The city wind smelled of exhaust fumes and deep-fried grease. Far from the pure, immaculate void of the stars, Earth was a noisy, chaotic, and suffocating place. The three ancient deities of the Hall of Probabilities were stuck in the mud. And to make matters worse, they were wearing mortal clothes.
Gad wore a gray hoodie two sizes too big and scratchy jeans she hated. She stood in front of a grimy ATM on a poorly lit street corner. Her face, once pale and majestic, now reflected the exhaustion of an ordinary human. The flickering screen illuminated her tense features.
She clenched her fists. She closed her eyes and tried to summon the immense golden light that once allowed her to change the destiny of galaxies. She wanted to replicate Gael's miracle. She wanted to overload the machine so it would spit out wads of cash.
But the power no longer roared like an ocean. Now, it was a dripping faucet.
She only managed to produce a pale spark the size of a firefly at her fingertips. She channeled it into the card slot. There was an internal flash, the electronics crackled, and the ATM made a sickly metallic noise. It coughed up a single hundred-dollar bill. Then, the screen flickered and went completely dark, dead.
Gad leaned against the brick wall, suddenly dizzy. Altering that minuscule probability in her favor had left her exhausted. She sighed in frustration, took the crumpled bill, and shoved it into her pocket.
A few meters away, Nemesis paced back and forth on the cracked sidewalk. She wore a black leather jacket and military boots that echoed on the cement. She looked like a caged predator.
The gravity of this world was crushing her. Without her immense wings of shadows, she felt ridiculously naked, heavy, and vulnerable. She was so consumed by her anguish, chewing on the humiliation of Moros's punishment, that she took a wrong step.
She crossed paths right in front of a young man with headphones speeding down the sidewalk on a skateboard.
The impact was loud and dry. The mortal's shoulder slammed squarely into the goddess's. Nemesis stumbled backward. For the first time in eons, she felt physical pain. A hot tingling in her arm announced the formation of a human bruise.
"Watch where you're going, crazy bitch!" the skater yelled at her. He didn't stop to help her; he just regained his balance and kept rolling.
Nemesis's eyes went dark instantly. Her pupils dilated until they swallowed the irises. The millennial instinct of retribution boiled in her earthly blood. A simple mortal, a fragile bag of meat, had just struck and insulted the very judge of cosmic karma.
Nemesis raised a hand and aimed at the young man's back. She felt the tug of her power. It was a dense shadow that traveled down her arm and slithered across the ground like a black viper chasing its prey.
She sought absolute punishment. She wanted the asphalt to split open and tear him apart. She wanted immediate divine justice.
But her cosmic authority failed miserably. Instead of a tectonic fault, her shadow barely deepened a small crack in the pavement, right where the board was passing.
The skateboard's front wheel jammed violently. The young man let out a muffled cry. He lost control completely, his arms spinning in the air like windmill blades. His chin was about to kiss the concrete.
However, inertia saved him. At the last moment, the mortal managed to plant a foot on the ground. He clumsily pushed off and hopped back onto the board through sheer luck.
"Old hag!" he yelled from further down the street, flipping her off over his shoulder as he skated away laughing.
Nemesis ground her teeth together until they creaked. The veins in her neck throbbed. She channeled the rest of her fury and reached out in desperation, trying to invoke misfortune upon him once more. She wanted to blow out the wheel bearings. She wanted a car to run him over at the intersection.
She felt the energy leave her fingers... and dissipate into the air.
Her power died completely upon crossing the five-meter mark. It hit an invisible wall. There was no connection. There was no authority. Her long-range reach had been cut off entirely.
She was a lioness without claws.
She dropped her arm, trembling with rage and humiliation. The mortal turned the corner, completely unharmed.
In a dark alley, a few meters from the avenue, Tyche was sitting on a rotting wooden crate. She raised her hands delicately, as if plucking an invisible harp. She closed her eyes and searched for the silver webs that bound the universe's destiny.
Before, her mind was a brilliant map. Now, there was only static.
