Chapter 112 - Scrapyard of the Gods

The early morning fell upon the camp with a cold, dense calm. Ikki remained on guard around the campfire, indifferent and lost in thought.

While the rest of the group slept around the fire, he sat lazily, keeping the flames alive, occasionally tossing in leftover wood. Silence was his only company. Despite appearing lax, his gaze pierced the darkness of the night with unusual precision, his mind alert to every sound, every movement in the distance.

As night slowly gave way to dawn, the first light of day began to appear on the horizon, painting the sky with soft shades of blue and gold. Ikki felt the change in the environment, but didn't hesitate. He knew that if he wanted to ensure everyone woke up with something extra to eat, it would be best to act quickly.

Without making a sound, he moved away from the fire, moving with impressive agility.

In the blink of an eye, he was miles away from the camp, crossing the forest with supernatural speed. The trees and bushes offered no resistance. In seconds, he advanced faster than the mind could process, his steps silent but powerful. He knew where to look—the hunter's instinct, honed by months of traveling the world in search of a way to revive his mother, guided him. He found the rabbit quickly, easy prey with his incredible speed. With a precise movement, he caught the first, and then another, making no more than a slight sound, a whisper in the air.

He took what he needed, ensuring the game was properly prepared to be carried. Then, he didn't forget about Grover. He knew the satyr wouldn't eat meat, so he searched the surrounding area, finding some cans of food that would be more suitable for his herbivorous friend. He grabbed them and, in a blink, was already heading back to camp, the same superhuman speed guiding him back.

Arriving back at camp, Ikki crouched near the fire, starting to prepare the rabbits with almost military dexterity.

The meat was expertly roasted, the smell quickly spreading through the air. The aroma enveloped everything around, filling the camp with a sense of warmth and satisfaction that would soon invade his friends' senses. The sound of the crackling fire and the gentle smoke created a welcoming atmosphere, but it was the smell of food that slowly began to awaken the others.

Grover was the first to stir, the smell of food awakening his sensitive nose. He woke up rubbing his eyes, looked at the fire and saw Ikki with the rabbits being prepared. "Hmm, that smells good, but... it's not meat, is it?" He asked, a little suspicious.

Ikki just shrugged, smiling almost imperceptibly: "I brought some cans for you…"

He said, handing over the food he had found to Grover.

Soon, Thalia, Atalanta, and Phoebe woke up, followed by Zoe. The aroma of the food enveloped them, and one by one, they began to sit around the fire, looking at the dish Ikki was preparing. Everyone was hungry, but none of them could help but notice the skill with which he worked.

"I didn't know you were so good at cooking." Atalanta commented, watching the rabbit being roasted so carefully.

"I'm good at many things," Ikki replied, with a short, but satisfied smile.

Thalia took a close look at the makeshift skewer and, with an amused smile, said: "I don't mind being surprised, but this... this is good."

"Feel free to help yourselves…" Ikki said, handing her one of the skewers that was just right.

She took the first bite, and the smile on her face was immediate. "Ikki, this is really delicious. Who would have imagined the legendary hero was such a good cook?"

The others quickly served themselves and expressed their gratitude. Zoe, who usually didn't offer much praise, gave a small nod of approval. "Good work."

Grover, now content with his canned meal, looked at Ikki and laughed. "Well... even though it's not exactly what I wanted, I'm not going to complain. Thanks."

They continued eating, sharing laughter and conversation, while the smell of food continued to envelop the camp. Atalanta asked where Ikki managed to hunt the rabbits considering the place they were in, to which he simply replied that he was lucky and gave an enigmatic smile.

After they finished eating, the atmosphere around the campfire calmed down. The group was satisfied and, with full stomachs, slowly got up, preparing for the next stage of the journey. The road ahead was uncertain, but with renewed energy, everyone was ready for what was to come.

Before they left, while packing their things, Ikki mentioned that he could guess that the junkyard they were going to pass was Hephaestus's scrapyard. He had been thinking about it all night and come to the conclusion—it wasn't hard to guess if you stopped to think about it. The ancient Greek god of fire, metallurgy, and crafts, Hephaestus was the incredible blacksmith of the Olympian gods, for whom he built magnificent houses, armor, and ingenious devices. Hephaestus had his workshop under volcanoes—Mount Etna in Sicily being his favorite—and it was easy to guess that he might have somewhere to discard his failed gadgets.

After talking about it for a bit, they quickly continued their journey west.

