Where the Styx Runs Cold, Vol. 2 Ch 4: The Olympian Gambit Pt. 1

The peace in Valhalla lasted six months. Five months and twenty-nine days longer than Rita had expected.

The truce held the way thin ice holds—under pressure, barely, with the cold dark underneath. Breaker's open fury had settled into something watchful, contained. New recruits and original members shared tables now. Conversation was short, professional, stripped of edge. Arthur's move in Denver—the quiet rebellion, the lives kept intact—had bought him back some ground. Not trust. Not yet. But something functional had grown in its place.

Rita had been spending more time in the Sanctuary wing. It was the only place in Valhalla where the truth didn't feel like a weapon.

Elias Jenkins' suite smelled of old paper and tea. The holographic wall showed a Scottish moor, grey clouds dragging slow across a flat, empty sky. Elias sat hunched over his screen, thin fingers moving across lines of code with the patience of something geological.

At Arthur's request, he'd been given limited, monitored access to Klein's lower-level data streams. A canary in a digital coal mine.

He didn't look up when she entered. "He's found a new obsession."

She crossed to the screen. A web of data points—money flows, surveillance reports, resource orders—all orbiting a single node. A stylized Greek temple. Two words beneath it: Pantheon Corp.

"He's moved past Radzig." Elias zoomed out to a global influence map. Pantheon's soft power—cultural, humanitarian, the kind that doesn't need a seat at a table to reshape what happens at one—outstripped most G7 nations. "The world doesn't just respect them. They're starting to worship them. A religion in plain sight. Benevolent gods."

A pause. The holographic clouds moved.

"Klein doesn't fear their power. He hates their philosophy." Elias's voice had gone quiet, academic. "Public heroism, grand gestures, humanitarian aid—he sees it as reckless. Sentimental. He thinks gods who walk in the sun and need people to love them are celebrities, not shepherds. He doesn't see Alexis Waid as a rival CEO." He looked at Rita. "He sees her as a rival high priestess leading the world somewhere it can't come back from."

Rita said nothing. On a nearby screen, muted—a news ticker crawled across the bottom: Pantheon's Prometheus Initiative Promises a New Era of Clean Energy. A press conference. Alexis Waid at a podium in Chicago, her face lit by camera flashes and something that looked, from a distance, like genuine joy.

Elias pulled up a blacked-out file. Most of it redacted. One field visible. FILE DESIGNATION: OLYMPIAN-ALPHA: HERA.

"His private history files confirm it." Elias sat back. "He's not just looking at her career. He's looking at a pattern. A pantheon rises, earns devotion through grand displays, and then their passions, their rivalries, their very human appetites tear everything apart. He's seen it before—or thinks he has." A pause. "He believes she's the embodiment of a cycle he's determined to end."

Rita looked from the redacted file to the face on the muted screen. Waid was gesturing. Generous, open. The kind of person who makes a room feel larger.

The kind of person Klein would consider catastrophically dangerous.

***

The Crow's Nest was silent except for the low-frequency hum of Valhalla's geothermal core.

Arthur stood in the center of the circular room, the 360-degree data stream circling him like weather. A financial summit in Singapore. A SHEPARD containment team in Brazil. Satellite images of unauthorized construction in the Gobi. The world in all directions, sorted and filed by a mind that had learned to treat chaos as signal.

Six months since Denver. The team had settled into something that functioned. Not harmony—something more practical. A shared tolerance of their circumstances, a working knowledge of one another's limits. He had their professionalism. Their loyalty was still conditional. He knew it, and let it be.

A priority alert flashed red in the corner of his vision.

He focused on it. A live feed expanded across one wall. Helicopter footage, unsteady—a massive plume of black smoke and strangely luminescent gas rising from an industrial complex on the shore of Lake Michigan. The reporter's voice cut through the rotor noise.

"…a massive explosion has ripped through Pantheon Corporation's Prometheus Energy Lab. Initial reports from first responders describe a catastrophic energy surge originating from the facility's core chamber…"

Arthur went still. Pantheon. Chicago. He didn't need long.

