Urban Plundering: I Corrupted The System!

Dr. Voss had no idea what lay beneath his laboratory.

Miles below the concrete floors where he crafted his Dark Harbingers, deeper than Earth's crust itself, existed a prison that predated civilization.

The walls were carved from stone that remembered the birth of planets, every surface etched with runes in languages that made reality stutter when spoken aloud. The very air thrummed with power so ancient it had calcified into something physical—explaining why this location, more than anywhere except the Ether Community location itself, pulsed with such concentrated cosmic energy.

Even the Dark Pantheon had never discovered why their chosen site resonated with such raw power.

They were about to learn.

Or perhaps never...

****

Hera materialized within the cosmic prison, her form flickering as the containment runes fought against her presence. The box remained clutched to her chest—dark, ornate, humming with malevolent purpose. Here, in the belly of existence itself, even gods moved carefully.

The first cell stretched before her like a cathedral of despair.

The entity within was massive—easily twenty feet tall, its form humanoid but wrong in ways that hurt to perceive. Chains forged from collapsed stars wrapped around its limbs, binding it to walls covered in runes that bled light whenever the creature moved. But it was the eye that commanded attention.

A single eye, larger than Hera's head, split between molten gold and absolute black. It stared at her with hatred so pure it seemed to burn the air between them. The pupil was a void that whispered of endings, while the golden iris blazed with the fury of something that had been denied its birthright for eons.

"*You,*" the entity spoke, voice like grinding continents. The hatred in that single word could have withered forests.

Hera scoffed, unimpressed by the display. "Still dramatic, I see. That stops today!"

Her fingers traced the box's lock. The mechanism clicked open with a sound like reality tearing, and something emerged—not light, not shadow, but the space between thoughts. It was so fundamentally dark that looking at it created cracks in perception itself.

The thing flew straight into the entity's eye.

The massive form convulsed. Chains that had held for millennia began to crack as power flooded through limbs that had forgotten their strength. The golden-black eye blazed brighter, pupil expanding until it threatened to swallow the chamber whole.

"*Go,*" the entity commanded, voice now layered with harmonics that made the prison walls tremble. "*Free the others.*"

Something had taken the place of the previous owner!

Hera bowed—a gesture of respect mixed with satisfaction—and moved to the next cell.

*

Callianeira hung suspended in a sphere of crystallized tears, her own sorrow made solid and turned into a prison.

The daughter of Poseidon had been weeping for so long that her grief had become a physical thing, trapping her in endless cycles of her own emotion. Her form was graceful yet terrible—skin that shifted between pearl and storm-grey, hair that moved like underwater currents even in the still air, and eyes that held the depth of oceanic trenches.

Hera opened the box again. Another fragment of absolute darkness emerged, diving into the sphere like a shark through water.

The crystallized tears shattered. Callianeira's eyes snapped open—no longer the blue of ocean depths, but something that shifted between tsunami-grey and abyssal black.

Her body began to change as the darkness merged with her essence.

Her skin took on the texture of crushing depths, her hair became liquid shadow that writhed with its own current, and when she moved, the very air around her grew heavy with pressure that made breathing difficult.

"*Sister,*" she whispered, and hurricanes were born in her exhale. Her voice carried the sound of drowning civilizations. "*I can feel you. Your betrayal will never be forgotten?*"

*

The final cell was different. Smaller. More heavily warded.

Aelion sat cross-legged in the center, apparently calm, but the runes covering every surface of his prison sparked and sputtered with each of his heartbeats.

Even contained, his very existence made reality struggle to maintain coherence. He was beautiful in the way lightning was beautiful—perfect features that seemed carved from storm clouds, hair that flickered between gold and electric white, and skin that held a subtle luminescence as if lightning ran through his veins instead of blood.

This time, when Hera opened the box, she poured everything remaining into it.

The darkness that emerged wasn't just absence of light—it was the negation of divine law itself. It struck Aelion like lightning in reverse, and his transformation began immediately. His skin became translucent, revealing networks of pure electricity flowing beneath. His eyes shifted from stormy blue to something that looked like captured thunder—bright, violent, and constantly moving. When he smiled, static electricity danced between his teeth.

"*Finally,*" he said, standing with fluid grace as chains of crystallized commandments crumbled to dust. His voice carried the authority of absolute decree, each word vibrating with power that made the air itself obey. "*Now... let's remind existence why it feared us.*"

The three entities—no longer merely the forbidden children of Olympus but vessels of the THREE, something the Earth itself could not contain—looked at each other across the shattered remains of their eternal prison. Their transformations were complete.

They had become something beyond cosmic threats, beyond divine punishment.

They had become inevitability.

Not even Nyxavere, with all her omniscience, had seen this moment coming. Some events existed outside the flow of knowledge itself.

Hera bowed one final time as an invisible force swept her from the prison, depositing her back on Earth's surface.

*

She appeared in the African savanna, under a sun that suddenly seemed dimmer than it had moments before. The smile on her face was the expression of someone who had just reshuffled the cosmic deck in the most fundamental way possible.

Looking up at Apollo's domain, she sent her message through the sun, her voice older than prayer:

*Mission accomplished.*

The sun itself seemed to flicker in acknowledgment.

*

Meanwhile, in New York, things were indeed different.

Parker emerged from the depths of the Prime Core chamber, carrying Maya and Seoryeon with him.

Both women remained frozen, their bodies locked in temporal stasis—whether from glimpsing his Eighth Life self or simply being touched by that incarnation's overwhelming aura, even Maya's soul-deep connection to him hadn't been enough to shield her from witnessing something her current form couldn't comprehend.

He looked up at the sky where the battles still raged—Street Rat's shadows warring with Hercules' divine strength, while Ma'at's cosmic justice clashed against the Painter's reality-warping madness.

The four combatants seemed locked in eternal conflict, their powers creating storms that threatened to tear Manhattan apart.

It was time to end this useless spectacle and seal the first forbidden Gateways.

What Parker didn't know was that THEY had seen this moment coming.

And they had made preparations.