Sup, guys!

I am back.

This is part three, as promised. I reread what I wrote in part two and decided that it was way too depressing, especially in the later chapters. This is supposed to have humor as a genre, for gods' sake! So I injected some humor.

Yeah. Tell me if this works.

This chapter doesn't feature Orion (Yes, gasp) and will instead feature Hippolytos, because I feel like he deserves a mention and I'm too lazy to write out another fic. So hopefully, this chapter does it justice.

So have fun, read, enjoy!

Also, review.

Vengeance.

It wasn't like Artemis wasn't in favor of dishing out some divine retribution when push came to shove-the former king of Calydon could attest to that-but vengeance that required careful planning, which could take years to come to fruition? She lacked the patience for it.

It was funny, in a way. She was prepared to go years in order to hunt down a particularly evasive prey, but she wasn't willing to dedicate the same amount of time to something that wasn't all that different conceptually. But she never saw the practical reason for it: why waste years systematically destroying someone when a well placed arrow would do the trick? She preferred to outsource the brain work to Athena these days.

But this, this was crossing the line.

Hippolytos's dead body was laid out in front of his father, Theseus.

Artemis growled at the Athenian king, "You better have a damn good explanation for this."

Said king gulped, "My wife, Phaedra, said he attempted to rape her. She had killed herself because of it. I had to punish him for that!" [1]

Artemis took a deep breath, let it out. "And do you recall, by any chance, the oath all of my followers have to take?"

Theseus paled. "Yes."

She narrowed her eyes, "And yet you still condemned him. I knew Hippolytos, son of Poseidon, and I knew that he was one of those rare mortals who could not be moved by romance or lust. How is it, o great and wise king, that I knew him better in one year than you did in twenty?"

The spawn of Poseidon flinched. She struck a nerve, then.

Good. She pressed on, "Or did it not matter to you what he wanted? As long as it was conventional? As long as it was proper? He had no interest in men or women, as I'm sure he had told you. Did you listen?"

Was she projecting a little? Definitely. That was fine, though. She needed to get things off her chest.

"Make no mistake, boy," she let her voice drip with contempt. "You may have triumphed in the past. You may think yourself a hero. But your strength does not make you a good one. Heroes always fall, son of Poseidon. You will do well to remember that."

She gathered the broken body of the hunter in her arms.

"I'll deal with you later," she promised the king, before turning to leave.

"Wait!" the king called out. "At least give me a body to bury! Please!"

She smiled at him coldly. "You don't have to worry about that anymore."

She left without further elaboration. [2]

One might assume by the verbal thrashing she had just delivered to the king of Athens that her vengeance would be delivered to the aforementioned son of Poseidon.

It wasn't. Theseus's literal fall would come in its own time. Psychological torment would have to suffice for now. Artemis, meanwhile, had bigger prey to hunt.

Upon Hippolytos's arrival to her nephew's recovery and his subsequent resurrection, she was able to piece together a general idea of what had transpired.

Namely, Aphrodite.

That overgrown piece of seafoam didn't know when to stop, did she?

After thanking Asclepius for his help, awkwardly skirting around the fact that she had technically killed his mother upon Apollo's request [3], and how she wasn't really on talking terms with his father anymore [4], and making sure to give the man her blessing as thanks, she picked up the undead Hippolytos and transported him to one of her temples in Italy.

"My lady?" he asked, a little confused. "What am I doing here?"

"You're no longer safe in my Hunt," she paused, "Well, even less safe than usual, anyway. You have attracted the unwanted attention of the love goddess, and as your recent death has shown, it is something you really, really don't want."

"So you're...kicking me out?" Hippolytos sounded absolutely devastated.

Artemis winced, "I'm trying to keep you safe. Italy is far enough out of the way that people wouldn't think to look here. Out of sight, out of mind, and all that. Believe me, you do not want to be in the center of attention for what's about to go down."

"Why? What's about to go down?"

"Well, I'd imagine Hades would not be happy about losing a soul. It's Olympian politics, Hippolytos. It is best you stay out of it: it gets bloody, especially when mortals are involved."

"Oh," he seemed to think it was worth the risk, but he didn't argue.

