The sight before them was already starting to drain the Olympians' morale.
They had struggled so hard to break the void defenses and punch through three layers of spatial barriers, only to discover they had merely opened the first door.
Staring at the endless tangle of roots like a pit of snakes, every Olympian felt a chill seize their limbs.
"No time to hesitate! With me—charge!" Zeus piloted the "Thousand-Armed Giant" and dove toward the basal rock of a lower layer beneath the Ginnungagap world.
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
Zeus made up his mind: even if he had to blast a path by brute force, he would drive straight to the World Tree's core.
Just as Zeus led the charge, a "small" accident occurred.
Several soul-beasts appeared from who-knew-where. These semi-transparent hulks were clearly being directed by the Aesir; the moment they thrust through the spatial barrier, they arrowed straight for the Titans around Rhea.
"Awooooo—"
"Beast, how dare you!"
Had this clash between Titans and monsters taken place upon the earth of the Greek world—or on some continent of Ginnungagap—it would have been an epic duel for bards to immortalize for ages.
But the battle erupted on the world's edge where no mortal eye could see, dooming the record to be beautified and penned by the historian of the victors.
The abyssal Kraken, the venom-drake Nidhogg, the world-ending demon wolf Fenrir, the sun-chasing demon wolf Skoll… these "Twilight Beasts," dead for a century, should have faded from memory; at the outbreak of war, they once more entered the gods' sightlines.
Only this time, Thalos didn't need to micromanage them; all control had been temporarily handed to subordinate beast-aspect deities.
Those minor Aesir would normally be unqualified to stand before the Twelve Titans. With the soul-bodies of doomsday beasts upon them, and Helheim's near-endless death-force as an energy supply, they could fight those Olympian Titans to a standstill.
The Aesir sub-gods, already briefed, had a crystal-clear objective: hit Titans only; ignore Olympians.
Zeus now faced a dilemma. He could take the gods and, with the Titans, encircle and slay these incorporeal soul-beasts—at the price of slowing the offensive—or abandon the Titans and continue the thrust.
Zeus chose.
"You finish off those beasts and catch up on your own."
Chase?
Is it that simple?
Ginnungagap's world-will was clearly at work. The gaping hole just torn in the spatial barrier was closing at a pace visible to the naked eye, like a body's self-healing sealing over a world-class wound.
The Titans had no attention to spare; they had to focus on the foes before them.
The beasts roared; the Titans bellowed.
The devastation these fights should have wrought would be world-ending; because this was at the world's rim, it had no impact on the mortal realm.
In the Golden Palace, Thalos sat upon the Supreme Throne. Through the world-will and divine sight, a flood of real-time optical images appeared as psychic projections above the hall, neatly categorized.
Every Aesir could clearly see the movements of their assigned opponents.
"Do it." At Thalos's call, the already hyperactive world-will received the order at once.
Right before Zeus, a massive tuft of World Tree roots began to converge.
If not for knowing the World Tree's plant form, anyone seeing this cluster—thousands of roots of varying thickness, the smallest a hundred meters across—would have thought it an ultra-gigantic, corrupted octopus.
Before the Olympians' eyes, that composite mega-root came crashing down.
In front of the World Tree's thick roots, even the "Thousand-Armed Giants" controlled by Zeus and his brothers looked like ants.
Every Olympian flinched on instinct.
Some left, some right.
Little did they know the purpose of the falling roots wasn't to wound any one god, but to cut the battlefield.
Before their eyes, the roots abruptly fanned out, forming a wall that nearly split the entire bottom space of Ginnungagap in two. The roots moved, grew, and spread at speed; in a few breaths, the gaps that should have been between them were crammed full.
Only then did Zeus realize that he and Hades were together—but Poseidon had been separated.
"Poseidon?" Zeus felt his divine sense heavily disrupted and blocked; he could barely reach Poseidon.
"One-on-one, huh? I like it!" Poseidon wasn't scared in the least. His broken-up reply even carried a hint of eagerness.
Poseidon's confidence wasn't shared by others. Some Olympians were already losing heart.
Are we all going to be divided, surrounded, and annihilated here?
By Murphy's Law, the worst thing you fear will happen.
Another massive swath of roots came slashing down.
"Everyone move with me!" Zeus shouted.
But when a downpour of World Tree roots fell like a cloudburst, how many could actually keep pace with Zeus?
Everyone knew the World Tree was the embodiment of Ginnungagap's world-will.
With divine-power transmission severely impeded, every bit spent was a bit gone. Who would pit their finite reserves against an entire ultra-gigantic world?
When dodging becomes reflex, it's easy, in a careless moment, to be cut off by masses of roots.
The Olympians' clumsy performance was fully visible to the watching Aesir.
Their eyes burned hotter.
If the two pantheons charged in formation across an open plain, it would be hard to say who would win; perhaps the Aesir, with stronger average combat power, would prevail, but not without losses.
Now that the Olympian ranks were carved apart, the waiting Aesir could pick their targets at will.
Cut! Cut! Cut again!
When Zeus and the others had been split into eight battle groups, Thalos halted the roots' further partitioning.
No need.
The World Tree's roots weren't invincible; as partition walls, spread too far and too thin, they would lose strength.
Too much is as bad as too little.
At the God-Emperor Thalos's command, the Bifrost over Asgard flared with unbroken arcs of rainbow light.
Beams bearing the main Aesir fighting force spanned the heavens.
To mortals across Ginnungagap's continents, it looked like the gods were moving—turning into meteors and plunging down to meet the evil Olympians rising from the "underworld" depths.