"Are Athena's priestesses bandaging the wounds of slaves, delivering water and food?"
When the High Priest of Sparta, who was also Ares himself, saw the report sent back from the Athens front, a strong sense of surprise arose in his heart.
Has Athena awakened? Does she know to first please the people at the bottom and gain their support?
No, that shouldn't be possible. Athena's primary goal right now is to deal with Atlantis. These slaves must be cannon fodder that she's pulling out to send to their deaths. Since they're all going to die anyway, what's the point of trying to win them over?
In this era, treating slaves well wouldn't be understood by the Athenians. Those Athenians are Athena's base, and she couldn't possibly do something like sacrificing her knight to save her rook.
After thinking it over, Ares decided to go and see for himself.
At this time, Athena was personally sitting in the temple in Athens, so Ares, to avoid alarming her, did not go using his divine power avatar.
He directly created a body of an ordinary adult man, pretending to be a savage, wearing only a piece of animal skin around his waist, and ran naked outside Athens, even shamelessly stealing things from the Athenians.
His behavior was quickly discovered by the Athenians. The Athenians gathered three or five men and quickly devised a plan to catch him, and they threw him into the center of the slaves who had just been captured from outside Athens, preparing to train them into soldiers to fight against the upcoming Atlanteans.
Ares quietly shrank into a corner and stayed in the Athenians' slave camp for a while. At noon, the other slaves, who had been drilled by the Athenians all day, were driven back with exhaustion by the Athenians in the same way as livestock, and behind them, sure enough, there was a little girl wearing Athena's priestly robes and a hood, following along.
While the other slaves, with tired or painful expressions, collapsed crookedly on the straw mats near Ares, this priestess also walked over holding a wooden box. She opened the wooden box, which contained some herbs and bandages.
This young girl crushed the herbs together, mixed them on the bandages, and then began to treat the injured slaves, and incredibly, when these slaves with desperate or angry faces saw the girl walking over, they actually began to slowly relax.
Because it was just training, the number of slaves injured was not too many. Soon, this priestess girl completed the bandaging. She picked up the wooden box and left. After a while, she came back pushing a cart, which was loaded with a lot of food and clean water.
This priestess girl distributed these crude foods and clean water to the slaves present, and the Athenians responsible for guarding the slaves next to the slave camp turned a blind eye to this and did not interfere with her behavior at all.
Ares carefully distinguished the identity of this priestess girl. Although the black hood on her head obscured most of her face, Ares still caught a glimpse of the purple hair and white chin under her hood from her movements.
Is it really Medusa? Why is she here now?
After thinking about it, he couldn't understand, so he called out:
"Priestess, have mercy on me. I just arrived today, and I'm hungry and haven't had a sip of water. It's been so long, and I'm about to die of thirst and hunger."
Hearing his voice, the priestess turned around and looked at him. The Athenians next to her also laughed and said:
"Priestess, you don't need to pay attention to him. This slave isn't from your tribe. He's just a petty thief who was caught stealing things and became a slave."
Ares glared at the Athenian angrily, then pretended to be very weak, lay down on the ground, and looked at the priestess with a pleading expression.
The priestess looked at him, not knowing what she was thinking, and finally took some food and water and handed it to him.
"Here, eat."
"Thank you, priestess, you are such a kind person." Ares took the food and water she handed over, and also took this opportunity to finally see the face under her hood. Under the hood was a beautiful goddess's face, with a hint of coldness in her loveliness, purple hair hanging from her ears, and her eyes looked a little listless.
It was indeed the pitiful anti-hero Medusa of later generations.
So Ares quickly solved the coarse grains and water Medusa handed over, and without caring what the things he swallowed tasted like, he shouted to Medusa: "Kind priestess, thank you for saving my life, I want to give you a gift."
While speaking, he took out a beautiful hair accessory from his arms. The hair accessory had a black ribbon tied into a bow, which looked very cute.
