Kronos, of course, didn't know who Artemis was. After a brief explanation from Odin, he immediately understood she was Zeus's daughter, now counted among the god-kings alongside Poseidon, Hades, and Hestia.
"Hahahaha! Those bastards—they deserve it!"
Kronos was utterly cold-blooded when it came to family. After he castrated his father Uranus and was cursed by him—that he too would be overthrown by his children—the Titan Kronos, for the sake of his rule, swallowed each child as soon as they were born, consigning them to a sunless, horrific existence inside his vast belly.
Later, Zeus was switched at birth and raised outside. Not only did he rescue Poseidon and the others, he joined with those siblings to launch the Titan War and overthrow Kronos's rule.
For this cold and cruel former Titan god-king, this was certainly news worth celebrating.
"Wahahaha! Does my good eldest boy dote on that granddaughter? Now that she's been captured, is his heart aching? Tell me what she looks like."
Odin had never seen Artemis; that didn't stop him from using Athena to fill in the picture, describing her vividly, then concluding: "He absolutely dotes on that precious daughter. You know that bastard Zeus—he won't spare even his sisters and daughters, much less other men's wives. Only Artemis he wouldn't touch, and made her one of the 'Three Virgin Goddesses.'"
Naturally Odin didn't know that much. He'd gotten it from Ixion, the poor soul grilled daily on the burning wheel. As for how true it was, Odin had no interest in verifying it. When it came to blackening an enemy, you couldn't go wrong.
The more Kronos listened, the happier he got. The worse Zeus had it, the better he felt.
Call it karma or retribution—feeling good was what mattered.
Once he'd finished gloating, Kronos began discussing with Odin how to link up the other imprisoned Titans and then, in concert with Thalos's divine army, break out of Tartarus and make life miserable for Zeus.
Odin assented with his mouth, but in his heart he looked down on Kronos even more.
The hatred this former god-king bore his eldest son Zeus was undoubtedly genuine.
But the courage to break out of hell by himself? He didn't have it.
Not only that, he was "talking a big Titan game," boasting that once he escaped, he'd take Zeus down and then split the universe fifty-fifty with Thalos.
Honestly, Odin had worn that little trick threadbare long ago.
What Kronos didn't know was that while he was commissioning Odin to contact every Titan prisoner, Odin had already, by leading questions, pieced together the full picture of the Titan War back then.
The Titans' weakness—fearing thunder and other elemental divine arts—was already laid out before Odin.
He sneered inwardly: Kronos, if you really had that much ability, you wouldn't be sitting here as a prisoner. Even as a prisoner, if there'd been a chance, you'd have been the first to break out. You couldn't beat Zeus when his position was still shaky, and now you think you can? If you really could win, why wait for my big brother Thalos's army to arrive?
Odin slapped a big question mark on the wisdom of this mountain-sized former Titan god-king, and pegged him as an extremely selfish, shameless creature.
Still—as the saying goes, even if Kronos was trash, he was a massive divine-world shit-stirrer, perfect for jabbing Zeus in the backside.
As long as Kronos and Zeus, father and son, bared their fangs and tore at each other—who won and who lost, Odin didn't care. Pushed to the extreme, as long as he could avenge this imprisonment, Odin felt that even if he truly fell, it wouldn't be unacceptable.
Odin was ruthless to others—and to himself as well.
…
While Odin plotted a grand rebellion, the battles at the six spatial corridors outside gradually approached their end.
The increasingly ordered cosmic current pushed the two world-clusters onward, steadily moving them away from those six vast corridors capable of passing god-kings.
These past days, to lull Thalos, Zeus had deliberately sent his two most dependable brothers, Poseidon and Hades, to harry them in succession. They led a host of sub-gods and slave gods from vassal worlds and launched many offensives of great momentum.
The Greeks looked strong; Ginnungagap showed no sign of weakness.
Hades, bringing Sleep Hypnos, the three-headed hellhound, and the underworld host, was actually losing on the surface.
In truth, that wasn't Hades's fault.
The strength of an underworld's divine power depends on the number of dead.
And the number of dead is absolutely tied to the number of living in a world.
The Ginnungagap world had a population in the hundreds of millions, and mostly highly intelligent species like humans. Where there's life, there's death. The absolute strength of Helheim's underworld was inherently greater than the Hades-run underworld.
What's more, in the Greek world, Tartarus and the underworld were separate. The part that imprisoned Kronos wasn't under Hades's control.
That natural disparity in divine power was enough to make Hades miserable.
Comparing further down, besides having Garm the hellhound and her second brother, the World Serpent Jörmungandr, Hela also had Elae and Scathach—ridiculous sub-gods with the power to be main gods.
All told, Hades was beaten back step by step, and the fact that he could barely hold the line only proved how formidable he was.
Poseidon fared no better.
He brought a slew of sea goddesses and sea beasts—and ran into Thor, Vidar, and Tyr, the three brothers.
Several times Poseidon tried to seize the corridor's elements and turn it into a death sea to drown the enemy. First Vidar countered with the roots of the World Tree; when that proved less than ideal, Thor—brutally unreasonable as ever—smashed through the corridor every time, dumping the seawater out into the mutated starfield.
He wasn't dumping seawater—
He was dumping Poseidon's lifeblood!
That "pouring out a sea" move was one he definitely didn't want to repeat.
Without home-field advantage, Poseidon was at a loss in close-quarters brawls against three Aesir with giant blood.
When everyone could "go giant," Poseidon was at a significant disadvantage one against three.
The two old-line Greek god-kings were indeed formidable. They lost, yes, but at least they weren't routed.
Then, with Athena, Apollo, and Ares not having taken the field, the six Aesir god-kings all went to consult their elder brothers on fighting arts.
Gilgamesh was the first to seek out Heimdall, hoping to be instructed.
When Heimdall handed over the Rainb…
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