The Hundred-Handed Giant was the trump card Zeus had specially pulled out of Tartarus—failing to make a decisive showing was bad enough, but falling behind?
"On pins and needles" was the perfect description of Zeus's mood.
To brace for a possible Æsir assault, he had risked a great deal to deploy one of the three Hundred-Handed Giants.
Don't forget, Tartarus held a "model father" who wanted nothing more than to kill every last one of his children, along with a host of Titans so full of hatred they could turn the world upside down.
Zeus had left the three Hundred-Handed Giants there for three reasons: they hated Cronus as much as he did; the surface world had few places where such beings could live; and with them as wardens, even if Cronus broke out, they could pin the former God-King back into his cell at once.
And now you're telling Zeus that the trump card he'd risked so much to pull out wasn't as explosive as he'd hoped?
How could Zeus accept that?!
Lightning flashed in his hands—at a thought, a bolt could crash down from the holy mountain and turn that wicked serpent into snake stew in one strike!
Queen Hera's mind-voice cut in: "Your Majesty, the other God-Emperor hasn't taken the field yet."
Zeus cooled in an instant, his face burning.
If his God-Kings failed to hold the stage, that was their dereliction—but a God-Emperor also had his standards. If Thalos had yet to act, and Zeus jumped in first, it would only prove he was far beneath Thalos! What would the slave gods think then?
If a slave master's authority falters, the slaves' backlash is more terrifying than any enemy's blade.
That truth holds even in the divine realm!
Zeus gritted his teeth and sat back down.
His anger came and went quickly. Still, he was a God-Emperor acknowledged across the realms—and his power was thunder.
With such brutal, overwhelming aura, there was no way Hel and Jormungandr below hadn't noticed.
"Hel, did you feel that?"
"I did. Don't push it too far."
The brother and sister reached agreement at once.
At the end of the day, the spatial corridor was too small, and without a complete descent from Thalos, this was the foot of Mount Olympus—if they provoked the opposing God-Emperor into throwing shame aside and going all out, the siblings' strength—formidable at the God-King tier—wouldn't be enough.
This was the Greek world—the enemy's home field.
They exchanged thoughts with Freyr and Arthur and quickly agreed to take the win and disengage.
That's how it should have gone…
Just then, every god on both sides felt the ground give a savage jolt—not the step of the Hundred-Handed Giant, whose body towered to the sky. True, with a mass measured in tens of thousands of tons, a single stomp could shake the earth.
But this tremor made the entire Olympus range lurch and sway.
Anything standing on the ground either toppled outright, or had to rely on tremendous balance to stay up—or else took to the air.
Of course, aside from gods, most mortals—or even demigod attendants and heroes—couldn't manage that.
At the mountain's foot, in uncounted temples devoted to the Olympians, priests and attendants fell in rows, in all manner of undignified poses.
Some knights had their legs broken beneath their falling horses; some broke their own necks.
No one spared a thought for mortal life and death now.
A world-ending roar rumbled up from deep beneath the mountains.
Whether Olympian or Æsir, all forgot their battles at once and stared at the gaping chasm that had split open in the earth.
As the ground shook more violently, an energy far more terrible than a volcano's eruption surged toward the surface.
A heartbeat later, as the earth cracked into a fissure several kilometers long, a roar of absolute fury burst forth.
Rumble rumble rumble!
It was as if invisible giant hands, strong enough to tear the world apart, were ripping the ground open. The rift raced outward, from the center of Hel's field of view to the flanks of the battlefield, running unbroken to the farthest horizon.
The muddled bellow grew clearer as it rushed nearer. At first it sounded like some primordial beast.
As it approached at speed,
everyone heard a name, clear as day:
"Zeus—"
Filled with immense hatred and rage, with the deepest malice and hostility, its owner was clearly racing toward the surface.
Crack… crack…
The sound was heavy, rhythmic, and getting closer.
Hel's senses were keen. Drawn by the upheaval beneath the earth, she also noticed an anomaly in the sky—ever since the Æsir God-Kings broke in, the mixing elements of different worlds had left the heavens a little chaotic.
Now, the sky was anything but normal. It wasn't simply darkening—it was quietly forming two titanic eyes.
It wasn't an illusion!
Hel felt that the seemingly ordinary Greek sky had truly condensed into two living eyeballs.
Each was larger than the entire polis of Athens.
She could even distinctly sense the emotions of the sky god those eyes represented—mockery and scorn.
That sky god should have been lending power to Emperor Zeus, and yet, as the clouds boiled, he drove them away instead.
This…
At that moment, the fissure beneath Mount Olympus gaped to its widest. From the kilometer-wide north–south maw burst a blaze of scarlet radiance.
It was a crimson of searing fire—and an umbra that spoke of the abyss.
An instant later, a "mountain" was blasted into the air.
It—he—was hurled straight up.
At his peak, he rose five to six hundred meters above the ground.
That wasn't the point. The point was that his outline resembled that of the giant Jormungandr had just been pummeling.
He too had a pair of enormous hands and feet, a total of fifty heads—one large, forty-nine small—and ninety-eight additional arms of varying thickness and length.
This Hundred-Handed Giant was clearly a size smaller than the one who'd appeared earlier—Gyes.
"What?!" How could Zeus, upon the holy mountain, still keep his seat?
A Hundred-Handed Giant—the warden of Tartarus—had been blasted out. What did that mean?
It meant the thing he feared most had happened at last:
Cronus, former God-King—had broken out!
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