The thirteen gods, even weakened by Edward's Noble Phantasm, even suppressed by the God-Slayer's Authority that pressed down on their divinity like a physical weight, knew they had no choice. This was their only chance. One final, desperate gambit.
Everything they had. All at once. Or they would die here.
Poseidon met Shiva's eyes across the arena. No words were needed. The Sea God, who had never cooperated with anyone in his existence, who viewed even other Olympians with cold disdain, nodded once.
"Together," Apollo said, his voice strained. The Sun God's face was streaked with golden blood, his thigh still bleeding where his own arrow protruded. "All of us. No holding back. No second chances."
"Agreed," Ares growled through his split face. The God of War looked monstrous now, bone visible through the gash in his cheek, but his eyes burned with desperate fury. "We end this. Now."
Thor spat blood from his ruined face, his remaining eye blazing with lightning. "For Asgard," he rumbled, raising Mjolnir. The hammer crackled with barely contained power.
As one, the thirteen gods spread out in a wide circle around Edward. The movement was coordinated through desperation rather than planning—predators instinctively surrounding their prey, except in this nightmare scenario, they were the ones being hunted.
Divine energy began to build up. The air grew thick, hard to breathe. Reality itself groaned under the accumulated weight of thirteen gods channeling everything they had into their ultimate techniques.
In the human section, people felt it immediately. The pressure made it hard to draw breath. Several children began crying, though they didn't understand why. Adults clutched their seats, their chests, anything solid, as primal fear swept through them.
"What's happening?" someone gasped. "The air feels wrong!"
"They're doing something! Something big!"
An old woman grabbed her husband's hand. "This is it. This is where we find out if we live or die."
Her husband smiled. "It would be a good death even if we lost. We made the gods fear us, humans. Showed them that they can't toy with us. That's more than enough."
The barrier containing the battlefield began to crack. Hairline fractures appeared in the divine construct, spreading like a spider's web. Gods in the audience—minor deities, lesser beings—rushed forward, pressing their hands against the barrier and pouring their own power into it.
"Hold it!" someone shouted. "If it breaks, the shockwave will kill thousands!"
"I'm trying! The pressure is too much!"
"Just hold it! Whatever happens, we can't let it fail!"
In the divine sections, the atmosphere had shifted from fear to desperate hope. If this didn't work, if thirteen simultaneous ultimate techniques couldn't stop him, then nothing would.
"This has to work," a goddess whispered, her hands clasped in prayer . "Please. Please let this work."
"Thirteen ultimate techniques," another murmured. "Nothing survives that. Nothing can."
But in the Valkyrie box, Brunhilde sat with that twisted smile, utterly unconcerned. Her sisters looked at her with varying expressions of disbelief and terror.
"Sister!" Göll's voice cracked. "They're using everything! All of them! He's going to—"
"Watch," Brunhilde interrupted, not even glancing at her youngest sister. Her eyes were fixed on the arena, glittering with anticipation. "Just watch and learn what real power looks like."
Siegfried, sitting beside her, remembered Tartarus. Remembered Edward casually breaking chains that had held him for millennia. Remembered the ease with which the godslayer had torn through seals that Odin himself had placed. "She's right," he said quietly. "This isn't going to end how the gods think."
On the arena floor, Edward stood in the center of the circle, watching the gods prepare. He could feel their power building, could sense reality bending under the weight of divine authority being gathered. His wounds still bled—shoulder, back, chest, dozens of cuts and burns. But his crimson eyes were clear and focused.
And he was smiling. That same cold, savage smile. The smile of someone who'd been waiting for exactly this.
"FINALLY!" His voice boomed across the arena. "SHOW ME WHAT GODS CAN REALLY DO!"
Then, as one, the gods unleashed everything.
"TANDAVA NRITTA!"
Shiva's four arms blurred into motion, moving in patterns that violated geometry itself. His body began the cosmic dance—the Tandava, the dance of creation and destruction that existed before time had meaning. Each movement rewrote a fundamental law of physics. Each step created matter from nothing and annihilated it in the same instant. His third eye blazed open fully, cosmic fire pouring from it in waves that distorted space itself.
