Asgard, Golden Palace.
"Oh? Ares, huh." Through divine sight, Thalos saw a scene within the spatial corridor from afar and couldn't help voicing it.
"Huh? He's the Greek war god Ares? Is he going to be very strong?" Ishtar's face was tense even as her hands didn't stop, gently kneading the muscles of Thalos's arm.
Thalos almost laughed.
Don't be fooled by how flighty this goddess usually is—when it comes to raising a child, her bar is basically "as long as he's alive."
She's unreliable, but she truly loves her son.
In this life, she and Gilgamesh had become mother and son as if by karmic entanglement, and she really did put her heart into it.
Thalos glanced at her. "He's strong. Gilgamesh is stronger."
At that, Ishtar immediately relaxed.
Among the Six God-Kings, Gilgamesh wasn't just precocious; he could really fight. Especially after the infiltration of the Egyptian world and the war against the three Maya realms, his overall strength should be the greatest among the six. That's why Thalos let him lead off, hoping for an opening victory.
But any way you looked at it, Ares was fierce!
Wielding a bronze spear imbued with the power of the war god, he had enlarged his body to a full hundred meters tall—his aura made it feel like a single strike could tear the firmament. When Ares lunged with that spear wrapped in the blood-flames of war, thrusting at the golden figure of Gilgamesh, Ishtar truly clenched her hands in worry for her son.
Just then, tens of thousands of gold-plated forged-steel javelins blasted out of the void, spanning the sky; from afar they looked like a golden river suddenly appearing across heaven and earth.
"Shu shu shu—"
The terrifying whistle of slicing wind never stopped!
Don't think these were just simple thrown spears—each bore surging "power of money," or more accurately, the divine power various Aesir had imbued into the weapons.
Yes.
Gilgamesh used money and treasure to pave the way, persuading every god too embarrassed to refuse to help make these single-use artifacts.
Added together, it was no different than thousands of lesser gods volleying divine arts at once.
With that absurd flavor of a divine tycoon, these mortal-grade weapons ended up with god-tier destructive power!
Gilgamesh might not understand the "true essence" of combat, but he understood engineering!
If you can't do it yourself, spend the money.
All weapons must be the best!
If he could, he'd even buy out every last dwarf in Svartalfheim for all eternity to forge him munitions!
At that moment Ares finally realized—he wasn't facing a single god-king. He was facing a god-king commanding an army of heaven with wealth.
"B-bas…tard—"
No matter how aggressive the Greek war god had been a heartbeat earlier, now he had to tuck his tail like a grandson, snatching up from behind a bronze shield bearing Hephaestus's power and locking it before him to try to block the concentrated fire of tens of thousands of lesser artifacts.
Gilgamesh's wild laughter echoed through the realm: "Hahaha! Big guy! I don't like your size. Get smaller—"
Ares had wanted to tank it.
But at that size he was nothing but the best target; those human-sized javelins could penetrate his thick hide and muscle, sinking like needles into his flesh and giving him excruciating pain.
"Arrrgh—I—I'll kill you—I'll rip that arrogant face off—" Even as Ares very sensibly shrank back to mortal size, his foul mouth never stopped.
Losing the fight, winning the trash talk.
"Shu shu shu—" The terrifying barrage didn't stop.
Only because Ares had shrunk did the number of spears that could hit him at once decrease.
In just a few breaths, Ares's divine body looked like an oversized porcupine.
The increased relative defense from shrinking did seem to help.
But then Gilgamesh raised his right hand and slashed it down—another god-spear shot forth.
This one, however, was sized for a pure-blooded Aesir.
Only twice as big as the others, but the divine power within—both in quality and quantity—was likewise doubled.
Now it was Ares's turn to be awkward.
His shield, forged personally by Hephaestus, had already been riddled with holes; the only luck so far was that none of the spears had pierced it completely through.
Now with such a large spear driving in, his shield felt like a sheet of paper—well, a folded sheet of paper.
Hold and you'll break; bat it away?
The moment Ares moved, more human-sized god-spears punched through his skin, making him howl.
"Duang!" Gritting his teeth through the agony of a thousand needles, he managed to knock aside that Aesir-class thrown spear.
But it wasn't over!
With a flick of Gilgamesh's hand, more top-tier Aesir javelins appeared from thin air.
They bore the powers of his big brothers—Thor's thunder, Tyr's war, Vidar's nature, Baldr's holy light…
He hadn't even used the proceeds Ishtar had wrung out of Thalos yet.
Even so, it was enough to make Ares choke.
"No—how is this possible!"
Ares's bloodshot eyes bulged.
He'd thought this was a duel—why did it feel like the entire Aesir pantheon was taking turns on him?
Everyone had a God-Emperor for a father, but Gilgamesh's big brothers were also monsters—and happy to help their kid brother!
When the first thunder-spear struck Ares, the arcs blasting from it burned the clouds for a hundred miles to a purple-red.
The second spear's essence of light burst into ten thousand golden suns on the bronze shield; platinum radiance became a prison that caged the Greek war god.
The third spear drove a seed of the World Tree into a crack in the bronze shield; an overwhelming surge of nature erupted there, thick roots racing along the splits and even into Ares's vambrace to stab into his divine flesh.
At the same moment, the copper-red bracer struck by the fourth spear ignited with a world-scouring karmic fire.
And in the same instant, a black ray filled with the breath of death shot from Ares's left cuisses, the overflowing death force instantly killing everything living within a kilometer.
Ares was in a miserable state. After being bombarded hundreds and thousands of times by who knew how many divine powers, the light bursting from him had become increasingly mottled. The glow of his own war divinity was no longer dominant—sign that his divine power was starting to shriek and collapse.
The bronze cuirass tempered by Hephaestus melted into charred holes; his divine blood was smeared all over him.
"Argh—y-you—you just wait—"
To everyone's surprise, Ares ran!
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