More Tokusatsu AU craziness, here’s Violent Athena! This would be towards the climatic finale of the series...
Saori Kido, heir to the financial empire known as the Graude Foundation, was adopted by Mitsumasa Kido as an infant after the wounded Aries Mu and the dying Sagittarius Aiolos teleported to his mansion’s doorstep with her in tow. While Aiolos could not be saved, Mu told Mitsumasa that the baby was the reincarnation of Athena and needed to be protected at all costs. He also told Mitsumasa that the reason they teleported to his estate was that the baby’s mother told Mu that if something were to happen to her, the Kido family would where to go.
Meanwhile in Sanctuary’s headquarters in the outskirts of Athens, the newly crowned Pope Arles cursed his weakness and entered deep thought. The baby Athena was not like previous incarnations of their treasured goddess. Born to the Angel Bilquis and the Gold Saint Aries Mu after a tryst that formed following the two Pantheons joining forces to seal away the treacherous “Lord of Hell” Lucifer, this new baby had the potential to totally unravel whatever hold Sanctuary had over the remaining Pantheons. When Arles, back then known as the leader of the Gold Saints “Gemini Saga, attempted to tell Pope Shion, he discovered Shion using forbidden arts in an attempt to create artificial Spectres. The constant stream of blasphemy caused Saga to lose control of his better half, and in a rage Saga slew Shion and took his place in an attempt to “right the wrongs.”
As his rage abated, Saga realized in horror what he had done and quickly set out to discover what Shion had been up to. As it turned out, Shion was attempting to reverse engineer the “Specterism” plague that befell Sanctuary during the previous Holy War of the 18th Century. Saga had walked into the final testing stages that would turn a possessed human back into their former self. Shion had left enough of his notes for Saga to complete the cure, and quickly put the experiment to rest. Saga decided that he would honor his former Pope by finishing what he started and reclaim Sanctuary’s glory.
After allowing the child prodigy Hornet Milo to kill Bilquis, whom Arles poisoned with dark energy so that she appeared to have gone mad, he attempted to poison the baby Athena, as well. The goal was simply to present the possessed Athena to his former comrades and cure her in order to boost his cult of personality among the other Pantheons. Aiolos walked in by happenstance, and in the struggle he learned Arles’ true identity. Saga quickly overpowered his former comrade and ordered his death when Aiolos snatched Athena from her crib and brought her to Mu.
Finding Athena was easy enough for Arles, who could sense her Holy Cosmo all across the planet, but it was pointless to go after her now. The window had passed, and he needed to ensure that Sanctuary would not suspect him for foul play. As he gathered his allies and removed those who may one day rise against him, an even grander scheme formed in his mind. Perhaps Athena being born of an Angel and a Gold Saint was not a blasphemy, but a blessing in disguise. When she reached maturity and awakened to her true self, Athena would possess the most powerful vessel ever. It might even one day surpass the height of Athena’s divine flesh prior to the end of the Age of Myth.
If this vessel could be that powerful...perhaps it would be possible for it to become a vessel for another entity.
19 years later, Saori Kido awakened and her godly Cosmo was felt all across the world. It would signal a months long campaign for Sanctuary to reclaim the “ripened” Athena from the traitors who whisked her away. Mu, who had adopted the identity of billionaire weapons developer and head of Graude Foundation’s R&D Division “Mutsuki Zeto,” had prepared two teams to meet Arles’ assault: the noble “Zodiac Knights” led by Pegasus Seiya who fought to protect all innocent life from Sanctuary’s tyranny, and the unrelenting “Zodiac Horde” led by Unicorn Jabu whose sole purpose was to protect Saori and inflict harm upon anyone who put her at risk.
