Thalos's divine voice spread far and wide, and the Aesir who had been waiting at the Bifrost terminus and guarding various fronts all showed knowing smiles.
This was the confidence and courage forged by more than a century of continuous, victorious god-wars!
By now, Thalos had reforged the Aesir into a war machine that wasn't particularly delicate but ran with incredible smoothness.
When it came to each small, localized war, there could be many tactics. Different god-kings had different, more granular methods. But the overarching strategy had long since been set.
The World Tree was the strongest point of the Ginnungagap world, and the Aesir's vanguard.
First, see whether the opposing world has any world-class entity capable of resisting the World Tree. If not, it becomes a one-sided beating and attrition, forcing the opponent to abandon their home-field advantage and switch to the offense.
Across so many god-wars, the only thing that had troubled or hindered the World Tree was the Sumerian world's rocky shell.
Thalos had long since absorbed that best practice, turning the current Ginnungagap world into a terrifying hedgehog.
Don't be fooled by how, once the two worlds drew near, the shortest distance between their spatial barriers was a mere thousand-plus kilometers.
For those Olympians not adept at spatial movement, that distance was absolutely deadly.
At that range, every second brought the chance of a World Tree root strike.
Unluckily for them, most of the Olympians were fooled by how sluggish the roots had seemed at first.
"What is that?" the goddess of banquets, Akete, suddenly screamed.
Because the roots around her in the void clearly differed greatly from what others were facing. At first, the roots seemed normal. As she charged, a root abruptly turned conical—and then spiraled toward her at speed.
So fast it was shocking, so fast the eye couldn't follow.
She had almost no time to react before "thin" roots, each ten to a hundred meters thick, were entwining her.
Akete didn't fail to try resisting, but once the space she flew through was locked down, all that was left was to blast the roots with divine arts and try to break out.
"Die die die! Go to hell! Don't come any closer—" As a proper Greek deity, Akete's power hadn't been low. But as the Greeks were either captured or killed, a belief-god like her, who lived on faith, lost her source of power.
Every divine art she cast sounded the death knell for her own demise.
Before ten exchanges had passed, she found she could no longer burn the roots around her.
Not only had the roots clearly developed resistance tailored to her divine arts, their density and whipping speed had both greatly increased.
"Who? Who's there?" Akete's guess was right—this cluster of roots was under the control of Neith, the Egyptian goddess of hunting and weaving.
As the World Tree root tactic became ever more important, Vidar the forest god had long since stopped fighting solo. Many gods from other pantheons who could help were assigned to Vidar as subordinate deities. Neith was just one such hired hand.
The roots she commanded were like a woven spiderweb, wrapping Akete with ease.
The sharp roots stabbed into the victim's divine body, forcibly sucking away part of her divine power.
"Let me go, let me—" In moments, the victim was like a little insect injected with venom by a spider, bundled in a mass of roots and passing out.
Akete was lucky—she'd run into a relatively soft-hearted Aesir.
Many lesser Olympian gods had no chance to surrender at all. The numerous sea goddesses, for instance—if they failed to dodge, the roots would instinctively lance into their bodies and drain them into "god jerky" in an instant.
There was no helping it; the World Tree had an innate thirst for water.
These unfortunate sea goddesses with water attributes thus became nourishment to strengthen the World Tree.
It's no exaggeration: of Poseidon's so-called three thousand sea goddesses, at least a third fell during the charge.
A similar number of nymph goddesses suffered as well.
These spirits with faint divine power became the most tragic figures of the assault.
One wail, one scream—and yet another "god" fell.
They died in such numbers, and in such misery, that the Olympian goddesses—long used to being served by nymphs—were heartsick.
Sadly, they had no time to spare.
All they could do was stick close to the Titans breaking the path and launch a glorious death charge at the Ginnungagap world.
"Ahhhhh!" Hyperion, one of the Twelve Titans, the sun god who soared the high skies, became the spearhead of the charge.
His colossal divine body, wreathed in terrifying flames of tens of thousands of degrees, reduced any root that dared approach to ash.
"Thin" roots a kilometer long ignited halfway in, set ablaze by the extreme heat like the fuse of a firecracker, and burned back with a hiss—all the way to the rocky shell encasing Ginnungagap before finally guttering out.
Hyperion's berserk charge lasted roughly five hundred kilometers—then Vidar set his sights on him.
When a horrifying main root over ten kilometers in diameter lashed down, the "mere" six-hundred-meter-tall Hyperion was like a pitiable little speck, swatted flying at once.
Before that massive root, he wasn't even an ant.
Though he strove mightily and charred perhaps a tenth of the root's surface, that was his limit.
The mighty Greek sun god was thus whipped away to who-knew-what corner of space.
"Damn it!" Crius, another of the Twelve Titans, let out a roar. His whole body shimmered with a strange radiance, condensing a meteorological light mass with the power to refract rays.
"Huh?" Vidar was surprised to find his lash had struck nothing but air.
"My son, that is visual deception. Do not over-rely on your eyes." Thalos's timely reminder made Vidar realize.
On the next strike, Crius was sent flying.
It must be admitted—the Titans were thick-skinned and tough.
To a Titan, the World Tree's thick main roots were a bit slow.
The thinner, relatively faster roots struggled to beat a Titan to death.
After Zeus subdued these Titans, they had indeed become tools for charging the breach.
But Thalos didn't care.
As Greek myth itself recorded, if the Titans truly could beat all comers, they wouldn't have been defeated by Zeus's new generation and reduced to prisoners.
With the World Tree's roots, merely cutting down the number of Olympians was a mission accomplished.
Seeing a large crowd of deities on the other side break through the roots' interception zone, Thalos instructed Vidar.
"My son, that will do. Now focus on completely dismantling the Greek world."
"Don't worry, Father—I'll leave them homeless!" Vidar said with full confidence.