In times past, the three main goddesses of the Olympian pantheon (Hera, Athena, and Artemis) made Themyscira a safe haven for their chosen, the amazons.
However, thirty years ago, thirteen of these chosen women wanted to have children, and their progeny to come from them, from their wombs, instead of mere enchanted clay. So insistent they were that Hippolyta allowed them to return to Man's world to... do the deed, and then go back to the island.
They never actually asked for their children to be of the wrong gender. Then again, most of the Olympians were known for being fickle and, using more modern terms, jerkasses when it suited them.
Naturally, none of the impregnated amazons expected to bear male children, and most definitely didn't expect for all of them to give birth to sons. And that before they realized that the newborns had too been gifted with the gods' blessings.
Unwilling to do as some of her sisters asked, but also refusing to allow men to dwell in Themyscira, Hippolyta asked the gods for advice to solve this predicament for her, because she just didn't know what to do with the babies.
The god's solution to the dilemma? Gather the newborns and give them to Hephaestus, the olympian of the forge, who gladly took them in, raising them sternly yet with paternal love as they became both his helpers... and sons in all but name. That said, they did allow the mothers to say goodbye to their sons.
Since Hippolyta had named her daughter after Artemis' roman name, Hephaestus decided to do something similar to the boys, but closer to home, naming them after the great heroes of the old times: Ajax, Odysseus, Diomedes, Aeneas (Aphrodite felt touched when she found that out), Castor and Pollux (who like the original Dioscuri were twins)...
And then there was Pausanias, a tall, well-built man, the most responsible of the helpers (they were all roughly the same age), and the only one whose namesake had been born well after the Achaean Age, being a general from the (in)famous Sparta. Ironically, he was also the son of a follower of Aphrodite.
He was the best of the men, both in body as in mind, thanks to being able to visit the world outside the forge from time to time, although he was restricted to Greece and Italy (Hephaestus' forge was located in an island in the Adriatic Sea). However, even with this, sometimes he yearned to see the world at large, to meet with the modern heroes, to earn the glory of being a hero ,and even to become one of them,. The only reason he didn't do so despite having Hephaestus' permission was that he also wanted to make sure those he fought stopped being a menace through lethal means, something that modern society frowned upon.
And then one day, as he helped his father in the manufacturing of a cannon for Ares, they heard a conmotion from the TV room, where the others gathered around the screen and muttered in excitement as it displayed a most incredible sight: a giant monster, a creature that looked like it had escaped from Tartarus itself, annihilating a group of soldiers with impunity, before battling a large, green-armored individual... who then proceeded to rip its guts out, revealing a squirming worm hiding in there.
The Doom Slayer. The only known hero that was willing to kill. They already knew of him and his opinion about evil-doers, they knew of the massacre of the Voyager of the Seas... but to see him actually killing something that mere seconds before had been a screaming girl...
It was horrifying, disgusting even... but also inspiring to some point, especially to a certain smithy.
If a man could kill to protect the innocent, and not be feared hated for it, so could others, no? Especially those who took inspiration from the ancient heroes of greek 'myth', who became so because they slayed their enemies.
He had the strength, the endurance, the motivation, and everything he thought a protector of the meek needed. The last thing to check, of course, was a place to defend.
He put on a blindfold, grabbed a knife, and threw it at a bronze earth globe, deciding to become the protector of where the blade landed, no matter how far it was. He naturally expected it to be his 'native' Greece, or maybe even Italy.
Instead, the dagger stabbed Japan. He didn't know what to feel about that, to be honest with himself: all he knew about the isles was their people went from honourable, if overzealous warriors, to disciplined workers.
"Greece would have been a tad obvious, you know, and Rome too." Hephaestus noted when he saw the result before shrugging. "I think you should make the equipment yourself."
And forge it he did, with no one's help but that of his learned skill at smithing, making a set of armor and weapons worthy of Achilles himself, despite being completley mundane (and even then, that meant they were still worthy of Leonidas). After that, and after bidding farewell to his family, he set for the archipelago.
It turned out to be harder than it seemed.
During the first days, when he wasn't trucking around the area, his stint as a vigilante was rather lacklusting, for a lack of a better term: most crime in Japan simply didn't require the need to kill the perpetrators most of the time. As for dangerous groups like the Yakuza that did deserve death, they had already been erradicated, or forced to hide further to avoid the former fate. The few times he did act like a hero ended up with him running away from the police because he was a large, armored warrior.
