Destruction and collapse were everywhere!
The temples the Olympians had driven demigods and mortal craftsmen to build to glorify them were kicked apart like a child's block houses under the Titans' trampling.
Zeus's heart ached. After this battle, even if he slew his own father with his own hands, the majesty he had lost could never be made whole. He didn't even dare imagine how the slave gods would look at their God-Emperor.
A God-Emperor who couldn't even keep his own temple—was he still a God-Emperor?
Sadly, Zeus had no time to ponder how to reclaim his divine prestige; his immediate task was to beat this crazed father to the ground.
The problem was that over the long years Cronus had grown vastly more tolerant of thunder.
It wasn't that thunder did nothing; it just could no longer make him howl, flinch, and hold back like before.
Cronus would be wounded, he would feel pain—but he would never stop advancing to attack.
And with the damned "sky" sagging, Zeus had lost his room to juke and weave.
In such a situation, how could Zeus spare attention for the Æsir watching like tigers nearby? He truly couldn't mind anything else.
Zeus was thus; Poseidon and Hades, hastening to the rescue, were no better off.
Why had the Titanomachy dragged on for so many years?
Because the sides were evenly matched—neither could do for the other.
If Zeus hadn't brought out the three Hundred-Handed Giants and the three Cyclopes, even his side wouldn't have won.
The trouble now was that the three Hundred-Handed Giants were finished.
One had been dragged off by Jormungandr; the other two had been beaten to death by the Twelve Titans in Tartarus.
Chaos on Olympus was guaranteed.
Meanwhile, Thor, with more than three hundred gods, stood guard just outside the portal near Mount Olympus, deliberately keeping their auras from seeping into the Greek world—giving the Olympians the illusion that they only needed to deal with the Titans before them.
Zeus knew perfectly well that Thor and his followers were close by. Still fantasizing about salvaging his temples, he chose to ignore them.
The reaction was laughable in the extreme.
If you had to describe it, Zeus was an ostrich not only burying his head in the sand but numbing his hindquarters as well—so that even if the enemy kicked his backside raw, he'd feel nothing.
Across the way, Thor, so often written off as a hothead by onlookers, was unusually calm this time.
"Everyone, if we don't have to move, we won't. As long as we pin these Olympus types in place, we're the ones with first merit this round!" With a few words, Thor quieted the new gods who had begun to grow restless.
They couldn't storm into the enemy's divine realm and pillage at will—pity.
Everyone knew that once Cronus and Zeus finished their fight, the situation would shift dramatically.
No one knew what would happen next: Would Zeus win? Would Cronus cut Zeus down and reclaim the throne? Would they both be crippled? Or would they suddenly make peace and turn on the outsiders together?
The result would go a long way toward determining the course of this death match between two great pantheons.
Either way, as long as they succeeded at the pin, Hela, Enki, and Gilgamesh could do great deeds.
In fact, Thor had wagered right.
In the Greek underworld, an upheaval without precedent erupted.
"What's happening?"
Blue ghost-flames bobbed on the surface of the underworld river, reflecting countless twisted faces. On the bank of that fearsome water where even a fingertip's touch would corrode a soul, the ferryman Charon raised a skeletal hand from beneath his tattered cloak, tilted his petasos—the wide-brimmed felt favored by Greeks—and looked toward the gates of the underworld.
"Weren't all those pesky foreigners sent to Tartarus? With that dog there, it should be fine."
Events defied Charon's expectations.
Drool from the three-headed hound Cerberus fell on the red rock at the underworld's threshold, hissing up coils of poison fog—terrifying, to be sure.
But that only applied to common souls.
When it saw that the attackers were actually three powerful, death-aspected foreign gods, its baying turned to a wail of pure despair.
That single wail shook the whole underworld.
"Who?" Queen Persephone started, instinctively rising from the queen's throne.
Knife-cold air still swirled above the River of Wailing, Cocytus, and the golden stalks on the far Elysian Fields swayed in illusory light. All seemed as usual, but the queen knew: the realm she and Hades had tended so long had been invaded.
"So it's the Æsir's death gods? Where has Hades gone?" Her lips pressed tight; the knuckles gripping her scepter went white.
A warning?
Pointless.
In a single exchange, Cerberus's shattered fangs were spiked into the battered bronze gate of the underworld, and its three heads were reduced to half-severed necks dangling from the jamb.
Netherwinds carried frost-grit, and a foreign underworld gale blew in!
Through a forcibly torn spatial rift, tens of thousands of Helheim warders surged into this already crowded realm, escorting the Æsir's triad of death goddesses.
It wasn't that the Greek underworld's guards didn't charge up bravely; they were simply overturned in the first clash by Helheim's stronger warders.
It wasn't their fault.
Hela's troops were the product of Thalos's campaigns against gods across many worlds.
At minimum they had once been divine attendants, and Hela's personal guard included no few former sub-gods of enemy pantheons. Their souls were bound tight in Helheim and compelled to serve Hela's will.
And this was just the force Hela used for offense.
If this were Helheim's own ground, an attacker would be greeted by more than a hundred Major-God–class dead spirits.
Even with only part of her hoard committed, the Greek underworld—bereft of Hades, Death, Sleep, and the Three Judges—could not hold.
The howls and battle-cries rose and fell—and then faded quickly, because the fighting ended too fast.
The underworld wasn't a place for the World Serpent Jormungandr; Hela's mount was Garm.
Its vast paws padded over splintered bones, each claw-gap wedged with half a Greek heroic spirit still wailing.
Without Hela's orders, the shadowy vanguard became black mist that pounced on the panicking Greek souls. They swung underworld chains inscribed with runes to bind the souls still queued on the riverbank, then hauled them into the rift, where a great underworld train bore them swiftly back to Helheim.
The ferryman Charon had counted as someone, once.
But before Helheim's three death goddesses, he didn't even count.
Before he was snuffed out, he spat his blackest curse: "You will never pass the Wall of Sighs!"
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