Clearly, the old-era god-king Uranus wasn't much good at physics.
Seeing that mass of divine power still in a gaseous state, not even much larger than the plummeting asteroid itself, Thalos knew there was no way Uranus could stop this move.
Don't be fooled by Uranus's grand display, with the entire Greek sky trembling as if a giant were bellowing world-rending fury from his chest, and even the cloud-sea near the point of impact instantly freezing into ice crystals to form a colossal shield of ice.
All the same, the fruit of his efforts exploded into thousands of prismatic shards of light the instant it struck the asteroid.
\[Ah?!] Uranus cried out.
Only by meeting it head-on did he truly feel how terrifying it was to hurl an asteroid, accelerated to such speed by the opposing God-Emperor.
Even with hundreds of millions of square kilometers of sky at his command, with divine power that felt inexhaustible, the moment he faced an asteroid big enough to end the world he felt his own helplessness, and he understood—what it meant to face the might of a God-Emperor!
Yes—though Thalos, limited by the spatial corridor, couldn't unleash a God-Emperor's full power, that knowledge and method alone weren't something a "little god-king" like Uranus could withstand.
\[No! I won't let you destroy our world!]
As Uranus's two storm-hands kept turning, a gargantuan tornado thousands of kilometers in diameter took shape—an apocalypse-class maelstrom.
The monstrous storm blasted upward against the fall.
Those wind blades, raging with power, met the asteroid and tore at it at a rate of thousands and tens of thousands of cuts per second.
Whether it was that sincerity can split stone, or Uranus's power was just that extreme, roughly half a minute after he threw himself into the fight there came a thunderous bang from within the asteroid.
That immense rock, stone with a bit of metal mixed in, split in two before the eyes of the gods.
\[Hraaah!] Clearly encouraged, Uranus kept pumping in power, inflicting further damage on the asteroid.
Sky and wind power shattered it again—this time into eight pieces.
Soon after, thirty-two…
One thousand and twenty-four…
Once the count passed ten thousand fragments, Thalos couldn't be bothered to keep tracking them with his senses.
Even with Uranus laboring mightily to pulverize the asteroid, the sky above the Aegean was still stained with orange glow—the long tails drawn by a world-darkening meteor shower as it punched through the Greek world's atmosphere.
Watching the falling stars fill the sky, hearing the shrieks as the air was torn open, the remaining mortals of the Greek world all dropped to their knees in a daze.
To mortal eyes, this was the end of the world.
Some prayed, some wailed—and even gods cursed.
"Cronus! This is the result you wanted? We're fighting for our lives while those damned Æsir invade—they're going to destroy this world." Zeus cursed his father as he flashed back and forth in the sky, dodging Cronus's attacks.
Cronus narrowed his massive eyes, sensed for a moment, then sneered. "Doesn't matter! That bastard Uranus can still hold!"
Neither of them knew what the other gods, fighting not far away, were feeling at that instant.
Grandfather battled in the sky to repel an outside enemy; father and son hacked at each other on the ground out of hatred!
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant!
Athena's face was like frost; only she knew how heartbroken and despairing she was.
In the sky, the meteor rain seemed as if it would never end.
Smaller meteors vaporized high above the ground; but once the larger ones punched through the atmosphere, there was nothing Uranus could do to turn them aside.
Boom boom boom boom!
The earth, the mountains, the islands—countless places were punched full of craters by those outrageous, hypervelocity meteors, some of which raised ring-shaped ramparts over a kilometer across.
Whether or not Thalos did it on purpose, most impacts were concentrated on the Greek peninsula, rather than Asia Minor or places like Italy.
"No—" Athena cried out, startled.
She loved Athens most. Seeing this, she spent divine power without hesitation, raising a hemispherical, translucent shield over the city of Athens.
The shield wasn't very large, barely covering the main urban district; as for the shops and markets outside—sorry, that would be up to fate.
At the same time, far away in Troy in Asia Minor, King Priam had been hesitant about the proposal from his eldest son Hector, newly returned from hell. When Priam, his other son Paris, and the Trojans saw the meteor storm scourging the direction of the Greek city-states, they went pale with shock.
The king said, "My good son, you spoke well. Even the Olympian gods cannot remain unscathed under such circumstances. The entire Greek world is no longer safe. For the future of the Trojans, I will immediately rally the nation and evacuate Troy."
"Father, you've made a wise decision!" Hector never lacked decisiveness. He didn't know whether following Odin was reliable, but he knew that if the Greeks themselves were not saved by the Olympians, people like them from Asia Minor were worth even less.
In this era, evacuating an entire nation would take at least a month even at breakneck speed.
Once the royal decree was given, how much could be carried out would depend on fate.
Hector prayed sincerely that the God-King he served, Odin, could seize a small world quickly…
As it happened, Odin's campaign went exceedingly smoothly. The world he struck—the Dogon world—had originally been under the control of a small East African pantheon. The former God-King Amma had long been deeply dissatisfied with Zeus. Rather than "surrender," it was more like they hit it off at once.
After all, not all God-Kings are equal. Odin and his cohort were currently at full divine strength, while Amma and his gods had long since been drained by the Olympian God-Kings.
Amma put up only symbolic resistance, called for aid from Mount Olympus, and, seeing that Zeus could hardly protect himself, promptly sided with Odin.
From Odin's invasion to fully opening a portal between the Dogon world and the Greek world to begin evacuating the Trojans took only three days.
Thalos saw Odin's little maneuvers and deliberately ignored them.
His focus remained on wearing down Uranus's divine power.
Just after Uranus fought off the first asteroid barrage, Thalos sneered: \[Uranus, your nightmare has only just begun.]
Sure enough, without giving Uranus a chance to breathe, another asteroid of nearly the same size, from even farther out, began to accelerate under Thalos's power.
Above the Greek world, Uranus's divine eyes went wide.
From the start he hadn't thought he could defeat a God-Emperor; he simply hadn't imagined he would lose so utterly, without the slightest room to breathe.
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