For Uranus, the august Greek sky god, to lose because his "arms were too short"—who was he supposed to complain to? Such are the old gods who perform their offices on raw instinct alone: powerful, yet full of limits.
Could Uranus simply ignore the asteroids Thalos was flinging over? Yes—and no.
As the former god-king guarding the world's gate, he could, in theory, open a passage and let the asteroid pass through his sector; the price would be forcing the earth mother Gaia to take the full brunt. Even if, back then, it was Gaia who plotted the "cutting" when Cronus castrated him, don't forget—without Earth, there is no Sky.
Uranus certainly didn't understand anything like planar gravity, but he knew by instinct that it was precisely the vaster, heavier being that is the earth which held fast a sea of air, and thereby formed him—the sky.
If the land of the Greek world is destroyed, he goes with it.
Precisely because he understood that, Uranus felt wretched.
To do nothing but defend passively, without being able to mount a single effective counterstrike—what better definition of endless suffering?
Worse, while Uranus was stuck fending off the impacts, Thalos began piercing the Greek world's spatial barrier with brute-force divine thought and, using methods unique to \[Sky] and \[Wind], started siphoning away the Greek world's air.
"Whoo—whoo—whoo—"
Holes were punched across the heavens—who knew how many.
The large ones were over ten kilometers across; the small still ran to several hundred meters.
Thalos just poked holes and left the rest to the law called \[Pressure].
The vacuum of space could easily draw off huge quantities of air.
At this scale, the damage wasn't much against Uranus's body measured in "hundreds of millions of square kilometers."
Scaled to a human, it was like being pricked with a needle.
The problem was—there were far too many "needles."
Tens of thousands of "pricks" obviously left the overgrown Uranus trying to cover one breach while another opened.
So Thalos kept jabbing, letting the air spill out of the Greek world to become ownerless; only then did he leisurely gather those drifting masses with his mind and "bundle" them up to send back to Ginnungagap.
This trick of Thalos's left the goddesses attending behind him dumbfounded.
Artemis's lips trembled. "You can weaken a sky god like this?!"
In her conception, heaven and earth ought to be indestructible.
Yet the God-Emperor who had conquered her was giving a live lesson in how to reliably take down a world's sky—and, along with it, its sky god.
In fact, this wasn't Thalos's first time "un-skying" a world. The last sky god he completely erased was back in the Sumerian days.
While Thalos was suppressing Uranus here, his subordinates weren't idle either: Odin was stealing Zeus's vassal worlds; Enki went to drain the seas—taking advantage of Poseidon's clash with the Titans, he used an existing grand corridor to draw a deluge into the expendable Fusang world.
"Rumble—"
Enki had a modest goal: dump out an Aegean Sea's worth of water.
"Bastard, bastard! Damn you—" Since taking office as sea god, Poseidon had never been this aggrieved. He was fighting the sea-goddess Tethys of the Twelve Titans, yet his own power was plummeting at a sea-toppling rate.
In theory, with two sea deities, the weakening ought to be equal.
In reality, the Twelve Titans had long since been stripped of their offices; with no "lawful" source of power, all they could wield was what their skill could rob back by sheer will.
The point was: even without divine power, the Titans were still giants of grotesque size. That thick hide and meat alone could inflict plenty of hurt on third-generation gods like Zeus.
And with Æsir harassment striking from afar, Poseidon and company were truly at their wits' end.
Fight the Titans here; over there, send underpowered sea nymphs to fend off Æsir raids. The Titans themselves only had eyes for pounding third- and fourth-generation Olympians like Zeus.
These self-styled "legitimate" Olympians were being hit from within and without.
In a situation this dire, Olympian casualties began to spike.
The first to suffer were the sea goddesses, each bound tightly to a specific stretch of ocean. Poseidon had lost South Atlantis but still had North Atlantis to feed him; some sea nymphs, however, held domains like the Trench Kingdom or the newly ravaged Fishermen's Kingdom—pure bad luck. Their current strength and office were beneath even what Achilles had before he ever took divinity.
Yes—Achilles had now "ascended" to become the yardstick for these so-called true gods' strength.
After Hel, Ereshkigal, and Arthur merged with Thor's host, the Æsir became even more unstoppable.
This time Thor fully displayed his command ability, sweeping his arm. "Spread out! All of you, spread out! Yekaterina, Brigid, Baldur, Enkidu, Anubis—take your own commands and hit the Greek vassal worlds. Either destroy those little worlds, or drive them far from the Greek world."
"Yes!" the five younger siblings answered in unison.
"Hel! Take your people into the Greek underworld and seize as many souls as you can."
"Understood."
"Freyr, you and Cú Chulainn see if you can locate Helios."
"I'm on it!"
"Gilgamesh—use your swords and take apart some border tract of the Greek world at will. We need to sap Gaia's power as much as possible."
"Mm." The Golden One nodded.
Thor rattled off orders, parceling the mass of Major and Lesser Gods among the six God-Kings who had come with him. He didn't know how far Cronus and Zeus would take their fight, but he had to use this rare bout of infighting to weaken the Greek world's divine foundations to the maximum.
Even though Thor kept things fairly discreet, much of this was still seen by Zeus.
Zeus watched his own father, like a rabid dog, ignore everything to chase him alone, and he nearly went mad with rage.
"Cronus! Are you insane? You actually brought in an outside pantheon. Do you have any idea this will destroy the entire Greek world?" Zeus shouted even as his hands never stopped, thunderbolts slamming into his father and crisping his beard black.
Cronus looked half deranged, blood-shot eyes wide, striding after Zeus in the air with steps hundreds of meters long. Don't be fooled by the "farmer god" label—as if he couldn't catch Zeus.
With Uranus bleeding off massive power and Atlas, the other Titan supporting the Greek sky, openly abandoning his duty, the sky of the Greek world had sagged to within mere hundreds of meters of Olympus's peak.
If Zeus didn't keep moving, Cronus's sickle could literally reach him.
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