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.

Hadie stepped back through the portal with the crystal sample clutched in his hand. The medbay lights hit his eyes after the Underworld's darkness, and he blinked hard as he crossed to where Harold lay on the examination table. The grey had spread to Harold's neck now, creeping toward his jaw. Pegi looked up from the monitors, her expression tight with hope she was trying not to show. Ace stood near the door, arms crossed, watching Hadie with the same intensity he'd had since the photo fell out of Hadie's jacket. Hadie held up the crystal. "I found proof," he said. "The curse can be extracted." But proving something could be done wasn't the same as knowing how to do it. Hadie stood in the ancient library on the floating island, surrounded by scrolls his father had mentioned once—records of divine healers and ritual procedures from before the Olympians ruled. The purified crystal sat on the marble table between him and the others, catching the blue glow from the celestial panels overhead. "We need equipment that can isolate curse energy from living tissue," Hadie said, reading from a scroll that described a process used on minor gods centuries ago. "And someone who knows how to perform the extraction without killing the patient." Pegi scanned another scroll, her finger tracing the ancient text. "This says the healer needs to channel divine energy through a sanctified vessel while the patient is in a consecrated space. We don't have any of that." Ace tapped the table. "We don't even have a healer. Your father might know how this works, but he's stone." Hadie looked at the crystal again, then at the scrolls describing procedures none of them understood. He'd brought back proof that Harold could be saved, but the gap between knowing it was possible and actually doing it felt wider than the distance to the Underworld. He pulled out his communicator and ran through the scenarios one more time: contact the other Rangers teams across Greece and hope one of them had access to a healer, search for surviving gods who might remember the old ways, or try to reverse-engineer the process themselves with equipment they'd have to build from descriptions in thousand-year-old texts. Every option ended with Harold running out of time. Then Pegi stopped on a scroll near the bottom of the pile. "Wait. This one mentions a sanctuary—a place where Demeter performed healing rituals for mortals during the first Titan war. It says the ground itself was blessed to draw out corruption." Hadie looked at the description: an outdoor sanctuary overgrown with plants that had absorbed divine energy for millennia, creating a natural filter like the hydra's lair. "Where?" "Two miles from headquarters," Ace said, reading over Pegi's shoulder. "If it still exists." They found the sanctuary an hour later, hidden behind a wall of moss and flowering vines that had grown over the ancient columns. The stone structure pulsed with a faint green glow where the plants had filled every crack, drawing power from the earth below. Hadie stood at the entrance and understood what he had to do: bring Harold here, place the purified crystal as a template for what the curse should become, and trust that the sanctuary's natural filtering would do what none of them knew how to accomplish manually. It wasn't the controlled extraction described in the scrolls. It was improvisation built on hope and a pattern he'd seen work once before. Pegi met his eyes across the sanctuary floor. "You really think this will work?" Hadie looked at the crystal in his hand, then at the ancient sanctuary that had survived since mortals and gods last fought together. "I think we're proving that impossible things happen when we stop trying to do them alone," he said. "Let's bring Harold home."

They carried Harold through the sanctuary entrance on a makeshift stretcher, his body rigid where the grey had locked his joints in place. Hadie walked ahead, clearing vines from the path while Pegi and Ace maneuvered Harold between the ancient columns. The green glow from the plants pulsed brighter as they moved deeper into the space, responding to the curse energy radiating from Harold's chest. They laid him on the stone platform at the sanctuary's center, where moss had grown in patterns that matched the symbols Hadie had seen in the ancient scrolls. Hadie placed the purified crystal on Harold's chest, positioning it directly over the grey discoloration. The crystal caught the sanctuary's green light and began to hum—a low vibration that made the vines around them shiver. But nothing happened to the curse. The grey continued its slow crawl toward Harold's jaw, indifferent to the crystal's presence. Ace stepped forward. "It's not working. The sanctuary needs something more than just the template." Hadie looked at the ancient carvings on the nearest column—instructions he hadn't been able to read before, but now the symbols shifted in the sanctuary's light, revealing their meaning. The ritual required an anchor. A bloodline connection to the divine. Someone who carried both mortal and god in their veins to bridge the gap between Harold's humanity and the curse's divine origin. Hadie pulled off his contact lenses and let them fall to the moss-covered stone. His yellow eyes reflected the sanctuary's glow as he knelt beside Harold and pressed his palm against the crystal. Heat surged through his hand—not painful, but intense, like holding flame that recognized him as its source. The crystal blazed gold, and the sanctuary responded. Vines wrapped around Harold's body, drawing the grey corruption out in threads of shadow that the blessed ground absorbed and filtered. Pegi grabbed Hadie's shoulder. "Your hand—" Hadie looked down. His palm glowed with the same gold light as the crystal, marking him with fire that didn't burn. The symbol of a bloodline he'd spent his whole life hiding behind blue contacts and careful distance. Harold's chest rose with a full breath as the last of the grey drained away, and his eyes opened. He stared at Hadie's face—at the yellow eyes Hadie had never let him see—and Hadie waited for the question he'd rehearsed a hundred answers for but never actually wanted to face. "How long have you been able to do that?" Harold asked, his voice rough but steady. Hadie looked at his still-glowing palm, at the proof he couldn't hide anymore. "Since I was born," he said. "I'm the son of Hades and Persephone. The only one here who qualifies." Harold sat up slowly, supported by Pegi, and met Hadie's eyes without looking away. "Then I guess we know who has to anchor the ritual when we reseal the Titans." The words hung in the sanctuary's green light—not an accusation, but a statement of fact that made Hadie's worst fear and his deepest hope collide. He'd proven mortals and gods could work together to accomplish the impossible. Now he had to prove he could stand as both, visible and known, with no contacts left to hide behind.