There were no thunderous war drums, because the Titans' footsteps were the loudest war drums under heaven.
Each step crushed and tore the ruins of Athens further.
Their ponderous tread made the gold leaf flaking from the temple colonnades leap several meters into the air like stones launched by catapults.
Those colossal figures tangled in a savage melee, every collision spraying a cataract of crimson mist.
Above the height of the Acropolis rose a weird cloud of chaos; scalding, chaotic breath poured down and burned through the marble slabs of the Parthenon's rubble with ease.
At Piraeus, only nine kilometers from Athens, the bronze statue of Poseidon was being swallowed by scarlet magma; fish rolled up belly-white on the steaming sea.
The dying sun speared through volcanic ash to cast purple blotches across the valley of Delphi, lighting the giants whose veins carried the same blood.
"Impossible! Absolutely impossible! How is this happening? How is this happening?!"
In that chaotic world, two giants smashed together with a boom. On Kronos's bronze skin flowed an elemental turbulence like vortices of chaos—Zeus's gift. Disordered, those elements corroded far faster and more viciously than in a state of order the god-body he fancied "immune to all poisons."
"Get off me—" Kronos swung up his obsidian scythe again.
The stroke came with such ferocity it felt it might tear a dimension in the next instant.
Yet that lightning sweep, before the power that seemed to rot all things, looked pitiful.
"Thunk!"
A dull, viscous sound.
A blow that could cleave mountains bit into a withered giant arm—once belonging to a Hundred-Handed Giant—and only opened a gash a few meters long.
"Again… again this…"
Kronos no longer knew what face to wear toward his eldest son—or even if this thing was his son at all.
Lightning, as ever, wreathed "Zeus" head to toe.
This "Zeus" was no Zeus he knew.
This "Zeus" was too huge.
At least two hundred stories tall, casually towering over most Titans.
And seeing on "Zeus's" body those heads and arms like the damned of the pit, the nightmare that had once brought Kronos down returned—he had never imagined Zeus and a Hundred-Handed Giant would one day be fused.
It was a "miracle" born of chaotic power!
During his breakout, catching the Hundred-Handed off-guard, Kronos and his Titans had ambushed the last two in Tartarus. They had indeed butchered them—wrenching off every limb, tearing them apart, twisting off every head and stamping most to pulp.
The Titans forgot this was already the underworld; in Tartarus, the line between life and death is hard to see.
When Zeus, at any cost, drew on the world's hoarded chaotic energy, fusing the Hundred-Handed's remains ceased to be a problem.
Put bluntly, what Zeus was playing now looked a lot like Odin's old game.
Trace it back to when Gaia birthed the three Hundred-Handed brothers—same principle: Gaia lost control over the use of order's power and produced three chaos-sided monstrous Titans.
The Hundred-Handed and Kronos were both children of Gaia; to Zeus, all three were uncles.
That vastly eased the fusion.
With Zeus's power fallen to god-king tier, he abandoned the side of order and threw himself into chaos—and a "resurrected" Hundred-Handed Giant was born.
No—"Thousand-Handed Giant" was closer to the mark.
While Zeus recalled the Hundred-Handed's severed limbs, his emanating divinity also drew in legions of heroic corpses from Tartarus.
The result: an ultimate monstrosity with a Titan's frame, and hundreds of heads and a thousand arms plastered across its chest and belly.
Where the Hundred-Handed's main head had stood, only half a neck remained (Kronos had smashed the head to pieces); planted square in that dry cross-section was Zeus's small divine body.
Navel and forearms sunk into the old neck wound, he directly piloted the massive carcass.
Borrowing this twisted chaotic body, Zeus finally had a physique to grapple with his father in the flesh.
And that wasn't all—this Titan-shaped "Zeus" seethed with liquid lightning. When Zeus roared himself hoarse, the hundreds of lesser heads across the huge body gaped in unison, bellowing with a soul-shaking terror.
"Kronos! You idiot—this is all your doing! I'll kill you! I'll rip you to pieces—!"
Zeus was near-mad. He rammed the Titan's lightning-laced forearms into Kronos's already-wounded chest and tore with all his might.
By now Kronos's own arms had been broken. He meant to fight back, but the Thousand-Handed's other proliferating chaotic arms pinned him down.
Upon the chest of the chaotic Zeus, many arms thickened and lengthened, turning into clawed, hellish hands that wrenched Kronos's chest wound wider, snapped obstructing ribs, and gouged away his flesh like a forest of hooks.
"Ahhhh! Let go of me! Zeus, you monster! Let go—" Kronos writhed and screamed.
But his wife and the other Titans were under assault from the likes of chaotic Poseidon and chaotic Hades, with no hands to spare.
In this quintessential god-king versus god-king duel, Kronos came to his end.
From the flesh torn from him burst the origin of life.
That was the power of the god of Agriculture.
Just as, long ago, when Demeter searched for the daughter Hades had carried off, the earth lay barren and nothing grew.
When the god of Agriculture's power dissipates, it should be a mortal blow to all life in the Greek world.
Once, Zeus dared not commit father-slaying, fearing that with Kronos dead the earth would fall into lifeless silence.
Now, it was different.
Demeter had long since held the office of Agriculture.
Or rather, so long as Kronos lived, Demeter could not reclaim it in full.
As Zeus tore, vast divinity blew from Kronos's Titan body, becoming a myriad tiny lights that flew into Demeter—far off and not taking the field.
Endless tearing, destroying Kronos's body—until at last, after a long, blood-soaked execution—
Zeus raised high his father's head, eyes wide in death.
"I am the true master of the Greek world! Who else refuses?!"