CHAPTER 270: CHAPTER 28

Hecate took a deep, trembling breath, feeling her chest rise and fall as the aftershocks of her spell still reverberated through the fabric of the cosmos itself.

The air, or rather, the conceptual space that passed for it in this battlefield, was thick with the residue of her power, humming with the scent of ozone and burnt starlight.

Her body ached in ways that no mortal or godly form was ever meant to endure; every vein within her felt as though it was carrying molten light instead of blood, and her mind still pulsed with the residual echoes of the incantation she had just unleashed.

Never before, not even during the chaos of the Titanomachy when she along with Zeus, Poseidon, and the Underworld Rivers fought Cronus, had she ever released such an immense flood of magic.

As her breathing steadied, her eyes turned back toward the battlefield in front of her, the headless giant, its colossal body convulsing endlessly, and the torrent of black ichor erupting from its severed neck.

From that vile liquid, new horrors were born every second: writhing abominations of shadow and flesh, dripping and crawling across the void, their mouths whispering in alien tongues, their countless eyes darting with malice.

Each creature carried within it a spark of that same unnatural hunger that defined the Outer Ones, and the divine armies struggled against them, their combined power barely enough to hold the creatures back from overwhelming everything.

Lightning crashed, divine fire seared, celestial frost spread across the battlefield, but for every monster burned, frozen, or crushed, ten more would emerge from the bleeding neck of Ymir’s twitching corpse.

The gods could barely advance.

The radiant legions of Olympus, the storm-born warriors of Asgard, the ferocious giants—all were locked in a battle of attrition they could not hope to win if things continued this way.

Hecate clenched her staff tighter, her knuckles whitening as she felt frustration gnaw at her heart.

She had unleashed power enough to crack the bones of the cosmos, yet even that wasn’t enough to end this nightmare.

Just then, amidst the chaos and screams, a light voice spoke beside her, bright and strangely full of excitement, "Was that... magic?"

Hecate blinked, momentarily startled by the question.

She turned, and there she saw Freya, the Norse goddess of beauty and desire, standing a few paces away, her appearance a chaotic contrast of divinity and exhaustion.

Her bluish-silver hair was wild, strands matted with blood and cosmic ash, and her armor was scorched, cracked, and drenched in the ichor of the monsters she had slain.

Yet, despite her state, her beauty remained undimmed, radiant even beneath the ruin of battle.

Her crimson eyes sparkled with genuine curiosity and admiration as she gazed at Hecate, like a scholar seeing the stars for the first time.

"Yes," Hecate replied after a moment, her voice weary, her tone carrying the faint trace of pride that only a true sorceress could possess. "That was magic."

Freya’s face lit up in delight, her smile blooming despite the carnage around them.

"Magic! I love magic!" she said, her voice full of infectious energy, a brightness so out of place in a field drenched in divine blood and darkness that even Hecate couldn’t help but let out a soft laugh. "But your kind of magic... it’s nothing like ours. Ours is tied to life, to the runes, to the flow of the world’s fate, but yours feels like it bends creation itself. It’s... beautiful."

For a fleeting second, Hecate almost forgot the battlefield around them.

There was something so pure, so untouched by despair in Freya’s enthusiasm that it felt like a brief light piercing through the suffocating weight of endless war.

The goddess of witchcraft found herself smiling faintly, a small, tired curve of her lips that nonetheless carried warmth.

"You have a good heart, girl," she murmured softly, her eyes glinting with rare fondness. "I already like you. But now isn’t the time to talk about the beauty of my magic."

Freya blinked, her expression sobering immediately, though that spark in her eyes did not fade.

"Right," she said, her tone hardening, her aura shifting from admiration to focus.

Hecate turned her gaze back to the headless colossus, its immense form casting an impossible shadow across the broken fabric of the cosmos.

"That giant must fall first," she said firmly, her staff raised once again, its tip glowing with the faint shimmer of renewed power. "As long as its body endures, that accursed blood will continue birthing those things. We have to destroy it completely."

Freya nodded, her face serious now, though her eyes gleamed with determination.

She turned her attention toward Ymir’s twitching body, watching the rivers of shadow-creatures pour forth.

Around them, gods were fighting desperately, some falling, others rising again with furious cries.

"Then we’ll destroy it," she said, her tone resolute, her divine energy flaring around her like sunlight on a storm-tossed sea. "No matter how many times it bleeds, we’ll burn it down to nothing."

Hecate smiled faintly again, though this time it was grim and full of resolve.

"That’s the spirit," she whispered, the exhaustion in her bones forgotten for a moment as her eyes once again glowed with eldritch fire.

Together, the goddess of witchcraft and the goddess of beauty faced the colossal corpse and its endless spawn, two pillars of different worlds, united not by origin or pantheon, but by the shared will to defy the cosmic darkness before them.

Without hesitation, Freya flew towards the horde of monsters.

Meanwhile, Hecate rose higher into the sky, her robes trailing behind her like a flowing shadow that shimmered with the residual essence of the void itself.

Her breaths came shallow and sharp, her body already trembling slightly from the immense expenditure of energy earlier, but her eyes remained steady, locked upon the divine figures waiting for her above.

