Opposite Cú Chulainn stood a dark-skinned god, his face painted with strange totemic markings. He slid his left foot forward, lowered his stance, raised his shield arm to the side, and with his right hand tapped the ground with a strange bone staff.
The staff looked like the remains of a human whose limbs had been severed—except the spinal column was unnaturally long, over two meters, and the skull was disproportionately large, at least a size bigger than an ordinary human's, making the weapon resemble some mutated giant's remains.
This god, radiating a heavy aura of death, made an odd ceremonial gesture.
Through mental transmission, his voice reached Cú Chulainn's ear: "I am Owuo, Death God of the Ashanti."
They had no intention to exchange words.
Both were avatars—win or lose, the loser might suffer, but it wouldn't be a fatal wound to their true selves.
After a brief formality, the battle began.
If in the past Cú Chulainn as a demigod was like a swift leopard, now as the God of the Spear, he was a bolt of crimson lightning.
No one could see his movements clearly.
In Owuo's vision, Cú Chulainn seemed to flash into place right before him.
If this weren't a god-battle, Owuo would have already been dead the moment Cú Chulainn struck.
In the realm of gods, "speed alone is unbreakable" doesn't apply—
—but the attack was fast enough to tear open a divine shield, or rather, a domain.
Across all times and worlds, Death has always been one of the most fiercely contested domains among gods.
Look at the old Egyptian pantheon—over a dozen deities tied to death.
Yet to Owuo's shock, his plan to block his opponent with the Death domain collapsed in the very first second.
The crimson spearhead pierced through the domain instantly.
As the blood-red thunderbolt of a spear ripped it open, Owuo reacted instinctively, raising his bone staff to unleash power from the depths of the underworld.
Too fast!
Far too fast!
Perhaps only because they were both gods did Cú Chulainn's speed have its full effect.
Before the tide of black wraiths in Owuo's withered claws could take form, Cú Chulainn was upon him, body nearly parallel to the ground, skimming forward like a missile. At the last instant, he twisted his waist and thrust, the spear tracing an impossibly vicious arc—nearly two centuries of battles, countless causal threads condensed into this Gae Bolg. The runes carved upon it erupted like a scarlet dragon, rending the air.
The death god's staff screamed with a thousand wails, foul mists of death trying to turn this place into the true underworld. But as the wave of specters came crashing down, it vaporized the instant it touched the spear's glow.
Owuo tried to crush him with sheer numbers.
He was utterly wrong.
He could never have expected that though Cú Chulainn was "only" an Asgardian true god, the Ginnungagap world's hundred-million-strong population, all with a tradition of martial drills in peacetime, meant no weapon was more common than the spear.
For Ginnungagap's farmers—the majority of the populace—nothing was simpler.
A steel-tipped pike was a spear; a pitchfork was a spear; a sharpened bamboo stalk was a spear; even a straight branch could be a spear.
As the God of the Spear, every spear and every spear-wielder in existence was a source of his power.
Most were only nominal believers, but the sheer number was overwhelming.
Crimson flames flared in his eyes, and with a war cry that shattered the void, Cú Chulainn roared: "Pierce!"
In that instant, his crimson spear multiplied into ten thousand in the mind's eye—
—as if a phantom army of unseen warriors all took the same basic horse-stance thrust at once.
"Hah!"
Thousands upon thousands of illusory voices merged into one, forming an immense spear-wall to meet Owuo's tidal wave of ghosts.
The result was obvious.
The God of the Spear crushed the Death God outright.
"This is impossible!" Owuo cried.
The crimson spear, like a falling star, struck his left eye—the soul-core of his avatar.
Silence fell.
The spreading crimson veins of Gae Bolg raced across his divine body.
It was over.
Even if Owuo had more tricks, he'd never use them now.
He tried to throw open the gates of the underworld, but the portal collapsed before its outline could take shape.
His divine body and the imitation death staff shattered into purple-black dust in the bloody thunder, scattering into nothingness in the massive spatial cavity.
With a neat flourish of his spear, Cú Chulainn closed this clash between pantheons.
He frowned. "That's it?"
For a moment he wondered if something was wrong—or if this was some enemy ploy—until the Star Domain Laws activated and the great space won from the enemy began transferring back with him. Only then was he sure of victory.
Three thousand square kilometers of land—plus the elements it carried.
Holding the divine crystal earned from slaying the god, he felt almost unreal.
When he returned to the Liranca world, stepping out of the spatial cavity, he immediately saw a youthful-looking "purple-haired old crone"—no, his eternally youthful master, the great goddess, now the Aesir's own death god, Scáthach.
"Here, Master—some local specialty I brought back," Cú Chulainn said, tossing her the prize without hesitation.
Scáthach didn't stand on ceremony, taking it and remarking, "At least you're thoughtful."
Rivals in the same field might hate each other—but a dead rival? That was a tonic.
The divine essence of a same-domain foreign god not only greatly boosts one's own power, but also deepens understanding of divine laws.
"I'll owe you. I'll find something good for you later."
"No rush," Cú Chulainn waved it off casually.
He knew his master had plenty of channels to acquire rare treasures, and that Hel herself, Queen of Helheim, wasn't stingy. After nearly two centuries of comradeship, there was no need for ceremony between them.
"How did it feel? I mean the enemy god's strength."
Cú Chulainn shook his head. "Just a death god from a slave world. Disappointing."
"That's to be expected. Still just a slave god from a subordinate world."
For an Asgardian true god, even an avatar, there was no reason to lose to an avatar from a vassal world.
At least, that's how it should have been.
But the grim battle report made the Olympian goddess-king Athena's jade-like face turn black as soot.
"What? Out of thirty-seven god-avatar battles, we lost every single one?"