Artemis nodded. "You should stay here for a while. You're free to do what you want with your life. I will no longer hold you to my service."

"I-I think I'd like to continue to serve you. I can...be a priest, or something."

Something pleasant and warm grew inside her. "Very well."

He bowed, "It has been an honor being in your Hunt, my lady."

"It has been an honor having you in the ranks," she smiled.

"This is farewell, then."

If either a god or a mortal were to play word association with the name Ares, "blood" would probably be the first word to pop up, followed closely by "war" and "jerkass."

Yes, with the exceptions of the Spartans and the Amazons, Ares was not a popular god. He was, however, an impulsive one, and that made him easy to manipulate. Artemis wasn't one to plot beyond the basic doomsday prepping she usually did, and she definitely wasn't one to conspire, but in this case, she was more than happy to take a page out of Athena's playbook.

Between Ares's impulsiveness and his current status as Aphrodite's boyfriend, she was confident she could get him in on this. The fact that he owed her after the whole trapped-in-the-jar incident didn't hurt either.

She chose the form of a seventeen year old-the one she usually reserved for when she needed to be eye-to-eye with another god. "Ares."

The god turned his flame-filled eyes on her. "Artemis. Finally decided to rejoin society?"

Artemis gritted her teeth. Ares had an extremely punchable face. "I have a proposition."

Ares snorted, "You sound like Athena. 'I have a proposition.' Fancy words and no substance."

"That's because you didn't let me finish!" she snapped.

Ares raised his eyebrows, taken aback. "All right, I'm listening."

"Does anything come to your mind when you hear the word 'Adonis'?"

It was a bit ridiculous how fast she got Ares to agree to her plan after that. "So, I'll summon the wild boar?"

Artemis nodded, "It's your sacred animal, and he'll be killed while hunting, which is my thing. It would be difficult to trace back to any individual god, so you'd be off the hook with Aphrodite. Any questions?"

"Nope. Well, one. How do we make sure he would be the one to get mauled and not some random passerby?"

"Leave that one to me." [5]

In the end, it was a simple matter of leading Adonis's hunting dogs to the appropriate spot and watching the carnage happen.

Artemis watched the grieving goddess gather up the body of her dead love with a sort of vindictive satisfaction. That's what she got for taking away people she loved!

Perhaps the whole "revenge served cold" thing had some credit.

So the whole revenge thingy came about when I was reading Hippolytus by Euripides. Basically, after Hippolytos died, Artemis mentioned that she will exact revenge on one of Aphrodite's followers. I think it was supposed to allude to the cycle of revenge. I also think that Artemis would take steps to make sure she doesn't get revenged back, such as making it slightly harder to trace back to her.

Alright, so this chapter does require a bit of explanation.

[1] So you'll notice that Hippolytos dies a bit differently than described in Percy Jackson's Greek Gods. I've decided to make it so that the way he died was closer to the original myths, though I did allude to Hippolytos's and Theseus's disagreement a bit. In Hippolytus, though, Euripides did have Hippolytos go on a tirade about women. I don't think that makes sense, though, seeing as Artemis in the play basically saw everything, and still cared enough to honor him. And she's the protector of women, and I don't think she would have appreciated misogynistic remarks coming from her model follower.

[2] I don't think Artemis would have liked Theseus, between the whole abandoning Ariadne on Naxos thing and the whole kidnapping Helen (who was like, twelve, and some sources say she was ten or even seven) and keeping her until she was of marriageable age thing. Also, he's the king of Athens, and Artemis had already made her opinion of Athens exceptionally clear.

[3] So that showed up in the Tyrant's Tomb. Remember how Apollo mentioned the whole ravens thing, and how their feathers are black because he cursed them after they told him that his former girlfriend Coronis cheated on him? Remember how he had Artemis kill her for him, and how she was pregnant at the time? Well, her unborn child was Asclepius.

[4] After Apollo had Orion killed, Artemis gave him the silent treatment for a few centuries. Or would have if the Trojan War hadn't broken out. More on that later.

[5] Remember the whole Artemis swearing vengeance thing I mentioned earlier? Well, Artemis and Ares were both suspects in Adonis's death, so I thought, why not?