Almost at the sa ti, in the Greek world.
Earth-mother Gaia cursed under her breath: "Tch! Has that little wretch Zeus still not settled it?"
Case closed!
Zeus's \\[All Things] office could be very strong or very weak; the crux was that this office only had the right to requisition power. Whether it could be borrowed depended on whether the deity who actually held that single-category office allowed it.
A God-Emperor could ask, but the one in charge could refuse.
When Zeus just drew on the earth elent of multiple great mountains, Gaia hesitated.
To be honest, with Vidar, the forest god, driving the World Tree's roots in a fierce assault on the Greek holand, Gaia's divine power was already insufficient. She was like a hapless woman with five lids trying to cover ten boiling pots—barely coping with the roots as it was, and now Zeus had co at this critical mont to borrow power on top of it.
In the end, she still gave it.
For the sake of the bigger picture.
Much as Gaia disliked Zeus, she at least understood she and Zeus were grasshoppers tied to the sa rope.
If Zeus went down, she would die with him.
Who could have thought the power Zeus fought to requisition would be offset by his own forr vassal worlds?
That was the most maddening part.
(Eunuch) sky god Uranus, whose temperant had softened after being castrated, tried to soothe her: "Everything is for our world."
"Shut up! Not a single one of you—grandfather, father, or grandson—is ever easy!"
The exchange between Gaia and Uranus was a microcosm of the Greek world at that mont.
Everywhere needed borrowed power, and nowhere had enough.
They had to stave off the World Tree's destruction and still siphon power at a ti like this.
That feeling of wishing to split a single unit of divinity in two was the truest portrait of Zeus's awkward situation.
Seeing the five World-Swords from small worlds roaring in, Zeus grew anxious: "More!"
The next second, what Zeus summoned across space was the entire Aegean Sea.
The Aegean map behind Zeus turned substantive within seconds; water asured in hundreds of millions of tons compressed into the purest water elent, a world-drowning torrent charging at Thalos.
It might have looked like a re sea chart, but any small patch of it weighed countless tons.
So extravagant a volu of water made even the special spatial conduit Zeus had built take on a subtle brittleness.
Thalos knew well: if Zeus had borrowed Poseidon's waters, the pressure on Thor's side would naturally ease.
Poseidon's willingness to loan water-elent power was itself an admission he wasn't confident of taking Thor.
In Poseidon's eyes, that brute was absurdly strong. Every bolt from the short-handled hamr could level an Athens, and those terrifying strikes—nearly a kiloter across by eye—Thor could rattle off in volleys.
Perhaps Thor's godly might ultimately didn't match the God-Emperor Zeus's, but to the eye it wasn't far off.
Hundreds of millions of tons of seawater congealed into Poseidon's fierce visage, but that savage wave-incarnation was blasted into spray by countless blinding bolts of varying girth; violet-blue arcs of lightning beca the sole master of that realm.
No matter how Poseidon stoked the remaining five seas of Atlantis against Thor, his surges were inevitably shredded by the rolling purple-black lightning.
Every tsunami was fated to be replaced by deafening thunder.
After dozens of bitter exchanges, he'd gained not an inch.
How was Poseidon supposed to fight that?
In truth, Poseidon's side had it better; Hades's front was the real gale in their faces.
Hypnos, the god of sleep, couldn't withstand the joint assault of Ailei and Skaha and had fallen ten minutes earlier.
A re subordinate god—at best proper-god level—Hypnos bore pressures he never should have. Surrounded and battered by two major goddesses, he was sheared in half on the spot, his body detonated, and even the shreds of his divine soul failed to escape, snatched straight into Helheim.
At a mont like this, who had ti for fair one-on-ones.
After finishing Hypnos, Ailei and Skaha imdiately joined the siege of Hades.
The Lord of the Underworld's situation teetered on the brink.
Even so, he pressed his lips together and stubbornly refused to call Zeus or Poseidon for aid.
Across the entire lower Ginnungagap front, there wasn't a single place where the Olympians held the advantage.
The only difference was between small deficits and massive headwinds.
Yet like Gaia and Uranus, when Zeus ca to requisition power, they all agreed—silently—each ti.
…
On Thalos's side, countless vast phantoms from Greece battered his position, and he answered bluntly with World-Sword after World-Sword.
From Massalia on Great Greece's westernmost border to the city of Troy in the far east, from Dacia in the north to Egypt in the south, back to the Peloponnese in the center—every earth, water, fire, and wind elent of the Greek world was drawn out by Zeus to pour at Thalos, only to be hewn apart just as bluntly by World-Swords.
Each ti a World-Sword shattered a Greek phantom, the collapse of the elental torrent and the breaking of the image inexplicably reminded Thalos of the soul-banner in so novel he'd read before crossing over—blasted apart by a righteous sect's sacred tool.
With Zeus, Thalos had patience to spare; the one who couldn't afford the attrition was Zeus, not him.
Ever since parts of earth, water, fire, and wind had been plundered from the Greek world and chaos introduced, the montum of attack and defense between the two worlds had flipped. When the Greek world's proudest elent domain no longer held the upper hand, Ginnungagap—with more people—began to show its advantage of greater faith supplying more god-force.
Grind?
It would only slowly crush Zeus to death.
Since Zeus wasn't flipping other cards, Thalos didn't hurry.
The lower Zeus's power, the fewer cards he could play.
Clearly, Zeus was starting to get anxious.
"Hmph! Thalos Borson! You are worthy of the title God-Emperor…"
Acknowledgnt from a weighty opponent was a kind of honor.
"Zeus, any more tricks? Wait any longer and you won't get the chance," Thalos said, that faint curl at the corner of his mouth needling Zeus most.
"I already did." Zeus smiled cryptically.
"Oh? You an… them?"
Less than a hundred yards off Thalos's left front, a seemingly harmless Greek elder was delivering so speech; straight ahead, a Greek was dropping grains of rice one by one onto the ground; to the right, another Greek elder was soaking in a bath at his leisure…
One after another, a chain of phantoms, bizarre and even absurd.
Ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of gods in this cosmos would have thought—what did it even an, in a final god-war, to trot out these mortal phantoms?
Honestly, Zeus's play was so sly that Thalos didn't identify it at once.
Not until the bathing Greek elder appeared…
______
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