The headquarters of the Leviathan Crew sat buried under layers of reinforced concrete and steel, deep enough that no natural light ever reached it.
Rows of monitors lined the walls, each one feeding live data from field teams, satellite feeds, and internal systems. Right now, every screen in the main command room showed the same thing: flatlines.
Seven red icons pulsed on the central display. Seven A-rank soldiers. All dead. Their vital signs had flatlined within seconds of each other. No final transmissions. No warnings. Just silence.
"What… what happened?" Officer Kline asked, his voice cracking as he set the microphone down on the metal table. His hands were shaking. This mission had been listed as routine. Secure the target, extract information if possible, eliminate if necessary. Standard procedure. In and out. Now the best strike team they had sent into that sector was gone.
Captain Harlan stood at the head of the long table, arms crossed behind his back. He had ordered Marcus into the field himself. The man's file photo was still up on the screen, but outlined in green like Ethan, his photo sat right beside it, also marked red.
"You had potential," Harlan muttered under his breath, staring at Marcus's picture. "More than Ethan ever showed on paper. And you threw it away saving that kid."
He turned to face the room. Twenty corporals and junior officers sat in their chairs, all of them waiting as no one spoke. The air felt thick, like the weight of the failed operation had sucked the oxygen out of it.
Harlan's voice cut through the quiet, calm and cold. "This is now an S-grade mission. You all saw what just happened."
He snapped his fingers once.
The central screen zoomed in on Ethan's file photo. A new symbol appeared beside it: a jagged bolt of lightning glowing in electric blue.
"We had doubts before," Harlan continued. "But the last transmission from James confirms it. The target is a demigod. Direct bloodline from the main three."
One of the female officers leaned forward, her face pale. "Which one?"
Harlan let the pause stretch just long enough for the tension to build. "Zeus. One and only. Son of Zeus."
The room went dead silent. Not the normal quiet of people thinking. This was heavier. The kind of silence that comes when everyone realizes the rules just changed and nobody liked the new ones.
They had dealt with demigods before. Minor ones. Kids of Hermes who could slip through security like ghosts. Ares offspring who fought like machines. Hephaestus descendants who built weapons that shouldn't exist. Those were manageable. Dangerous, but manageable.
The big three were different. Zeus. Hades. Poseidon. Their children carried power that warped the battlefield itself. And now Leviathan had confirmation that one of them was walking around in the body of a teenager named Ethan.
An officer in the back row finally found his voice. "Can we even dare to attack his son? It's… it's Zeus."
Harlan's eyes narrowed. He understood the fear. Everyone in this room had grown up hearing the old stories. The gods were not myths here. They were real, distant, and terrifying. Attacking the son of the king of the gods sounded like suicide.
But Harlan knew something most of the lower ranks didn't.
They weren't really afraid of Zeus right now. Zeus had been quiet for decades, busy with whatever kept him occupied in the sky. The ones actually pulling strings on the ground, the ones who gave Leviathan their orders, were Ares and his mother, Hera.
And Hera had never been fond of Zeus's outside children. She hated them. Actively.
Harlan made his decision right then.
"Send the AAA-grade soldiers," he said. "Target is Ethan. Priority one. Lethal force authorized from the start."
The silence that followed was even thicker than before.
AAA-grade. Triple-A. The absolute top tier. These weren't soldiers who cleared buildings or ran escort missions. These were the ones deployed when entire cities needed to be silenced.
When something that shouldn't exist had to stop existing immediately. Sending three of them after one kid, even a demigod, was unheard of.
One of the corporals swallowed hard. "Triple-A… on the son of Zeus."
Harlan didn't blink. "We follow orders. The ones who pay us. The ones who rule us. And right now, that means Ares and Hera want this bloodline ended."
He looked around the table, meeting every pair of eyes.
"Send the troops."
No one argued. They couldn't. Not if they wanted to keep breathing.
A junior officer at the comms station nodded once and began typing rapidly. "Dispatching AAA team Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Destination locked on last known coordinates of target Ethan. Estimated arrival window: fourteen hours."
Harlan turned back to the screen. Ethan's face stared back at him, young, ordinary-looking except for that faint scar along his jaw that the file noted had appeared after his first power manifestation.
"You should have stayed hidden, kid," Harlan whispered to the image. "Now the sky is going to fall on you."
*****
The jungle was still waking up when Ethan opened his eyes.
Morning light filtered through the thick canopy in thin, dusty beams. Birds called overhead in short, sharp bursts. The air smelled of wet soil, rotting leaves, and something metallic that Ethan couldn't quite place.
His clothes were damp from the night's dew. His back ached from sleeping on the hard ground, but the pain felt distant, like it belonged to someone else.
He sat up slowly, rubbing the back of his neck. The thunder inside his chest, the power that had exploded out of him last night, was quiet now. Like a storm that had spent all its lightning and was waiting to build again.
Around him, the campsite looked normal enough. The small fire pit they had dug yesterday was cold ash. The makeshift shelter of branches and leaves they had thrown together still stood. Marcus's pack lay untouched a few feet away.
Marcus.
Ethan's stomach twisted. He remembered the man's face right before the lightning took him. The shock. The fear. Then nothing.
He pushed the memory down. There would be time to deal with it later. Right now he needed to move. Leviathan wouldn't stop coming just because seven of their guys had died. If anything, they would send more. Harder ones.
Ethan stood, brushed dirt off his pants, and checked the small knife he had taken from Marcus's gear. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. He slung the pack over one shoulder and started walking east, following the faint animal trail they had used the day before.
The jungle pressed in on all sides. Trees with trunks wider than cars. Vines thick as ropes hanging down like nooses. Every step made leaves crunch or twigs snap. Ethan tried to move quietly, but he wasn't trained for this. Not really. He had spent most of his life in cities, dodging school, dodging cops, dodging questions about why lightning followed him when he got angry.
He had never asked to be a demigod. Never wanted it. One day he was just Ethan, the kid who got in fights and fixed cars sometimes for cash. The next day the sky answered when he yelled, and everything changed.
A branch cracked somewhere behind him.
Ethan froze.
He turned slowly, knife held low the way Marcus had shown him once during a short training session. The jungle looked the same. Green. Endless. But the feeling in his gut said otherwise.
"Come out," he said, voice low. "I know you're there."
Nothing.
He waited ten more seconds. Then twenty.
A shape detached itself from the shadows between two massive roots. Not an animal. A man. Tall, dressed in dark tactical gear that blended with the undergrowth.
His face was painted in streaks of green and black. In his hands he carried a rifle that looked too advanced for any normal military Ethan had ever seen.
The man didn't speak. He just raised his hand. Showing his surrender.
Ethan felt the spark ignite in his chest before he could think. The air around him crackled. Tiny blue arcs danced across his knuckles. Even though the man appeared harmless, Ethan felt it.
This is no man.
He thought, as lightning sparked in his hand, "Who are you?"
From the shadows, he finally revealed himself to Ethan—his golden hair shining brightly, that smile paired with those yellow eyes. Ethan knew who he was without him even saying it.
"I am Shawn, son of Hermez, and I'm here to help."