Chapter 920: Ch 919: Zeus's Another Cosmology

Saints.

That was the collective name the Cross Pantheon gave to humans who had been canonized and risen into the three-digit ranks.

Saint George was one of them.

As the patron saint of soldiers and the sick, he had been canonized for countless years, and his power had long since settled into the upper tier of three-digit elites.

By all rights, a veteran three-digit like him should have ended a fight in seconds against someone like the Princess of Azure Ice Dodekatos, a four-digit rule-breaker who had only been pushed up by brute-forcing Sun Authority.

However, the reality was very different. He was getting pummeled, and badly, by that mermaid-harpy hybrid.

Swosh—

Dodekatos swung her jar, and huge swaths of air froze solid in its wake. A sprawling sheet of ice spread across the sky.

Trapped inside it, Saint George stared at the dark green blood in his palm, and the tiny scraps of organ floating in it. He could feel the concepts radiating off of it, and his mind went completely blank.

AIDS? Cholera? Black Death? Venereal disease? Syphilis?

His first thought was that Ryo had infected him. Then he threw that idea out.

Most of these diseases belonged to Zeus's, not Ryo's.

That bastard Zeus had actually poisoned him?!

Furious and shocked, Saint George began channeling the power of disease-warding, the authority of a patron saint, to purge all of this filth from his body.

He was an upright, honorable saint who kept himself pure. What was he doing with AIDS and sexually transmitted infections?

But before he could finish clearing them out, an overwhelming, unbearable agony flooded into his brain from every part of his body.

Is this the legendary Hydra's poison?

Through his rage, he figured out who the culprit was.

Ryo Yagami!

It had to be him!

He must have been releasing the Hydra's venom into the air from the very start, slowly poisoning him. That was the only way this could be happening.

And while he was still reeling, a new pain surged into his mind, like being roasted alive in the core of a star.

This scorching venom couldn't be cleansed or blocked. It made the blood in his veins boil, and for one instant his brain short-circuited.

How long had he even been standing next to Ryo and Zeus?

And these two lunatics had already piled this many poisons on him?!

For the first time, real terror rose in Saint George's heart.

Not even back when he was human, charging into battle at the head of the army, had he felt fear like this.

One thought filled his head.

...What the hell are those two? A Greek third generation and a fourth generation, what kind of lunatics are they?!

While he was still thinking it over, Dodekatos swung her hand, freezing everything it touched, and brought it down hard on him inside the ice.

...

..

Ryo looked at Zeus, clutching his chest and kneeling in pain, with nothing but deep contempt.

Using the traits of the Lord of Mosquitoes, Zeus had scattered transparent mosquitoes through the air, so subtle that even a spirit-sense scan couldn't pick them up.

It was, admittedly, a vicious trick.

That invisible, hidden swarm alone could catch most careless gods and buddhas off guard and leave them in serious trouble. And judging by the fact that even Ryo, who had been on guard the whole time, got hit, those mosquitoes carried some power to twist causality as well. They could warp the cause behind a poisoning so that it happened in total silence.

But Zeus had picked the wrong target for such a clever trick. He'd used them to drink the blood of a Pisces holder, the blood of a Pisces Saint.

Was Pisces blood something you could just drink?

Their poisoned blood was a lethal substance that even gods in Saint Seiya had to handle with care.

A single trace of it would wither the body's functions, wipe out the five senses, and let a person die miserably without pain and without ever realizing it.

Still...

"Who exactly are you putting on this show for?"

Ryo looked down with scorn at Zeus, kneeling in agony. Pisces blood didn't cause pain. It only ate away at the body and killed sensation.

Writhing in pain on one knee was not a symptom of that blood.

Was he trying to bait him into rushing in?

How laughable!

'I got careless!' Zeus thought bitterly.

Unlike what Ryo assumed, Zeus really was in agony.

A moment ago, he had used his own matching diseases to suppress the venom Ryo had planted, holding its effects below the level where they'd interfere with his movement. It was a fragile balance.

But the Pisces blood shattered that balance the instant it entered his system.

