I Am Zeus - Chapter 260
Chapter 260: Making A Move
The world blurred around Elena and Leo. One moment they were in the lab, the next they were standing on a windswept cliff overlooking the sea. The storm Zeus had summoned still raged, but here, the air was calm. Zeus stood with his back to them, watching the angry clouds.
“I am done hiding,” he said without turning around. “This world has forgotten my name. I intend to remind them.”
Leo stumbled, his legs weak. “Teleportation. Okay. That’s… that’s new.”
Elena hugged herself against the sudden chill. “Remind them how? What are you going to do?”
“I will appear before them,” Zeus stated, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. “As I am. They will see their king.”
Elena and Leo exchanged a horrified look. “You can’t just… appear,” Elena said, her voice tight. “It’s not that simple.”
Zeus finally turned, his eyes glowing faintly in the twilight. “Why? I am here. They are there. It seems simple to me.”
“Because people don’t believe in gods anymore!” Leo blurted out. “They believe in science. In evidence. If you show up on live TV, they won’t think you’re Zeus. They’ll think you’re a crazy person with a really good special effects budget.”
“Special effects?” Zeus frowned.
“Magic tricks,” Elena explained hurriedly. “Illusions. They’ll say it’s CGI—computer-generated imagery. They’ll analyze the video frame by frame looking for wires or editing mistakes. They’ll call you a fraud, a sorcerer, a publicity stunt.”
“Let them analyze,” Zeus scoffed, a rumble of thunder underlining his words. “Let them see that there are no wires.”
“It doesn’t matter!” Elena insisted, stepping closer. “Don’t you get it? Faith isn’t about proof anymore. It’s about what people are willing to accept. And they are not willing to accept a Greek god in a suit on their news feeds. They’ll rationalize it away. They have to, or their whole understanding of the world falls apart.”
Zeus was silent for a moment, the only sound the distant storm. “So they are blind by choice.”
“It’s worse than that,” Leo added, finding his nerve. “You’ve got the fanatics to worry about. The hardcore believers. The ones who already have a god.”
Zeus’s gaze sharpened. “His followers.”
“Exactly,” Elena said. “If you declare yourself Zeus, to them you’re not a returning king. You’re a false idol. A demon. You’ll be sparking a religious war overnight. They won’t try to debunk you with science; they’ll try to destroy you with pure, simple faith. And there are billions of them.”
“Let them try,” Zeus said, a dangerous smile playing on his lips. “I have faced faith before.”
“Not like this,” she countered. “This isn’t a temple sacrifice. This is global. It’s on the internet. It’s in their homes. They will call you the Antichrist. They will see your return as a sign of the end times, and they will react with fear and violence. Not against you—you could probably handle that—but against each other. Against anyone who even listens to you.”
She gestured vaguely toward the invisible world beyond the cliff. “You’ll cause chaos. Panic. The very structures that hold this world together will crack. Is that what you want? To be a king of ruins?”
Zeus looked from her desperate face to Leo’s terrified one. He saw the truth in their fear. This was not a battlefield he understood. He could not fight armies of ideas with lightning alone.
“Then what would you have me do?” he asked, his voice low and frustrated. “Remain a ghost? A story they tell their children? I will not fade quietly into their history books.”
“You don’t have to,” Elena said, a desperate idea forming. “But you can’t just shout your name from the heavens. You have to… introduce yourself. Slowly. You have to make them want to believe.”
“How?”
“You give them small things first. Unexplainable events. Miracles that can’t be debunked. You make the impossible happen in a way that’s too public, too real to ignore. You let the rumor of you spread. You let them come to the conclusion themselves.”
“A whisper before a shout,” Zeus mused, considering her.
“Yes! Exactly. You show them power, but you don’t explain it. You let their own curiosity do the work. You make them question their reality on their own terms. If you just tell them, they’ll reject it. If they discover it, they’ll defend it.”
Leo nodded vigorously. “She’s right. A guy on a mountain claiming to be God is a lunatic. A mountain that starts floating in the sky is a global mystery. They’ll make the connection for you.”
Zeus looked out at the churning sea, his expression unreadable. The plan was cunning. It was subtle. It was not his way. His way was the thunderclap, the undeniable strike. But he was the last of his kind, fighting a war against an enemy who had won without drawing a sword. Perhaps a new war required new tactics.
“Where?” he asked simply.
Elena’s mind raced. “Somewhere iconic. Somewhere that still whispers of the old world. Somewhere the cameras are always watching.”
“Olympia,” Leo suggested. “The site of the ancient games. It’s a huge tourist spot, but it’s also… hallowed ground, in a way.”
A slow smile spread across Zeus’s face. It was a good place. A place of competition, of strength, of glory. His glory.
“What will you do?” Elena asked, almost afraid of the answer.
“I will give them a miracle they cannot explain,” he said. “I will give them a sign that even their science cannot bury.”
He turned to face them fully, and the air began to crackle with energy. “But I will not do it as a whisper.”
He raised a hand toward the storm raging over the distant city of Athens. The clouds convulsed. The wind died.
“I will give them a single, quiet question.”
He closed his hand into a fist.
And every single light in the city of Athens went out.
The sprawling tapestry of orange and white lights, the glowing arteries of streets, the bright windows of skyscrapers—all of it. Vanished.
The city was plunged into an absolute, profound blackness, deeper than any modern human had ever known.
Elena and Leo stared, their mouths agape, at the sudden void where a metropolis had been. The only light came from the moon, reflecting off the sea.
“They will call it a blackout,” Zeus said, his voice calm. “They will blame their fragile power grid. But in the back of their minds, they will remember the storm. They will remember the man in the church. They will feel a chill they cannot name.”
He looked at Elena, his eyes like captured lightning.
“Let the whisper begin.”
In the pitch-black silence, a single, pure bolt of lightning, white shot with threads of chaotic black, lanced down from the clear sky above them. It struck the center of the dark city, and for one breathtaking second, the ancient Acropolis was illuminated in stark, terrifying relief—a ghost from the past, blazing against the unnatural night.
Then the darkness returned, deeper and more frightening than before.
On the cliff, Zeus lowered his hand.
In the silent, dead city, three million people were suddenly afraid in the dark, and they didn’t know why.
And high above, in a place beyond places, a presence that had been silent for millennia slowly turned its gaze downward.