Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo.

Small warning: this chapter will get a little bloody (or should that be ichor-y?)

APOLLO VIII

An old nemesis
Returns to taunt me again
Leave my son alone

"If it isn't Apollo himself," a voice he hadn't heard in several millennia, and would cheerfully have gone several more millennia without hearing again, sneered. "What an honour."

Apollo considered himself an avid lover of words, written and verbal alike – he was the god of poetry, of course he was – but the way the last word was spoken left him feeling like he'd just been digested by Python – slimy, disgusting, and thoroughly sick.

That wasn't to say he was any more enamoured with the rest of the situation; appearing from behind one of the yawning caverns pitting the surface of Tartarus was a figure nearly twice his current size, short dark hair slicked up into vicious-looking spikes and the most unremarkable part of his appearance.

His eyes were long gone – gone longer than Apollo had paid attention to his existence – replaced by the mechanical genius of Hephaestus in one of the forge god's greatest mistakes, in Apollo's furious opinion. They glowed like lasers, long before mortals had discovered that particular application of light, homing in on whatever their owner considered prey with no warmth at all. Right then, they were boring straight into Apollo's essence, and he shifted until he was certain his injured, vulnerable son was behind him.

"Orion," he snarled, not bothering to contain himself as his form flickered a little, revealing shafts of his divinity. He had never made a secret of his hatred for the giant, not since he realised the danger Artemis had been blindly falling deeper and deeper into; it had driven a temporary wedge between him and his twin, something he'd never realised could hurt so much until it happened, and had only begun to disappear again once she'd been free from his influence long enough to realise it had been there at all.

He wasn't about to start making a secret of it now. Not for this monster, who had so nearly destroyed everything his beloved sister was.

"Apollo," the giant mocked. His bow – a large monstrosity that would've been an impressive work of art in the hands of literally anyone else – was held loosely at his side, but his free hand was lingering near his quiver of vicious arrows, identical to the one Asclepius had just yanked out of his arm, and Apollo saw nothing but a silent threat.

Master archers didn't need to hold arrows at the ready to fire instantaneously, and as loath as Apollo was to admit it, Orion was one of only two beings on his own par with a bow.

Being his bane – their bane – it had been a given, but that never made Apollo any less insulted by the fact.

"You were a fool for coming here," the giant continued, but his tone was less warning and more amused. "You couldn't defeat me in the Overworld; what makes you think you can challenge me here?" His mechanical eyes flicked obviously to Asclepius, behind Apollo, and it took all the self-control Apollo had not to tense up. He had to stay loose, keep his grip on his bow easy and his free hand floating near his arrows, in – as much as he hated it – a mirror of his bane's own posture. Straying would do nothing but invite attack.

Orion had been his sister's best Hunter, for a time. He could spot and exploit any weakness in his prey in a non-existent blink of his prosthetic eyes, and Apollo and Asclepius were very, very much his prey right then.

"Go crawl back to whatever hole you clawed your way out of," Apollo retorted. "You had no business respawning so quickly." Powerful monsters were supposed to take centuries at least to reform enough to be a threat, not barely a year.

Orion laughed. It was an unfairly pleasant sound, to go with his unfairly good looks. Apollo couldn't have had a snake-footed, ugly mess for a bane, could he? No, his bane had to stand out from the crowd of his hideous brethren and look attractive.

"No business?" he mimicked. The look the laser eyes gave Asclepius behind him almost drew a growl from Apollo's throat. He managed to hold it at bay at the last moment – the hunter before him would doubtlessly take it as a weakness to exploit. "How could I possibly stay slumbering when such a perfect prey came stumbling right past me?" Handsome lips twisted into a wry grin, showing a flash of Orion's perfect teeth. "Or did you not know I can smell your children, Apollo?"

Apollo hadn't known that, and the thought horrified him.

Orion must have seen something in his face, or sensed something, because he laughed again, a cruel sound that was far too melodious for what it was. "Artemis' Hunters, your children – they're the same to me. As for the ones that are both…" He shrugged, all loose and easy in the face of Apollo's rising fury. "Phoebe should have known better, challenging me the way she did. Four thousand years and she was just as feeble as ever. Her face-"

Apollo's arrow smashed straight through his lips, pinning his tongue to the roof of his mouth and forcibly silencing the giant.

