"Ah…"
At the instant the hammerhead sank into Hermes's spine, the surrounding space seemed to be yanked into a sudden vacuum.
His arched backbone cracked with the brittle sound of shattering jade. Gold-and-crimson viscera burst from his split lips, turning into a skyfull of thunder-lit, warped rain.
Thor looked down calmly at Hermes's falling god-body, feeling no thrill at slaying the other side's god-king.
Perhaps, in his eyes, a noncombatant deity wasn't worth mentioning.
The other Æsir didn't care. Hermes was, after all, a universally acknowledged Olympian god-king between the two pantheons. Even though capturing Artemis had been a feat, that one was done by God-Emperor Thalos himself. Thor was the first to directly kill an Olympian god-king.
They exploded on the spot into cheers like rolling thunder.
"His Highness Thor is too strong!"
"Long live, Your Highness!"
"Whoa—!"
Thor didn't need to go himself; a retainer flew off to gather up Hermes's corpse and present his caduceus.
Thor gave it a single glance. "\[Commerce]. Send it to my brother Gilgamesh."
"Yes!"
At the same time, on the western side of the Olympus range, a grand divine battle suddenly broke out.
Flame, Light, Sacred Fire—an entire mess of law-arts that looked all over the place—were being worked in one pair of hands by a hearth goddess, completely overturning the gods' stereotyped image of the Olympian goddess-king Hestia.
Especially that tongue of sacred fire—if an ordinary Æsir got close and was touched by it, it was death or crippling.
Right before the gods' eyes, two South Asian vassal gods turned into torches of godforce and, howling loudly, burned to death on the spot.
In Hestia's white-jade palm, a dazzling torch flared so brightly the Æsir nearby could scarcely keep their eyes open.
"Who else wants to die?!" The stately, hourglass-shaped hearth goddess somehow gave off the aura of a slayer in that moment.
She'd hidden deep.
Before this fight, everyone had thought she was merely an internal-affairs deity. Who would have guessed her combat power was standard god-king level? That was the most outrageous part!
Had the Æsir truly been careless here, Hestia might really have broken out through the encirclement.
Her luck was bad: standing in her way was one of the Æsir's top deities.
"I am Tyr, the War God! I hope you'll surrender." Honestly, Tyr had no desire to fight a goddess.
It felt dishonorable to win.
"Surrender? Debase myself like Artemis and beg your God-Emperor's pity?" Hestia's voice was full of sarcasm and bite.
Tyr sighed. "I won't deny it—you are the goddess my Father-God named."
"Hmph!" That was all he got in reply.
"Then there's nothing to discuss."
Unfortunately, the tougher Æsir had been spread out; only he could stop her here.
Hestia bit her lower lip. Without a word, three seconds later her curvaceous god-body erupted in a blinding radiance and turned into a small sun, dyeing heaven and earth golden.
Tyr could not see, but that didn't mean he couldn't sense her movements.
Deprived of sight?
Tyr didn't care.
He lifted his divine sword and strode forward.
One step, two, three…
Don't forget: as an Æsir, Tyr's frame was three times Hestia's.
He didn't have a Titan's sky-piercing bulk, but to Hestia he was still a giant—and Tyr's fluid motion and explosive speed were not something the relatively sluggish Titans could match.
"Die—" Hestia pointed, and a sacred blaze as fierce as a volcanic eruption rolled over Tyr.
Tyr took it head-on.
Tyr was unscathed.
No flowery spellcraft—only the blunt, edgeless heft of a thick-backed blade, and that dense, scalp-prickling godforce that would make even god-kings tense.
Tyr is the War God.
The apex deity worshiped by tens of millions of warriors across the whole Ginnungagap world.
Thalos set up a polytheism there and decreed that if you served within a stream, you honored it top to bottom. A knight, for instance, first worshiped God-Emperor Thalos, then War God Tyr, and only after that Knight-God Arthur.
If you had anything to do with war among mortals in Ginnungagap, you could not bypass Tyr.
His pool of godforce was terrifying.
He simply bullied through Hestia's killing arts and closed in, and she truly had no answer.
Seeing Tyr's sword sweep down, Hestia bit her lip until holy blood welled, and flung up a "torch that burns the sky" to clash with him—never knowing that the seemingly heavy chop curved midair in an elegant arc to slip past her torch, and brought the spine of that Æsir-forged greatsword down across her back.
"Ah—"
Even though Tyr had held back on purpose and struck with a blunt blow, he was not adept at taking foes alive; it seemed he hadn't controlled his strength well. Power that could split mountains, even reduced by ninety percent, was still more than Hestia could withstand.
She pitched forward in a graceless sprawl, slamming down beneath Tyr's war-boot.
Thank the Titans for her bloodline—if she'd been a delicate nymph goddess, that one "club" from Tyr would have doubled, then redoubled the number of broken bones in her body.
Hestia's head swam; her body felt like it was in pieces. She wanted to struggle, but simply couldn't get up.
"My lord—" Her "god-warriors" could no longer hold back. They charged in a desperate attempt to snatch their goddess-king from Tyr's hands.
They didn't even make it halfway before Tristan—once of the Round Table, now a retainer under Tyr—cut them all down.
"Let me go! You barbarian gods, let me go!" Hestia still fought, but several Æsir piled on and pinned her tight with binding spells and shackling artifacts.
"Head back. We've completed the mission." Tyr let out a soft sigh.
Elsewhere, Arthur also had results: he and his men blocked Dionysus.
The luckless wine god had first been beaten bloody by Titans and was already grievously injured. Then, as fate would have it, he ran into Arthur.
Arthur didn't care. His orders were to weaken the Olympians as much as possible.
Persuasion failed, and Arthur struck to kill.
After a fierce but brief fight, Dionysus—who would have been promoted to the Twelve in Greek myth—fell.
Even now, fleeing in a panic, Zeus still had no idea that the pantheon he'd painstakingly maintained for so many years had suffered such a heavy loss.
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