Foolish Brother Odin

Chapter 482 Zeus's Wound
"Ahhh?"

"Impossible! Absolutely impossible!"

"How could the goddess Athena betray His Majesty Zeus? She is the emperor's own daughter!"

The commotion in the crowd turned into a clamor, with countless Athenians jumping out to angrily berate the more than one thousand Amazons opposite them.

They expected the Amazon warriors to glare at them angrily and hurl insults back, but to their surprise, they showed no intention of attacking at all.

Instead, Penthesilea pointed at the priestesses of Athena and said with a wicked grin, "Just ask them."

The priestesses, who had been aloof when they were saving people, now looked rather grim.

【My believer! I fought a bitter battle and was captured. Through the persuasion of the great divine emperor Downs Paulson, I finally understand the true meaning of the universe…】

[That shameless Olympian king Zeus not only covets me, but also persecutes me along with Hera behind him...]

His Majesty Paulson guarantees your safety...

【…】

Athena, at least, had some self-respect. She first claimed that she was captured because she was exhausted, then angrily denounced Zeus as a scoundrel, thus placing herself on a moral high ground. Finally, she subtly threatened him with the current situation.

She wasn't saying this to her priests and 'Saints'. These were her die-hard fanatics, who would still charge into battle even if Athena announced she was going to be the villain, slaughtering her father, grandfather, and deceiving her grandfather.

What Athena had to do was to persuade them, or to persuade the Athenians through physics.

The newly arrived Athena dared not ask Downs for any divine office; all she could get at this stage were these poor Greek believers.

Her priests and Saints discussed it and carefully considered their wording before announcing it to the public.

Unsurprisingly, this caused a great uproar.

Almost all Athenians felt like they had been tricked.

No way! How could you, Athena, resort to such deception and sneak attacks? That's incredibly unethical!

However, they faced another very real problem: most of the Greek city-states had been destroyed before their migration. Those city-states without the protection of the Olympian gods, such as Sparta and Corinth, were all reduced to ruins.

Seeing that they had escaped, most of the Athenians were pragmatic.

Of course, there were also followers of other gods who protested on the spot, and even cursed Athena for her betrayal.

In response, Athena's priests tried to reason with them and appeal to their emotions, and if they still couldn't convince them, they simply... enslaved them.

Unless the jump is particularly exaggerated, they rarely use lethal force.

Not only the Athenians, but Athena also preyed on Greek slaves.

A large number of Athena priests traveled through slave camps that held large numbers of Greek slaves, preaching: "This is how it is. Those who are willing to believe in the goddess Athena can immediately be freed from slavery and promoted to free citizens. They only need to pay taxes to the kings or nobles who are loyal to His Majesty the Aesir."

Those poor Greeks who couldn't bear the whipping any longer simply surrendered, including even the former Mycenaean king Agamemnon.

No one mocked him for being spineless. Even the goddess Athena voted for him; what was a mere mortal king compared to that?
The most ironic thing is that from the very first night Athena defected to Zeus, she kicked him with the "excitement kick" and by dawn she still hadn't put her foot down. Three whole days had passed, and Zeus still hadn't realized that Athena had defected.

It's perhaps hard to blame Zeus, since he was being chased by his own great-father for three days.

In fact, the battle at Syracuse cannot be described as a stalemate between the Olympian gods and the Titans; rather, it was a dynamic balance.

Compared to the previous Titan war, the list of gods on Zeus's side was largely the same, with the addition of Ares and Hephaestus, and the absence of Hestia. Crucially, compared to before, the three Zeus brothers now held divine positions.

Unfortunately, the divine realms of the three brothers have all suffered major blows, and the supply of divine power is insufficient, which is somewhat similar to when the three brothers had not yet obtained the divine positions of the sky, the sea, and the underworld.

Oh, it's just somewhat similar.

The once-prosperous Syracuse had long been reduced to ruins by the Titans' attack.

Even without deliberate destruction, the mere trampling of these giants, whose height was generally over a hundred stories, easily reduced this beautiful city-state, which Greek craftsmen had spent countless years building, to dust.

"You bastard Cronus! Do you know what you're doing? By attacking me, you're just letting those damned Aesir gods have an easy time!"

Thunder tore through the chaotic sky, and arcs of electricity illuminated Cronus's enormous face, which was filled with hatred.

The second-generation God-King raised his right hand and shattered a blazing white lightning ball, the electric current shooting out from between his fingers exploding into sparks on the obsidian scythe.

But so what?
Even as the seawater surging ashore formed whirlpools at his feet, and the deathly aura emanating from the underworld surged towards the old king like a swarm of sharks, he still did not stop his steps.

Bearing the most devastating lightning strike in the world, gritting his teeth, and panting heavily through his massive nostrils, Cronus approached Zeus at a speed unimaginable to mortals.

After fighting for so long, Zeus was quite familiar with his father's fighting style. With a beautiful backflip, he dodged the scythe shadow that was enough to cleave space in the blink of an eye. The power of the sky crushed by his heel suddenly transformed into a sharp wind spear and pierced the seemingly insignificant small wounds on Cronus's huge body.

For a massive Titan, a wound a meter or two long is merely a superficial injury. However, the divine power of wind and thunder can writhe and churn within such a small wound, gradually aggravating the Titan's injury.

After fighting for so long, to think that Cronus was like a bull, relentlessly pressuring Zeus but failing to hit him would be to greatly underestimate this former king of the gods.

The pupils of this former Titan God-King glowed with a strange divine light. His gaze was like a pair of colossal scepters capable of splitting mountains and cleaving rocks, striking heavily into the void. In reality, divine power pierced through the sky, exploding into a strange, rain-like green shower.

These fine, magical threads, resembling green grass bathed in the spring sunshine, pierced through Zeus's scalp, and in an instant, countless new vines, almost invisible to the naked eye, sprouted from the hair follicles on Zeus's head.

"what?!"

The tributary of the river of time that hovered over Syracuse suddenly froze.

Zeus saw that his head was turning green because of the power of Cronus, the god of agriculture.

This natural force clearly affected Zeus's control over the power of thunder, causing him to pause for a moment.

This momentary opening was seized upon by Cronus, the most powerful chicken-slayer in the world. He first slashed down with his huge black stone scythe, and as the scythe collided fiercely with Zeus's thunderbolt, Cronus used an extremely savage shoulder charge.

And so, with extreme brute force, he shattered three of Zeus's ribs.

This is why Zeus was unable to discover Athena's situation immediately.

(End of this chapter)