"…sources inside the facility report that a high-level, superhuman employee was present in the core chamber at the time of the explosion. Early accounts describe him as unstable…"

Unstable. One word, doing a lot of work. He watched the smoke roll across the lake.

His command interface blinked. A priority-one summons. Klein.

The data streams vanished. In their place: a single file, stark on black. Thermal satellite imagery. Seismic readings. A partial transcript of Pantheon's internal emergency comms, assembled and cross-referenced in the minutes since the blast. Klein's network worked fast and without sentiment.

The directive appeared.

SUBJECT: PANTHEON INCIDENT, CHICAGO.

ANALYSIS: EVENT PRESENTS A STRATEGIC OPPORTUNITY. THE 'PROMETHEUS INITIATIVE' IS THE CORNERSTONE OF WAID'S 'BENEVOLENT GOD' NARRATIVE. THIS INCIDENT REVEALS THE INHERENT RECKLESSNESS OF HER APPROACH AND THE FALLIBILITY OF HER PANTHEON.

DIRECTIVE: YOU WILL LEAD AN 'INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION' UNDER THE COVER OF 'HAWKE GLOBAL SECURITY CONSULTING.' YOUR STATED OBJECTIVE IS TO DETERMINE THE CAUSE OF THE FAILURE AND ASSESS PANTHEON'S LIABILITY FOR OUR INSURANCE SYNDICATES.

PRIMARY OBJECTIVE: PROVIDE A FULL, CONCLUSIVE REPORT DETAILING PANTHEON CORPORATION'S OPERATIONAL NEGLIGENCE, INSUFFICIENT CONTAINMENT PROTOCOLS, AND RECKLESS ENDANGERMENT. THE EVIDENCE MUST BE IRREFUTABLE.

Arthur read it twice.

The evidence must be irrefutable. Not: find the truth. Find this truth. Build this case. Deliver this verdict.

He was being sent to frame a goddess.

He closed the file. Looked at the smoke still curling on the feed. The lake glittered cold beneath it.

He had his blueprints. Now he had to build.

***

The main briefing room. The team gathered. The Pantheon footage played on one wall, looped—smoke, lake, the same thirty seconds of ruin, over and over.

Arthur stood at the head of the table and didn't dress it up.

"The world knows Alexis Waid is Juno. Founding Legionnaire. Saint of clean energy." A beat. "Neil Klein sees her as a civilization-ending mistake. An explosion just crippled her flagship project. We've been ordered to write the official story of how it was her fault."

Silence. The old team processed it differently than the new recruits. He could see it—a dark humor beginning to form, the particular camaraderie of people asked to do something genuinely insane.

Breaker let out a long, low whistle. "So we're not framing a celebrity. We're framing an actual goddess." A pause. "The balls on this guy."

Ricochet spun a disc on the table. "I hope she has a sense of humor."

Arthur let it settle, then moved to the schematic of the blast site. "Here's how we build it. We give Klein a perfect case. Airtight. Every data point sourced, every conclusion sound. Exactly what he wants." He zoomed to a corrupted energy reading from the core chamber. "But we build it with one flaw. A single piece of embedded misinformation, technical enough that only someone with access to Pantheon's original divine-level source code could identify it as a forgery." He looked around the table. "A mind like Hera's."

No one spoke.

"We're not just writing a false report. We're leaving her a key. We're telling her—in a language only she can read—that the shepherd is trying to poison the flock. That his dogs are off the leash."

Rita spoke from the wall. Quiet, but the room shifted toward her.

"There's one more thing." She paused. "Klein's private archives go further than tactical obsession. He believes she's part of a cycle. A pantheon rises, earns devotion, and then destroys everything through its own passions. In his own mind, he's not just winning a corporate war." Her eyes moved to the screen, to Waid's frozen face mid-gesture. "He thinks he's preventing an apocalypse."

The loop started again. Smoke. Lake. Thirty seconds of ruin.

Arthur looked at Waid's face on the holo-display. The charisma came through even in freeze-frame. She was the kind of person who made people believe in things.

He'd been ordered to build a cage of lies around her. He'd just told his team he intended to leave the key inside it.

He dismissed them. Let the footage run.