The unbearable burning, plus his sense of touch and his instincts slowly dying away, along with the penalties of his body failing, kept chipping away at Zeus's condition.

He hadn't seen any of this coming.

Or rather... Who the hell would have guessed Ryo's body ran on such a ridiculously toxic poison blood?

'This is going to be a problem.' Zeus watched the cautious Ryo, and his expression slowly turned grim.

Ryo was careful enough not to press the advantage, but Zeus knew perfectly well that in this state, he couldn't withstand a full assault from this freak.

'If this keeps up, the risk of exposure is too high. I need to bluff him first...'

The thought had barely formed when the gleam of an axe lit up in front of Zeus's face.

It was the shadow of the heavy stone axe in Heracles's hands, at point-blank range.

As a summoned star beast, Heracles had loyally carried out his role, taking the lead in Ryo's place and probing Zeus with a strike.

Seeing this, Zeus gave Heracles a long look and said softly, "What a shame. It's a little too early."

As he spoke, he released some kind of restraint on himself, spread his arms, and embraced the sky.

With that sigh, a towering, majestic divine mountain appeared high in the sky.

Its soaring peak had already broken through the atmosphere of the Little Garden continent and reached deep into the lonely stars of space.

Then a voice as authoritative as thunder echoed.

"In the name of the Great Father God! Break the shackles that bind you!"

"Remember! Sing out! This is the epic of the gods!"

As the hymn rang out, a mighty river flowed from the hazy past into the present. Lofty figures stood along its banks, stood in its waters, or drifted downstream in small wooden boats, riding the current of history.

At the source of that river, a god from the distant past, one whose shape couldn't be seen and whose presence couldn't be sensed, slowly opened its eyes.

In a daze, a beam of divine light burst toward Ryo, toward Heracles, toward Zeus, toward the entire 3345 Outer Gate!

"Damn it!"

Heracles, who had just attacked, recognized the true nature of that divine light immediately.

It was the attack of an ancient god summoned by Zeus's Another Cosmology, Theogony.

This was an attack from the age of chaos, aimed at the entire 3345 Outer Gate, meant to erase everyone and everything inside it!

"Damn you!" Heracles swung his axe, and bolts of black lightning leapt from his arm as he hacked savagely at Zeus.

Far off, in the Thousand Eyes territory shielded by its guardian lord, Shiroyasha shot to her feet, furious.

"He actually, he actually dared!"

Beside her, Queen Halloween only chuckled. "So he was planning this move from the very beginning!"

Before the ancient attack could land, Zeus, already cut in half by Heracles, looked at Ryo in the distance with his ruined body and grinned. "Not running? That's an attack from Chaos. It's only the Chaos conjured by the Theogony, but it's not something an ordinary three-digit can meet head on."

Ryo didn't answer. He only asked a question back. "So from the start, your plan was to wipe out me, 3345 Outer Gate, and the 2105380 Outer Gate where Arcadia sits, all in one go?"

"Exactly!" Zeus's mouth curled up, and he said with a smile, "When there's a wary mouse in the field, the best way to hunt it is to blanket every place it could hide with fire."

He went on, clearly pleased with himself, "That's why I kept stalling with talk, even goaded you into a contest with poison. Then I paid for it with part of this avatar's spirit rank to warp the positions of the 2105380 and 3345 Outer Gates. All of it was to create a chance where you couldn't escape."

Then Zeus sighed, a little regretful. "Too bad. Something unexpected went wrong, so I didn't stall long enough. I did drag in your precious Arcadia, but the most important part, the setup to stop you from escaping, is still a bit short. You could call that a serious failure of the plan."

"No, you didn't fail at that."

Ryo closed his eyes and spoke calmly.

"Oh?" Zeus raised an eyebrow, looking at Ryo in surprise.

Just then, a brilliant but not dazzling light made him squint.

"The reason you failed is that you never guessed what form my Another Cosmology would take."

As if wrapped in the sun, Ryo stood in that radiant glow and, for the first time, openly drew his true trump card.

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