Before long, they had reached the top of a mountain of scrap metal. Piles of metallic objects shimmered in the moonlight: broken heads of bronze horses, metal legs of human statues, wrecked chariots, tons of shields and swords and other weapons, along with more modern things, like cars that shimmered gold and silver, refrigerators, washing machines, and computer monitors.

"Wow…" Atalanta said, surprised. "That thing… part of it looks like real gold."

"And it is," Thalia said sternly. "Like Ikki said, don't touch anything. This is the gods' junkyard."

"Junk?" Grover picked up a beautiful crown made of gold, silver, and jewels. It was broken on one side, as if it had been cleaved by an axe. "You call this junk?" He bit a tip and started chewing. "It's delicious!"

Thalia snatched the crown from his hands. "I'm serious!"

"Look!" Phoebe said. She ran down the hill, stumbling over bronze scrolls and gold platters. She picked up a bow that glimmered silver in the moonlight. "A Hunter's bow!"

She yelped as the bow started to shrink, transforming into a hair clip shaped like a crescent moon.

Zoe's expression was severe. "Leave it, Phoebe."

"But—"

"It is here for a reason. Anything discarded in this junkyard must remain. It is flawed. Or cursed."

Phoebe reluctantly dropped the hair clip on the ground, still thinking she could've given that item to some new hunter in the future, but knew Zoe was right. The junkyard was no place for souvenirs.

"I don't like this place…" Thalia said, walking next to Ikki, frowning as she looked at the piles of scrap around them. "Everything here feels wrong."

"Let's get out of here quickly then…" Ikki replied without hurrying, his steps tranquil, but his eyes alert to every movement on the horizon. He remained vigilant, the feeling that the prophecy still hung in the air, like a shadow that never disappeared.

The others followed behind him, trying not to be distracted by the chaotic scenery around them. The wind made the scrap metal drag, creating a ghostly music that seemed to make the environment even more surreal. Ikki, despite his usual air of calmness, was alert, every fiber of his being feeling the weight of his decision to face destiny at that moment.

The feeling of being watched didn't leave him, and he knew that the junkyard held more mysteries than they could imagine. The metal hills seemed to have a life of their own, and the seemingly harmless piles of junk could hide something much more dangerous.

They began to make their way through the hills and valleys of scrap. The piles of metal and broken objects seemed endless. The horizon was blurred by the immensity of the place, and if it weren't for Ikki's sense of direction and the sun to help them orient themselves, which they had learned to trust, the situation could have become chaotic. Ikki possessed such keen senses, even more developed than Grover's, and with that and the help of the sun, he guided the group with ease, something that reassured the others. If they depended on their own guidance, they would surely get lost, since all the hills and valleys looked identical.

Ikki wanted to say they hadn't touched anything, but the truth was that the scrap around them attracted them irresistibly. He himself couldn't help it when he found something that seemed unusual: an electric guitar shaped like a lyre, just like Apollo's lyre. The piece was impressive, with details that seemed to emanate a soft glow, and he couldn't help but pick it up. There was something mesmerizing about it, as if it had been made for someone with a touch of perfection. He knew he shouldn't, but he couldn't resist.

Grover, on the other hand, was also distracted when he spotted a broken tree made entirely of metal. Although it was severely damaged, the tree still had branches that, even fragmented, contained small golden birds. Grover approached curiously, and the birds, when touched, began to swing as if trying to flap their wings, but they no longer had life. He amused himself for a moment with that, enchanted by the beauty of the work, but he also knew it wasn't the time to get too distracted.

The vastness of ancient objects and metal pieces scattered around the scrapyard seemed to beckon everyone to examine something, even if just for a moment.

Atalanta, the fearless huntress, couldn't help but stray a little from the group when she noticed a pile of rusty, but perfectly forged, blades scattered as if they were antiquities from a distant past. She approached with attentive eyes, analyzing each blade as if she were choosing the most appropriate one for combat. Her fingers ran gently over the blades, the feeling of metal cooling on her hands as she observed, almost as if she were revering the quality of the forge. But it was the reflection of the moon that caught her attention. On one of the blades, the glint of light caught a fascinating detail: an inscription in a language she didn't recognize, perhaps an ancient Celtic inscription or even a lost rune.

Phoebe, who until then had faithfully followed the group, also drifted away slightly, attracted by a series of small artifacts, many of them covered in dust, but with a unique beauty. She crouched beside a broken mirror, whose glass reflected light strangely, creating a play of shadows and lights on the ground. Something in the glint of this mirror hypnotized her, and for a moment she seemed lost, her eyes fixed on the distorted reflection. She wondered if that mirror had belonged to some important being, or if it was simply another of the forgotten relics of Hephaestus's junkyard.

