The sirens thought they finally bewitched a hero and felt smug and contemptuous, convinced that even a hero was just a man in the end.
When stripped of any means to resist their song, they were ultimately powerless against the enchantment.
And yet, just as heroes always somehow found a way to escape these creatures,
This hero had once again rendered their proudest weapon meaningless and, in the midst of their despair, lit the star of their own deaths above their heads.
Looking back now on those impossibly slow yet relentlessly deliberate steps, the sirens felt a chill go through them.
That breathtakingly beautiful face, one even the sirens were initially reluctant to destroy, a face so lovely even gods coveted it, now wore a cold and expressionless look the entire time.
They instinctively looked past it without registering what it meant.
That was the gaze of a death god who had been eager to crush their skulls from the very start.
This was no harmless, beautiful youth.
This was a creature slayer more brutal than Heracles.
At least Heracles had some gentleness toward the fairer kind, but that one arm right now was as unyielding as iron rebar, crushing the life out of her.
Ah, ah, ah...
The siren let out ragged, terrified sounds, barely more than broken gasps.
She struggled with everything she had, clawing and scratching and biting, but nothing could breach his skin by even a fraction.
The most she managed was to tear his upper clothing away, revealing the solid, lean muscle beneath, a body of steel wrapped in human skin.
Then the young man raised his fist high, and it came down on her like the sword of Damocles delivering its judgment.
Boom!!
Like a small earthquake, a thunderous and muffled impact, and the sky above erupted in a spray of red and white scattering in every direction.
The sea below broke into small churning waves.
The body that had been struggling in his arms went quiet.
If Night had known the siren's final thoughts, he would have laughed with nothing but scorn.
However much one might value grace and care toward those of a gentler nature, a man-eating creature was still a man-eating creature.
It could never return to what it once was, noble and beautiful, the proud daughters of a river god who dared to challenge the muses.
Even if Heracles himself were here, he would have felt nothing for something this foul.
How could a person feel anything for a group of beasts?
You do not extend courtesy to monsters.
.
.
.
Meanwhile, all the daughters of the river god Achelous let out screams of terror.
The scene before them brought rushing back the memory of the day the Muses tore out their wings with brutal finality.
That suffocating feeling of having fate seized by someone else's hand.
With the sirens thrown into chaos, the sailors who had been swimming in the water began to surface one by one and regain their senses.
Their eyes were still dazed, and they had no idea what had happened.
The sirens tried to scatter and flee in all directions.
But without the suppression of their song, Night was like a caged predator suddenly set loose, his fangs bared and savage.
He tossed aside what remained of the siren in his grip, and before the eyes of the still-dazed, sluggish sailors, put on a display of hand-to-hand combat that left them shaking.
Lord Griffith, who had seemed so elegant and refined to them, almost princely in appearance, was now throwing himself at the sirens like a diving hawk.
With no proper weapon in hand, he drove his fists directly into their spines.
One tried to flee, and he yanked her spinal column out through her back with his bare hand.
Like an iron fist driving through soft tofu, the man tore through flesh and blood with no effort at all.
The fighting style was wild and savage in a way that no longer fit the musician's image from before.
He moved through sprays of blood, silver hair coming loose and spreading in the wind, blue eyes cold as starlight, stained with crimson that made the whole image something otherworldly.
The gaze of an apex predator from an ancient age.
It made the sailors tremble, terrified that once Night was done with the sirens, he might turn on them next.
The young man flung the spine in his hand like a projectile, snapping the legs of a siren trying to swim away, tangling them into a knot, and then, amid the screaming of two sirens, grabbed one by the ankle and swung her like a club straight into the other.
Thud!!
Very soon, faced with that level of brutality, the remaining sirens scattered and fled at full speed, not one of them willing to stay and fight.
They were terrified.
Even after retreating to what should have been a safe distance, none of them looked back.
It was as though something monstrous was right behind them, and the smallest hesitation would cost them their lives.
In the end, several sirens did manage to escape.
Night did not chase after them.
He had speed on land, but not the kind that let him run freely across the surface of the sea, and without a blessing like water-walking, swimming was no way to catch daughters of a river god who spent every day in the water pretending to be mermaids.
Once the last enemy before him was dealt with,
He looked out at the shore of the island, now stained red all around.
No trace of any remaining sirens in the distance.
Only then did he let go of the thought of pursuing them further.
His trousers were more or less intact, but his upper half was bare, revealing lean, powerful muscle, and his tied hair had come undone and fallen loose around his shoulders.
At this point Night looked far less like a musician and far more like a hero.
No, a demon lord.
After the mental struggle and the slaughter, he sat down casually on a rock and began recovering his energy.
But the way he looked in that moment, hair slightly tangled and drifting in the sea breeze, flecks of blood across his face and body, that restrained and icy composure, made him look exactly like an ancient tyrant restored to life.
One who had ended all living things and looked upon everything that remained as insects and dust, without an ounce of feeling or mercy, unshaken in mood, continuing to reign from a throne built upon the bones of those he had destroyed.
Gulp. No one could tell who swallowed first.
But then every sailor turned to look at Night with expressions of quiet horror.
At the same time, on another front entirely...
The moon goddess quietly slipped away from where she had been watching, deeply satisfied with the unexpected and stunning outcome.
She was not like those sheltered mortals who cowered before his brutal power.
The fighting style was a little rough, certainly, but she was the goddess of the hunt, not a goddess of war.
A fight did not need to be elegant.
It only needed to be efficient.
A single, decisive kill was the essence of the hunt.
Now that the crisis on Night's end was resolved, it was time for her to deal with her own matter.
She did not know which god had arranged for the sirens to appear, but after offending her, those creatures were not getting away.
Artemis's gaze turned toward the distance, in the direction where the surviving sirens had regrouped.
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)