In Athena's view, Zeus had made far too many mistakes.
First was Kronos. Since you were already rebelling against your father, why not go all the way and just kill Kronos? Leaving a pile of Titans to be tormented in Tartarus—fine if they never got a chance to revolt, but once they escaped like now, that was all on Zeus.
Next was Odin. Why not be decisive with an outer-realm god-king? If he wouldn't surrender, just kill him. Had he been slain back then, at least there wouldn't be this Tartarus upheaval.
Then there was Zeus and Hera. At a time like this, why wasn't Hera being reined in—and how did they still have the energy to persecute their own side's goddesses?
Lastly, the timing of the strike. The Aesir hadn't even moved yet, and Zeus was already buckling. At this rate, even after three days when the two world-clusters were forcibly cut off, Zeus would still have a hard time punishing Odin and those rebel gods.
Precisely because Athena was bright enough to have strategic vision above most gods, her heart was heavy.
"Your Majesty Athena, His Majesty Zeus commands you to lead the army back to relieve Syracuse at once," said the messenger nymph.
"Understood." Athena sighed inwardly to the point of madness.
If the cosmic currents followed their usual pattern, there would be no barrier between the two worlds next time. She could hardly imagine the misery that would befall the Olympian pantheon once two great pantheons could attack each other with full force.
She had truly intended to obey.
Just as she turned to order Heracles, who had spearheaded the thrust into the Dogon world, to return, a sudden change erupted.
When Heracles, as vanguard, and Apollo, providing support, charged into the Dogon world, they were astonished to find that the only one defending it was a down-and-out Amma. Odin was nowhere to be seen, nor any of the Maya gods.
At that very moment, ink-violet cracks split the firmament with a sound like countless Greek clay jars cracking at once.
While the shattering still echoed across the sky, the entire firmament puckered and twisted like paper soaked in resin.
On the ground before the Dogon Temple where Heracles stood, countless fissures burst from the earth—each one wide enough to stuff a Greek war chariot into, no problem.
At first, the mighty god-king Heracles thought it was merely some Odin trick or a large-scale weaponized divine art.
Soon he realized something was wrong.
An eerie ink-black flame flared in the sky, then formed a void vortex; this wasn't divine art but a collapsing sky. Chaos energy from outside—though not in vast quantity—was pouring in and beginning to erode the world barrier.
A keening of the ley lines pierced every stone beneath Heracles's feet, every grain of sand. The brass plates on the temple opposite—so like gold—drifted off like dandelion seeds. Fine sand seemed to turn into running water, sluicing past the mighty one's ankles—not toward the ground but toward the sky...
Only those with sufficient grasp of physical common sense would know: the earth had lost gravity. When all things are freed from gravity's shackle, they begin to float on their own, out of control.
All manner of particulates began to float in the air, along with order-energy that had started to turn chaotic.
"Heracles! Something's wrong! It's like this world is going to be destroyed! Fall back first—" Apollo, still holding the skies in overwatch, urgently called to Heracles.
In that instant, Heracles still stared in disbelief at Amma, the former Dogon god-king, once a Greek slave-god, not far ahead.
Kind-hearted by nature, the mighty one saw on Amma's face both nervousness and… a hatred etched in the bone.
"Do you know why I'm destroying my own world?"
Heracles shook his head.
"Hatred! Hatred for Zeus enslaving me and my subjects, for humiliating my wife and daughters!" Amma gnashed his teeth. "The Olympians' glory was built on the Dogon's prosperity and independence! We couldn't beat you and became the lowest of slaves! No dignity, no freedom, nothing! But fortunately, the Aesir came…"
Amma's impassioned gesturing was met with Heracles's silence.
There was nothing to argue!
Might makes right!
It was an iron law recognized across the Greek world and the entire chaotic universe!
If you slaughtered the other side's whole family and carried off their wives and daughters, the only thing you didn't do to the hilt was, for vanity's sake, leaving their god-king alive.
"The defeated should submit to the victor!" Heracles ground out.
"What if the victor is the Aesir—and not the Olympians who have already lost their holy mountain?" Amma tossed out a hypothesis—or rather a thesis—the mighty one couldn't refute.
If the Olympians were really that formidable, they wouldn't have failed to hold their lair!
This had stirred not only the slave-gods' will to resist; it was a collapse of faith even among the Olympians themselves.
Not every god was as loyal to Zeus as Heracles.
"I don't accept hypotheticals. I will fight for Father Zeus until the chaotic universe is destroyed."
"Just as His Majesty Odin said! You—powerful and blindly loyal bastard—should be the first to die!" Amma laughed in rage. "Hahaha! To have a great Olympian god-king die with me—good enough."
"You…"
As if in answer to Amma's words, Heracles finally registered that the Dogon world was wrong. As space's pleats clamped like a serpent's vertebrae, every peak within sight exploded at once.
At last, Heracles couldn't hold his ground. He vaulted onto Helios the sun god's chariot and began retreating at top speed.
"Run? Can you run?"
This was Amma's small world. It might be poor, but it wasn't small—three hundred thousand square kilometers of desert. Under this self-immolating operation, the divine power it could unleash was, of course, terrifying.
The sunlight blazing from Helios's body turned, under the world's deliberate strangling, into countless golden butterflies whose wingbeats, upon touching the violet-black vault, congealed into a sky full of turbid slurry.
When a world collapses, laws cease to be laws; they are only vortices of energy bringing ultimate destruction to everything around.
With Heracles and Helios at the center, the entire space, under Amma's extreme manipulation, became like dough in a baker's hands—sacrificed to the shattering of space.
Truth be told, if Heracles had been strong enough—and an old-line deity—he might, with sufficient divine reserves, have held out.
As a new god-king, his foundations were too thin.
His world-shaking might had no room to operate inside a dying small world.
Heracles—the beloved eldest son of God-Emperor Zeus, a truly loyal hound of a god—actually fell just like that.
Sensing the extinction of Heracles's divine sense, Apollo and Athena, only just extricated, were stunned.
Worse was yet to come. Another small world, like a pebble hurled by a child into the ocean, smashed into the Greek world.
"Zeus! You want me dead? Fine! Then we die together!" Odin's brutally vicious god-voice rang again and again in the ears of Athena, Apollo, and the other surviving gods.
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