The Hindu god's body multiplied—not clones, but the same being existing in multiple states simultaneously. One Shiva struck from the north. Another from the south. A third from above. All of them the real Shiva, all of them performing the dance that had ended and restarted universes in the myths of his pantheon.
Reality around Edward began to unravel, the cosmic dance literally rewriting the rules that governed existence.
"TÝRFINGR REVELATION!"
Thor poured every drop of his divine lightning into Mjolnir. The hammer blazed so bright it hurt to look at, storm clouds materializing from nothing overhead. Lightning arced between the clouds, each bolt thick as a tree trunk, crackling with power that made the air taste of ozone and copper.
The Thunder God raised his weapon high, and the clouds answered. A pillar of lightning descended—not a single bolt but thousands, merged into one apocalyptic column that could split continents. This was the technique that had ended Jörmungandr, the World Serpent that had wrapped around Midgard. Pure annihilation made of thunder and divine wrath.
The lightning struck down toward Edward like judgment from on high.
"PHOTON RAY!"
Apollo's perfect body became incandescent. Every cell, every molecule of his divine form transformed into pure light. He was no longer solid—just condensed solar energy given consciousness and purpose. The Sun God rose into the air, his form becoming a miniature star, temperature rising until the stone beneath him began to melt.
Then he focused everything into a single point. A beam of concentrated starfire, moving at light speed, hot enough to burn holes through planets. The attack that had killed Python, the serpent that had terrorized ancient Greece, amplified a thousandfold by every drop of his remaining divine power.
The beam lanced toward Edward, leaving a trail of ionized air and melted stone.
"DIVINE TEMPEST!"
Perun's massive frame swelled, growing to twice his normal size as he channeled the aspect of the storm itself. His axe blazed with electricity, and he struck it against the ground. The impact sent shockwaves through the arena, and the sky answered his call.
Every storm in existence converged on this point. Lightning from a thousand different places—from mountains, from oceans, from the poles—all arcing toward the arena. Wind that could tear ancient forests from the ground by their roots. Hail the size of boulders, each one moving with ballistic force. Rain that fell like bullets. The storm that had once leveled an entire kingdom of demons, focused into a space no larger than a building.
The tempest descended like nature's fury given form.
"COSMIC AUTHORITY!"
Anu raised his broken staff, and despite being split in two, the ancient artifact blazed with stellar light. The eldest god channeled the first laws—the ones written before other pantheons existed, before concepts like "up" and "down" had meaning.
Reality bent to his will. Gravity around Edward increased exponentially—ten times normal, then a hundred, then a thousand. Space compressed, folding in on itself. Time stuttered, moments repeating and skipping. The fundamental forces of physics became weapons, twisted by a being who'd helped define what those forces meant.
The air itself became crushing weight, trying to compress Edward into a point smaller than an atom.
"DESERT OF ENDLESS DEATH!"
Set struck his was-scepter into the ground with such force that the arena floor cracked for a hundred feet in every direction. Sand exploded upward—not normal sand but chaos given physical form. Each grain glowed with sickly yellow light, radiating entropy and decay.
Metal aged to rust in seconds where the sand touched it. Stone crumbled to dust. Flesh withered and died. Time itself became meaningless, past and future colliding in the present. This was the desert that had consumed three pharaohs' armies, where civilizations went to die and be forgotten. The wasteland that ended empires.
The sand storm converged on Edward like a hungry living thing.
"LOTUS PRINCE EIGHT ARMS!"
Nezha's young form blazed with divine fire. His body multiplied, not through illusion but through manifesting his full divine aspect. Eight arms materialized, each one wielding a different divine weapon gifted by the celestial court.
The Fire-tipped Spear thrust from the east. The Universe Ring spun from the west. The Demon-Subduing Pestle struck from above. The Gold Brick from below. The Wind Fire Wheels from the north and south. The Huntian Ling ribbon wrapped from multiple angles. The Nine Dragons Covering Fire Shield projected flames that could burn demons.
Eight simultaneous attacks from eight directions, each one carrying enough power to shatter divine armor, each one moving at speeds that blurred even to divine perception.
"VOID CONSUMPTION!"