While Atalanta analyzed the rusty blades, Phoebe was distracted by the strange mirror, and Grover was still observing the golden metal birds, Thalia, who had been trying to stay focused, ended up being attracted by something that glittered among the scrap. Her eyes narrowed and she approached, pushing aside some twisted pieces of metal until she found what appeared to be a leather bracelet with a silver clasp. The material seemed old, but incredibly well preserved, and a slight thread of electricity ran through her arm as soon as her fingers touched the surface.

She frowned, feeling a strange familiarity with the object. The bracelet had a small lightning bolt symbol engraved on the clasp, something that made her heart race.

Was it a coincidence? Or something related to her father? Her instinct told her to drop it, but the feeling emanating from the item was almost hypnotic.

Before she could make a decision, a stern voice cut through the air.

"Enough!" Zoe called, her patience clearly at its limit. Her expression was one of pure displeasure as she looked at the hunters and Thalia. "I warned you not to touch anything. And yet, you are rummaging through the scrap like children at a fair."

Phoebe dropped the mirror instantly, looking ashamed. Atalanta sighed, running a finger along the blade before stepping away. Thalia hesitated for a moment, looking at the bracelet in her hand before clenching her fists and throwing it back into the pile of scrap.

Ikki, who until then had been standing next to Zoe, had already stopped checking the objects around him. Unlike the others, his curiosity had passed quickly, and he had already returned to focusing on the main objective.

"Let's go." He said calmly, but his posture showed that he was attentive to anything out of the ordinary. His gaze swept the junkyard one last time before he started walking, expecting the others to follow him.

Zoe gave one last reprimanding look to everyone before following beside him. The group resumed their march, now more focused – but the weight of curiosity still hung in the air, leaving a strange feeling that maybe they had missed something… or avoided a greater danger.

Finally, they saw the edge of the junkyard about a kilometer ahead, the lights of a freeway stretching across the desert. But between them and the road…

Ikki looked at it with mild surprise, feeling a familiar feeling wash over him, forcing him into a deep silence.

"What is that?" Grover gasped.

Before them stood a hill much larger and longer than the others. It was like a metal mound with a flat top, the width of a football field and as tall as the goalposts. At the end of the mound was a row of ten thick metal columns crammed tightly together.

Atalanta frowned. "They look like—"

"Toes," Grover supplied.

Phoebe nodded. "Very, very large toes."

Zoe and Thalia exchanged nervous glances.

"Let's go around," Thalia said, making a more prudent decision. "Way around."

"But the road is right there," Grover protested. "It's faster if we climb."

Ping.

Thalia readied her spear and Zoe drew her bow, but they quickly realized it was just Grover. He had thrown a piece of scrap metal at the toes as he spoke and hit one, making a long echo, as though the column were hollow.

"Why did you do that?" Zoe demanded.

Grover cringed. "I don't know. I, uh, don't like fake feet?"

The toes were starting to freak him out, too. I mean, who sculpted thirty-foot-tall metal toes and then stuck them in a junkyard?

After several minutes of walking, they finally stepped onto the freeway, an abandoned, but well-lit strip of black asphalt.

"We made it," Zoe said with a sigh. "Thank the gods."

But apparently the gods didn't want to be thanked. Just then, they heard a sound like a thousand garbage disposals grinding metal.

They turned quickly.

Behind them, the mountain of junk was boiling, rising up. The ten toes moved, and he realized why they looked like toes. They were toes. The thing that rose out of the metal was a bronze giant in full Greek armor. He was impossibly tall—a skyscraper with legs and arms. He gleamed terrifyingly in the moonlight. He looked at them, and his face was deformed.

The left side was partially melted. His joints creaked with rust and on his armored chest, written in thick dust by some giant finger, were the words WASH ME.

"Talos!" Zoe gasped.

"What is one of Hephaestus's creations doing here?" Thalia said, too worried. "Wait, it can't be the original. It's too small. A prototype maybe. A defective model."

The metal giant didn't like the word defective.

He moved a hand to his sword belt and unsheathed his weapon. The sound of it leaving the scabbard was horrible, metal screeching against metal. The blade was over a hundred feet long, easy. It looked rusty and dull, but Percy didn't figure that mattered. Getting hit by that thing would be like getting hit by a battleship.

"Someone took something," Zoe said, looking at everyone with an accusing glare. "Who took something?"

While Zoe asked about this and accused everyone in the group, Ikki looked at Talos. His heart raced not with fear, but with the absolute certainty that this moment was a milestone.

The same feeling.

