I Am Zeus - Chapter 231

Chapter 231: “I hope you can do better.”
The divine army pulled back, a tide of power receding, leaving Zeus alone on the vast, glassy plain. The silence they left behind was deeper than before, broken only by the faint, hungry whispers of the Watchers’ wings.

Samjaza watched the retreating gods with mild interest, then turned his grey eyes back to the solitary figure before him.

“You believe you can handle all of us by yourself?” Samjaza asked, his voice devoid of mockery, simply stating a fact he found curious. “That is… statistically improbable.”

Zeus didn’t answer immediately. He rolled his neck, a series of satisfying pops echoing in the stillness. He stretched his arms out to his sides, fingers flexing as if shaking off a long sleep. The air around him began to warp, shimmering with heat.

“You know,” Zeus said, his voice conversational, “looking at this, it really seems like an unfair fight.”

From among the ranks of the Watchers, one with wings of flickering, broken light let out a sound. It was a dry, rasping noise that might have been a laugh in a dead language. “Of course it is,” it hissed, its multiple voices overlapping. “You stand alone against the architects of sin. The outcome is inevitable.”

A slow, genuine smile spread across Zeus’s face. It was a terrifying sight. “Yeah,” he agreed, his eyes locking with the laughing Watcher. “That’s what I meant. For you.”

The smile vanished. “Let’s begin.”

He didn’t give them a chance to respond. He moved.

It wasn’t a blur of speed. It was an eruption. One moment he was standing still, the next, he was in front of the laughing Watcher, his fist already buried in its chest. There was no dramatic wind-up, no battle cry. Just a simple, brutal piston motion.

The Watcher’s eyes widened in shock. Its body of condensed concept and forbidden knowledge wasn’t designed for this. It wasn’t prepared for a force that didn’t try to reason with its nature, but simply overwrote it with pure, physical violence.

Light—real, golden, divine light—erupted from the point of impact. The Watcher didn’t scream. It came apart. Its form unraveled like a knot of shadows in the noon sun, its wings of broken light shattering into a million harmless motes that faded to nothing.

Zeus stood, the remnants of the Watcher dissolving around his fist. He shook the sparkling dust from his hand.

“One,” he said.

The perfect, silent formation of the Watchers broke. They didn’t panic, but a ripple of something—not fear, but profound reassessment—went through them.

Samjaza’s serene mask cracked for a fraction of a second. “He is not just a god of lightning. He is a god of authority. He enforces reality by his presence.”

Two Watchers with wings of shifting geometry shot towards him from either side. The air around them twisted, trying to bend space, to trap him in a labyrinth of impossible angles.

Zeus didn’t try to navigate it. He looked at the twisting space and frowned.

“Stop that,” he commanded.

The word wasn’t loud, but it was final. The warping space snapped back into place with an audible crack, as if reality itself was grateful for the order. The two Watchers faltered, stunned.

Zeus grabbed the head of the one on his left and slammed it into the one on his right. There was a sound like mountains colliding. Both forms burst apart in a silent explosion of fading equations and splintered calculus.

“Two. Three.”

He turned, and a Watcher with wings of pure sound unleashed a wave of force meant to vibrate him into subatomic particles. Zeus took a deep breath and roared.

His roar was not just sound. It was the first thunderclap. It was the boom that heralds the storm. The sonic wave hit his roar and disintegrated, overwhelmed by a noise that was its absolute superior.

The Watcher was blown backward, its sound-wings tearing like wet paper. Before it could recover, a spear of lightning, thinner and sharper than any before, materialized in Zeus’s hand and flew true, pinning the creature to a distant obsidian cliff. It hung there for a moment, twitching, before dissolving into static.

“Four.”

He was toying with them. Not out of cruelty, but to make a point. Every law they tried to invoke, he revoked. Every concept they embodied, he demonstrated his mastery over it.

A Watcher that controlled gravity found its own power turned against it, crushed into a tiny, dense ball of nothing. Another that fed on fear discovered that the King of Olympus felt none, and withered away from the lack of sustenance.

Zeus moved through them like a farmer scything wheat. There was no grand spectacle, just efficient, undeniable termination. He was the foundation of a world, and they were flaws in the design he was now correcting.

Samjaza watched his kin be systematically erased. He did not try to help them. He was studying. Learning.

Finally, only the two of them remained standing on the plain. The air was thick with the fading echoes of unmade concepts.

“You are more than the stories say,” Samjaza admitted, his voice still calm, but now with a sharp edge of respect. “You do not just command the storm. You are the certainty that the storm will come.”

Zeus said nothing. He was breathing deeply, his chest rising and falling. Sweat gleamed on his brow. It had cost him. Each erasure had taken a piece of his immense power. But his eyes were still blazing, his will unbroken.

“You have killed my brothers,” Samjaza said, spreading his own wings—wings of profound, aching silence. “But I am the first. I am the one who taught humanity the paths of the stars. I am not so easily dismissed.”

“I’m not trying to dismiss you,” Zeus said, cracking his knuckles. A fresh spark of lightning danced between his fingers. “I’m trying to expel you.”

Samjaza smiled his cold smile again. “Then try.”

He didn’t attack with a concept. He attacked with an absence. A sphere of absolute nothingness bloomed around Zeus, a void where not even the laws of physics dared to exist. It was the opposite of creation.

For a moment, Zeus was gone, swallowed by the null.

Then, a flicker. A single, stubborn point of light within the void. It grew, pulsing, fighting the nothingness. It was the light of a throne room. The light of a pantheon. The light of a king who refused to be unmade.

The void shattered.

Zeus stood within the broken sphere, his skin glowing with internal heat, his hair wild, his eyes two miniature suns.

“You,” he said, his voice hoarse but firm, “talk too much.”

He lunged. This time, it was not a simple blow. He wrapped his arms around Samjaza, not in an attack, but in an embrace. A cage.

“Your knowledge is a cancer,” Zeus growled into his ear. “And I am the cure.”

He let his power go. Not as a weapon, but as a state of being. He became the fullness of reality. The weight of a cosmos. The unyielding truth of existence.

Samjaza, the great teacher, the first rebel, struggled. His silence was filled with thunder. His knowledge was overwritten by primal certainty. His form began to glow, not with his own power, but with the power Zeus was forcing into him.

“You cannot… I am… eternal…” Samjaza gasped, his perfect composure finally shattered.

“Nothing is eternal,” Zeus whispered. “Except change.”

With a final, silent detonation of pure white light, Samjaza came apart. There was no drama, no final curse. He simply expanded into a brief, beautiful constellation of fading light, and then was gone.

The light faded.

Zeus stood alone, panting, smoke rising from his shoulders. The plain was empty. The Watchers were no more.

He looked down at his hands, then up towards the dark heart of Pandemonium.

“Your welcome party was a bore, Lucifer,” he said to the distant spires. “I hope you can do better.”

He began to walk forward, each step steady and sure. The path to the final throne was clear. The lesson was over.