Chapter 121: Perseus (13)
Gasp!
The first to snap back to her senses was Euryte.
No matter how charming the man, as a priestess of Cybele, she could not become involved with a priest of Poseidon.
That was something the goddess Cybele herself had directly forbidden.
Ahem… “If Lord Perseus feels that way, there’s nothing to be done about it. But Lord Poseidon probably wouldn’t mind such things. You shouldn’t worry about it either.”
— Me?
It sounded like a strange voice had interjected midway, but Perseus nodded at Euryte’s words and quickly regained his composure.
He couldn’t stay embarrassed forever. Besides, the reason he had come here was to gather information on Diogenes and express gratitude for past help.
“Yes, thank you. I appreciate the advice. Still, for now it’s a bit… More importantly, has Diogenes caused any trouble here? That’s why I came straight to this place upon arriving in Athens.”
At Perseus’s words, Euryte’s expression grew serious as she shook her head.
“There hasn’t been any major movement yet. A man like Diogenes knows I’m a priestess of Lady Cybele. However… even if he doesn’t touch me directly, we’ve confirmed he’s been quietly gathering information on the children working in my establishment.”
Perseus nodded with an “as expected” look and made one request of Euryte.
“As I thought. That pig would do something like that. The moment he failed to kill me, he probably switched to harassing from another angle.”
Euryte nodded in agreement at Perseus’s calm words.
Diogenes’s viciousness was something everyone living in Athens knew.
“Yes, a pig like that would be capable of killing even a priest of Posei—?”
Who tried to kill whom?!
Euryte had been nodding along absentmindedly to Perseus’s casual remark when she suddenly jerked her head up.
She felt like she had just heard something utterly absurd.
At her reaction, Perseus gave a reassuring expression and calmed her.
“Ah! Don’t worry too much. Thanks to Njord here, I made it safely even on the way back.”
“That’s right. I saved his life a few times, after all.”
Euryte pondered whether she had misheard, looking at the utterly nonchalant mage and priest candidate.
‘Well, what I just heard is too outrageous. What madman would try to kill a priest of Lord Poseidon near the city of Athens?’
“Fufufu, so Diogenes sent people as a threatening warning, and the mage drove them away?”
Perseus tilted his head at Euryte’s words.
‘Huh? Did I phrase it that way? She must have misheard.’
“No. He sent assassins to kill me.”
Hearing Perseus correct her, Euryte experienced a moment where time seemed to stop.
They say humans freeze when faced with something too absurd and impossible—and for a mermaid who had lived quite a long life, this was the first time she had ever felt such dread.
‘That insane… bastarddddd!!!’
***
While Perseus was discussing Diogenes with Euryte,
Diogenes’s mansion was currently in utter chaos.
Treasures lay scattered everywhere, priceless pottery was shattered with fragments strewn about, and valuable artworks were torn to shreds.
The most eye-catching sight amid all this was a massive lump of flesh trembling violently, its bloodshot eyes roaring.
“Say that again! What did you say!!”
“Well… according to our own investigation, there’s a high probability he’s a priest candidate of Lord Poseidon.”
Crash.
Upon hearing the report, Diogenes hurled his wine goblet with his thick hand at the chief attendant who had come to deliver it.
“Does that make any sense?! The brat who ruined so many of my businesses was a priest of Poseidon?!”
Even at Diogenes’s outburst, the chief attendant calmly explained that one of Athena’s high priests, Teleiotes, had personally escorted Perseus into the temple and introduced him to the other priests.
Hearing the full report, Diogenes felt the world go dark before his eyes.
If it became known that he had directly tried to kill that brat…
He would become the idiot who threw away all the glory his ancestors had built in Athens into the gutter.
“Erase… erase every trace as much as possible. If it wasn’t a direct attempt to kill him, we might be able to get away with it somehow. And… that brat—no, the priest—will come to punish us, right?”
“Yes. It’s highly likely. The fact he went to <Mermaid’s Tear> was probably to gather information.”
“Then we have to stage it.”
“Yes?”
“Hide the most important things. Prepare the disposable assets so we can show the priest a spectacular downfall. We’ll make it look like we’re ruined grandly—then rise again.”
The chief attendant, who hadn’t understood Diogenes’s words at first, fully grasped them at the mention of “rising again.”
In modern terms, it was like preparing a scripted WWE match.
Receiving Diogenes’s orders, the chief attendant hurried out of the room, thinking,
‘Truly admirable. To come up with that even in this situation. But… will it work? The part about not having tried to kill him?’
***
Contrary to the subordinate’s thoughts, Diogenes’s initial plan worked out.
In fact, the first thing Perseus and Poseidon did was follow the information Euryte provided and go around smashing Diogenes’s illegal trapezitai operations.
Trapezitai were, in modern terms, loan sharks, money launderers, gambling den operators, or bankers—those who played with money.
Crunch!
As the door to an illegal trapezitai building was ripped off, the people inside were bombarded by blue beetles.
