Watching the Olympian pantheon start infighting at this critical moment, the Æsir almost burst their sides laughing.
[Heh heh heh!]
[Hahaha!]
Their private mind-links crackled with the gleeful cackling of bystanders eating popcorn.
The Greek gods hadn't exactly been outmuscling the Æsir to begin with—now this? Was there even any suspense left to this ultimate divine war's outcome?
Actually… there was!
Thalos's avatar led more than a thousand deities, surging down the spatial corridor at speed, meeting almost no resistance—until, just outside the Greek world, things changed.
Before them hung the Greek world like an enormous glowing sphere.
Through its semi-transparent atmosphere curled with cloud, the thinner patches even let you peer straight down from space at the lands, seas, and rivers below.
And just when Thalos and the host were about to descend and put a period on this grand farce—that period turned into a question mark.
Because on the outer skin of the world swelling in their view, a colossal human face appeared.
So vast was that face that, in a daze, Thalos felt it was as big as the Mediterranean.
A man's face.
Without any order from Thalos, the gods behind him halted as one, their fierce radiance flaring as they formed a layered battle array at his back, the entire army a titanic spearpoint from afar.
At the tip, Thalos manifested a phantom over ten kilometers tall—still not big enough next to that face.
\[Uranus?!] Thalos frowned.
\[Heh. Thalos, you do know our world well,] said Uranus—his features sculpted from cloud and atmosphere—wearing an expression Thalos recognized at once: self-mockery.
\[And if I do?] Thalos didn't deny it.
\[Nothing much. My bastard of a son and my wretched grandson are both trash,] Uranus said, briefly wrong-footing Thalos. Then he paused and stated his position: \[Trash though they are, they are still the children of Chaos.]
Case closed.
Why would Uranus stand up at such a moment of crisis? In the end, he couldn't harden his heart.
Back then, his darling son Cronus cut off his manhood and overthrew him; Uranus merely relinquished the crown and rolled back to the sky to be the sky god.
Hate him though he did, he still acknowledged his son's claim to the throne; as for Cronus getting overthrown later—that was another tale.
Either way, for Uranus, the meat still stayed in the family pot.
No matter how the Greeks fought among themselves, the victor would still be one of their own.
An outsider like Thalos was a different story.
To Uranus, that was the true mortal enemy.
Hearing this, Thalos actually felt a flicker of respect.
\[Heh. Very principled. But with just you—an out-of-date god-king—do you think you can stop me?] Thalos replied proudly.
The massive cloud-face showed a textbook bitter smile. \[Even if I can't, I must try. And I am the sky god. The sky god of this great world.]
\[Good.] The corner of Thalos's mouth lifted.
Just then he saw Thor arriving, fresh from his bout with Poseidon.
"Thor, take the host and make a circuit around Mount Olympus. No need to meddle in Cronus and Zeus's fight. Remember—press when you can, pull back when you must."
"Understood!" Thor wasn't stupid; he knew Thalos was telling him to fish for advantage without trading away their strength, and he nodded sharply.
"Enki," Thalos called next.
"I know." Who else would he single out but the sea god? Of course Enki understood—keep stealing seawater.
At Thalos's gesture, the host split like a tide—one detachment with Enki, the bulk with Thor, plunging along the corridor into the Greek world. Only Thalos's own goddesses and a cluster of Valkyries stayed with him.
Especially Artemis, whose homeland lay within arm's reach, yet who felt a strange alienation.
Looking at the legendary great-grandfather, she felt both shame and helplessness—ashamed of her own weakness, afraid that if the Æsir lost she'd be the first to face reckoning.
That extreme inner conflict made it impossible for her to calm down and view the duel between God-Emperor and God-King objectively.
Thalos moved.
He did not simply slam elements into the Greek sky, because that was Uranus's very body. Raw elements would only be torn apart by his storms and forcibly assimilated.
"Sky" itself is the greatest carrier of the wind element, and the Greek sky is measured in the hundreds of millions of square kilometers.
A standard strike would never floor Uranus.
So Thalos chose to… redirect an asteroid drifting in the mutated starfields between the two world-clusters.
Vmmmmm—
There should be no sound in the void.
But Thalos's power was so immense that, when he drove it in torrents, it made the vacuum hum.
Uranus saw it almost at once: some thirty thousand kilometers out from the Greek world, a small asteroid—its face area rivaling the island of Crete—stirred.
First a red rim seemed to trace itself around the more-than-two-hundred-kilometer-long rock.
Then, in Uranus's sight, it swelled larger and larger.
Thirty thousand kilometers sounds far, but for a body with a cross-section of several thousand square kilometers, it wasn't far at all.
\[You—you—you actually…] Clearly Thalos's means exceeded Uranus's imagination.
This wasn't gods trading conventional blasts.
If a rock that size hit the Greek world at extreme speed, the shockwave alone might flatten everything on the surface.
Uranus "changed color."
The sky god's head stretched in outline like silver hair tens of kilometers long, whipping in the vacuum's eddies.
Of course he wanted to smash the missile before it struck.
Unfortunately, he was the sky god of the Greek world, not the cosmos god of this chaotic universe.
Once his power left the space barrier, it bled away rapidly.
To put it another way, Uranus had never learned how to wield his might in space without massive loss. All his use of sky power still came by instinct.
Helpless, he watched the asteroid draw nearer and faster, until, trailing a long tail, it crossed within a hundred kilometers of the barrier. Only then did he gather a mass of unalloyed divinity and hurl it to meet the rock head-on.
______
(≧◡≦) ♡ Support me and read 20 chapters ahead – patreon.com/Mutter
For every 50 Power Stones, one extra chapter will be released on Saturday.