He looked down. His hands, still scarred and wrapped in the chains of the Blades of Exile, were holding a strange, flat black slab. A rectangle of polished obsidian. Within it, a tiny, flickering Kratos was running across a miniature version of the Floods of Poseidon.
The sound of a chain rattling.
Furious, Kratos dropped the black slab. It clattered on the pixelated stone. He raised his foot to crush it.
And then, silence.
"UNACCEPTABLE!" Kratos roared, not at Cronos, but at the unseen sky.
Then, the world blinked.
No messenger god. Just a faint, disembodied voice. "...Dude, the frame rate is dropping. Lower the resolution to 2x."
Kratos paused. He understood something now. He was not in Greece. He was a ghost inside a ghost. A memory of vengeance, running on a battery-powered brick in some teenager’s bedroom. His every rage-filled moment was subject to the whims of "multi-threaded rendering" and "audio stretching."
"You," Kratos growled, his voice low and venomous. "You press the buttons. You make me lag. You make me weak ."
"What trickery is this, Hermes?" Kratos snarled, spinning around.
"Seriously?" the distant voice sighed. "Try re-mapping the controls. The circle button is sticking."