The same premonition.

That was exactly how he felt when his mother died. A silent warning from fate, an alert that something inevitable was about to happen, that was what the prophecy said: "One shall be lost in the land without rain…"

This time, he wouldn't let history repeat itself.

"That doesn't matter now…"

Finishing speaking, Ikki walked toward the enormous iron giant. He walked towards Talos with calm, almost lazy steps, as if the metal colossus in front of him wasn't worth hurrying for.

But the atmosphere around him said otherwise.

Even without releasing any aura, even without displaying any outburst of power, just the slight tensing of his muscles was enough to change everything.

It was as if the world itself recognized the danger and recoiled. As if something ancient and primitive had been awakened, something that should never have been touched.

Fear took shape.

Thalia couldn't breathe. Her chest heaved desperately, but the oxygen simply didn't come. Her vision flickered, her ears buzzed, and her heart beat so fast it felt like it was about to explode.

It wasn't ordinary fear.

It wasn't fear of dying.

It was fear of something worse than death.

Zoe, who had already faced legendary monsters, titans, and gods, felt something she should never feel: the desire to flee. Not out of cowardice, not out of strategy. But because every fiber of her being screamed that staying there was impossible. That just continuing to exist near him was a mistake.

Atalanta and Phoebe pressed their hands against their heads, their eyes wide. Their minds couldn't handle it. Rational thoughts were crushed, replaced only by the instinctive impulse to escape. To end it all before it consumed them. The fear was so great, so absolute, that their own bodies began to suggest a way out… Any way out.

In an instant, Grover started to cry.

Tears streamed down his face without him realizing it. His legs failed, and he fell to his knees, unable to move. His instincts screamed. He knew. No monster, no god, no force he had ever encountered in the world compared to this. This was not something you faced. This was something you avoided at all costs.

And then, the impossible happened.

Talos hesitated.

The metal colossus, mindless, soulless, fearless, hesitated.

Its gears groaned, sensors beeping desperately. The automaton moved back for a brief instant, as if trying to process something impossible.

It didn't know what Ikki was.

But it knew it needed to protect itself.

Because the fear it felt...

Was the fear of extinction itself.

Ikki took a deep breath.

All the frustration. All the anger. All the resentment.

The pain of fate always interfering in his life. The crushing weight of choices that were never really his. The incessant feeling that he was just a pawn in a much larger game.

All of this accumulated within him like a silent hurricane, compressed into a single point.

His right fist.

The world went silent. Time slowed down until it became irrelevant.

Then…

He moved.

It was something impossible to comprehend with the naked eye.

The space around him distorted, as if the very fabric of reality was being torn apart. Just one step that seemed to transcend not only distances, but the very laws of the universe, as if he could cross the entire universe with just that single step.

One moment, he was standing still.

The next, Talos was already destroyed.

Ikki's fist struck the metallic colossus with such absurd force that, for a moment, Talos's very existence was completely disintegrated.

There was no resistance.

The impact didn't just destroy the automaton. It erased its presence from reality, as if it had never existed.

Then came the shockwave.

The desert shattered.

The dunes were swept away, the sand turned to glass and then reduced to cosmic dust. The landscape changed forever, as if the earth itself was trying to escape the impact.

The sky… opened.

Not in a figurative sense. Not as a metaphor.

The sky actually split.

A colossal fissure stretched from one horizon to the other, as if the punch had split the firmament itself. The clouds parted from end to end as if the blow had traversed the entire planet.

The air vibrated on such an absurd scale that shock waves swept across entire continents, causing the seas to rise and storms to be born where there was once calm.

The silence that followed was absolute.

There was nothing left of Hephaestus's junkyard.

There was nothing left of Talos.

Ikki stood before the place he'd utterly destroyed, his gaze fixed on the devastated landscape around him.

The impact of his blow had altered the desert itself, transforming the vast arid expanse into something new, unexpected.

The earth, once dry and cracked, was now yielding. Deep fissures opened in the ground, and from within them, water began to gush. Small crystalline streams flowed into the craters left by the impact, and then thickened, transforming into rushing currents.

Groundwater, hidden for countless years, emerged with force, filling the void left by the destruction of Hephaestus's scrapyard. The soil, thirsty for ages, absorbed the moisture for a moment, but soon yielded, allowing a new river to take shape.

A river that should never have existed in that place.

The streams of water snaked through the destroyed terrain, dragging metallic debris and washing away the dust of destruction. Sunlight reflected on the churning surface, creating a golden glow that spread across the horizon.

Ikki said nothing. He turned and walked towards his friends.