"Don't you ever talk about my daughter like that," he growled. Behind him, Asclepius had let out a barely audible noise of distress and Apollo realised he hadn't known. Hadn't known his older sister, one of the few he'd spent any time with, had known as a sibling, was gone. "Phoebe outclassed you right to the end," and he was proud of her for it, even though the grief over her death was heavy enough it ought to have been a tangible thing. She had been one of his earliest children, and while the Hunt was no guarantee of living forever, four thousand years had lulled Apollo into a false sense of security that maybe she would.

And then Orion had killed her. Culled her, in a mass slaughter of brilliant girls and women from across the millennia, and it was one more thing in the ever-growing pile of crimes Apollo could never, ever, forgive the giant for.

Orion yanked the arrow out, clearly unphased by the ichor dribbling out of his mouth and down his chin, and laughed again. "And yet, which one of us is never coming back?" he gloated. "She reached above her station and had to face the consequences." Drool-like ichor should not make someone more attractive, in Apollo's disgusted opinion, and yet somehow it did. "And she is not the only one."

The giant fingered the complex string system of his compound bow gently, a lover's caress, and a too-accurate mirror of how Apollo treated his own bowstrings. His fingers curled around his longbow's single, simple string unbidden.

The movement got another handsome yet derisive bark of laughter from Orion. "Really, Apollo?" he asked, sarcasm dripping much like the ichor from his chin to the skin of Tartarus beneath them. "You think you can match my bow with that stick-and-string? Real archers left those inaccurate disasters behind centuries ago."

Apollo thought of his sister and her Hunters, all reliably using traditional recurves and longbows, of his children, who between them spanned mastery of every bow style that had ever existed, and growled lowly. "It's not the bow, but the skill of the archer," he couldn't help but correct. "And you-"

"Have always been the better archer," Orion finished, smiling broadly. Gold stained his teeth. "This posturing is pathetic, Apollo. You cannot beat me. You have never been able to beat me. Even when you resorted to underhanded tactics, you still needed the aid of my own mother to send me here. And oh, look." He spread his arms, and made a show of directing his laser eyes around. "There's no-one here to help."

Behind Apollo, Asclepius bristled, but he didn't move. They both knew that he was no match for Orion.

Apollo was uncomfortably aware that he wasn't, either. Not alone, and not with his godly son. If Hades-

No.

Hades was not with them, and if he was, Apollo would have done his hardest to separate him from his son. He certainly couldn't trust his uncle to fight in Asclepius' defence, if he could even trust him to fight at all in the first place.

And besides, Orion was a giant, and Hades was the only Olympian with the luxury of a bane who could be defeated without a demigod's assistance, and Tartarus was all out of those – and would always be out of those for the rest of time, if Apollo had any say in the matter.

Unfortunately, Apollo was only left with two options, and the menacing grin of his opponent told him that Orion was very, very aware of the same fact.

"What are you going to do, Apollo?" the giant leered, one hand ghosting down to caress the raven feather flights of his monstrous arrows. "Fight me and die here, or…"

The hunter took a step forward, close enough that neither of them needed a bow to reach the other with an arrow, and stooped down until his face was level with Apollo's, laser eyes boring straight into his as he hissed.

"Run."

Apollo was the god of many things. Outside of archery, fighting wasn't – strictly speaking – one of them, but that didn't mean he couldn't throw a mean punch when he wanted to.

Orion's smirking, smugly self-satisfied face was just begging for one, and Apollo obliged.

A quick twist of his torso, fingers falling away from his bowstring to ball up as he did so, and then his knuckles slammed with the full force of his pent up frustration, fury, and eternal hatred for the giant, straight into Orion's zygomatic.

The crunch of bone, accompanying the crack of the giant's neck as it snapped around from the force, was deeply satisfying, but Apollo knew it wouldn't stop Orion. It wouldn't even hinder him.

"Asclepius, go!" he ordered as he pulled his hand back, only to crash his other fist, still wrapped around his bow, into Orion's nose.

"Father-" his son protested, but Apollo was in no mood for a debate.

"Get out of here," he snapped. "Go up."

A massive fist flashed through his vision before colliding with his own face. It took everything he had not to skid backwards from the force – Orion's greater size gave him more momentum yet no reduction in speed.

"Better do as your daddy says," Orion taunted, as Apollo lashed out again, increasing his size to match the giant's and feeling the giant strain to stay in place.

