It was time to see Hephaestus again. Pausanias and Ayame would come with us, if only to see the family (Ayame had yet to actually meet them).
VEGA couldn't teleport us to the forge outright, so we had to go to the door. Grundy and John didn't come with us to the forge, the former because he was too big to fit through the entrance, the latter because he hadn't resurrected himself yet, something about 'testing the waters' first.
Hephaestus, understandably, did not realize this woman was the same baby he helped protect fifty years prior.
"Hello Hephaestus." Rachel said smiling. Hephaestus looked at her up and down.
Naturally, the rest of Hephaestus' sons didn't waste time in mobbing Pausanias and Ayame.
"You bastard, you never told us you have a girlfriend!" This was the first time Ayame entered the Forge, so most of them didn't even know what she looked like.
"She a wolf? Does this make you a furry, or a roman?"
"Say, do you have a sister or cousin willing to test a greek man's waters? A nice japanese girl for poor Achilles?"
"Screw that, we want nephews! When are you going to kidnap her? That's what the Spartans did, right? Or am I mixing them with mongols?"
And so on. Have in mind, despite their frat-like attitude they were all in their mid twenties at the very least, a product of being sheltered in the Forge for most of their lives. Pausanias, naturally, was quite happy of being with his family. Again naturally, Ayame was, well, overwhelmed, not only because of her senses and being in an enclosed space with lots of smoke and red-hot metal, but the fact a dozen or so men the size of her boyfriend weren't giving her space.
Fortunately, Castor, Hephaestus' oldest son, a giant of a ginger, was more mature than his brothers, his twin included. "Settle down, you dolts! They've just arrived and the first thing you do is swarm them without letting them even talk!"
"C'mon, give us a break, it's the first time women, actual women, come down here!"
"If that's so, why don't you do the same to Slayer's friend?"
"Are we blind to you?"
"So, Arella's little girl's all grown up, eh?" Hephaestus replied with a smile, before frowning. "But something tells me you haven't come here just to let me see you." If only.
"My son and Superman's parents have been kidnapped. We've yet to reach a solid reason for the bastard who did it, but frankly, we don't care."
Mellowness turned to shock, confusion and even anger. "Your son?" His gaze moved between me and Rachel. "Already?"
We shared a look. "We're not engaged, she simply lives with me. As for Garfield, he's adopted, and I'm fairly certain you know what we're going through."
Hephaestus nodded. Admittedly it was actually worse though, because all his sons were fully grown men, whereas Garfield was still a toddler, but he didn't know that.
"He's also an extension of the Red, as you know." Rachel didn't say more, there was no need to: aside from our love, whoever had him in their grasp could unlock the power of controlling all animal life, humanity included. Needless to say, that couldn't be allowed happen, least of all because they'd had to rip it from Garfield. "And who knows what he has planned for the Kents."
"Any idea of-" He began to ask before I answered him.
"Ares. I'm pretty certain no other olympians are 'interested' enough in me to risk their necks like that."
Hephaestus hummed. He didn't even bother to warn me against going after Ares, he knew how could it really end, and besides he loathed him. "He's commisioned me to make him a weapon. It's a sword, nothing more, if that's what you're wondering. You could use the chance."
"Chance for what?" I heard Ayame ask.
"To beat the loacation of Garfield and the Kents out of him."
"You know you could just go straight to him, right? That robot of yours can go anywhere."
Indeed I could, but I didn't want to have a good chunk of the olympian pantheon against me (Zeus wouldn't tolerate me hurting one of his children, if only because it'd happen in Olympus itself, and at least three other gods were loyal enough or were fond of Ares to a point to help him), and as powerful as we were we'd still be outnumbered.
"Wait a minute. You want to fight freaking lord Ares?" One of Hephaestus' sons asked.
"No, we just want to talk to him." I wasn't being sarcastic, that's exactly what we wanted, despite saying our intentions outloud just seconds prior. That he'd have to be... coerced to talk... well, they just needed to wait.
Any opposition to it, from respect to the gods to the simple fact they believed it was suicide, didn't stop us from waiting in the main hall for Ares to arrive for his order. We didn't even plan or conjure traps
Ares, the God of War, Slayer of Many, the master of Fear and Pain themselves... just some pretty blonde.
"Brother, you better have that weapon..." He began to say before the smoke cleared out... and saw me and Rachel standing right in front of him.
As Hephaestus had told me months before, most of the olympian pantheon had been watching me as close as they could, but only him and Ares understood the threat I could pose if pissed off. And Ares, despite being the god of war, knew exactly what would happen if he dared to rear his pretty face near me, faking a good nature or not. As for Rachel, it took a good chunk of the Twelve to fight her father off, she had inherited a good deal of power from him, and despite hating him for it, she acknowledged that having a vast source of magic at her command was quite useful when the need arose and she could keep her mind focused.
And the first thing Ares saw of us was death.
Whatever bravado, whatever olympian smugness he had to chastise his brother at the moment, evaporated the exact second he realized what he was looking at. The second after that, he conjured a machine gun and let it loose on me. "Die motherfucker!" Profane little turd, wasn't he?
Enough firepower to destroy any tank on Earth at the moment, even wound Clark to the point of near death, simply bounced off of my body and Rachel's barrier. Without (most of) our allies in the same room, we didn't have to hold back.
And when you piss off the daughter of a god so evil he was considered a demon even by Hell itself and a powerful sorceress, and someone who KILLED his universe's version of Satan, with you being a random godling from a weakened pantheon...
Well, it would suck to be you.
I promptly walked up to Ares even as the supernatural shells slammed against my chest, grabbed his gun and bent it, and then punched him in that punchable face of his with enough force to crack the reinforced wall behind him.
"Brother help me!" Ares begged Hephaestus, who simply shook his head. That he didn't even stop from working at the anvil spoke volumes of what exactly he thought of his 'brother', and the empathy he had.
"Why? I'm neither suicidal to the point of pissing off someone who's more of a proper god of war than you, brother, nor bastard enough to take a man's child from him." Hephaestus explained. And if I were you, I'd start talking."
Ares got over his fear, if only for a moment, when he realized what was going on. "You set me up!"
"No, it's all your fault. They wanted to 'meet' you, and you just happened to ask me for a gun. It's all in your hands, not mine." Even better, Hephaestus cleaned his hands when he said that. Didn't help that Ares had done a couple dozen things that, well, would have ended with him crushing Ares' head with his hammer, like his affair with Aphrodite and nearly getting his sons killed. But that's for another time.
"Where. Is. My. Son."
"I... I don't have him, I swear, nor the mortals! I don't know where." It was Rachel's turn to play with him, grabbing him and slamming him against the ceiling.
"Your lackey reeked of you!" She sneered at him. Indeed, the magic traces we found at the farm and Ares' energy signature were identical. That he might not have that much involvement in the kidnapping didn't occur to us. "Talk! TALK!"
"Faust?" Most of you might now who he is, so I won't bother explaining. "He's not mine, I swear! Just some mage that needed my help for something!"
I slammed him once more. Was he being daft on purpose? Did he really think I would fall for that?! Was he really stupid to believe I wouldn't kill him?! "Don't deviate!"
Just because I needed him alive didn't mean I couldn't beat the shit out of him with the help Rachel. She didn't even have to grab him, her magic could inflict agony on Ares just by touching him. The threat of being overcome by her father's essence was nothing compared to the rage and desperation she had at the moment; in fact, it kept it in check.
As for why couldn't she just pry into his mind outright, two reasons:
-As a god, he was significantly tougher than even the most powerful psychic, and we didn't have time.
-Pain is the ultimate motivator, especially when you know lying will lead to more pain.
"Are... are these guys slamming fucking Ares around like a ragdoll?"
"Seems like he is."
I ignored their banter, and Pausanias' look of horror, and the fact I was starting to break the aura of mystery that surrounded me in front of people I did not want to know about my past. "What for? Where did he take him?"
Ares fidgeted, or rather tried to. "Look I can't tell you. He'll kill me, you know. Not Faust, of course, but-"
That brief moment of stupidity, despite the very fact he KNEW what I could to to him, what I would do if he didn't spill the beans...
It got me to chuckle.
Me, DOOM SLAYER. No, the forge didn't shake with my laughing, but everyone except Rachel got unnerved by the fact the giant stoic soldier from the future could make a sound like that. Nobody likes the sound of Doomguy laughing under his breath.
And then I punched the spot right next to his head, hard enough I sunk my entire arm on the rock. THAT didn't just cause the entire place to tremble, it made the entire island quake, and in fact I might had caused a tsunami if not for the nature of the place. Hell, any geologist withing a radius of five hundred kilometers thought someone had detonated a nuke.
Never make me angry.
Just a bit farther on the left, just an inch, and Ares would have ended like the billions of demons I slaughtered in the past, the difference being they at least died fighting; Ares pissed himself, and pretty sure he crapped too. Any other time I'd enjoyed the expression of pure terror on the bastard's face, but the longer he kept his mouth shut...
I grabbed him by the head and lifted him up, applying only enough force to crack his skull a bit. "WHERE IS GARFIELD?!"
"Tartarus! He's in Tartarus!" He all but cried, blood coming out of his tear ducts. Fortunately for him, his words were enough
Tartarus. One of the most terrible, darkest afterlives one could end up, the closest place outsde Apokolips to Hell, where those mortals who commited unspeakable crimes, or simply happened to anger Zeus, fell into after dying... and Hades' prison in DC.
I dropped Ares to the ground. "Leave, and if you are stupid enough to send your father after me, I'll eat your head, shit down your throat, and do to Olympus what Rome did to Carthage." I had to drive the point home, and for a brute like him, what better than threaten him and his family with one of his best moments?
Ares nodded hurriedly before leaving in an explosion, leaving us to ponder about what we pried from him.
The mythological Hades was a dour, but fair and just god of the underground, not a psychopomp, for that was Charon's job. DC's Hades, on the other hand, was the typical Satan stand-in, a demonic madman who tried to overthrow his younger brother by helping Kronos in the Titan-Olympian War, and paid for it when Zeus won.
Naturally, Hephaestus' sons did not take the news of an apocalypsis in the making well.
"Hades breaking free?"
"The Titans breaking free?!"
Hephaestus grabbed our shoulders shoulder "Slayer, Rachel..."
"I've killed worse than petty gods with delusions of greatness."
But Hephaestus shook his head. "I can't NOT believe on that, not after everything you've done, but if you kill him, you will piss off Zeus and, more importantly, announce to certain beings about your existence." He then turned to Pausanias. "Son."
Pausanias, who until that moment had been just as paralyzed as his brothers, came out of his stupor.
"Dad?"
"You will go with them and open the gate to Tartarus. You still remember the code, right?"
Pausanias nodded warily. "Yes, but dad, the gate to Tartarus is on Themyscira. What about Hippolyta and her people?"
"They're not our enemies" I replied. ", and besides I doubt they'll want to stand and watch as Hades breaks free from his prison."
"But what if they refuse?" It was Pollux, Castor's twin, the one asking about girls. "You're a man, and Themyscira has been closed to the rest of Earth since, well, our births, and they're rather unfettered when it comes to enforcing it."
I didn't bother to reply... but only because Rachel got ahead. "We'll kill them if they try to stop us." You don't get between a mother and her children if you don't have a death wish, misandrist culture or not.
"Ain't that a bit excessive? I mean, it's not like they'd know, well, anything"
Before I replied something in the lines of unleashing the awesome firepower of the BFG at full charge, Hephaestus spoke. "If they did anything to you, I would flood the entire island with enough magma to make another Sicily." He was completely calm when he spoke, which only served to get the point across. "You don't try to stop a parent from getting to his children."
This naturally, terrified yet heartwarmed Pollux. "Oh. Thanks, dad."
"And if this... Faust is in the island, he's either dead, which I doubt, or he has done something to the locals." In the cartoon he turned them to stone except for Diana, but here? But despite that happened, I just assumed he did the same, not that it'd changed anything.
But if the amazons even dared to stand in our way...
No, Kara is not going to stay behind, she's simply waiting for Team Powerhouse to get the info needed. As for the next chapter, it'll basically be a mix of the cartoon and the Wonder Woman movie, since Faust didn't have time to prepare the petrifying. For those who might not like how I portrated Ares given how he is in other media, aside from DS being DS and Rachel being Raven, remember than a mortal man sent him packing in the Illiad. Both Doom Slayer and Rachel are gods in their own right, and powerful ones to boot. Finally, Ares' involvement in the freeing of Hades: he gave stuff to Faust to skip the worldwide quest crap.
And yes, this means more people will find out about Doom Slayer's non-self insert nature (as in, the games' lore).
As a sidenote, I'm writing a Gate story, Knight in Power Armor. No, it's not an Astartes/BoS knight ending in Falmart, it's just a kinda ironic title given the protagonist is an interstellar bounty hunter. As for the summary, the guy got hired to rescue the daughter of a powerful politican of the not-Republic and given a Starship Trooper-esque set of armor (helluva powerful even by their standards), only to run into several problems. It's short with only five chapters, but the reviewers say it's good nonetheless.