I am Thalos, Odin's older brother

At the end of the day, the Aesir gods were a battle-mad race. A pantheon so revered by Viking pirates could never have had a foundation rooted in peaceful farming.

What truly tested the Aesir God-King wasn't wartime, but peace.

From Crown Prince Thor to the most ordinary mortal warrior, every single one of them was a battle maniac—ironically, it was Thalos, the God-King himself, who was the voice of reason.

Times of peace were when a God-King's capacity for rule and governance was most truly tested.

Of course, after experiencing Ragnarok and an external war, everyone understood that without God-King Thalos mediating the worlds, overseeing the fusion, and creating a new cycle of nature, they wouldn't have the powerful divine strength they enjoyed now.

That understanding didn't stop them from bottling up all their pent-up battle lust, waiting for the day they could unleash it.

Bringing the Tuatha Dé Danann and new gods into the Aesir pantheon served as a wake-up call to the mid-tier Vanir gods and the goddess Jarnsaxa. Meanwhile, the Tuatha Dé Danann, having finally recovered, also hoped to raise their bottom-tier standing within the divine hierarchy.

Especially the Tuatha Dé Danann's war goddess, Morrigan—formerly a "war goddess," her desire for combat was perhaps the greatest of all. When the two worlds fused, her divine domain had been significantly weakened, leaving her subordinate to Tyr as a secondary god.

With the arrival of news this time, she was undoubtedly one of the loudest voices shouting for war.

The gates of the Golden Palace were in utter turmoil.

Those qualified to enter had rushed in early. The ones without permission loitered at the entrance, craning their necks to catch glimpses through any opening they could.

Inside the great hall, the atmosphere was nothing short of chaotic.

"My Lord, any new developments?"

"Your Majesty, please let me be the vanguard this time!"

These single-minded fools gave Thalos such a headache that he had to bellow in frustration to calm the frenzy: "Enough! I never fight an unprepared war. Let me send out scouts first. Come back tomorrow!"

"Yes…"

Thalos dispersed the crowd and made his way to Valhalla.

Once again, the time had come for the warriors raised over a thousand days to be used in a single moment.

Thalos never deliberately incited wars among the mortal nations of Midgard or elsewhere, but neither did he ban them outright. Wars could erupt over anything—from a mountain full of ore to a mere stream. As long as natural resources were involved, no dispute was too small.

Where there is war, there are casualties. Valkyries would then select the finest mortal warriors from these battles, bringing them into Valhalla after careful evaluation.

The battle of Ragnarok had long since proven that the souls of mortal warriors had limited strength.

Thalos no longer considered the einherjar as his main fighting force; instead, like last time, he intended to use them as spies, inserting them into enemy worlds.

In the Celtic world, Siegfried and Beowulf were prime examples.

Having completed their missions, the two were granted semi-divine status by Thalos, fulfilling his promise and placing them as Scáthach's lieutenants to train the next generation of einherjar.

Before scattering a new batch of einherjar as scouts, Thalos did something else first.

In the chaotic cosmos, a formless power gathered—and one by one, chaotic monsters and giants were launched in various trajectories toward the place where the Kraken soul had been attacked.

These creatures were all chaos beings that Thalos had stockpiled from Ragnarok and the Celtic war.

Yes, he hadn't wiped them all out, but instead wrapped them in order energy and saved them for situations just like this—to use as pathfinding stones.

No matter how Thalos launched these creatures, it seemed at first like it was all pointless.

Not a single chaotic being could break through what appeared to be a completely impenetrable defensive net. They shattered like eggs against a vast, unyielding wall.

Thalos, unfazed, continued projecting chaos monsters, this time expanding the area of projection outward, both laterally and vertically.

"Boom, boom, boom—"

Another stone-giant chaos monster exploded—but interestingly, just 300 meters away from it, another chaos monster passed through along a parallel path.

Thalos rested his cheek on his palm, eyes half-closed as if dozing, but within his mind, a conical three-dimensional space was being fully mapped out.

"It seems the opponent is a powerful long-range god who indiscriminately attacks both order and chaos beings. In the chaotic universe, their sensory limit appears to be about 100 kilometers. Effective attack range on large targets is probably no less than 50 kilometers; on smaller targets, around 5 kilometers… Remarkably capable perception!"

Thalos concluded his analysis.

Don't be fooled—Thalos could hurl the Kraken's soul 100,000 kilometers ahead only because the entire Ginnungagap world's power was supporting it.

That was passive sensing, too—a system that periodically emitted soul pulses of order energy backward. When those pulses stopped, it meant something had gone wrong.

That was different from active perception.

Active sensing usually meant that the moment you detected the enemy, they were also likely detecting you.

If their perception was superior, then you were basically walking right into an ambush without even knowing it.

Still, through this method of throwing stones to probe the path, Thalos had more or less determined the nature of the opposition…

Elsewhere, a massive bow hovered in the void of the chaotic cosmos.

A female deity in scant clothing frowned as she floated mid-air. Her left hand rested on her hip while her right flipped her radiant golden wavy hair with an annoyed expression.

"What's going on? There's more and more garbage in the 'Sweet Sea' and 'Salty Sea'? What disgusting crap is this?"

Muttering to herself, her hands didn't stop. Countless arrows of light shot from her stringless bow, accurately obliterating the chaos monsters drifting through the chaotic currents.

She quickly grew tired of it.

"Hmph! Whatever. These trash can't possibly break through Anu's 'Luludanitum' crust anyway!" the goddess snapped impatiently, then turned around and simply left.

Her retreat left Thalos, ten thousand kilometers away, momentarily puzzled.

Still, he continued scattering chaos monsters like beans until one of them collided with something massive and solid.

"What is this… a world?"

A colossal world!

In terms of sheer volume, it was even larger than the original Ginnungagap world. Only after merging with the Celtic world had the new Ginnungagap world surpassed it in size.

But this new world was extraordinarily strange. In Thalos's understanding, most worlds resembled inflated balls, possessing a flexible and elastic world barrier. Such barriers allowed the world to expand or contract with ease.

This one, however, was different.

Its outer layer was made of unimaginably hard rock.

That alone would make Thalos think it was just a desolate planet or something similar.

But this was beyond strange—it wasn't just that it had a walnut-shell-like structure, its interior brimmed with intense divinity!

"What? A celestial god acting as the world's barrier?"

[Check out my Patreon for +200 additional chapters in all my fanfics! Only $5 per novel or $15 for all!!] [[email protected]/Mutter]

[+50 Power Stones = +1 Extra Chapter]

[+5 Reviews = +1 Extra Chapter]