Odin had no choice. After fully sensing the immense power of the mysterious god-king before him, he knew that just sneaking his soul out of confinement wasn't nearly enough to convince this being.
The whole "bluff from the Void" trick wasn't something just anyone could pull off.
You either had to be genuinely powerful—or at least have a reputation that made the other party believe you once were. Only then was there a chance your bluff might land.
Besides, the poor bastard before him was being restrained by Zeus's most extreme containment system.
Brutal divine energy-draining restraints, divine-curse-infused bronze walls to suppress power, and the pièce de résistance: a god-king-level prison warden, the Hundred-Armed Giant.
Who could endure all that?
What made it worse was that this particular Hundred-Armed Giant was actually doing his job—relentlessly monitoring everything. If Odin acted alone, he had zero chance of success.
His only hope was that Thalos would cause a major commotion outside, weakening the prison's defenses—or maybe even find a way to smuggle some divine weapon into Tartarus.
Fortunately, Odin wasn't in any rush.
He even took the time to pass by the cell of Apuch, the death god, offering a few words of comfort.
Tartarus's god-king-level prison was truly terrifying.
It was a bronze labyrinth designed specifically to suppress divine power.
The very walls could shift and move like a living creature.
More than once, Odin had been tempted to escape through gaps that briefly opened after the hundred-meter-tall bronze walls shifted—but he always held back. Instead, he prudently sent out a faint wisp of divine sense, which was immediately extinguished.
A trap. As expected.
"Hm?" One of the Hundred-Armed Giant's many heads tilted, perhaps momentarily confused.
But it soon lost interest—the soul fragment was so weak it felt like one of the many lost wraiths that occasionally wandered into Tartarus.
Nothing unusual.
Odin's true soul remained hidden in the shadows, quietly mapping the labyrinth's patterns.
To a mortal, this might seem impossibly complex.
But to a god-king whose mind could simultaneously process tens of thousands of prayers, this was just a puzzle.
Like slowly unraveling a tangled thread, or piecing together a jigsaw puzzle made of thousands of fragments, Odin spent an entire month just reconstructing a small part of Tartarus's maze.
Then suddenly—the hellish sky cracked open.
A strange beam of light penetrated the darkness of the underworld…
——
Elsewhere, as the flow of the universe shifted, the two great world-clusters reached a brand new crossroads of fate.
Black holes. Variable stars. Distorted gravity wells. Suns of different colors crammed side by side. Radiation belts powerful enough to instantly incinerate frost giants… In the gaps between these cosmic death traps, there was one narrow safe corridor—just wide enough for the gods of both worlds to pass through.
One glance at it and Ishtar immediately shook her head, hands raised in surrender. She refused—both mentally and physically—to scout it alone. She even changed into a skimpy lace maid outfit, feigning pitiful helplessness.
Thalos didn't force this unfortunate goddess.
This was a battlefield crafted by the laws of the starfield themselves. There was no longer any need for someone like her to step beyond the Ginnungagap world to do reconnaissance.
All the previous battles—mortal armies, mortal heroes, demi-gods, divine avatars—had merely been warm-up acts.
When someone like Poseidon could unleash a city-drowning tsunami on a whim, a million mortal troops would just become fish food.
This was why the Olympian gods hadn't been the least bit anxious.
They had absolute confidence in their power.
——
As it happened, so did the Aesir.
Right now, Ginnungagap had ten times the population. In the realm of faith-based apotheosis, they were leagues ahead. On the other hand, the Greek world theoretically had vaster elemental reserves, fueling even more terrifying divine power.
Who would win? Still too early to say.
Time to see which side's gods could truly deliver.
To say Thalos was under no pressure would be a lie.
He'd spent nearly two centuries preparing for this. If, after conquering all these pantheons and annexing multiple worlds, he still couldn't beat Olympus—if he still lost to raw elemental talent—then it would be the most laughable, unreadable trash story ever written.
Conversely, as the Celestials liked to say: "Plan for the worst"—what if the Olympian gods were actually kind of bad?
Thalos felt... conflicted.
So much so that not even the dances of the goddesses around him could lift his spirits.
Regardless, with this divine corridor now open, after nearly a month of stalemate, the war erupted once again.
Unsurprisingly, both sides launched their assaults simultaneously.
This time, there were no slow-drifting spatial chambers. No warm-up moves. Just raw divine power being hurled across space.
If you pulled your perspective all the way out—to the "ceiling" of the universe—you'd see, through the distortion of the mutated starfield, that countless divine avatars and even true godly forms were surging through that narrow universal passage.
Their divine energy boiled, and they tore across the void—thousands of kilometers—to reach the enemy world.
The universe cannot carry sound.
But the elemental tremors generated by godly energy were another matter.
If your senses could extend beyond a world's veil, you'd hear the "whoosh whoosh whoosh" of space being shredded.
It was like a scene from Thalos's memories—space fleets trading endless laser barrages across the void.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet—each divine light a representation of a different divine attribute. The sight was breathtaking.
At the frontlines, the shrunken version of the Fuso world had its sky ripped open by a thunderous crack—thousands of meters wide. The broken dome, fractured by divine force, suspended in place by distorted divine energy, now rained down like a monsoon of debris.
One after another, colossal giants descended, their impacts turning the ground to dust.
Each time they climbed from the craters they'd created, their footsteps split the already cracked land into spiderweb fissures.
They were not alone.
The Slavic gods tasked with defending this region stepped forward.
The male god Chernobog, riding a strange ram-drawn chariot, charged forth at high speed.
His spiked steel wheels tore across the earth with a screeching roar that rang in the invaders' ears.
"I am Chernobog, God of Darkness and Sorrow of the Aesir! Name yourself—!"
The rather unpleasant-looking Greek male god brushed off bits of spatial debris from his armor and coldly responded, "Kuknos of the Swan Constellation, son of Poseidon, Sea God-King."
No need for pleasantries—just names exchanged, then straight into battle.
And in the next instant, the earth lit up with blinding neon light as the two powers clashed.
(End of Chapter)
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