My Scumbag System Chapter 717: The Showrunners

The sun never set on Olympus.

That was the point. Apollo had designed the space himself, fourteen billion years ago during a particularly inspired weekend, and he remained proud of the work. Golden light cascaded through columns of living marble. Clouds arranged themselves into seating that cost more per square foot than most mortal civilizations produced in a century. The air tasted of ambrosia and consequence.

Today it tasted of argument.

Apollo reclined on his throne, a modest affair of solidified starlight that he had spent three millennia perfecting, and watched the other eleven members of the Dodekatheon tear each other apart over one eighteen-year-old boy with a baseball bat and a pornographic number of girlfriends.

"He is not ready." Athena’s voice filled the chamber with the weight of someone who had never been wrong and resented the possibility. She stood at the center of the amphitheater in full bronze armor, because Athena dressed for the conversation she wanted to have rather than the one she was having. Her gray eyes swept the assembled gods like searchlights. "The integration was incomplete. He took a fragment when the protocol demanded totality. The boy rejected the design."

"The boy improved the design." Aphrodite’s response floated from her couch, where she lay draped in something between silk and condensed moonlight that left very little to divine imagination. Her hair shifted colors with her mood, cycling through rose gold and champagne and the exact shade of sunrise that made mortal poets quit their day jobs. She popped a grape into her mouth. "He chose what to keep and what to burn. That requires more courage than blind acceptance."

"Courage and utility serve different masters." Athena’s jaw tightened.

Apollo watched this exchange with the particular satisfaction of a director whose actors had exceeded the material. He had spent six months cultivating this narrative. Six months of carefully timed Gacha pulls and divine quests and strategically placed romantic obstacles. Six months of watching Satori Nakano climb from a dead boy’s corpse to the top of the most competitive Hunter academy in Valoria, surrounded by women who would happily burn the world for the privilege of sleeping in his bed.

The ratings had been spectacular.

"The Titans stir." Ares stood beside his throne rather than in it, because Ares considered sitting a form of surrender. His arms crossed over a chest that could have served as an anatomical reference for muscle groups that did not exist in mortal biology. The god of war looked exactly like what he was: violence given a face and told to behave at dinner. "Kronos shifts in Tartarus. The walls thin. We have forty years. Maybe thirty."

"We have less than that." Hephaestus spoke from his forge-throne, a mobile workstation that traveled with him because the smith god never stopped building. His massive hands manipulated something small and intricate, a clockwork model of the mortal world that he adjusted with each new piece of information. His broad face, scarred from eons of working with materials that burned even divine flesh, reflected the orange glow of his perpetual flames. "The seismographs I embedded in the Tartarus boundary show acceleration. The pattern has changed in the last six months."

"Since the boy manifested." Hermes tapped his winged sandals against the marble floor in a rhythm only he could hear. The messenger god perched on the edge of his seat like a bird considering flight. Quick eyes. Quicker smile. The kind of face that made you check your pockets after shaking his hand. "Since Kenji Nakano’s protocol activated and his little science project woke up with a gangster’s memories and a cosmic cheat code."

"My cheat code," Apollo said. His voice carried the warmth of a spotlight and the edge of a blade. He let it fill the chamber because he had earned this moment. "My system. My entertainment infrastructure. My carefully curated selection of abilities, traits, and narrative-appropriate romantic entanglements."

"Your toys." Artemis, twin sister and eternal critic, sat with one knee drawn to her chest and a silver bow resting across her lap. She wore the forest like other gods wore robes, leaves and shadow woven into something that made her look like she had walked straight out of a painting commissioned by someone who feared women and respected them in equal measure. "You gave a mortal boy a slot machine and called it a divine instrument."

"I gave a mortal boy the tools to become something that has never existed." Apollo sat forward on his throne. The starlight shifted with him, casting his shadow long across the amphitheater floor. He was beautiful. He was always beautiful. It was exhausting. "Every other candidate in the Prometheus line failed. Twelve died in Kenji’s first trial. Kimiko Nakano rejected the integration entirely. Fourteen hundred candidates across nine hundred worlds over the last fifty thousand years have either died, gone insane, or been absorbed into the entity’s collective consciousness."

He paused for effect. Because he was Apollo, and pausing for effect was a sacrament.

"Satori Nakano survived. He took what he wanted and left the rest. He walked into my chamber, met the entity face to face, told it to go fuck itself, and walked out carrying a piece of cosmic awareness that he wears like a jacket. He is the first successful partial integration in the history of the program."

"The program." Athena loaded the word with contempt. "You speak as though this were a production."

"It is a production. It has always been a production." Apollo spread his hands. "We created the Gates to test mortal civilizations. We seeded Aspects through controlled trans-dimensional energy exposure to give the survivors weapons. We built an entire system of evolution through conflict because the Titans will return, and when they do, humanity needs soldiers who can fight beside gods rather than behind them."

"Humanity needs weapons." Ares’ voice held the deep satisfaction of someone who agreed with Apollo for once.

"Humanity needs a bridge." Apollo shook his head. "Weapons break. Swords dull. Even the greatest mortal warrior is just meat with opinions. What we need is someone who exists in both worlds. Someone human enough to lead mortals and divine enough to survive what comes through that barrier when Kronos breaks free."

"And you believe the boy is this bridge." Zeus had not spoken until now.