Thankfully, Asclepius had not inherited Apollo's own temper, and Orion's taunt seemingly washed over him unacknowledged. It certainly didn't appear to stop him from recognising that his presence was more a hindrance than a help and pulling himself together enough to run.

Apollo felt him go, and lunged for Orion's arm as the giant immediately went for his quiver, no doubt intending to shoot his son down yet again. Equally sized, and equally strong, they ended up in a tug of war over the movement of his arm. Apollo's nails dug into where bronzed skin was pulled taut over straining muscles and ichor trickled down Orion's skin to join the drops already falling from the giant to the membrane of Tartarus beneath their feet.

Apollo's own ichor was dripping down his face, too. Orion's punch had crashed into his nose, shattering it and causing an irritating sting in his eyes even as it reset itself and sealed back up again. The pain was negligible – compared to the humiliation of the stomp from Cade back in an alleyway in Hell's Kitchen it was nothing – but the fact that Orion could injure him as easily as he could injure the giant was an unwelcome and unnecessary reminder that the giant truly was his match.

With the hand not gripping Orion's arm like a vice, Apollo slashed at the straps binding the quiver to the giant. He didn't dare watch the result of the action – Orion had a free hand, too, and Apollo's had to quickly come up and deflect it from slamming into his face again – but he heard the rattle of disturbed arrows, and the uncannily muted thud of something landing on a surface that was more taut than solid.

It certainly wasn't enough to hinder Orion for more than a few moments, but having the giant's arrows just that bit further out of his reach meant he couldn't shoot Asclepius down as Apollo's son fled the scene.

The deflected fist slammed into his shoulder instead of its original target, but it was the fist still holding Orion's bulky, steampunk-themed compound bow, and one of the sharply curved limbs caught his lips in a glancing blow at the same time as his shoulder muscles shifted unhappily. Not a dislocation – even if his opponent was his bane, Apollo's godly form wasn't that fragile – but a warning of what could come if he let this physical confrontation drag out for too long.

He had no intention of letting that happen; the longer he spent fighting, the longer Asclepius was alone in Tartarus, and while his son was still a god, he was far more susceptible to Tartarus' effects than Apollo liked.

Orion would not let him go easily, and it rankled Apollo to know that he couldn't actually kill the giant, but he could, in theory, disable him – at least long enough for Asclepius to get to safety, and if he was really lucky, until he was done with the quest and left, too.

Apollo refused to listen to the voice that pointed out that he wasn't a lucky god.

The massive compound bow swung towards him again, and Apollo held his ground as the giant's fist connected, his own fingers trying to gouge at the laser sights that made up Orion's prosthetic eyes. Unfortunately, Hephaestus was very good at what he did, and Apollo's nails couldn't even make a scratch, even if sharpened like feline claws. The rake of his claws down his bane's too-handsome face, leaving golden lines carved into the flesh, was a poor consolation prize.

Orion's spare hand went for Apollo's wrist as he pulled back, grasping for the massive bow between them. His own longbow flew out of his grip, several yards behind him, but he paid that no mind; this was a battle he could not win with a bow.

It was one he could win by being the god of archery, however.

The massive hand around his wrist stopped his from moving any further, but that didn't matter because Apollo's hands were already where he wanted them, and even the ever-increasing pressure on his carpals wasn't enough to stop his fingers.

Compound bows were complex. It was what gave them their impressive accuracy – the sniper rifle of modern archery, he'd heard some mortals call them, and it wasn't an inaccurate comparison – but it came with one huge downside.

They were very, very fragile.

Sure, longbows had their own issues with being temperamental beasts, the wood reacting to differing environments and needing constant adjustments from the archer in order for their arrows to fly true every time, but the onus there was on the archer – and as the god of archery, Apollo had no problems at all instinctively adjusting to every possible environment that might alter his bow. Even Tartarus itself couldn't take that away from him.

If a compound bow was damaged, however, there was very little an archer – even one as good as Apollo – could do about it without having to manually repair the bow.

One of the rarely-used seeds of knowledge Apollo held about bows was how to ruin them. It wasn't something he liked to do, but in certain situations, it was necessary.

Like now.

Something in his wrist crushed to powder but he clung on, nimble fingers twisting a piece of metal here, a joint there.

