The Hydra? He had Iolaus burn the stumps. The Augean stables? He diverted two rivers. He didn't suffer the stench; he engineered a solution. The algorithm flagged him as "Efficiency-Oriented," which was bureaucratic hellspeak for soulless grind .

He began to hum. A lullaby his mortal mother, Alcmene, used to sing before the snakes came, before the madness, before the glory. He had never had time to miss her. He was always too busy becoming a god.

Marcus scrolled down. The system had a slot: .

Aethelred leaned in. "Then make him bleed now . This isn't about justice, Marcus. It's about optics. The mortals worship him. If we deny him apotheosis because he was too good at his job, the PR department will have a riot. Add a thirteenth labor. A silent one. A private one."

"Exactly," Marcus said, tapping his tablet. "You climbed it. You didn't sit in the valley. You didn't let it fester. You turned your trauma into cardio. The algorithm requires stagnation. Despair without solution."

Heracles looked up. His eyes were red, but not empty. They were deeper than any god's. They had the weight of a thing fully felt.

He programmed it. In the shimmering twilight of the Lethean delta, Heracles sat on a boulder, his lion skin heavy, his club leaning against a tree that wasn't quite real. He looked calm. Annoyingly calm.

He cried.