Chernobog's shadow-form expanded explosively, growing until it covered half the arena in primordial darkness. But this wasn't mere absence of light—it was the void that existed before creation. The nothing that came before something. Darkness that didn't block light but erased the concept of light ever existing.
Plants withered and died where the shadow touched. Stone didn't crumble—it simply ceased, reality deciding it had never been there. The shadow reached for Edward with tendrils of un-being, each one capable of erasing matter, energy, and the memory of their existence.
This was entropy's final form, death beyond death.
"EVIL EYE!"
Balor's massive hands moved to the metal plate covering his face. The Celtic demon god's fingers trembled—even he feared what he was about to unleash. The eye that killed everything it gazed upon. The eye that ended gods with a glance. The eye so terrible that Balor kept it sealed for millennia because its power was beyond control.
The plate lifted. Just a crack. Just enough.
The eye beneath blazed with sickly green light. Everything in its direct gaze began to die—not violently, but instantly. Existence simply... stopped. No pain. No struggle. Just the cessation of being.
Death itself made visible and weaponized.
"AMPHITRITE—FORTY DAYS FLOOD!"
Poseidon raised his trident, and his body became translucent, made of water itself. The Sea God's weapon blazed with the power of every ocean, every sea, every drop of water that existed. He thrust it forward, and reality screamed.
The trident multiplied. One became three. Three became nine. Nine became twenty-seven. Each one as solid and real as the original, each one carrying the weight of drowned civilizations. Water materialized from nothing—not drops but torrents, oceans' worth appearing with no regard for physical laws.
This was the flood that had ended Atlantis. The technique that had drowned an entire continent for forty days and nights. Divine water that crushed with pressure deeper than any trench, cold enough to freeze stars, moving with the inevitability of tides.
Twenty-seven tridents thrust toward Edward while a biblical flood crashed down from above.
"WAR GOD'S DECIMATION!"
Ares's body became pure violence. His form blurred, red mist pouring from his armor like steam, and his blade—the sword that howled with the voices of the dead—blazed with crimson light. He channeled every battle ever fought into this single technique.
Every soldier who'd ever died. Every war that had ever been waged. Every drop of blood spilled in conflict. All of it compressed into one strike. His sword didn't move through space—it existed at multiple points simultaneously, striking from every angle where violence had ever occurred.
This was war incarnate, condensed into devastating purpose.
"MOON ECLIPSE ARROW!"
Loki's shifting form stabilized for just a moment, and in his hands appeared a bow made of frozen darkness. The Trickster pulled back an arrow that glowed with dark light—a paradox made real, trickery given solid form. The arrowhead forged from Fafnir's teeth that could kill gods.
The arrow didn't follow normal trajectories. It would hit its target regardless of dodging, phase through any defense, strike from impossible angles, ignore causality if necessary.
The arrow that made "inevitable" meaningless.
"TWELVE LABORS STRIKE!"
Heracles, despite his wounded arms that bled golden ichor, channeled every impossible feat he'd ever accomplished into his club. The Nemean Lion's invulnerability. The Hydra's regeneration. The Erymanthian Boar's unstoppable charge. The Stymphalian Birds' penetrating strikes. The Augean Stables' overwhelming force. The Cretan Bull's divine strength.
All twelve labors, all twelve impossible victories, concentrated into pure overwhelming power. His club grew massive, expanding until it blocked out the sun, and when it fell it carried the weight of divinity earned through mortal effort.
Thirteen ultimate techniques. Thirteen gods unleashing everything they had, holding nothing back, burning their divine essence for this one moment.
The attacks converged simultaneously.
BOOM!
The explosion defied description.
Light and darkness collided and created a chaotic mess of reality breaking down. The arena floor didn't crack or shatter, it vaporized, exposing bedrock that immediately began to melt under the assault. The temperature spiked to levels that would liquify steel, then dropped to absolute zero, then spiked again.
The noise was defeaning. Every human in the audience clutched their ears, and many still felt eardrums burst. Blood trickled from noses and ears. Children screamed without being able to hear their own voices. Several people simply passed out from sensory overload.
The barrier cracked. Dozens of fractures spread across the divine construct like lightning, and the gods reinforcing it screamed as feedback tore through them. Three minor deities collapsed, their power completely drained. Others poured everything they had into holding the barrier together.
