"Conqueror of All Realms, Guardian of Order, God-King of the Aesir—Thalos Borson!" From a height far above, Thalos looked down imperiously at the petite Goddess Amaterasu, his gaze sweeping over her without restraint.
"Leader of the Five Tribes of Fusang, Amaterasu!" It took everything Amaterasu had to calm her trembling heart and speak her title in a voice that wouldn't bring shame to her people.
Against a lesser foe, she could have proclaimed a string of grandiose titles for herself.
Unfortunately, before such a monstrous résumé as her opponent's, no matter how many honorifics she listed, they would sound hollow.
They weren't even in the same league.
"Leader"?
True, the Fusang gods had been the ones to conquer worlds like Malaya. The problem was, those conquests were far from complete. Truly dismantling the local temples and destroying the native gods would've come at an immense cost. For a divine system as decentralized as Fusang's, the difficulty was too high.
This wasn't something Amaterasu could simply decree into being.
With so many shared interests at stake, even within the Fusang pantheon, no faction wanted Amaterasu or Tsukuyomi to become too dominant by achieving foreign conquests, potentially elevating one of them into an absolute God-King.
Ever since the era of Izanagi-no-Mikoto, the feudal structure of the pantheon had made centralization impossible. This meant that even when they conquered other realms, what they obtained was fragmented rule at best.
In the end, while Amaterasu could command vassal gods to fight for her, her divine power was still no greater than a single-realm god-king.
Now look at the other side—
Sixteen world swords floated around Thalos, each radiating an overwhelmingly vicious and formidable presence.
Just by briefly sensing them, Amaterasu could tell that some of the spirits sealed in those swords had been far stronger than herself in life.
The sheer hopelessness of this made both her and Tsukuyomi turn pale.
They were not fighting an equal. They weren't even fighting something comparable.
Separated across the void, feeling the faint divine energy flowing from the Fusang world, the siblings both knew—if they couldn't suppress Thalos or gain the upper hand in just a few exchanges, the fight would be lost. With that enormous world backing him, Thalos could simply grind them down. And tragically, they didn't even believe they could survive a single swing of his sword.
They were completely pinned in place by this no-win scenario.
Then Thalos spoke: "This is your final ultimatum—submit and swear fealty to me. I shall grant you the status of Aesir True Gods."
A casually spoken line, yet it trampled wildly on the reverse scale of every Fusang god, dancing and provoking in their most sensitive, untouchable space.
What?
The great Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, offered nothing more than the rank of common True Gods within the Aesir?
The Three Noble Children were the supreme deities of Fusang at this stage. If even they were given this treatment, then what did that make the rest of them?
Glory shared is glory sustained—shame shared is shame multiplied.
If their own chief gods were treated this way, whether out of pride as Fusang gods, the need to defend their dignity, or just to negotiate a better deal in surrender, the subordinate gods' reactions were far more explosive than Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi's.
"Outrageous!"
"How dare you!"
"You may be a God-King, but you must not insult Amaterasu-sama!"
"Apologize! You must apologize!"
"Kneel before Amaterasu-sama—!"
Spittle flew, fingers pointed wildly as they shouted and raged, seemingly oblivious to the overwhelming divine force radiating from Thalos.
At that moment, Amaterasu nearly burst into tears.
What looked like irrational behavior to outsiders actually followed a certain internal logic.
As vassals of Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi, their operating principle had become extreme xenophobic loyalty—blindly defending the honor of the Three Noble Children. If their enemies dared question that honor, they had to immediately protest. Otherwise, they'd be seen as disloyal.
After all, even if something went wrong, the Three Noble Children were supposed to take the blame.
As the three figureheads of the Fusang pantheon, they were both banners and scapegoats.
Because in the Fusang Divine Realm, "dignity" was a very expensive thing.
Honestly, when the Three Noble Children faced opponents of comparable strength, this kind of posturing wasn't a problem.
The problem was when the enemy's strength vastly outmatched their own… then things turned ugly.
Buzz—
Unexpectedly, the first to snap on the Aesir side wasn't Thalos, nor Arthur or any of the other gods slightly lagging behind—it was… the Sword of Sumer!
Each of the sixteen World Swords housed a sword soul with its own will and temperament.
Even though their memories and divine minds had been erased long ago, their instincts remained deeply etched into their souls.
The sword cry from former God-King Enlil cut through language itself.
In that moment of disorientation, all present heard the gruff, scolding roar of a hot-headed wind god: "Noisy—"
Yes, the divine sword had grown impatient with the blustering Fusang gods—and took action.
Wind elements were infamous for acting fast.
Before Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi could react, the entire sky battlefield erupted in a storm of slicing wind blades.
A tornado formation bloomed around the azure-green Sword of Sumer, devouring the entire crimson firmament.
From within the eye of the storm, the ethereal figure of God-King Enlil emerged. With a flick of his finger, every single Fusang god who had just spoken had their foreheads simultaneously split open by glowing cyan lines—these were primal wind elements from the Sumer world, violently tearing apart what should have been their immortal godly bodies.
"No—!" they screamed in horror, casting desperate glances toward Amaterasu and Tsukuyomi for help.
But before either sibling could react, the magatama amulets they had gifted these gods as protective talismans shattered into dust. Streams of wind, as thick as fingers, gushed from the seven orifices of each Fusang god. Their shattered divinities were caught in the storm, forming a brilliant galaxy of scattered fragments.
A second later, the storm carrying pieces of divine corpses leveled a thousand-mile mountain range to flat ground.
Tsukuyomi stood frozen. Amaterasu trembled, nearly collapsing to her knees.
These victims were no nobodies.
While Fusang claimed to have eight million gods, only those descended directly from Izanagi-no-Mikoto were truly recognized. The rest were cannon fodder.
Among the ones just obliterated by Enlil's phantom were four gods born from Izanagi's ritual purification after returning from Yomi.
They were dead.
Their divine bodies fell here, and even their souls could not return to the Fusang world. They were intercepted by the endlessly expanding underworld of Ginnungagap.
They died in vain.
No—perhaps not entirely in vain.
Through their deaths, Amaterasu finally confirmed that what she had sensed wasn't a delusion. The sixteen suspended World Swords truly represented sixteen separate worlds. Each one housed a god-king-level sword soul no weaker than Enlil.
The Goddess Amaterasu was terrified.
She turned to her brother Tsukuyomi and saw the same panic and fear reflected in his eyes.
If anything still kept their knees from buckling, it was the thought of Susanoo's fate.
But soon, even that final reason to hold on to their pride would disappear.
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