OSP did a stream of the Hades game recently and I'm weak for the snarky blood-spattered himbo that is Zagreus. His quips are so good, AND his character design is awesome. 10/10 definitely a character I would hang out with while talking shit about the bastards in our respective lives.

Anyways, Rika would thematically fit Zagreus's role a lot more, but she doesn't quite encapsulate his "feral himbo" energy quite as well as Keiichi does.

June 17th, 2021

Keiichi hated the Underworld.

It might have been his home and the only place he'd known, but something deep inside his bones itched at him, telling him that he should be somewhere else. Where that somewhere else was, he wasn't entirely sure, but since the only way he had to go was up –up to the surface of the real world– he figured that it must be somewhere over there.

So, swiping a sword from the armory conveniently nearby his bedroom, he had set out into Tartarus, prepared to battle his way up to the top, since his father wouldn't let him go and he'd already been trained by some of the best warriors in history. Yes, the Underworld was infamously inescapable, but Keiichi was a god and more importantly than that, he was on a mission. He didn't care how many times it took or how often he got dunked back into the Styx –he was making it out of here.

Honestly, half of it at this point was just his sheer stubbornness. He'd said he'd get out and by all the gods on Olympus, he'd get out, whether or not he actually found what he was looking for at the top.

Slicing through Louts and the other wretched souls of Tartarus wasn't easy, but Keiichi had had the best teachers and, moreover, boons from his relatives up on Olympus, who had somehow gotten wind of his escape attempts and were reaching fragments of themselves down into the Underworld to help. Far from being the sort of person to refuse extended aid (even when the reputation of the other gods in the Underworld was…not complementary), Keiichi accepted those boons and all the power they brought with them as he smashed his way through Tartarus on flame-licked feet.

Only to come to a screeching halt as he spotted a familiar figure in the farthest room of Tartarus.

"Well…this is awkward." Keiichi muttered to himself, hefting his sword with a groan as he advanced into the chamber. The Fury there scowled as he approached, standing upright as her wing twitched outwards stiffly in an unconscious threat display.

"Halt, Keiichi." Mion said, her poisonous green eyes narrowing. "Not one step further."

"Come on, Mi. Haven't we had more than enough of each other by now?" Keiichi tried. "Besides, don't you have someplace else to be?"

"Your father sent me. All in all, I'd rather be on your bad side than his." Mion drawled, before unhooking her snakeskin whip from her belt and cracking it through the air. "Now you can turn back like a good little man, or I can send you home the painful way. What'll it be?"

"…I'll have to go with the painful way." Keiichi said, shifting into a battle-ready stance as he held up his sword. The barest twitch of a smile ghosted across Mion's face as she drew her arm up, ready to send the whip outwards with more lethal intent.

"A man after my own heart."

Keiichi washed up in the sticky pools of the Styx, that time.

But that was okay, because Tartarus was still there and so was Mion, ready for another fight.

They fought and they fought and they fought, and eventually, he got past her, into the lava-streaked hellscape of Asphodel, and he fought and lived and died there, too.

When he got to the mossy fields of Elysium, wounded and panting, he found another familiar face, one heralded by the ominous tolling of a bell.

"Thought you could just get away from me, did you, Keiichi-kun?" the copper-haired woman drawled, tilting her head as her black robes billowed and seethed around her.

"Rena. I figured it was only a matter of time before Father sent you after me to do his dirty work." Keiichi said in disgust –and perhaps a hint of betrayal.

"Keiichi-kun. Is that really why you think I'm here?" Rena asked, looking disappointed and perhaps a little hurt at his words as she slid her fingers along the gleaming edge of her hooked cleaver, before she grinned at him with a familiar spark of challenge. "Let's see how many of these exalted champions you can send back to their dooms, unless you'd rather I would send you back to yours."

Keiichi grinned and readied his blade, prepared to turn it on the Shades around them rather than his childhood friend. Maybe his father didn't approve of his reckless jaunts through the Underworld, all the damage he caused and how he continually got closer and closer to the surface, but Keiichi thought, in his own way, that his brash chaos was just as perfect as his father's mind-numbing idea of order.

After all, even the Underworld needed a bit of livening up, now and again.

10.14 AM, USA Central Time