And then one day, as he looked over the streets of Tokyo from the balcony of his crappy apartment, he saw as a red-headed girl and her dogs were being chased by gun-toting robots through the alley below, the machines blasting away at the group and injuring the girl in the leg.
He didn't waste time in jumping down betweeen the two groups and attacking the machines with his bare hands, and while they were strong and tough, Pausanias was even stronger. It helped that their guns weren't powerful enough to pierce his tough skin, although it still hurt.
It was only after destroying the machines that Pausanias finally realized something about the girl: natural red hair was practically unhear of in Japan, her ears were slightly long and pointed, and her green eyes were literally narrow. Said eyes were regarding him with a mix of fear, awe, and defiance as he carefully walked towards her.
After calming her down and proving he wouldn't hurt them, she finally spoke: her name was Ayame, and she was a yokai, a wolf to be precise, and she needed help.
To understand their plight, we'll turn back time a few hundred years.
Hundreds of years prior, yokai reigned rampant across Nihon. Sure, there were humans that could take them on, but these were rare and few, and most of the time the humans required numbers to fight the creatures, even after the arrival of gunpowder from China and better guns from portuguese merchants.
All of this changed when the Emperor decided to modernize the country over a century prior... and that included the extermination of yokai through military intervention, severely eased by the advent of repeating firearms from America. Even then, the tables had merely evened in no one's favor, since as far as the mikado cared other countries posed more of a threat than them, and now most yokai realized they had to be careful.
Again, that changed, and this time sooner than anyone, much less the yokai themselves, had expected...
Just after the conflict with Russia, in the evening of the 20th century, the metahumans began to sprout: human men and women who had powers (no magic, not honed skill, just powers) and, in some cases, the willingness to use them to kill others. Some received them from external sources, others simply were born with them; some were simply foreigners, while others were japanese-born. All, however, were much stronger than the yokai's usual victims. Suddenly, the yokai in general no longer had the advantage of having powers on their side.
Powers like discerning who was a yokai with mere glance... and throwing bony blades at them.
And to make things even worse, the metahumans were simply the tip of the iceberg: the advancement of weapons technology, robots designed and programmed to hunt down yokai whenever they hid and termiante them with extreme prejudice, government programs (both the japanese and foreign ones), simple hunters that had gotten pretty good at their jobs, and more.
Naturally, this meant that the yokai population went from a few millions to less than half that, but those who had it the worst were the wolf yokai, who suffered the most because of their relative weakness compared to most other yokai and Meiji the Great's edict to cull the population of mundane wolves until those in captivity became the vast majority, which meant that the rest could be singled out as yokai. For years, the packs had been slowly whittled down, until only a few tribes remained across the islands... including the one that made their home in Japan's capital.
They couldn't ask other yokai for help either, or even other wolves for that matter: most loathed each other more than they loathed humans these days, and many other yokai (again, wolves included) had happily integrated themselves into human society, some not even bothering to hide their nature.
The worst part, however, had to be the hatred: no one hunted wolves, and the anti-yokai edict stopped being enforced after the surrender in 1945 and the abdication of Hirohito, but that didn't stop people from killing them anyway... and some of those had the means to do so with impunity.
What had begun as simple reprisal evolved into purely spite-driven torment by those who had not forgotten about the wolves' past attrocities and refused to let go of their hatred, and other yokai were happy to take advantage of the situation. Granted, the packs were more than willing to pay their attackers back in kind, but years of having been the aggressors and man-eaters, demonization from part of the government, complete unwillingness from the tribes' part to help each other, and simply being outnumbered by several magnitudes meant that the Tokyo tribe simply stopped having the the strength to fight back.
And that was before the deaths of several people, attacks that had been supposedly carried by dog-like monsters, made things even worse for them.
None of that meant anything for Ayame, a fiery redhead she-wolf and the future leader, who refused to back down against any threat to her family, be it human, yokai or other. Sadly, not even her determination to protect her family could help their situation.
One day, Ayame's grandfather (her parents had been killed in a fight with another tribe) finally decided that they could not stay any longer in their homeland, else they would all just die out, and so formulated a simple, yet also dangerous plan: gather enough money to leave for Russia,. (for starters none of them spoke russian, and the taiga was simply not a good place to live) but as far as he knew it would be better than living the rest of their lives like abandoned dogs wandering the streets of Tokyo.