During the conflict, Arles discovered that the Knights’ Andromeda Shun was the vessel for Hades. Under the advice of his twin brother Kanon, who was now acting as his kagemusha for the Gemini Cloth, Arles waited for Pisces Aphrodite to repot the successful assassination of longtime Sanctuary target Pandora Heinstein, and sent him to Japan for his next mission. As Aphrodite headed to Japan, Kanon sent a message to Siren Sorrento under the “Sea Dragon” codename that the time had come to awakening their secret God Poseidon.
On the surface, it appeared that Saori’s protector and old childhood sweetheart Julian Solo and her trusted Saint Andromeda Shun were going to be pitted against one another with the hopes that one angry God killed the other. Shun had been forcibly awakened as Hades with a dart laced with Pandora’s blood, and Julian through the vase containing Poseidon’s seal soul being undone by Sorrento. Because neither possession was natural, the hold of them was not absolute, and the Zodiac Knights were able to restore their teammate by sealing Hades’ soul within the now-empty vase. Sorrento volunteered to ensure the vase would not fall into the wrong hands, but two days later Julian discovered his body with no vase in sight.
In reality, Sanctuary had planned this chain of events from the beginning. Kanon had acquired the Sea Dragon moniker from Sorrento’s late father, whom he had killed to cover his tracks that his “youthful romantic indiscretions” with the fiance of the Solo Shipping Conglamerate’s heir resulted in the birth of Poseidon’s next vessel. He was imprisoned by his brother when Shion got word of this, but now it was an avenue of Arles’ greatest triumph. Because he was fathered by a Gemini Saint, it meant that his possession would be a split dichotomy instead of a gradual transformation like Saori into Athena. This gave the Knights a chance to reason with Julian and work together to stop Hades.
Now Hades’ soul was sealed entirely within the vase, and Arles quickly went to work on the next phase of the plan as Aphrodite returned to Sanctuary with the vase in tow. Arles withdrew his troops from Japan and accepted Saori’s proposition for a final showdown. Three weeks later, Saori and the Zodiac Knights arrived at the Aries Temple, where they were immediately ambushed by 500 of Sanctuary’s best soldiers. In the conflict, Saori was wounded by an arrow, and Arles telepathically challenged the Zodiac Knights to conquer the 12 Houses if they wished to save her.
As the Knights marched up the temple, the Gold Saints still loyal to Athena hurried to the Aries Temple in an attempt to stop the venom that had entered his bloodstream. As the final temple was cleared, Libra Dohko had successfully nullified the arrow’s venom, but in doing so sealed the fate of himself, Scorpio Milo, and Taurus Aldebaran. The venom was only a decoy, a medicine that kept Saori’s soul pure from the true purpose of the arrow. The reality was that the arrow contained the entirety of Hades’ soul, warped by Arles’ Judeccan Sorcery to be more susceptible to consumption by Saori.
The dark wave of violent intent was felt all the way in the Pope’s Sanctum, where Aries Mu and his protege Knights were on the cusp of victory against the fearsome duo of the Gemini Twins. Realizing that he would likely never have a chance to admit to Saori that he was so much more to her than just her mentor, Mu used his Starlight Extinction to teleport the Knights as far down the Temple stairs as he could muster. As for himself, Mu opened a portal to the crawlspace between realities known as “the Void,” and let nothingness swallow himself and the Gemini Twins before they could stop the Knights.
Back at the foot of the Aries Temple, the Zodiac Horde finally arrived to provide reinforcements, but realized it might already be too late. Instead of Athena taming Hades’ soul with her purity as Saga had hoped, instead the two souls fused together into something new and twisted. Dohko, Milo, and Aldebaran had been reduced to bloody slush, and in place of the Nike Staff was the Sword of Kers. Once hailed as a Goddess of Righteous War, Saori Kido had instead turned into an entity of Ultimate Punishment, triggered by even the slightest scent of moral decay.
As the smell of humanity’s sin entered her nostrils, Saori Kido reached for her blade and prepared to begin her judgment of her charges. Athena had been reborn, and nothing would ever be the same again...
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