Structures built upon the convergence points of a world's ley lines rarely faced destruction.
Barring catastrophic disasters, such places could endure for ages.
To mortals, mountains were simply mountains.
To gods, they were something else entirely.
The divine perspective saw the world through the lens of energy. Everything could ultimately be reduced to its underlying forces. Even faith itself was simply another form of energy.
At the foundation of this multiversal reality lay four primordial elements:
Time.
Space.
Energy.
Matter.
Though countless worlds and civilizations had evolved from those origins, every phenomenon could ultimately be traced back to those same fundamental pillars.
That was why the gods of the Celestial Court didn't see Mount Olympus as a mountain at all.
What they saw was a colossal concentration of the world's ley-line energy.
"If Your Majesty intends to conquer this world," said the Time God, Longhear, "then this mountain must eventually be removed."
The vast knowledge Drex had granted him allowed him to grasp far more than most divine beings.
Still, understanding Olympus and reaching it were two different matters.
At present, they couldn't even approach it.
Whatever power protected the mountain was unlike anything they had encountered before.
To the gods of the Celestial Court, the phenomenon was mysterious and unfathomable.
To Drex, it was riddled with flaws.
He raised a hand.
The entire Celestial Court army vanished.
Then, in the next instant, they appeared within Olympus's divine domain.
The principle was surprisingly simple.
The divine domain was like a painting.
The Celestial Court's gods were figures outside the canvas.
No matter how they moved, they couldn't bypass the boundary.
But Drex existed on a far higher level.
To him, the divine domain was merely a picture.
And if it was a picture...
He could simply paint new figures into it.
Just like that, the obstacle ceased to exist.
"My Emperor's power is unmatched!"
The Celestial Court's gods immediately offered their praise before launching their assault on Mount Olympus.
The Olympian gods were still immersed in endless pleasure and indulgence when the invasion began.
The attack caught them completely off guard.
Zeus especially.
At that particular moment, he had transformed himself into a woman and was attempting to seduce Apollo.
Then the invasion arrived and ruined everything.
"RAAAAH!"
A furious roar exploded across Olympus.
The summit of the mountain erupted with dazzling lightning.
Zeus was beyond enraged.
Frankly, anyone would have been.
As the god who ruled thunder and punishment, and the supreme ruler of Olympus, his divine power overshadowed every other god in the pantheon.
The moment he unleashed his full strength, the heavens responded.
Dark clouds swallowed the sky across hundreds of miles.
Silver lightning surged through the storm like countless serpents writhing through the clouds.
The sheer pressure alone would have driven ordinary mortals to their knees.
The Celestial Court's gods weren't impressed.
If anything, Zeus was the one shocked.
He hadn't expected to be facing so many beings on the level of Skyfathers.
The Twelve Primordial Witches.
Yang Jian.
The War God Xingtian.
The Warlord Chiyou.
Sunpiercer.
Kuafu.
Seventeen Skyfather-level beings.
And that wasn't all.
Drex had recently created another terrifying powerhouse.
The Nine-Spirited Sage.
A colossal nine-headed lion.
Eighteen Skyfather-class gods in total.
Zeus barely survived the opening exchange.
He was blasted backward and severely injured almost immediately.
Only then did the Twelve Olympian Gods realize what was happening.
At first, they had assumed Zeus had gotten himself into trouble again.
That sort of thing wasn't exactly uncommon.
Now they understood.
An enemy invasion was underway.
The Olympian gods rushed out to confront the Celestial Court.
Unfortunately for them, more than half of them weren't even true Skyfather-level entities.
Against Drex's forces, they stood little chance.
The Nine-Spirited Sage moved first.
Its nine massive heads swayed slightly.
In a flash too fast for even the Olympian gods to react to, nine jaws snapped forward simultaneously.
Nine gods were seized.
The technique was known as Nine-Head Capture.
It was the Nine-Spirited Sage's greatest trump card.
Its effectiveness dropped dramatically after the first use, and it could only target up to nine creatures at once.
But that hardly mattered.
The attack had already succeeded.
Without so much as a scream, nine Olympian gods vanished into the lion's stomach.
The remaining gods froze in horror.
What kind of monster simply swallowed gods whole?
At that moment, Zeus returned.
He had hoped the Olympian gods could buy him some time.
Instead, they had nearly been wiped out by a single beast.
The Nine-Spirited Sage couldn't assume a humanoid form.
It remained a gigantic nine-headed lion.
Originally, neither Zeus nor the Olympians had paid much attention to it.
After all, Greek mythology was full of monsters.
Most of them ended up dead.
This one was different.
Terrifyingly different.
It had casually devoured nine divine rulers.
Even Zeus felt a chill.
Then determination hardened in his eyes.
He raised a hand toward the heavens and roared.
"Thunder! Judgment!"
The storm answered instantly.
Countless bolts of lightning converged above him.
A spear materialized in his grasp.
The Lightning Spear.
The next moment, Zeus hurled it.
The weapon tore through the heavens wrapped in endless thunder, carrying enough destructive force to shatter worlds.
Legend claimed the spear had been forged by either the Cyclopes or the Titans.
The truth hardly mattered.
It was a divine artifact embodying the authority of the Sky God himself.
An object comparable to the greatest divine treasures in existence.
Perhaps even greater.
The moment it appeared, every god present felt the overwhelming pressure radiating from it.
Lightning exploded across the battlefield.
These weren't ordinary electrical discharges.
They were manifestations of divine authority.
God-Thunder.
Each bolt carried enough power to annihilate almost anything it touched.
Compared to this, even the Sentry's billion-degree thermal radiation seemed crude and simplistic.
Both appeared to be energy attacks on the surface.
In reality, they existed on entirely different levels.
Even Thor's divine lightning would have been shattered upon contact with such power.
Just as the devastating attack descended, Tempest stepped forward.
The Thunder God of the Celestial Court.
He wielded divine lightning as well.
But unlike Zeus, who shared portions of his authority with Hera and other divine powers, Tempest held near-total dominion over thunder itself.
In ancient Chinese mythology, the highest thunder deity had been the Heavenly Worthy of Universal Thunder.
A supreme divine ruler commanding countless thunder gods and celestial generals.
Yet even that position possessed only a fraction of thunder's overall authority.
The power had been divided among countless divine offices.
Tempest was different.
Drex had granted him sole dominion.
One god.
One authority.
Thunder itself.
Lightning was more than a weapon.
It was one of the fundamental mechanisms of creation.
The force that connected opposing energies.
The catalyst that drove transformation.
Without it, the worlds could not function as they did.
Its presence echoed throughout the cosmos.
From the birth of stars to the clash of primordial forces.
Thunder existed everywhere.
And now two divine masters of thunder stood opposed.
Tempest raised his hand.
Divine lightning answered.
Then the two powers collided.
The world detonated.
BOOOOOOM!