After fighting for so long, Thalos had already taken the measure of the Greek world's size.
It was vast, essentially covering the entire Mediterranean coast. Counting Atlantis's more than seventy million square kilometers, its total ocean and land area wouldn't be less than two hundred million square kilometers.
Only, it existed in the form of a plane, not an entire planet.
A planar structure with its thickest parts under a hundred kilometers doomed it to fragility.
Across that vast land and sea, there wasn't a single plate that was truly sturdy; last time, Gilgamesh had been able to hack off a huge chunk of continent with the Sword of Rupture, which proved the point.
In all the cosmos, Thalos had never seen a planet or star that resembled a true spherical world.
This planar structure simply couldn't resist the World Tree's roots.
"Rumble!" Countless World Tree roots plunged into various tracts of the Greek world and began to take root and sprout. They were both seizing the world's control and wreaking more destruction upon its continental plates.
Every place a root drove in was chosen by Thalos with precision, targeting the weakest stress points between plates and using the roots' powerful boring force to damage the Greek world.
The situation was clear: so long as Vidar had enough time—so long as Uranus couldn't completely destroy every single root—the total prying-apart of the Greek world was only a matter of time.
Above the charging Olympians hung a guillotine; none of them knew when the World Tree's roots would utterly destroy the domain their divinity relied on, leaving them unable to receive any further divine power.
It was another race against time!
Before the Greek world was completely destroyed, they had to seize control of Ginnungagap; that way, not only could they salvage their old lair, they could grab a massive territory.
Now it was a question of whether the Aesir could dismantle faster, or the Olympians could seize faster.
On one side, Uranus and Gaia—former husband and wife—joined forces after a long estrangement to resist the World Tree's invasion. On the other, Rhea, one of the Twelve Titans, had already slammed into the outermost Luludanitu rock-shell defense ring of the Ginnungagap world.
That rock layer, thickened to a full kilometer, was already an insurmountable moat for most subordinate gods.
After multiple reinforcements, many sections of the rock were as hard as iron, combining hardness with a degree of toughness.
Unfortunately, under the second-generation earth-mother Rhea's divine power, that sturdy rock disintegrated in great swaths into quicksand; one impact sent countless grains blasting into the boundless void.
Rhea was doing an impressive job.
But Ginnungagap's spatial barriers were layered one within another. The moment the outer "tortoise shell" was cracked, a second layer of blazing magma erupted out.
"This…" Zeus's eyelid twitched.
"I'll handle it!" Poseidon roused the divine power within him, and a vast wave spanning dozens of kilometers leapt across space and slapped down hard, colliding with the jetting, incandescent magma.
"Hiss—" There was no air in space, but in the interlayer between the void and the inner atmosphere—within the stacked spatial barriers—anything was possible. Under the gods' gaze, fire and water clashed at the site of that giant "ring-shaped crater."
An ocean's worth of water was vaporized by the magma's heat, turning into murky steam masses drifting into surrounding void.
The magma within was rapidly cooled, congealing into clotted black, viscous slag.
Rhea struck again—only this time, what shot out from beneath the cooled magma layer was pure water.
Not seawater!
If it had been simple seawater, Poseidon was confident he could spend the divine power to forcibly convert it into his elemental thralls.
This was simply water.
"Ocean" and "Water" as divine offices were not interchangeable.
As one of the most fundamental four elements, the "Water" divinity sat above "Ocean" in rank.
It wasn't that Poseidon didn't try to seize control of that supermass of water locked into the spatial barrier.
He failed.
On the surface, it was an Aesir called the Goddess of the Lake opposing him.
In truth, Poseidon could feel that above the Goddess of the Lake there was a god-king—or god-emperor—using his incomparable divine power to crush Poseidon's consciousness in return, allowing his god-sense no purchase.
Let alone seizing control of that water mass, Poseidon was even slyly stripped of control over parts of Atlantis's seas.
The wildest part was that this wasn't even a divinity the other side was actively trying to command and wield at full force.
Their attitude was so casual that they lightly transferred control of the office to the Goddess of the Lake for the moment.
The sheer nonchalance—and overwhelming mastery—left Poseidon incredulous.
"How is that possible?" Poseidon cried out, losing his composure.
"Don't get bogged down. Don't entangle!" Zeus barked, then turned to another Titan.
Phoebe, the goddess of radiance among the Twelve Titans, nodded with a bitter look and rammed her head into that water shield of unknown thickness.
The third-layer spatial barrier was also nearly a thousand meters thick. If an Olympian of human scale rashly dove in, it would be no different from a chick dropped into the middle of a pond; only Titans—so massive in stature and still wielding considerable divine power—could serve as unique shock troops capable of opening a true passage.
With a blinding divine radiance, a massive void more than twenty kilometers across finally appeared before the Greek gods.
"Charge!"
Zeus didn't need to give the order; everyone knew this would be one of their few chances. No one hesitated—thousands of Olympians, great and small, surged through.
"What… is this?" Hera's voice quivered slightly.
The scene before them felt unfamiliar and a bit beyond imagination.
Spread out before them was a vast space with a hint of chaos.
They were beneath the rock strata of Ginnungagap's lower world, so what they saw were broad tracts of underground with indeterminate thickness. In the gods' sight, these were inverted towering peaks, immense quantities of floating soil spiraling in the "sky," and tens of thousands of World Tree roots of varying thickness.
The Greek gods had thought that once they broke into Ginnungagap, they could escape the World Tree's roots. They'd been naïve—this was where the roots were thickest.
Some thick, some thin, many with diameters over a thousand meters.
These knotted roots were no dead matter; just as the Greek gods had seen outside, they writhed without cease, sucking the earth and even the chaotic energy of outer space for nourishment.
There were so many of them that a host of Greek goddesses felt as if they had fallen into a pit of snakes, their eyes filled with writhing, slithering "vipers."