There, amidst the fractured heavens of the Nordic cosmos, stood Odin, his one eye gleaming like a sun forged of wisdom and wrath, flanked by Thor, thunder raging wildly around his hammer, Zeus with his body crackling in blue lightning, and Poseidon wreathed in swirling tides of cosmic seawater.

Together, they stood as pillars of two pantheons, the air around them heavy with the oppressive pressure of divine might.

Odin’s gaze followed her ascent, the golden runes spinning faintly in his remaining eye.

He had witnessed many miracles throughout his eternal life—wars among the divine, births of worlds, and deaths of stars—but even so, the devastation wrought by Hecate’s earlier incantation had shaken him to his core.

He could still feel the aftertaste of it, that lingering hum of creation and destruction interwoven so tightly that it became indistinguishable from the first breath of existence itself.

"Hecate," Odin called, his deep voice cutting through the echoes of thunder and divine roars around them, "that spell of yours, it tore through the fabric of this universe as though it were parchment. Can you still use it?"

Hecate stopped beside him, her purple hair drifting in the ethereal winds, her staff glowing faintly as if it were pulsing in rhythm with her heartbeat.

She gave a small, measured nod.

"I can," she said quietly, her voice steady though her aura flickered slightly from strain. "Once, perhaps twice more. Any more than that, and I risk collapsing the equilibrium of my form."

Odin’s single eye flashed, his expression unreadable as he processed her words.

"Once or twice," he murmured, almost to himself, before glancing toward the raging battlefield below—toward Ymir’s enormous corpse and the unending torrent of black ichor that spawned monstrosities faster than the gods could destroy them.

"That may be enough," he said grimly.

Zeus, who was standing beside them, crossed his arms, his thunderous aura pulsing brighter with each word.

"We’ve been watching the giant," he said, his tone sharp and deliberate. "Every time it’s damaged, the flow of that... thing’s blood increases, and the monsters multiply. Cutting it apart would be suicide, it’ll drown us in filth. We’ll have to annihilate the body completely in a single strike."

Poseidon nodded, his trident shimmering with power as oceans swirled faintly behind him.

"If we destroy it piece by piece, it’ll adapt," he said, his voice low like the rumble of waves before a storm. "Its nature is chaos and it thrives on division. We can’t give it that chance."

Hecate tilted her head slightly, her sharp mind already forming a plan.

"Then I will clear the field," she said. "The monsters are the problem, there are too many of them. If I can erase them, even for a brief moment, you must strike immediately. Don’t hesitate, or the chance will vanish."

"Understood," Odin said at once, and then he closed his eye, his mind stretching out across the cosmos.

His voice, magnified by divine will, resonated in the minds of all gods who still fought within the broken realm.

"Prepare yourselves," his telepathic command thundered across the heavens, the witch-goddess will purge the abominations. "When the path is clear, use every ounce of your divinity. Do not hold back. One strike, all at once. That is our only chance"

At once, every god felt the call.

Across the broken battlefield, divine lights flared, halos ignited, weapons gleamed, and the air became thick with the aura of tens of thousands of gods readying for their final, all-encompassing assault.

Meanwhile, Odin, Zeus, Poseidon, and Thor retreated higher into the heavens, their instincts screaming at them to distance themselves.

They could feel the atmosphere around Hecate warping as she gathered power, time slowing, light bending, the boundaries of reality shivering as if bracing for a primordial storm.

The witch-goddess rose to her full height, her robes unfurling like wings of shadow, her staff glowing so bright it illuminated even the deepest cracks of the cosmos.

The runes of creation and the letters of death intertwined around her, spiraling faster and faster, forming a sigil so vast it seemed to encompass the entire sky.

Her voice echoed then, calm but immense, as if spoken not from her lips but from the heart of existence itself—

"I will show you the beginning. Heaven and earth split, nothingness births creation. Mortar of the stars, celebrate the eve of Genesis."

Then, her voice rose into a declaration that shook the stars themselves—

"Khaos Aidees!"

The words detonated across the battlefield.

A blinding beam of pure white light erupted from her staff, cutting across the heavens like the dawn of a new cosmos.

Wherever that light touched, reality itself unraveled, mountains dissolved into dust, the air fractured into motes of light, and the very laws of existence reverted to their most primordial state.

The monsters screamed, their bodies writhing as the light consumed them.

It was not pain they felt, but erasure, their existence was being rewritten, reduced to the formless nothingness from which all things were born.

Tens of thousands vanished in an instant, their corruption burned away by the raw brilliance of chaos made pure.

But even as the light reached Ymir’s colossal corpse, the body resisted.

The ichor surged like living magma, forming a barrier of flesh and darkness that absorbed most of the light’s impact.

The giant remained standing, though scorched and trembling, but all around it, the battlefield was cleared, and silence reigned.

That was all they needed.

"Now!" Odin’s voice bellowed through the shattered sky.

At once, the heavens ignited.

Tens of thousands of divine attacks descended like a rain of stars, lightning that split galaxies, fire that burned through dimensions, winds that shredded time, water that could drown planets.

Odin’s spear Gungnir shone like a comet as it flew; Zeus hurled a storm of lightning vast enough to blind creation; Poseidon’s trident unleashed tsunamis that roared through the vacuum; and Thor brought down his hammer with the fury of a thousand storms.

The combined force of the gods, the might of Olympus and Asgard united, descended upon the headless giant in one devastating instant, turning the universe itself into blinding light.