Alcides the Berserker 4 (Patreon)

Alcides the Berserker 4 - or ‘My Twin Sister and I go through a wild journey in Ancient Greece’ (Fateverse, Herakles!SI)

EDIT: A bit of a serious lore-related discussion at the end of the chapter as I found a severe dissonance between the original ‘timeline’ offered by Hesiod about Greek mythology and the one the Nasuverse is based about.

Also, Ref for Young Asterios (Found on Gelbooru)!

At this point, two were the potential eventualities of our daring escape: we either made it back to the boat without any issues, or we ran into trouble and ended up facing a large portion of the Cretan Army to get there.

Considering how Greek Stories tended to go and how unlucky I tended to be, I thought that we were going to go through the latter option. Turns out that this was not the case as we conjured a rather convincing trick to be ignored. After borrowing a cart off the nearby stable, we put Asterios there with a large sheet over his body as he lay down on the cart.

Iphi kept watch over him and gave him some company while I personally took care of carrying the cart. It was the first time I tried such a feat, but despite what many would think… I managed just fine. Asterios’ weight, combined with Iphi’s, was far less than what I could easily pull.

The real gripe was how tight the gripping spots were for the cart. It wasn’t meant to be used by a single man, but it was nonetheless a good exercise to train my muscles and my palms to grab things properly.

Since some legends related to Herakles demanded for the hero to not only have mighty strength, but also the means to keep a grip going for long… It was good training for me to rely upon as I had a lot of grabbing to do once I started to pick monsters that were far bigger and nastier than I was in the normal situation.

Much to my chagrin, however, a pair of guards did stop us in the middle of the path, and yet I managed to dodge a bad situation by using the very excuse I knew would sell the deed easily to them considering what Knossos and Minos were both ‘renown’ about.

“Oh, I am training for the Olympics. I want to teach those mongrels of Athens that their foolish attempt to ruin our glory was all for naught.”

Winning the Olympics and Shitting on Athens. Two things that both the Cretan Civilizations and the dipshit king in charge of it at the moment were quite eager to see through to maximum efficiency.

“And you are carrying-” One of the guards remarked, only for me to cut him short.

“Two large bulls and my sister,” I explained bluntly. “I was planning just on the two bulls but-”

“My feet hurt and my brother cares for me!”

The girl’s chirpy addition gained a sigh, a pat on the shoulder from one of the guards that said ‘I feel you’ and then a smooth retreat to the docks. This is where Asterios was given a proper chance to see what his home had been like.

From the docks, Knossos manifested a sense of decaying beauty, but I could tell that Asterios saw it with pink-tinted lenses. This was his ‘home’ after all and, despite the pain it carried in his memory, its beauty, now seen by him in the fullest for the first time, seemed to almost make up for all those years of imprisonment.

What it didn’t do was paint a good feeling he had towards his father. That remained unchanged, but the bitterness was, dutifully so, going to make it more difficult to forgive in the long run. And, as much as I knew he was sold to the idea to depart from it to save other lives, the brief glance of unease and self-disappointment were quite frustrating to see.

Not because of what he felt, but because of the things that led him to suffer like this. I may not have plans to directly kill Minos, but I was so going to have Asterios as proof of Minos’ trickery to use Zeus for his plans. Once in Athens, I will have to just find a temple dedicated to him and… speak to him. Somehow.

This was the last thought I entertained as the ship was set to sail. Asterios questioned us both in regard to how it worked and how the wind carried the strength to see us through the sea.

It was like having a massive child onboard, but a polite one as he seemed to keep the ‘more more’ side of him when it came to deeper situations. Such as why Poseidon was truly the one in charge of this.

All in all, a seemingly ‘easy win’ for us. I just… couldn’t help but feel uneasy about it. After all, Minos could still plot something and try to get Zeus involved. The only reason why I knew this may not be the case was a rather unusual ‘weakness’ Olympians were known to have- if you don’t know the one that you are meant to ‘hurl a revenge at’, then you can’t do it.

The classic example of this was when Odysseos tricked the Cyclops Polyphemus in one of the many tricks he had to pull through during his decade-long trip back home.

When the Cyclops lost his eye to the mastermind and only knew Odysseos by the name of ‘Nobody’, he could not get Poseidon to hunt down Odysseos with renewed wrath to the already-vengeful ploy of having the man go through ten full years of sea-traveling to get back home from the Trojan Wars.

This was… sketchy, but it was one of many other similar events where, if a Deity was unfamiliar with the source of some issues, then they wouldn’t enact a Wrathful act against their targets.

Names carry true power, even more in a world of Gods and Magic.

I kept being vigilant over this thought, keeping watch over any ships trailing us, but feeling only stupid when Iphi just lamented I was being paranoid for nothing. She was a dumbhead at times, but I could tell she had good reasons to sound like that.

Worry was not an emotion she was fine in showing around, and she seemed unwilling to do so around Asterios as we both knew how much awkward he still was around other people and spending time around others for as long as he was with us.

As night came and everyone went to sleep, I ultimately conceded that we were safe from any trouble. But while I was growing convinced that our trip back to Athens was going to be devoid of issues, I failed to notice that an eagerness was flying far above our heads, peering and studying us as we continued to sail north to Athens.

I had been thinking that my real father would have been planning to try and ‘connect’ to me somehow. I just didn’t expect him to pull a stunt like the one waiting for us at our destination…

—-----d-d-d-d—----

AN

So, I have spent some time gnawing at the fact that the Nasuverse has added a ‘tiny’ detail in the Age of Gods that makes the overall timeline I was following through Hesiod’s own works somewhat ‘troubled’.

Pandora (in the Nasuverse) was created in 4000 BC.

Pandora (by Hesiod’s account) opens the box (after marrying Epimetheus) in 1654 BC.

This lil’ thing then exploded in the Gigantomachy being set around 1600s BC- yet the Nasuverse set those events to before Sefar’s arrival in 12000 BC. This is… mind boggling. Not permanently, but it does hurl a grenade at what general timeline I had in mind. It means I can’t rely too much on yearly events, but ‘go random’ on some dates to prevent issues. I will still rely on Hesiod’s account in regard to some Heroes’ ages/deeds/events, hence why:
1) Medusa has already been slain since Alcides is Perseus’ great-Grandson;
2) Theseus has yet to be of ‘Heroic Age’ since there are a few generations of ‘slaves’ sent by Athens to Knossos before he takes the journey as a young man;
3) Due to how time fluctuations work, there is a rather abysmal chance by eyeballing the timeline that… Gilgamesh may still be alive at this very moment in the story.