She managed to catch a microscopic thread. She read the probability of the next three seconds: a drop of dirty water would fall from the rusty balcony above her. She moved her head one centimeter to the left. The drop hit the wooden crate, exactly where her hair had been.
Then, the thread snapped.
It vanished into an opaque fog.
Tyche opened her eyes, overwhelmed by the temporary blindness. She could only read immediate chance. The distant future was an unfathomable concrete wall.
Gad appeared at the alley entrance. She walked in, dragging her feet, with her hood pulled up over her head. She held out her hand and showed the crumpled hundred-dollar bill.
"That's all I could get," Gad muttered, exhausted. "A hundred-dollar miracle. I almost passed out doing it."
"The tapestry is blind," Tyche replied, ignoring the money. Her bureaucratic voice trembled with impotence. "I can't see further than ten seconds within a five-meter radius. I can't even calculate the probability of it raining. We are useless."
An electrical hum cut through the air. Out of nowhere, an urban messenger bicycle skidded to a halt in front of them. The wheels threw sparks that gleamed with a golden hue. The cyclist wore a yellow windbreaker jacket and sneakers. The latter featured a winged, aerodynamic design at the ankles.
He took off his protective helmet. It was Hermes, the messenger of Olympus. His youthful face lit up instantly upon seeing the goddess of probability. He looked at her with total devotion, with the eyes of a love-struck fool.
"Tyche..." Hermes sighed. He dropped the bike and approached her, completely ignoring Gad's existence. "What have they done to you? You're pale. Look at your hands."
"Hermes. Cut the useless sentimentality," Tyche cut him off, standing up and smoothing her wrinkled clothes. "What are you doing here? Moros forbade the intervention of other gods."
"I slipped through a blind spot in the quantum network," he replied, spellbound by the coldness of her voice. "Moros is out of control. I had to warn you. His punishment isn't just a temporary block. He cut off your access to the destiny mainframe."
Nemesis entered the alley at that precise moment, rubbing her bruised shoulder from the hit with the skater. She heard the last sentence and growled.
"Speak plainly, messenger."
Hermes swallowed hard. Nemesis's murderous glare intimidated him, but he stayed close to Tyche to protect her.
"You are local routers now, so to speak. He disconnected you from macro-causality. You can only affect or read your immediate surroundings. Zero global miracles. Zero long-distance divine retribution. You are bound to physics and the space your bodies occupy."
"We already figured that out the hard way," Gad spat, kicking an empty can. "Is that what you risked your neck to tell us?"
"No. I came because of what happened on the astral plane." Hermes's expression lost all trace of romance, turning grim. "Moros sent a Persian Daeva to execute Gael. A creature designed purely to cause pain."
Tyche frowned, her mind processing the variables at top speed.
"An isolated plane. Zero civilians. Zero collateral damage available. Gael didn't have his probability shield. He should be dead."
"That's the problem." Hermes lowered his voice, looking around as if the shadows could hear him. "Gael didn't just survive; he disintegrated her."
The three goddesses froze. The air in the alley turned to ice.
"How?" Nemesis asked, taking a quick step toward the messenger. "A mortal can't kill a superior Hound. He doesn't have the destructive power."
"He didn't use power. He used math," Hermes explained, and in his eyes, there was a glint of genuine terror. "Being isolated with no innocent victims nearby, he forced a survival miracle to the absolute limit. The universe had to collect the collateral damage immediately. And since the Daeva was the only other variable in that closed system..."
Tyche's eyes widened. Her brain completed the monstrous equation.
"The universe collected the toll from the assassin herself..." Tyche whispered, feeling a purely human shiver.
"Exactly," Hermes nodded. "He made the Daeva implode with her own lethality. Moros is tearing apart his own hall in a fury. He is about to mobilize his twelve Apostles. Gael just discovered how to turn his weakness of isolation into a weapon of absolute execution. If he finds you now, being as vulnerable as you are... he wouldn't hesitate to use you as human shields. You have to hide."