"IT'S BREAKING!" someone shrieked. "THE BARRIER'S BREAKING!"
"HOLD IT! IF IT FAILS WE'RE ALL DEAD!"
More gods rushed forward, adding their strength. The barrier held barely, but sections of it became transparent from the strain, showing how close to catastrophic failure it was.
Some gods in the audience were knocked backward by the shockwave that leaked through. Several rows of divine seating cracked. A minor goddess fell from her seat, unconscious before she hit the ground.
The human section was in chaos. People couldn't see, couldn't hear, could barely think through the overwhelming sensory assault. Some tried to flee and found themselves unable to move, paralyzed by the divine power washing over them. Others simply curled into balls, covering their heads, praying to gods who weren't listening.
A man held his daughter, both of them crying. "Don't look," he whispered, though she couldn't hear him. "Don't look, baby."
But she looked anyway. Everyone looked. Because if their champion was dying for them, the least they could do was witness it.
Then, as if being influenced by something, all the humans in the audience stood up. They stopped crying or praying. Despite their differences, races, ages, genders; all of them stood as one in that moment. And they were full of hope, not despair.
Then their voices echoed through the vast arena.
"Go Kratos! We believe in you!"
"You can't lose, all of us are behind you. "
"We are proud of you Kratos!"
"We entrust our lives to you!"
Dust and divine energy obscured everything. A massive cloud of destruction that hid the arena floor completely, glowing with sickly colors that shouldn't exist. No one could see through it. Divine senses couldn't penetrate it. Even the gods who'd launched the attacks couldn't confirm if their techniques had connected.
For ten eternal seconds, there was only the ringing of shattered eardrums and the taste of blood and ozone in the air.
Then the wind began to clear the dust slowly. Like reality itself was reluctant to reveal what had happened.
The human section held its collective breath. Thousands of people silent and still, hope and terror warring in every heart.
The divine sections leaned forward, gods standing, trying to see past the clearing smoke. Some praying that it had worked. Others already knowing, somehow, that it hadn't.
The dust cleared.
And Edward stood.
Not in the center of destruction where the attacks had converged. But in a perfect circle of untouched ground, as if reality itself had carved out a space where violence couldn't reach.
His divine weapons surrounded him in a defensive formation. Each one blazed with god-killing power, each one positioned perfectly to counter the technique it had intercepted.
The Blade of Olympus, had caught Shiva's cosmic dance. Divine metal had clashed with reality manipulation itself, and where they met, space was still rippling, trying to figure out which version of physics to follow.
The Nemean Cestus gauntlets held Thor's Mjolnir, actually held back the legendary hammer that always returned, kept it trapped in gauntlets that couldn't be pierced or broken. Lightning still crackled around it, but the hammer couldn't escape the grip.
The Claws of Hades, dripping with death-essence, had absorbed Apollo's photon ray. Light had met death, and death had won, devouring the solar energy like a hungry void.
The Chains of Atlas, the chains that had once held the world, were wrapped around Perun's storm. The tempest was bound, lightning trapped in links of indestructible metal, wind caught and held motionless.
Edward's own divine authority had countered Anu's gravity manipulation. Two wills—one to crush, one to resist—locked in stalemate, and the god-killer's will had proven stronger.
The Boots of Hermes had granted impossible speed, letting Edward dodge through Set's entropy sand by moving between the grains themselves, too fast for chaos to catch.
Multiple weapons had deflected Nezha's eight-fold assault. Each divine weapon met and turned aside, the lotus prince's perfect coordination broken by even more perfect defense.
Olympian fire had burned through Chernobog's void. Heat and fury against primordial nothing, and somehow fury had proven more fundamental.
And Edward's raw will—nothing but absolute refusal to die—had forced Balor's Evil Eye closed before its full power could manifest, the God-Slayer's Authority simply rejecting the concept of inevitable death.
Poseidon's tridents had been caught by chains and redirected into each other, divine water weapons colliding and neutralizing.
Ares's war-blade had been parried by the Blade of Olympus, violence meeting god-killing steel.
