Hadie stood in front of the statue and forced himself to look at their faces. His parents. Frozen mid-reach, like they'd been trying to shield each other when the curse hit. He'd run the numbers a hundred times since the Titans broke free. The probability of reversing petrification without divine help sat somewhere near impossible. He knelt and brushed dust from the base where the family photo had fallen. The frame was cracked straight through the middle, splitting his father from his mother. His siblings smiled up from the glass, unaware of what was coming. Hadie slipped it into his jacket pocket. If the Rangers asked what he was looking for out here, he'd already planned three different answers. None of them were the truth. The ground around the statues told its own story. Cracked earth spread out in all directions like a web. No water had touched this place since the Titans passed through. The curse had drained everything—moisture, hope, time itself. Hadie pressed his palm against the dry soil and felt the wrongness of it sink into his skin. This was what the Titans left behind. Death that looked like stone. He stood and met his mother's frozen eyes one last time. Harold would ask where he'd gone when he got back to headquarters. Ace would notice the dust on his boots. Pegi would see right through whatever excuse he gave. But standing here, looking at what happened when gods fell and mortals weren't there to help, Hadie made his choice. He'd tell them. Not all of it, not yet. But enough to let them fight at his side with their eyes open. His parents had tried to face the Titans alone. He wouldn't make the same mistake.

Hadie made it back to headquarters before the others finished their patrol sweep. He went straight to the corner where they kept their gear, shrugging off his jacket without thinking. The photo slipped out and hit the floor face-up. Ace reached it first. She picked it up and stared at the cracked image, her eyes going wide. Pegi stepped closer, looking over her shoulder. "Wait," Ace said slowly. "That's not just any gods. That's—" She looked up at Hadie. "This is Hades and Persephone. With kids." Hadie's mind ran through every response he'd rehearsed, but his mouth stayed shut. Harold walked in behind them and stopped when he saw their faces. Pegi turned the photo toward Harold without a word. The crack split right through the middle, dividing the family in two. Harold studied it for a long moment, then looked at Hadie. "You said your parents were taken. You didn't say they were gods." His voice was flat, careful. Not angry yet. Hadie watched Harold's expression shift as he worked through the implications. This was the moment Hadie had feared most—Harold learning the truth and deciding what it meant for everyone else. Hadie forced himself to meet Harold's eyes. "They're stone now. Same curse that's spreading through half of Greece." He pointed at the tapestry on the wall behind them, the one showing Rangers and gods sealing the Titans away together. "That's what we're supposed to be. Mortals and gods fighting side by side. But my parents tried to face the Titans alone, and look what happened." Harold handed the photo back without breaking eye contact. "So you need us," he said. Not a question. Hadie nodded. "Yeah. I do." Harold glanced at Ace and Pegi, then back at Hadie. "Then we're in. But no more secrets." Hadie felt something shift in his chest—not relief exactly, but the weight of isolation cracking open. He'd been calculating scenarios for weeks, and somehow the simplest path had been the right one all along.

The briefing room felt different now. Harold stood at the tactical display, marking coordinates where Titan energy had spiked across the mainland. Ace leaned against the wall, arms crossed. Pegi sat at the table, reviewing patrol routes. Hadie watched them work together, no longer outside the circle. Harold tapped the map where a cluster of readings converged. "The Chimera's been moving south along the ridge. If we set up here—" He stopped mid-sentence, swaying slightly. His hand went to his left shoulder where his jacket sleeve had torn during yesterday's encounter near the hollowed tree. The skin underneath looked wrong. Grey. "Harold?" Pegi stood up fast. Harold pulled his sleeve higher. The discoloration spread from a thin scratch, branching out like frost across glass. His fingers had gone pale at the tips. "I thought it just grazed me," he said quietly. Then his knees buckled. Hadie caught him before he hit the floor, but Harold's weight pulled them both down. The cold coming off Harold's skin felt like touching winter stone. Ace grabbed Harold's hammer where it had fallen and kicked it aside, already moving toward the door. "Medbay. Now." Hadie looked at Harold's face—color draining, lips turning blue—and saw his parents. The same curse. The same impossible weight. Pegi helped lift Harold's other side, and together they hauled him through the corridor while Ace ran ahead, shouting for medical support. Every step felt like carrying proof that mortals couldn't survive this fight. That Hadie had led them into something they weren't built to endure. They laid Harold on the examination table in the medbay's marble hall. A medic pressed instruments against Harold's chest, checking vitals, but Hadie could see the grey spreading faster now, creeping up his neck. Harold's eyes found Hadie's. "Not your fault," Harold managed. His voice came out rough, strained. "We knew the risk." But Hadie hadn't known. He'd thought telling the truth would be enough. That honesty would protect them somehow. Instead, the first person to believe in him was turning to stone, and Hadie had no divine power to stop it. He'd wanted mortals and gods to fight together, but he'd forgotten the cost mortals paid when gods' enemies struck back. Ace grabbed Hadie's arm, her grip tight enough to hurt. "There has to be something. Your parents—they're gods. You must know something." Hadie looked at Harold's greying face and made the only choice left. "I know someone who might. But we'd have to go to the Underworld."

Hadie stepped through the portal into the Underworld with Harold's grey face burned into his mind. The air here pressed hot against his skin, thick with sulfur and ash. Somewhere in these caverns lived creatures that predated even the Olympians—things that remembered curses from the first age of gods. The molten river carved through black stone ahead, its surface rippling with waves of liquid fire. Heat slammed into Hadie like a physical wall. He'd come here searching for a creature his father had mentioned once—a hydra that nested in the volcanic depths, whose blood carried properties that could dissolve ancient magic. But standing at the river's edge, watching lava bubble and spit, Hadie realized the problem: he had no idea how to cross, let alone survive long enough to extract what Harold needed. Then the river moved wrong. A serpentine head rose from the molten flow, dripping fire. Then another. Then three more. The hydra's multiple heads swayed above the lava, each one tracking Hadie with eyes like burning coals. He'd found the creature. Now it was going to kill him. Hadie morphed and launched himself sideways as a jet of lava sprayed across the stone where he'd stood. The hydra surged forward, its massive body creating waves that splashed molten rock onto the banks. Hadie ran, his mind racing through scenarios—fight it, distract it, try to communicate—but every option ended with him melted or crushed. Another head struck, jaws snapping shut inches from his shoulder. He rolled, came up running, and spotted the fortress built into the volcano's slope ahead. The hydra's lair. If the creature nested there, maybe it kept something inside—shed scales, pooled venom, anything he could use. He sprinted for the entrance as three heads converged on him at once. The impact of their collision behind him sent him sprawling through the doorway into darkness. Inside the lair, Hadie's eyes adjusted to the glow of cracks in the stone walls, veins of lava running through them like arteries. The hydra didn't follow him in—it circled outside, heads weaving, blocking his exit. Trapped. Then Hadie saw it: a crystallized formation in the center of the chamber, where the hydra's body heat had condensed something from the air over centuries. The crystal pulsed with the same grey color as the curse spreading through Harold. The hydra wasn't just a monster. It was immune to the petrification curse, and its body had been filtering the curse's magic out of the Underworld's air, concentrating it here. Hadie pulled an empty vial from his belt and carefully broke off a piece of the crystal's opposite side—the clear, purified part. The section that showed what remained after the curse was removed. He'd come looking for blood or venom, but he'd found something better: proof that the curse could be extracted. As he turned to face the hydra still waiting outside, Hadie understood that mortals and gods weren't the only ones fighting to survive the Titans' return. Even monsters were trying to endure.