Thaddeus Ambrosios

"Is that all you've got, Xerxes? You're no god, gods don't fear death. Remember my face in your deepest nightmares: Death won't be enough to keep me away from you. Either I'm coming back up here, or you're going down with me."

- Thaddeus II's dying words

Thaddeus II was a son of Ares active during the Greco-Persian Wars and a former polemarchos of the Spartan army by the time of the Second persian invasion. Back at then, he was given the alias Ambrosios and called The Unliving, also because of his supernatural physical abilities and fighting skills, but the main reason was his god-like durability and stamina, being able to withstand a massive amount of physical and mental damage. After being killed alongside King Leónidas and the Spartan army, he somehow managed to escape Elysium without proper reincarnation by the time of Alexander the Great.

History
Born in Sparta just a few years before the Greco-Persian Wars, Thaddeus II was a very powerful son of Ares. His mother was a very strong woman, strong enough to get the god of war's attention, and with him she had two twin sons. The first one to be born was called Thaddeus I, and the second Thaddeus II, each of them born with a massive amount of divine power inside their bodies. Realizing the twins wouldn't live long without his influence, Ares blessed both of them with a very high durability before leaving back to Olympus. Regardless of the god's influence, Thaddeus I died a few hours later and while his soul went to Underworld, his blessing and powers got stuck inside Thaddeus II's body also.

At first, the vast amount of divine energy the boy had made him grown up at supernatural speeds. By the time he was two months, Thaddeus had already the size of an one year old child. Since he could first walk, his mother taught him to fight and survive, and by the time he was seven, the boy was taken away from his mom in order to be trained as a soldier.

Being a son of Ares (even if he didn't know that), Thaddeus quickly mastered any kind of fighting technique he was taught and could endure the beatings, floggings and starvation from the training without too much difficult. At twelve, he was sent besides the Spartan army in the aid of Athens during the First persian invasion of Greece, but didn't fight since when they arrived the persian army had been already defeated. Almost twenty years after that, a 20 years old Thaddeus II marched alongside Leónidas I to the Thermopylae to fight Xerxes I army during the Second persian invasion of Greece. Despite having killed more than three hundred persian soldiers by himself, the persian giant army and Ephialtes' unexpected betrayal defeated Leónidas' king. Thaddeus, at the time a polemarchos of Sparta, was able to come close enough to directly hit Xerxes with his shield. He was given the Unliving alias by the persians for the massive amount of damage he could take, and Xerxes himself described Thaddeus insane abilities as if "Duzakh itself was fighting alongside the enemy" (Duzakh being hell to the persians).

In the Underworld, he "lived" in Elysium for over half a century, but managed to escape without reincarnating. With a lost time perception, at first he tried to find a way to kill Xerxes I -- only to find out Xerxes had died a long time ago. It didn't took much longer to the gods realize his escape, and Ares was sent to take him back -- what culminated in Thaddeus finding out the god of war was his father and the later training him personally instead of taking him back to the Underworld. By the time, Thaddeus also found out he couldn't die anymore since he was already dead, unless killed by magical weapons like Celestial Bronze, Imperial Gold and Stygian Iron or divine power. A few decades later he joined Alexander the Great in his campaign to conquer the Persian Empire, seeing that as revenge for his and his fellow's death.

(Shall be continued...)

Escaping Death
(Upcoming story)