This was originally made by the Fire God Hephaestus, who wanted to use it to pursue Athena and win Athena's favor. After his courtship was beaten up by Athena, the disheartened Fire God was prepared to abandon all these things, but after Ares saw it, he took it from his brother.
His little finger quietly rubbed the gem in the middle of the hair accessory, leaving a simple magic, and then he reached out and handed the hair accessory to the priestess, but his actions aroused the anger of the Athenian guards next to him. The Athenians walked up with wooden sticks and hit Ares's arm, while scolding:
"You slave, you dare to hide things secretly?"
Ares's body was just a mortal body, so after being hit, he still felt pain. He couldn't help but loosen his hand, and the hair accessory also fell into the sand and dust.
He retracted his hand, carefully remembered the face of the Athenian who hit him with a stick, and then retorted:
"This hair accessory is something my mother left me, not your property!"
"You dare to resist?!"
Two Athenians walked over with wooden sticks, preparing to beat Ares's body, but the priestess raised her hand and stopped the two Athenians:
"Okay, stop."
After stopping the two Athenians' violence, the young priestess slowly squatted down, picked up the hair accessory from the sand on the ground, patted off the dust, and then said to Ares:
"Thank you, I will cherish it."
She put the oath on her head in front of Ares and a group of slaves, and then turned and left the slave camp.
The time Athena allowed her to visit her believers for a day had ended. Now, she had to return to the Parthenon to work for Athena.
...
At night, the Athenian guards outside the slave camp suddenly saw the Spartan commander leading several Spartan strong men, following their leader, walking over together.
"Our war with Atlantis is about to begin." The Athenian leader said to his guards: "At this time, the more strength we can get, the more strength we will have, so I have asked the Spartan warriors to come and do combat training with you, so that you can control the Pelasgians inside when they go to the battlefield."
Then he waved his hand, and someone behind him carried over two boxes, which were all wooden sticks with smoothed edges, just like the wooden sticks the Athenian guards used to control the slaves. At this time, the Spartans were preparing to use them as training equipment.
"Come on, let's start directly."
The Spartan commander reached out and pulled out a wooden stick from the box, and the other Spartan warriors also took one each, stood in a neat row, and looked at the Athenian slave camp guards.
Under the order of the Athenian leader, the Athenian guards of the entire slave camp reluctantly formed groups of three or two and each faced a Spartan.
The Spartan commander looked at the two Athenian guards who had hit Ares's arm with wooden sticks today. He stared at the two guards for a while, until they felt a chill in their hearts. Then, the cold commander suddenly showed a cruel smile and waved to them:
"Come, come, come, you two come over, I will personally accompany you to exercise."
...
At the same time, Medusa, who had finished her day as a priestess, returned to the high-end stone house next to the Parthenon that Athena had prepared for her.
She washed her body, changed into another set of clothes, but had no sleepiness, but came to the window, looked up at Selene's chariot, and looked at the distant sea.
At that time, Athena led the Athenians to forcibly occupy the Pelasgians' tribe, demoted all the Pelasgians to slaves, and also wanted to take all three of her sisters as subordinate gods and take them to Olympus.
Although the Medusa sisters had never been there, they had heard that there were many terrible gods on that mountain. They possessed great power, and they liked to forcibly occupy some beautiful women and goddesses as wives. If they went there, Stheno and Euryale, the two goddesses who had no combat power, and even Medusa, were likely to encounter such misfortune. Therefore, Medusa did not hesitate to lower her godhood and exchanged her two sisters' freedom from Athena on the condition of being a priestess for Athena.
However, Euryale and Stheno were still not allowed by Athena to appear on the earth, so they were exiled by the Goddess of Wisdom and driven to an Invisible Island near the sea where the golden apple was located, as neighbors to the dragon Ladon.
In this way, Medusa and her two sisters would probably be difficult to see each other again in the future. She could only look up at the moon and miss her two sisters.
However, just as she was missing her relatives while looking at the moon, suddenly, a stream of light flashed on the hair accessory on her head. Then, as if something inside was activated, a somewhat rough male voice came to Medusa's mind:
"Hey, hey, is anyone there?"