"Fair point!" And there's the other end of the little passage they've been following, a great marble wall with two passages sealed by what look to be giant circular bronze shields half buried in the ground. "Let's see, right or left?"

“I don’t know. How do you usually choose?”

"Randomly!" he says brightly.

“And that works for you and doesn’t get you running in circles? Uh, okay. Left, then.”

"Sometimes there's a circle or two but no, the local geography always gets you where you want to go even if Father tries to make it a little bit harder for that to happen for me than other people."

He raises a hand in the direction of the left shield, palm forward, and the shield glows then sinks down into the earth. In he goes.

“That’s... not how geography works in. Any of the other places I’ve been. But. Okay. Sure.”

"Achilles mentioned that it made him pretty confused at first but he got used to it."

On the other side of the short tunnel they find themselves in a beautiful walled garden, decorated with bronze statues and vases, the walls covered in decorative carvings and peppered with vines. There are a couple of blueish human-looking people standing at attention, holding spears, here and there, and they immediately notice Zagreus and start sprinting towards him. The entrance he came from is immediately closed shut by another huge bronze shield. "Time to play," he says, drawing his sword and dashing forward faster than he has any rights to.

“Yaaaaaay,” drawls Yvette. Okay, so mostly this is a Zagreus show, because it’s surprisingly difficult to just blast dead things with star plasma until they die, but she can manage to shove them around a bit. She mostly uses this to foil attacks against Zagreus.

But she can take advantage of all of this sprinting to trip one of the spear guys with a little mote of sticky night! Hi spear guy, enjoy crashing face first into this nice lush green ground, isn’t it such a lovely ground to faceplant into.

These were the great people of Greece, so after only falling on their faces a couple of times they learn to watch for it.

When Zagreus kills his first spear-wielding shade, it turns into a floating black-and-purple flame with an eye, and drops a spectral spear where it was killed. The flame stands there, motionless, doing nothing, but Zagreus nevertheless makes for it and starts hacking at it with a vengeance.

Well, he's the expert here. If he needs to kill the flame thing as soon as possible, she'll try to give him time to do it. One moment to build up some mass and power and then - boop! Wave of night at the spear guys trying to stab Zagreus in the back while he's busy, knocking them back and buying him time.

It dissipates into nothing after relatively few hacks, and he's back at the shades with actual limbs.

Well, then they can just continue this system of theirs until all of the shades that are trying to kill Zagreus are themselves killed. She still can't manage to directly make much of a dent in these jerks, but she's going to get very good at giving Zagreus openings and covering his back while he's busy.

"This is substantially easier when I don't have to spend half my awareness worried about being stabbed in the back, you know," he says as he deals the killing blow on the last shade.

"What, is the lack of challenge boring, should I stop?" she teases.

"No, there will be challenge enough later," he says. He looks around for further enemies and, finding none, cracks his neck and starts looking for useful loot.

"Ominous. There's going to be another boss fight at the exit, isn't there."

"...boss fight? Uh, I don't know that Theseus and Asterius are anyone's bosses..."

"It's a, a reference to a sort of game, don't worry about it. Enemies that are greater in power than ordinary foes, and that are often hard to defeat. So is it just one after the other or is it both of them at the same time...?"

"Both at the same time. They share the title of Champions of Elysium, and I think Father is making sure I'll run into their coliseum whenever I get as far as here."

"The boyfriends who slay together stay together," she mutters. "Ugh, two on one though, that's so unfair. I'm kind of glad I'm here to even things up a bit more now, just out of principle."

"You know, that's exactly what I told them, but Theseus still managed to be a self-righteous prick about it."

"Lovely. Self-righteous pricks, my favorite. I'm going to hate him, aren't I."

"I don't know, Asterius seems fine but somehow likes him anyway."

"Is he some combination of extremely cliché, prone to saying lots of words that don't amount to anything, not particularly thoughtful or empathetic towards others, or infuriatingly dimwitted?"

"Who, Theseus? He likes to declaim everything loudly to the audience and declare with very precise consonants that I am a fiend from hell he shall exterminate with the gods' blessings."