The simpler part, of course, was getting the money and finding a flight big enough to carry a family of over thirty people and their dozen 'dogs'. It would take them some time, but it was nonetheless doable.
The hard part would be getting to the flight without being outed as yokai... or wolves.
This last part was why Ayame had sneaked into the Edogawa Natural Zoo to get several members of her pack that had been captured weeks prior by animal control as they roamed the city in their alternate forms. She didn't expect the place to be guarded by LexCorp drones. Armed LexCorp drones. She could have escaped them easily since she was the fastest of the tribe, but she didn't want to leave her packmates behind.
Fortunately for them, Pausanias had been there.
After Ayame told him their story, Pausanias asksed her if he could go with them back to their tribe, to see if he could help them in some way, something she agreed to after thinking about it. Naturally, her tribe was wary about him and his intentions, and not just because he was human, and a metahuman to boot, but also because he was a foreigner that reeked of some unknown power.
Their mistrust faltered when Ayame told them about the robots and the greek's intervention, and when Pausanias offered them all the funds he had, as well as to take them to their airport with his truck so that their journey would be more inconspicious, it practically ended up halved, so desperate for help and for someone willing to do so they were, even Ayame.
When a baffled elder asked him why did he do this, help what people saw as monsters, he merely replied:
"It's the least I can do for your tribe. That, and because as a hero it's my duty to help those who need it."
What they didn't know was that Pausanias was only mostly doing it out of the goodness of his heart; they didn't need to know he wanted to get glory out of his deeds.
For several days, Pausanias helped the tribe prepare for the journey, earning the trust of the group, Ayame included, but even with hers and the others' accounts they didn't believe that a man, no matter how strange he was, could destroy several machines all by himself.
That is, until a dozen LexCorp drones, following the trail left by the wolves, forced their way into their hideout, weapons rised and optics blazing red as they glared at the surprised and terrified tribe.
The drones barely managed to say anything through their speakers before both Ayame and Pausanias were upon them. The future leader took down three of them with a combination of speed, fencing, and hardened leaves, but most ended up ripped apart by Pausanias. Had they been able to, they would have celebrated such victory, but instead the tribe got into the trailer and Ayame to the truck with Pausanias. They knew that more would come after them
How naïve had they been, genuinely believing that some robots would be their only obstacle in their journey, that they were safe.
They only found out they had been followed when they were stopped in route to the airport by a certain detective.
..........
Sorry for the narrative heavy (okay, nearly narrative exclusive) chapter, I thought the arc (yes, arc) and the new characters needed backstory; the following chapters will be focused first on the start of the fight from their POV, then DS's 'intervention', so we're gonna be with them for some time.
Anyway, how was this chapter in general? Too long for a backstory chapter? Is Pausanias' want of honor a realistic flaw for a man raised by a literal god from Ancient Greece? Also, I'm revealing what other works and characters have been added to the story because one is very sparsely written about here, and the other is practically unknown. So, going by the characters.
-Yokai in general: Inuyasha. Specifically, Ayame was Koga's love interest in the anime (she doesn't exist in the manga). As for why I specifically added her, dunno, I saw an image of her the other day and thought 'eh, why not?'. Plus, I used to watch the series when I was a kid because my big sister hogged the TV and didn't let me watch anything else, so it got ingrained in my head. As for why Ayame, she seems like an underused character to me.
-The hoplite: Spartan: Total Warrior, a very anachronistic, yet fun game (and Creative Assembly attempt to port a game to consoles) where you play as an spartan fighting against the legions of Rome (and in the year 300 B.C) with the aid of Ares. I was raised by the game, and one day I realized that with some tweaks it could fit perfectly on DC's timeline. The Spartan is never actually called by name in the game, so I named him Pausanias (namely because Leonidas is also in the game... as are Castor, Pollux, an Elektra turned amazon, a Sejanus turned sorcerer...).
Oh, and Ares ends up being the BBEG AND final boss of the game.
For those who might be wondering, the Olympians do not know about Doom Slayer; they do know that something powerful has entered their universe, but being the greek gods they are, and Doom Slayer making it seem like he came here through technological means, they have yet to put two and two together, although they'll realize (some of) the truth if/when they meet him in person.
Also... Doom Slayer finally made it to Super Smash Bros. Ultimate! Hurray!
... as a Mii gunner, despite being a very, very iconic videogame character armed with several 'family-friendly' guns. Better than nothing, I guess. On the other hand, does this mean he can still get a spot in Mortal Kombat?