Thalos's lips quirked in an amused smile. "Oh? I heard you were pretty tough."
The hearth goddess, face flushed crimson, turned her head aside in "anger," yet under her good niece's assistance, she set herself to receive him.
Thalos almost laughed. Since she'd begged for mercy, he'd make it smaller.
Watching Hestia's dignified, elegant, holy face contort in broad spasms, going from taut at first to collapsing out of control, took less than half an hour. Her cascade of black hair at first kept flinging, quite a sight, but later could only tremble helplessly.
Thalos had actually been about to let Hestia off, but then her mischievous niece came up and softly kissed away her tears, and Thalos couldn't help taking Artemis in hand as well.
He had to admit, the feeling of dragging a goddess whom no one dared profane down into the dust was fantastic.
Perhaps this was one of the few pleasures left to Thalos, exalted as a God-Emperor.
Even now, though Thalos was holding back a bit, the impact of a body one and a half times a man's height still overwhelmed aunt and niece with ease.
Especially when Thalos saw Hestia, unwillingly, learning under her niece's guidance how to serve him, the satisfaction was beyond words.
"Get yourself together. You still have to go out and offer a dance later," Thalos said to Artemis.
Hestia jolted as if struck by lightning; in the end she neither argued nor resisted, tacitly consenting to all that was to happen to her.
Attended by valkyries, Thalos dressed and, beaming, entered the Hall of Joy.
"Praise our supreme God-Emperor—" Even though Thalos had not had Brynhild call out and announce his arrival, a sharp-eyed god spotted him at once and raised a goblet of gold and gems high.
"Praise our sovereign—" A thousand gods in the hall lifted their cups in unison.
Thalos casually took the great goblet handed up by the maid Helen and raised it high. "In the name of victory, let us drink together—"
"In the name of victory—" the gods shouted in unison, their voices piercing the palace dome and shooting straight into the sky.
After draining that cup, Thalos surprised the gods by picking up a second goblet and raising it high.
"There is something you may already know. Odin, the great traitor of the Aesir, has been resurrected!"
As Thalos's words fell, the entire hall fell deathly silent, a stark contrast to the earlier revelry, as if plunging from heaven straight into hell.
In truth, everyone had heard the rumor long since, but since the oldest batch of Aesir never brought it up, none of the later, mortal-sized new gods dared tear open what might be an absolute taboo scar of the Aesir.
That Thalos raised it now surprised them.
Thalos continued: "There is nothing here worth tiptoeing around. My second brother Odin was seduced by the power of Chaos back then and fell into the crooked path, nearly murdering my third brother Vili, then rallying a horde of chaotic monsters in an attempt to devour the World Tree and overturn the Aesir's rule, and then… well, I think you have all seen the result in the Rainbow Bridge Hall."
By now, the Rainbow Bridge Hall had long been turned into a display hall for giant monster heads and oversized trophies.
"Heh-heh-heh…" Thor and the other old-line Aesir led with a good-natured laugh to ease the mood.
The faces of the new gods looked much better, and they followed with appeasing smiles.
Thalos: "Back then, Odin was slain by me, and his core soul was still sealed within the world-sword Asgard."
As he spoke, that radiant divine sword slowly hovered before Thalos's chest, radiating the divine ripples within for the gods to savor.
Thalos launched into his long declaration in one breath:
"If betrayal required no price, then anyone could betray. But Odin did pay—his life, and most of his soul. In the end, a small remnant possessing his memories escaped. When I discovered that, I used and drove his remnant soul as a pathfinder to obtain intelligence on the next world and chalk up victory after victory. That is the whole truth of this so-called ultimate secret of the Aesir royal house."
"I did use Odin—savoring his humiliations, looking down at his agonized struggles, forcing him to lose the small pantheons he had founded again and again—but that is Odin's atonement to the entire Aesir!"
"For the sins he committed, no amount of torment would be too much. No matter how he atones, he will never be qualified to rejoin the Aesir."
"Not long ago, he successfully incited Kronos, the former Olympian god-king imprisoned by Zeus, to rebel against Zeus and destroyed all the temples on Mount Olympus. That is indeed his achievement. I will not deny it either!"
"As for how Odin's remnant soul is to be defined and dealt with, that will be announced after the Olympian pantheon is completely defeated!"
That was counting Odin's contributions as making amends for his crimes. How far he could go would determine in what capacity he could continue to deal with the Aesir after the war.
When all was said and done, that Odin was merely a remnant soul. He could rally other forces and self-style as a god-king, but in terms of combat power he could not truly reach a real god-king's level; overall he wasn't that great a threat.
Now, with Thalos's every word ringing, his open and aboveboard proclamation scattered many malicious conjectures like mist before the sun.
The gods voiced their stances one after another.
"We support His Majesty's handling!"
"Traitors must not be lightly spared; those who render service must not go unrewarded!"
"Ha! I want to see what tricks Odin can cook up next."
Thalos smiled at the corners of his mouth; in a sense, he had also defused a land mine for his future rule.
In the less-than-formal setting of the Hall of Joy, announcing the matter of Odin served as a way to sound out and probe his vassals' attitudes; since all agreed, the matter was settled. Had there been fierce opposition, he'd have had to settle the core deities in private and bring it to the Golden Palace for deliberation.
Fortunately, all went smoothly.
Ultimately it came down to Thalos's overwhelming authority: his unfathomable might and his undefeated record made the Aesir effectively a one-man show under him.
So long as he didn't go overboard in such matters, it was just a formality.
In this chaos-born universe where strength reigned and slavery was the norm, as long as the God-Emperor remained the mightiest deity, never mind the God-Emperor—even god-kings wouldn't dare to collude to overthrow him.
Thalos's method merely strengthened the pantheon's internal cohesion.
With official business done, it was time for another "official business" for the night.
Thalos snapped his fingers, and the musicians—Olympian nymph goddesses—took the hint at once, striking up music with a strong Greek flavor.
Amid the hoots and cheers of all the Aesir, the great doors of the hall swung open, and the dignified Olympian goddess-king—the hearth goddess, former virgin goddess Hestia—face burning with shame and embarrassment, took slightly faltering steps, barely keeping the beat, dancing her way down the red carpet with movements just smooth enough as she entered the Hall of Joy.
The palace's atmosphere hit a peak in an instant; the cheers all but shook all of Asgard.
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