Heals broken ribs

A warcry, really more of a growl than a roar, rumbled out of my throat as I came upon him — but Leviathan was done playing, was done humoring us, as he had been up until now.

His tail slammed into me, harder than before, far, far harder, so hard that I actually felt it. I felt three of my ribs buckle and snap, felt the shattered fragments dig into the flesh around them, even as my torso folded over and I was thrown back — back down the street, the rain-slicked pavement, and through the pain and the dizzying spinning of the world as I tumbled, something bent and broke around me.

What eventually stopped me was a storefront. I smashed through the glass display and came to rest on the floor just behind it. For a few disoriented seconds, I blinked up at the darkened ceiling, taking in rasping breaths with a lung that I was fairly sure was filling up with blood.

But I wasn’t down for long. With a long groan and a pained grunt, I pushed past the pain and climbed to my feet. A cough deep in my chest dredged up a mouthful of blood, and I spat it out onto the ground like it was nothing more than snot. It swirled in the dirty water and was washed away.

This wasn’t enough to keep me down. Not by a longshot. I was fucking Herakles. A demigod, scion of Zeus, the man who could do the impossible, who had conquered the Twelve Labors, who had outwitted Titans and gods alike, who had suffered through many debilitating wounds and gotten back up for more.

This was fucking nothing.

My ribs were already healing as I charged out of the storefront the way I’d come in, snapping back into place and gluing back together in their original shapes.