Orion roared, the first angry sound he'd made since imposing his unwelcome presence on Apollo, and tried to yank his bow back, but Apollo clung on like a terrier. The foot crashing into his knee and making his leg buckle, the head slamming into his own hard enough that were he mortal, he would have been seeing stars, the teeth catching the sternomastoid muscle in his neck and tearing, causing hot, hot liquid to spill down his skin – none of it made Apollo let go as he steadfastly warped and ruined every single element of the complex bow.

It hurt.

It seared.

But Apollo had no choice.

No matter how much he wanted to tear the giant himself to pieces, no matter how much he wished every part that twisted and broke under his fingers was part of Orion's body, that sort of combat was beyond him and would only lead to his own defeat.

A rush of cold assailed his throat as Orion tore his head back, a chunk of Apollo's form going with it and leaving what had to be a gaping gap, gold splashing down to Tartarus' skin like a waterfall, and he stumbled as the giant thrust against him with all his strength, landing on his rear on the giving membrane beneath him.

"How dare-" Orion demanded, face twisted into something ugly. Where before there had been gold dribbles down his chin, now his entire lower jaw was gold, like a lion that had just made a bloody kill – if lions ever made kills of beings with ichor, not blood, in their veins. Like the beast he was, his throat bobbed and as Apollo surged back to his feet, knowing that to stay down was to lose, he saw part of his own form disappear forever into the giant's gullet.

The sight was as disturbing as it was disgusting, but Apollo didn't – couldn't – hesitate, throwing himself back at the bow and wrenching at the string. It snapped, the loose ends lashing out at both of them indiscriminately, and Apollo's eye fell victim to its final resistance as the bow shattered.

Orion roared again, a rage so intense it couldn't contain words, but Apollo still wasn't finished. He couldn't beat Orion, but he could delay him. Restrain him.

Weaving was Athena's skill, not his, but bow strings needed twisting and sailors lived and died by their knots so he had some skill in that broad area (not that his half-sister would ever deign to call them overlapping disciplines), and with the string yanked out of the pulleys and levers that once held it in place, Apollo had a several-metre long piece of rope to twist a quick sailor's knot into before lassoing it around Orion's ankle.

The giant crashed down, although not without catching Apollo's wrist on the way down and hauling him to the ground with him. Arrows fell from his quiver with a clatter, joining Orion's own black menaces, and the pair of them fell heavily onto the collection of very sharp – and barbed, in the case of Orion's – darts.

The pain wasn't enough to make either of them cry out, but Orion's face twisted even further into rage as he struggled against the string Apollo was hurriedly twisting around him, turning their fight into a wrestling scuffle on the ground as first Apollo, then Orion, then Apollo-Orion-Apollo-Orion was on top.

Perfect teeth coated in thick gold snarled down at him, the liquid falling onto his face and trailing into his eyes – the one that stung from the string's last defence and the other, uninjured, one equally, as Orion kept struggling against the string that somehow had managed to do what Apollo had been aiming for and trussed him up.

"You haven't won," Orion spat, and the glob of ichor landed squarely in Apollo's mouth, to his disgust.

Apollo glared up at him, spitting it straight back and splattering the laser eyes. Hopefully even Hephaestus' creations wouldn't like ichor seeping into their delicate mechanisms. "Yes I have," he snapped, and with a massive heave he flipped both of them over one last time and scurried backwards, out of Orion's restrained reach.

His ichor-stained hand found his longbow, almost dangerously in reach of Orion yet thankfully not quite, and he grasped it as he staggered to his feet. He was familiar with the sensation of swaying as he tried to stand from his time as Lester, but it felt wrong to be doing it as a god, no matter how much ichor was pouring out from his reconstructing neck. Still, he could pull himself upright, and even pluck several arrows from his quiver, delighted that it still had arrows in it without him needing to summon more. He nocked them all to his string at the same time, stumbling back a couple of steps to make sure he stayed out of Orion's furious reach, before letting them fly.

They didn't kill Orion, couldn't kill him, but they could pin him to Tartarus's membrane, stopping him from rising and breaking the string that tangled around him.

Apollo didn't wait to watch him struggle. He turned his back on the vitriol being spat in his direction, accusations of cowardice and repeated insistences that he hadn't won anything, honed in on his son's retreating presence, and ran.

He could feel his form struggling to heal as he dashed across Tartarus, plunging through the Phlegethon without hesitation – he didn't know if it would attack Orion the same way it attacked him but if nothing else it was a physical barrier between them – which undid all of the healing and then some.