Loki's impossible arrow had been snatched from the air by the Claws of Hades, death claiming trickery before it could strike.
Heracles's sword had been stopped by the Nemean Cestus, twelve labors meeting the hide that no labor could pierce.
Thirteen ultimate techniques.
All defeated in the face one mortal.
But Edward was far from uninjured.
His left side was charred black, flesh burned away in places to expose muscle and bone beneath. Some of Apollo's photon ray had gotten through, and the burns went deep—third degree at minimum, the kind of injury that would kill a mortal through shock alone.
His right leg was mangled grotesquely. Set's chaos sand had caught it for just seconds, but that had been enough. The limb was twisted at an unnatural angle, skin aged to leather, muscle atrophied, bone brittle and cracked. It looked like the leg of a mummy, not a living being.
Blood poured from his ears in steady streams where Anu's gravity crush had caused catastrophic internal damage. Burst vessels in his brain, ruptured eardrums, compressed organs. The kind of internal hemorrhaging that killed silently and certainly.
Cuts covered his entire body from Nezha's assault. Eight weapons, and at least three had found flesh despite the defenses. Deep gashes that showed bone, that leaked both red mortal blood and golden ichor from his partially divine nature.
His chest bore a deep puncture where one of Poseidon's twenty-seven tridents had pierced clean through. The hole went all the way through his torso—you could see light through it. Blood poured from both sides, crimson and gold mixing.
He looked like he should be dead. Like a corpse that simply hadn't realized it yet. His armor was in tatters, hanging from his frame in burned and torn strips. His skin was more wound than flesh.
But his eyes still burning crimson with Spartan Rage, were clear.
And then, as every being in the arena watched in stunned silence, his wounds began to heal.
Flesh knitted back together, new tissue growing to fill gaps. The charred left side began to pink with fresh skin. Burns faded from black to red to pink to healthy flesh. The mangled leg straightened with audible cracks as bones reset themselves, muscle regenerating, skin smoothing.
The hole in his chest closed from both sides, meeting in the middle, until only a scar remained. Blood flow slowed, then stopped. The gashes from Nezha's weapons sealed themselves.
Within thirty seconds, Edward stood whole again. Scarred, yes. Exhausted, certainly. But alive and functional.
"What..." Apollo's voice was barely a whisper, his divine senses screaming impossibilities at him. "He's absorbing divine energy. From the arena. From our attacks themselves. He's—"
"Taking our power," Poseidon finished, his voice hollow with dawning horror. "Using what we threw at him to heal. We didn't hurt him. We fed him."
It was true. The Remnants of Olympus skill was working exactly as designed. Fragments of divine essence that recharged through conflict. Every attack the gods had thrown, every technique they'd used, every drop of divine power they'd expended—Edward had claimed a portion of it. Absorbed it. Made it his own.
They hadn't been fighting to kill him. They'd been feeding him.
Edward straightened fully. Rolled his shoulders, testing his renewed body. The Blades of Chaos still burned in his hands, flames never dimming despite everything. The divine weapons around him pulsed with power, ready for more.
"Huh, neat."
He looked at the thirteen gods. At their exhausted, panting forms. At faces pale with spent power. At hands trembling from depleted strength. At the naked fear in eyes that had never known terror before.
Then he spoke, and his voice was pure Kratos now, Edward's gentler nature buried completely under battle-fury and savage joy:
"THAT WAS EVERYTHING YOU HAD."
It wasn't a question. Just a casual statement. Absolute and undeniable.
He took one step forward. The gods flinched like whipped dogs.
"YOUR ULTIMATE TECHNIQUES. YOUR FINAL TRUMP CARDS. YOUR ABSOLUTE POWER."
Another step. His boots cracked the melted stone beneath him.
"AND I'M. STILL. STANDING."
The words hit them like physical blows. Several gods actually staggered backward, as if Edward's voice itself carried force.
His voice dropped to something quieter but infinitely more menacing:
"So let me show you what happens when a godslayer stops playing."
Then he raised his arms and roared—a sound that shook the arena, that cracked what remained of the floor, that made reality itself tremble:
"LET ME SHOW YOU WHAT REAL DIVINE WRATH LOOKS LIKE!"