Yet the once-expansionist Christianity, after a string of unforeseen upheavals, had finally quieted down.
Especially the God of the Bible.
News of her death had set countless mythic factions cheering; the scourge was gone.
Since then, Heaven's faith-flow dwindled, forcing it to retreat and cede the worship it had seized.
Only then could the nearly extinct mythologies breathe again.
But the respite did not last.
Barely a few centuries passed.
The vanished God of the Bible reappeared.
In that instant, the once-subjugated pantheons remembered the terror of Christian domination and the humiliation of forced conversion.
At the same time,
the summoning rite of the God of the Bible did not last long.
Rosen had only attended out of respect for the Bible Loligoddess.
Otherwise, he would never have stayed.
With the troubles among Heaven's three great powers now settled, Rosen led the angels back to Heaven and dimmed the sky-spanning Holy Light.
Though his display had been grand, it barely affected the human world.
The radiance and the angels were shrouded in Divine Power; ordinary people could not perceive those of the mystical side.
Before departing, Rosen told the angels to speed up the peace accords with the Fallen Angels and the Netherworld, then went to find Rias.
Rias, idly gazing from the Seventh Heaven, rose when she saw Rosen return, a bitter smile on her Face.
"Now every mythic faction in the world knows you exist."
Worry and resignation lay beneath the girl's words.
She sighed that Rosen had announced the God of the Bible's return to the world.
She feared someone would seize the moment to stir trouble.
Take Hades, Lord of the Netherworld, and his Coalition of Hell's Sovereigns from the original plot.
Add to that the steadily growing Hero Faction.
Not to mention Infinite Dragon God Ophis and Great Red.
Yet more than any local power, Rias dreaded the Mechanical Evil Gods from the neighboring EXE World.
If even Great Red could be cut down in a few strikes by that evil cyber-god, then—save perhaps for Rod—no one here could help.
This wasn't Marvel; when a final boss appeared, the hero squad didn't instantly gain a dozen new allies.
"No matter—they'd have found out sooner or later. For now, let's locate Li Zevim; he must have sensed the God of the Bible's aura."
He is, after all, a Transcendent—weakling among them, but a starved camel still outweighs a horse.
Rosen could guess with his eyes closed that Li Zevim was already scheming how to take the God of the Bible down with him.
"All right—but are you sure Li Zevim has no other way to resurrect the Beast of Revelation?"
Though the story had never shown it, Rias still asked.
"Relax. The Beast may have been fearsome in the original tale, but it probably couldn't even scratch my defenses."
Rosen chuckled, easing Rias's anxious heart.
After a single night, every mystical faction on earth knew the God of the Bible had returned.
Yet on the surface, all remained calm, while within, every power seethed.
Still, not a single pantheon made a move.
Instead, they became quieter than ever; every sphere showed no outward change.
As though nothing had happened at all.
This was easy to understand.
Back then, Christianity's expansion had been terrifying; weaker pantheons were swallowed whole before they could resist.
Even mighty, time-honored spheres like the Norse were left tottering under the onslaught of foreign faith.
In the Bible, the Norse All-Father Odin himself was once branded a heretic.
Despite the Norse Mythology's resistance, it achieved little.
And this time—
the Northern European gods still made no special moves.
Many speculated that the pantheon had been so thoroughly beaten it had lost its spirit; facing the God of the Bible's return, they deemed resistance pointless.
Taking advantage of the lull, riots began flaring up across the lands…