he could place, a goal with other set conditions applied.

“Making my goal to destroy Tartarus worked, and so I began fiddling with the filters. It gives me a killer head ache if I use Odyssey of Victory for too long, at least actively… but my first filter was to have no deaths amongst my friends. The filter failed.” Aaron’s words caused Typhon to clench his fists in anger.

“From there, I narrowed it down, using specific filters. I still can’t tell who will die, but I allowed for one death, and it still wouldn’t work. I allowed for another, and it only predicted until the end of this year.” Aaron frowned, and Typhon noted the specification in his words.

“So the plan would work, but by the end of this year, two would die… and it didn’t continue because more would?” Typhon asked with complete worry in his voice as Aaron nodded.

“Yeah… I still can’t predict to the end of this, too much random facts and details which could destroy the plans, but predicting to the end of the year, from what I know of our enemies, tell me two will die… and it won’t be any of us five.” Aaron looked around, and the four with him widened their eyes as he continued.

“The five of us are integral to the plan to destroy Tartarus, it is literally impossible without Typhon, Echidna and I, and Medusa’s ability to look into my head is required, as well as Empusa for…” Aaron thought for a moment, then just shrugged.

“I honestly don’t know why yet, but Empusa is important.” Empusa just clenched her fist jokingly at Aaron’s face as she put on an angry expression. Again, just joking, they all got that.

“So… that leaves the Hydra Triplets, Mino, Sphinx, Cerberus, Cyclops, and Manticore.” Aaron noted the last name with raised eyebrows and a chuckle escaping his lips.

“Wait, he changed his name from Chimera to Manticore? I knew he would, but while I was gone no less… did we ever find the real one?” Aaron asked curiously as Empusa shrugged, not having heard of a ‘Chimera’.

“But yeah… two will die… possibly even more…” Aaron frowned, and everyone disliked what he was saying…

No one wanted their friends to die, and knowing they would was plain torture…

So Typhon didn’t hold any more anger against Aaron for his bomb drop… after all, Aaron dealt with the difficult decisions so the rest of them didn’t have to.

“Well, other than that bomb, I also know that we can’t do this with just who we have. We need new members.” Aaron added, and Medusa elbowed Empusa who was smirking in return.

“…What?” Aaron asked, looking to the two women while Typhon shrugged at the side. Echidna, watching the interaction, hid her giggles behind her hands, seeing the males of their group incapable of properly understanding their significant others… well, not that Typhon quite understood Empusa’s feelings just yet.

He was getting better, becoming more emotive as time went on, but he didn’t know how to react to some feelings. Anger, hatred, happiness, he could handle the simple things… things like love, affection; he was still working on that, though he was beginning to recognize what Empusa was doing.

“Well, Empusa is our spymaster you know? She’s been doing a lot of digging when it comes to other Chained and dangers. She has a list of ‘candidates’ we could recruit, though we’ll have to get rid of everyone not part of the Greek Chained.” Medusa pointed out as Aaron nodded with an impressed expression.

“Huh, no wonder we’d need you… you actually are important.” No one could save Aaron from Empusa’s flying kick to his chest as she jokingly attacked him.

He was being annoying… but he was their annoying wizard.

Their problems could wait while they half-killed him.