—Arrrgh!
—The demons are here!!
—I surrender, I surrender!
—I was wrong!!
The moment they saw the beetles clinging to them and exploding, the people inside screamed and surrendered immediately.
Perseus and Poseidon pushed through the smoke and entered the office where people were already shouting surrender.
“Hmm… something feels off?”
“Yes. I think so too.”
Perseus scanned the people who had lost all will to fight the moment they saw him, feeling a sense of dissonance.
He had already smashed around twenty of Diogenes’s establishments so far.
Yet this time, from beginning to end, everything felt strangely artificial.
Every single one of them acted as if they had planned to surrender from the moment Perseus appeared.
“According to what Lady Euryte said, Diogenes’s underlings are supposed to be vicious thugs just like him…”
***
The reason Perseus felt this unease stemmed from the information Euryte had given him when he first met her at <Mermaid’s Tear> and received her help.
“Lord Perseus, Priest. The most important thing is that it’s easier to avoid getting tangled with Diogenes in this city of Athens. Since you’re a priest of Lord Poseidon, Diogenes won’t be able to inflict serious harm. But he’s a tenacious one. The moment you leave the city, he’ll surely try to reclaim what he missed. Then the people you saved might end up resenting you instead.”
That warning from his first meeting with Euryte was still deeply etched in Perseus’s mind.
“If he’s the kind of man Lady Euryte described, he definitely wouldn’t let twenty of his businesses be destroyed this easily.”
Perseus looked at the people tightly bound with ropes.
They had caused a brief commotion at first, but now every one of them was docile—it certainly didn’t look like the behavior of criminals.
Even if all the oblivious criminals had died off, it made no sense that not a single one resisted and they all just watched his reactions.
“Above all, I don’t see any truly strong ones among them. Even if they can’t handle magic, there should at least be traces of long weapon use.”
“Then… are these people bait?”
“Hmm…”
Poseidon pondered Perseus’s question while staring at the bound men, then voiced a thought that came to mind.
“Perhaps… as the priestess of Cybele said, that pig Diogenes has now learned that I’m a priest of Poseidon?”
“Hmm…”
‘Is that it? Then he seems a bit stupid compared to Lady Euryte’s description…’
***
Before Perseus and Poseidon began smashing Diogenes’s businesses,
Back inside <Mermaid’s Tear>, Euryte—who had been shocked by the conversation—tried her best to remain calm.
She had never imagined anyone in the city of Athens would try to kill a priest of Lord Poseidon, but…
“It’s possible Diogenes grew too arrogant and made a mistake. Truthfully, what Lord Perseus said sounds absurd.”
“Yes? What do you mean?”
“Hmm… How should I explain this properly.”
After pondering for a while, Euryte cautiously explained the current situation in Athens.
In one word, Athens was a melting pot of division and conflict.
There was the faction insisting Athena should be the city’s patron deity, the faction arguing that as a central trade city it should serve Poseidon, the faction claiming that as the strongest city-state it should honor Zeus as chief god, and even the sudden appearance of the “war, only war” Ares faction—priests of various gods had gathered, turning Athens into chaos.
Add to that the many groups and power players intervening solely for Athena’s interests.
With no patron deity in a massive city flowing with gold and goods like Athens, it was only natural for humans to split and vie for power.
While most gods couldn’t intervene much due to Poseidon’s name hanging over roughly half the city, among humans the recognition that Poseidon owned the city was rare.
“In that sense, the one who has best exploited Athens’s conflicts is Diogenes.”
“Hmm… I still don’t quite understand. Why would harming a god’s priest be something to be horrified about?”
At Poseidon’s question, Euryte nodded as if agreeing.
Generally, there were countless priests of gods. Unless they were high priests who could meet the god face-to-face, anyone working at a temple could be called a priest.
‘In fact, gods often don’t even know their own high priests well.’
In short, gods had little interest in humans on the surface.
“However, unlike priests of other gods, the fact that there are so few priests of Lord Poseidon became the issue.”
Poseidon felt a slight prick at the mention that the scarcity of his priests was the problem.
He had left things a bit too much to the goddesses due to his lack of interest.
“Does that mean force was one way to protect the already scarce followers and priests of Poseidon?”
“No. It was more like a fight before anyone pulled the trigger. Everyone here is ready to point spears and swords at each other and kill at any moment. Moreover, many of Athens’s neighboring states are also in Lord Poseidon’s domain. Touching a priest of Lord Poseidon would give those countries—already drooling—a perfect pretext to intervene. So everyone had tacitly agreed not to touch anyone related to Lord Poseidon… but…”
Seeing Euryte glance at him while explaining the gravity of the situation, Perseus didn’t know how to react.
The Athens he saw on the surface and the Athens beneath were completely different.
The thought that his and Diogenes’s actions might spark a war made him uneasy.
The feeling that his well-intentioned deeds were returning as something far larger…
‘Priest Dictys, what should I do…’
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