CHAPTER 164: HUMANITY GREATEST WARRIOR

The city’s ruin still steamed with salt and sorrow. Moonlight poured over the half-sunken streets, broken towers jutting like ribs from a drowned carcass. The silence after catastrophe was always louder than screams; Poseidon stood at the edge of what he had wrought, feeling the pulse of the ocean in his veins, and the judgment of gods whispering just beyond the horizon.

He had not spoken a word since the flood receded. He did not need to. The sea itself had done the speaking for him.

Yet in the silence, humanity gnawed at the edges of his mind. The fragments of Dominic—the boy who once gasped for breath in hospital wards, who once prayed to gods that never answered—stirred faintly inside the drowned god’s frame.

They whispered questions.

Why them? Why this city?

Poseidon did not answer Dominic. He could not. He was no longer bound by the frailty of human morality. What he did was not vengeance. It was inevitability.

The sea does not ask permission when it reclaims land. It simply takes.

---

The Broken Survivors

From the rooftops that still jutted above water, survivors peered down at him. Their eyes were wide, caught between awe and terror. Some clutched children, others held onto what little remained of their lives in soaked bundles of wood or cloth.

One of them, a fisher with salt crusted into his beard, dared to call out.

"Lord of Tides..." His voice cracked. "If you are who they say you are... if you are Poseidon... then spare us. We are but men who bow to the sea every day. We feed our families with your gifts. Spare us."

The words were desperate, sincere.

Poseidon’s eyes, oceans without shore, turned upon him. He felt the boy inside him stir again, urging him to relent. To forgive.

But Thalorin’s echo within his marrow hissed: Mercy is weakness. Mercy is rot. The tide cleanses through destruction.

Poseidon raised his hand. The water at the man’s feet rippled, coiling like a serpent ready to strike. The fisher paled, clutching his child tighter.

And then... Poseidon stopped.

The serpent dissolved back into ripples. The child’s sobbing carried over the still water, and something deep inside his fractured self—perhaps Dominic, perhaps not—refused to strike.

The fisher fell to his knees in tears, bowing his head so low the saltwater lapped his forehead.

Poseidon turned away. He had no need for worship. Yet he knew this moment would spread. Mortals would whisper of him—not as a savior, nor as a god to be prayed to. But as a storm one must endure.

---

The Stir in the Depths

As he began to walk across the shallow sea that had consumed the streets, the waters shifted beneath him, whispering in voices older than Olympus itself.

Shadows moved under the waves. Shapes vast and formless, imprisoned for ages beyond mortal reckoning. The Forgotten Tides.

They had felt his breath when he tore the seal. They had stirred when the city drowned. And now, they pressed against his will, testing the strength of the vessel that bore their drowned king’s essence.

One rose close—too close. A shape like a manta, but its wings stretched leagues wide, its eyes abyssal lanterns. It surfaced only halfway, breaking the reflection of the moon.

Claim us, it murmured into Poseidon’s skull. We were yours. We will be yours again.

Poseidon’s hand clenched into a fist. The power surged, eager to bind, eager to command. And yet... he hesitated.

Because to claim them fully would mean surrendering more of Dominic. More of the fragile tether that still distinguished him from Thalorin entire.

His silence became his answer. The leviathan sank back into the depths, but not in defeat. In patience.

The Forgotten Tides knew he would call them eventually. They could wait. The abyss always waited.

---

Olympus Watches

Above, Olympus was restless. Poseidon felt it—threads of divine awareness brushing against him like hunters tracking a beast. The Council of the Azure Seat had cast their decree, and now their eyes burned into him.

But he would not kneel.

He raised his face to the moon, salt spray catching his hair like a crown of foam.

"Zephyros... Seraphin... Aegirion," he murmured, naming them like one would name rivals across a battlefield. "You sit in your halls of glass and coral, fearing what you cannot drown. You think me vessel. You think me child. You think me less."

The sea around him rippled outward in perfect circles, spreading his voice into the current.

"Then come. Send your blades. Send your flames. I will show you what a drowned god remembers."

His words carried not as sound, but as tide. Every mortal with salt on their lips, every sailor with brine in their lungs, every city with a harbor felt it. Not as a command. As inevitability.

---

The Child’s Voice

And yet, as the tide swelled with his vow, Dominic’s voice rose again inside him.

You said we would protect Kaeli. You said we would not forget. If we keep drowning everything... what is left to protect?

Poseidon froze mid-step. The water around his feet calmed.

Kaeli.

Her name cracked through the armor of inevitability like sunlight through stormclouds. She was the tether, the promise made when his humanity was not yet fully drowned.

The boy inside him clung to her memory, her laughter, her fragile mortality.

And for the briefest moment, the god faltered.

---

The Harbor Tilts Again

The sea leaned once more, as if sensing the fracture in his will. Entire blocks groaned as water rose another hand’s breadth, smashing what roofs still held survivors. Screams echoed as families tried to climb higher, clutching anything that floated.

Poseidon closed his eyes.

With a gesture, he pulled the water back just enough for those screams to fade. He had not intended it. He had not wanted to. But Dominic had.

And so the drowned god walked on, no longer certain if he commanded the tide—or if it commanded him.

---

In Olympus’s Shadow

Far above, in the mirrored halls of Olympus, Aegirion gripped his trident tighter. Through the divine currents, he had felt Poseidon’s hesitation. He had felt the flicker of Dominic’s humanity struggling to breathe within the abyss.

"He spares... and yet he destroys," Aegirion murmured. "He is not Thalorin reborn. He is not Dominic entire. He is... something else."

But the reef goddess snarled. "Something else that will drown us all if left to grow."

And so the decree stood.

Hunters were already sharpening their blades.

The war against the sea had begun.