Breaking three ribs would be excruciating for a human and could directly affect the fight.
For Zeus—God-Emperor with shapeshifting and Titan blood—it was tolerable.
It hurt, truly, but not enough for his father to combo him off the field.
As Kronos's sickle swung a second time, Zeus at least blasted the green grass atop his head to charcoal with thunder, regaining clarity and control over his power, which gave him more room to dodge.
"Dammit! Damn it! Damn it—" Zeus cursed nonstop; this was the cleanest phrase among the oaths most likely to be recorded by priests.
In his fury, Zeus even cursed Kronos to "die childless"!
Olympian gods and Titans were fighting until the sky went dark and sun and moon lost their light.
Because so much divine power spilled out and churned the air, making the world physically dim, Zeus and company didn't realize at first that sunlight was gone.
Not until Odin smashed a whole world into the Greek sky did this cathartic, hate-drenched, earth-shaking war cool a little.
Zeus and Kronos, pulling apart, looked at the meteor shower falling from the heavens and murmured, nearly in unison, "What's this now?"
"My idiot son! My moron grandson! You're still fighting? The world is about to end!" The sky god Uranus's furious rant crashed down from above.
"What?" father and son Kronos and Zeus cried out together again.
Their "pacify inside before repelling outside" mindset was ingrained—so long as they killed each other, that Aesir lot were just trash.
That wasn't reason speaking; it was the hatred they bore each other blinding their reason.
Kronos thought that once he killed Zeus, he could turn and tidy up Thalos's crew. That was because the prophecy back then said his overthrow would come from his own child (later confirmed as Zeus, the little bastard), not from Thalos. A first-generation god-king's confidence and superstition ran that deep.
Zeus?
Same old line: heresy is worse than heathens!
A backstab from your own father cuts deepest!
But the immediate bind made his back prickle too: a shrinking power base.
Once upon a time, he felt his divine power was inexhaustible—that was because of the Greek world's very existence. No one had ever thought of how to crack "Sky" and weaken its power.
By the same logic, no one had ever thought of how to wreck the Sea or the Underworld.
That was the limit of their thinking.
The fact was, that Aesir God-Emperor Thalos was not only freewheeling in thought—he actually did it: using asteroids to punch through Uranus's defenses, siphoning away the Seven Seas via spatial corridors, then sending Hela to raid the underworld and snatch souls.
That string of plays gave even the seemingly bottomless Zeus brothers a real sense of crisis.
The sky could be pierced, the sea could leak, the earth could be dismantled.
What, then, was impossible?
The problem was: with his dad pressing him this hard, where would Zeus find the bandwidth to deal with Thalos?
Kronos shattering three of his ribs only stoked Zeus's rage; Zeus focused on widening those seemingly small wounds on his father, flooding them with "air" and "thunder," even borrowing "seawater" and underworld death-breath from his brothers—and he concentrated fire on Kronos's left leg.
Zeus meant to cripple one of Kronos's legs.
In that killing state, the two camps slugged it out for three full days before Zeus sensed something wrong.
"Hold on! I can't feel Heracles's divine ripple anymore!" Zeus's god-voice rang in the Olympians' ears.
"Not just Heracles—Athena's gone dark too. I can't feel her contesting me for (war) power." Ares actually sounded a bit giddy. His "War" office wasn't exclusive; Athena had taken a big slice of his share. With Athena suddenly not competing, he felt a surge in his power and was happy.
"And Apollo's light, and Helios's sun!" Hades added coolly.
"Haha! That's grea—no, terrible." Hera blurted out before instantly correcting herself.
You could hardly blame her. She'd hated Zeus's bastards for ages—especially when Zeus, against her will, had made those gifted bastards Olympian god-kings. It was a direct stomp on her most sensitive nerve: "jealousy."
On ordinary days, just seeing them riled Hera.
This time, Hera actually felt Zeus's angry gaze, and a wave of guilt washed over her.
The anger didn't last; Zeus's eyes turned dim—with disappointment.
For all that the battlefield still roared—the Titans' furious bellows shaking heaven and earth, terrain changing every second under colossal force—the Olympians' hearts were growing still.
Even if Athena and the others had left the Greek world, the gods' sense of them should only have weakened.
Weakened and gone are two different things.
If the disappearance of Heracles's power didn't much affect the Greek world, the dereliction of Helios the sun and Apollo the light was stark.
With no light in heaven and earth, night fell without end.
Uranus, Gaia, and the primordials barely felt it; from the second generation like Kronos onward, it became painfully clear.
Terrible conjectures bubbled up uncontrolled in Zeus and the others' minds:
Was that Odin really so frightening?
Or did Hera, before the spatial corridor between the two world clusters had closed, force Athena to attack—leading to an ambush, even their deaths?
Or something else?
Just then, a vast, furious voice dropped from the sky: "My beast of a son! My idiot grandson! The Aesir assault is close to destroying the world, and you two are still at each other's throats? Will you only be satisfied when the world is torn apart and you're reduced to powerless trash?"
Obviously, it was the first god-king, Uranus!
Neither Zeus nor Kronos had a shred of respect for him.
Uranus wasn't a good sort either.
Gaia had the most to say on that.
After Kronos castrated his father, he didn't expect a kind face from him ever again.
Zeus? Anyone who threatened his divine rule was an enemy!
Even so, Uranus's entrance at least cooled the battle that had obliterated the polis of Syracuse—the two sides pulled back, glaring at each other while pricking up their ears to hear what lofty words Uranus would utter.
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