Their clash was far from unique.
Bloody afterimages of gods tearing into each other now filled every corner of sky and earth.
Whether old, revered deities worshiped by millions of mortals or newly ascended gods who had just crossed the mortal-divine threshold, all were now locked in deadly duels—for their pantheons, for glory, and for dominance over this chaotic universe.
The Fuso world, which had been deliberately emptied to become a battlefield, had shrunk to about one-tenth of its original size.
Still, it spanned tens of thousands of square kilometers.
As for its elemental energy, Thalos hadn't completely drained it.
After all, as a battleground, if all elemental energy were removed, it would become a perfectly neutral zone—harmless and fair to both sides.
Instead, Thalos had left a generous amount of earth, water, fire, and air elements in place—and long before, he'd had his subordinate gods imprint the Aesir's universal divine seal onto all of them.
Any foreign god trying to control those elements would have to fight for it—with divine power.
And it wasn't as simple as just taking it. They'd first have to deconstruct the divine script formed from Runes and Lunas glyphs, or risk wasting ten times the effort for half the results.
As the Greek gods poured in, they quickly noticed the problem.
Curiously, they didn't seem to care.
Or rather, they had long anticipated the difficulties of fighting on foreign soil.
In theory, the Aesir would face the same problem if they invaded the Greek world.
That was because the Greek world's sky and earth weren't just elements—they were beings.
The sky itself was Uranus, the first Olympian God-King. He was the sky; the sky was him. They were one and the same. That's why, even after his son Cronus seized power, he didn't kill his father—if he had, the Greek world would've been left skyless, exposed to the naked chaos of the universe.
The earth, meanwhile, was the physical manifestation of Gaia, the Earth Mother.
These two ancient beings occupied the Greek world's heavens and ground, which meant that any foreign god trying to draw power from the sky or earth would have a very hard time.
Taking a little power might be like plucking a hair—annoying but tolerable.
But taking a lot? That would be like slicing off flesh. The difficulty was unimaginable.
Even so, wave after wave of Aesir gods charged forward.
Because in the Aesir pantheon, at least on the surface, the path to ascension was open.
For lower-tier gods—descended gods, slave gods—this was their final chance to rise to the rank of a Major God.
It wasn't just the subordinates of the Six Great God-Kings. Even the most obscure gods under Thalos's direct command surged toward the battlefield.
It was in this chaos that Athena noticed something strange—certain unidentified figures had bypassed the subsidiary worlds acting as buffers and descended directly into the Greek world.
"Hm? What's this?"
Athena was no stranger to divine power.
She had seen Poseidon split a gulf with his trident, hurling massive waves and boulders at a city.
She'd seen Aphrodite whip up a seductive storm with just a flick of her skirt, bewitching an entire city's men.
She'd seen mighty beasts fall cold and lifeless under Artemis's whirling arrows of wind.
But now—from the sky—descended metal cylinders, seemingly simple, yet utterly extraordinary.
They fell with the divine light of Aesir gods, transforming into beams of light that pierced heaven and earth—plunging from the sky, through the earth, down into the ocean, and into the planet's core.
Gaia stirred.
It was faint—more a twitch than a tremor.
To mortals, it was just a momentary, minor earthquake.
A 3.0 on the Richter scale—harmless.
To Gaia, it was like being pricked by a single acupuncture needle.
And yet—almost no one realized the trick Thalos had just pulled.
Athena wanted to investigate what the Aesir had done, but she had no time.
All over the world, emergency reports were flooding in.
She was forced to reassign the Greek gods, sending them to repel Aesir invaders at once.
Only Odin, holed up in Tartarus, noticed the truth.
Whoooosh—
A forged-steel cylinder pierced through Tartarus's roof—not too big, not too small. Roughly the size of a human coffin. Its base was shaped like a spike, while the upper half was a standard cylindrical body.
The moment it entered the underworld, Odin felt a familiar law radiating from it.
Ignoring the risk of being seen by the Hundred-Armed Giant, he eagerly ran toward it.
He crossed the equivalent of three city blocks before finding the thing.
"Uh…"
He was shocked to discover—it had been stepped on by the Hundred-Armed Giant as it passed. It now looked exactly like those metal goblets that drunken giants had crushed back in Asgard's Hall of Joy.
But that didn't matter.
It was crushed, but not completely.
The core component had been partially exposed by the damage.
Odin's soul—if it could still be said to have a heart—was now pounding faster than ever.
Etched on the cylinder in rune script was a single line:
"Copper melts at 1083.4°C."
Odin swore—no one in all of the Greek world could possibly understand what that meant.
Hell, even in Ginnungagap, probably only a few gods truly grasped its significance.
But Odin? He knew.
He was the only one who did—because he had witnessed the first creation of the Ginnungagap world.
He knew—this was one of the "physical laws" Thalos had quietly embedded into the fabric of reality long ago.
Thalos had built Ginnungagap's entire cosmology from scratch, using what he casually called "physics equations."
Odin had never understood physics.
But that didn't stop him from feeling the weight of its power.
Ever since he was cast into the chaos, through every divine war that followed, he'd never once seen a god enter Ginnungagap and come out ahead.
Even the mighty Quetzalcoatl had charged in full of arrogance—only to be crushed almost immediately, unable to convert Ginnungagap's elements into usable divine power.
When it came to seizing elemental control, Thalos had the greatest talent in the entire universe.
So now, seeing this massive steel spike, how could Odin not be overjoyed?
"Big Brother! You knew I was down here, didn't you? You sent this just for me?! Brother, I get it now! Thank you, big bro—!"
Odin had been maddened by his entrapment behind Poseidon's cursed bronze walls—a structure absurdly effective at restraining divine power, godly presence, even souls. That's why Odin's spirit had been stuck here for so long.
But now that Thalos had sent this—
Now he understood.
"Low melting point…? Wait, does this mean the hellfire of Tartarus could actually melt these damned bronze walls?!"
Odin was partly right.
At that same moment, in Asgard's Silver Palace, Gilgamesh asked Thalos the same question.
"Father God, will this really work?"
"Of course it will!" Thalos chuckled. "I'll bet you—no one in all of Olympus knows that copper is a soft, low-melting-point piece of junk. They love their bronze weapons so much—serves them right if it blows up in their faces!"
(End of Chapter)
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