Asclepius' look of horror when he caught up with his son – the younger god likewise drenched in gold from his river crossing but enough a god of healing that those wounds, at least, were sealing up, if rather slower than Apollo would've liked – told him that he looked terrible.

"Father!" Old, wrinkled hands reached for him, but Apollo batted them away gently.

"Focus on yourself," he insisted. "I'll be fine." He was still the stronger god, even if his injuries were worse. Asclepius couldn't afford to spare his energy on anyone else.

His son's eyes looked back the way they'd come, full of trepidation, and Apollo realised he was looking for – expecting – Orion to appear.

He smiled at him reassuringly, although he wasn't sure how reassuring his expression looked when his face was still splattered with gold – most of it his own ichor. "He's not coming," he promised.

It didn't have the effect he hoped, as Asclepius bit his lip, an expression he'd seen on his son's face several times when he was a mortal teenager (it was an expression Will pulled sometimes, too). "But…" his son started, "Father… you can't-"

"Defeat him?" Apollo finished for him, catching him by the elbow and guiding him to keep moving, away from where he'd left the furious giant and up, towards a way out. Asclepius made a sorrowfully agreeing noise. "No, I can't," he admitted, an edge of frustration adding a bite to his words, "but I can still make his existence very difficult. He can't follow us."

Admittedly, that was more a hope than a truth, but it was one that Apollo had to cling to, because the alternative was a terrible prospect.

Orion would not fall for the same tricks a second time.

If Asclepius had doubts, he didn't voice them, and let Apollo lead him further on, over the sharp bite of glass as Tartarus' membrane transitioned back into the sharp, unwelcoming material beneath their feet.

Monsters were watching them.

Apollo had been aware of them for some time – most eyes had left while Orion was around, perhaps more wary of the hunter than a god, but they'd been slowing increasing in number once more as they trekked higher and higher, and unlike his journey down, Apollo knew he looked a mess.

Both of them looked a mess, Asclepius withered and wearing tatters that had once been a proper chiton but were now riddled with holes, and Apollo with his still-resealing throat and various other injuries inflicted by Orion which refused to heal instantly, and the stares felt hungry.

It was an inevitability when the attack came, an en masse descent of opportunistic monsters sensing weakness and seeking to exploit it. Apollo could understand it – Asclepius was not, and had never been, a fighter, and Apollo was visibly injured – but that made it no less frustrating as he sent arrows screaming at their attackers, covering Asclepius as best he could as his son resorted to the only offensive ability he currently possessed and let his divinity flash out.

In the Overworld, that would be enough to disintegrate any of the monsters, but in Tartarus, the laws were different. Godly divinity was not necessarily the instant kill it was anywhere else, although it still gave them enough pause that Apollo had the time to send arrows through their skulls.

Unfortunately, there was one major downside to being an archer, and while it was normally no issue for Apollo, Tartarus once again posed issues. Snapping arrows into existence took more focus, more energy, more time, and with his injuries and flight from Orion (which was exactly what it had been, no matter how much it rankled that he'd had to), Apollo had only been able to replenish his quiver so much.

He ran out.

It didn't leave him defenceless – he was still a god, still far more powerful than the monsters crowding him and his son – but it was a major inconvenience, and he ended up pressed back to back with Asclepius he was forced to let the monsters in close, his divinity more successful at destroying them than Asclepius', but still not enough by itself, as he forced more arrows into existence, agonisingly slowly, and picked off anything that got close even against the divinity of two gods.

Damn Tartarus for muting them.

There was another flaw with that tactic; so exposed, so raw, he could feel Tartarus slipping into his essence, tearing at it and threatening to overpower the parts of him that reached desperately for his sources of power in the Overworld, so, so far above.

It was too dangerous to expose himself like that for any length of time, he realised in alarm, suddenly fearing what it was doing to his son. "Asclepius," he started, but his son cut him off curtly.

"I know."

Of course he knew. He also knew he didn't have a choice, that this slow poisoning of his essence was the lesser of their worries right then.

Apollo let out a bark of frustration, because he would not, could not, lose his son to this senseless punishment, and flared out all the brighter, feeling his essence fighting against the assault.

A wave of darkness crashed over them. Behind him, Asclepius staggered, but the monsters disappeared, leaving them adversary-free.

Almost adversary-free.

Apollo willed a new arrow into his hand and whirled on the spot, essence still flaring, and drew back his bow to face the next threat.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari