While Natsu and Hestia were enjoying the warmth of their Familia’s birth celebration in the bustling heart of Orario, a starkly contrasting atmosphere was unfolding far away in the City of Preblica.
Inside a luxurious inn room, rented specifically to ensure absolute secrecy, a thick tension enveloped the three divine entities gathered there.
The light from the magic stone crystal lamp on the ceiling illuminated the faces of those who now bore the weight of the world’s fate.
Hermes, the Messenger God, sat slouched in a velvet-upholstered chair.
He had carelessly tossed his signature feathered hat onto the mahogany table in front of him.
Letting out a long sigh, he rubbed his exhausted face and looked straight at the goddess sitting upright across from him.
“You know, Artemis?
That emergency warning letter you sent to the Guild Headquarters in Orario has really caused me a lot of trouble,” Hermes complained miserably.
“Because your report mentioned a high-level potential threat that required fast and stealthy movement, the Guild immediately made an absolute decision.
They appointed me.
My Familia was tasked with personally investigating the condition of the Elsos Ruins.”
Artemis offered no sympathy for his complaints.
The Goddess of the Hunt simply met Hermes with an ice-cold glare.
Her posture was perfectly upright, exuding an absolute authority and discipline that could not be swayed by any amount of whining.
Artemis did not regret her decision; sending the report to the Guild was the most rational step after canceling her solo mission.
On the other side of the room, sitting on a plush sofa, the Goddess Aphrodite displayed a vastly different reaction.
The Goddess of Beauty paid absolutely no mind to the dire conversation regarding missions or the Guild.
She sat with a dazed gaze, her cheeks slightly flushed, and a faint smile occasionally gracing her lips.
Her slender fingers slowly twirled the ends of her golden hair.
Aphrodite’s mind was nowhere near that room.
She was still thinking about Natsu.
The image of the pink-haired youth who had completely resisted her divine charm, subjugated her pride with his predatory gaze, and made her immortal heart pound wildly, still dominated her entire consciousness.
The threat to the world felt utterly trivial compared to her newfound obsession with claiming the young man for herself.
Receiving a cold glare from Artemis that pierced straight to his core, Hermes’s courage instantly shrank.
He knew perfectly well that Artemis was not a goddess you could joke around with when it came to her sacred duties.
Hermes’s awkward laughter faded.
The god quickly cleared his throat and adjusted his posture, sitting up straight.
He banished all traces of playfulness from his face.
Hermes’s gaze now turned incredibly sharp and serious, revealing the intelligence that made him one of the most reliable gods in Orario.
“Alright, let’s put my complaints aside.
The situation really doesn’t allow for us to relax,” Hermes said, his voice now heavy and formal.
“After the veteran adventurers from my Familia conducted a reconnaissance of the location, I have to admit that your warning was correct, Artemis.
It is highly likely that the magic seal in Elsos holding Antares has indeed weakened and is on the verge of breaking.”
Artemis leaned forward slightly.
Her fingers interlaced tightly on the table as she listened to every detail from the messenger god.
“Based on the eyewitness reports from my children, the condition of the Elsos temple is now nothing more than an abandoned ruin,” Hermes explained further.
“The pillars are destroyed, and nature has begun to reclaim the remnants of the ancient structure.
The sacred magic seal embedded in the main altar is cracking and losing its light.
Its binding power has drastically weakened purely due to it being thousands of years old.”
Hermes swallowed hard, his face displaying a very palpable sense of discomfort.
He clutched his own chest, as if recalling a terrifying sensation just from reading his Familia members’ eyewitness reports.
“And the most unsettling part of it all is the aura.
The atmosphere in that place is incredibly dreadful.
Especially for me,” Hermes said with a bitter smile, looking at Artemis with a warning gaze.
“The residual energy seeping out from the cracks in the ruins’ seal made my divine instincts churn.
As you know, Antares isn’t just an ordinary monster.
That creature is a god-killing and god-devouring abomination.
That’s why I, as a fellow divine existence, could feel that discomfort and primal terror.”
Hermes’s explanation made the atmosphere in the room even heavier.
Antares was a deadly anomaly.
The monster possessed the absolute ability to absorb the Arcanum of gods if it managed to devour them.
If such a creature were unleashed in Gekai, it wouldn’t just destroy cities; it would actively hunt down every deity that had descended to earth, transforming itself into an unstoppable calamity.
Artemis closed her eyes for a moment.
Her hands, resting on the table, clenched so tightly that her knuckles turned white.
The bitter reality she had tried to prevent was now unfolding right before her eyes.
The warning from the young man in the town square was the absolute truth.
“A monstrous calamity of a horrifying scale might be happening very soon,” Artemis said in a very calm voice, yet one that carried the weight of a dark reality.
The Goddess of the Hunt opened her eyes, staring sharply at the map of the continent spread across the table.
“If Antares breaks free from its shackles in Elsos, begins to devour life energy, and seeks out the presence of gods, this world will face a mini-apocalypse.
The monster Antares is highly likely on par with the legendary monsters from the Three Great Quests, such as the Behemoth or the Leviathan.”
Mentioning the names of those legendary monsters made the silence in the room even thicker.
Hermes did not dispute Artemis’s comparison.
All the gods knew the dark history of how those ancient beasts had claimed the lives of the world’s strongest adventurers in the past.
The scale of destruction brought by creatures of that caliber could not be comprehended by the common sense of ordinary mortals.
“The current adventurers in Orario are not yet capable of defeating that monster,” Artemis continued softly, analyzing the available military strength.
The fact that the strongest Familias in the Labyrinth City were currently still in their developmental stages made the situation even bleaker.
Without the presence of an adventurer who possessed absolute power and army-destroying destructive capabilities, they would merely be sending thousands of lives in vain to become fodder for the god-devouring monster.
They lacked a conqueror existence capable of piercing the ancient creature’s defenses.
But then, Artemis suddenly remembered Natsu.