“You say you are the divine spirit Ishtar?”
“Yes.”
Grimm dangled this white-haired woman with one hand.
She was in a complete mess without a shred of divinity, looking precisely like a drowned dog.
Where is the divinity?
“You mean to say that you, a Mesopotamia goddess, got cornered by Odin right as you entered the highway intersection, and were chased into fleeing for your life by a few of His underlings?”
“…Yes.”
The white-haired woman gritted her teeth.
No matter how much she put on a brave face and pride, she couldn’t deny the fact that she had just suffered a crushing defeat.
“With just that, you still call yourself a goddess? You’ve cracked everyone up.”
The name Ishtar always made Grimm recall how his roommates before his time-travel complained that many characters in Type-Moon share the same face, and Ishtar has Tohsaka Rin’s face…
Although Grimm was just a casual fan who had only watched two Fate anime, he also knew that this person’s appearance completely mismatched the physical features of Tohsaka Rin.
That’s right, he didn’t time-travel to Type-Moon anyway, and the gods over there didn’t seem this weak.
Besides, think back to the first day of his time-travel when an Odin drove over with time stop to assassinate him—did he even need to guess what kind of background his traversed world had?
It was definitely Dragon Raja!
This ghost place was Odin’s Niflheim!
Taking a face-full of mockery, even Ishtar couldn’t help but be angered at this moment:
“Didn’t you say this place is the ‘Land of the Dead’, Niflheim? I… hate this kind of gloomy place of dead people the most!”
Although she wasn’t familiar with the Norse pantheon, it was certain that rule suppression existed in this world.
That treatment was simply identical to when she broke into the gloomy woman’s Underworld back then—her divine power was almost being shaved down to nothing here!
“Hey, still hard-mouthed!”
Grimm said, “I’ve roamed this ghost place alone for decades, and I haven’t died a single time, ha.”
He thought to himself that as a dignified ordinary human time-traveler who was assassinated by Odin with gungnir using time stop right at the start, he was still living well to this day, and relying on a cautious mindset and guerrilla assassinations, he had wrestled with the other party for so many years.
If you’re bad, practice more.
If you can’t afford to lose, don’t play!
How great would it be to keep a cautious and low-profile mindset; why put on airs of high-mindedness pretending to be a goddess!
He raised his arm and hoisted the dead-dog-like goddess onto his shoulder.
“Hey! Put me down!”
However, the disgraceful goddess was powerless to resist.
A pair of snow-white long legs swung futilely in mid-air.
…
Thirty minutes ago.
Snowfield City, battlefield of the Holy Grail War.
“Really! To actually cause a mere goddess to make a special trip to a gloomy and damp cave—based on this alone, you deserve to die ten thousand times over, Gilgamesh…”
Ishtar, with white hair, red eyes, and a charming appearance, was speeding along the highway driving a brightly painted Ferrari sports car.
In the distance was a boundless desert.
As well as a black circular giant crater with a radius of several kilometers.
That was the phenomenon left behind earlier, on the summoning night of the Holy Grail War, after two Servants—Gilgamesh and Enkidu—”friendly exchanged blows”.
And the goddess Ishtar had also awakened due to the two of them, possessing this Einzbern Alchemy puppet.
Drip, drip.
It was raining.
“Hmm?”
Ishtar took off her sunglasses and looked out into the sky above the city.
A dark gray canopy obscured the firmament, and the dense threads of rain suddenly poured down in torrents.
Water vapor gradually rose, and the car windows were covered with a layer of unremovable white fog.
The sports car continued to speed along the road.
She clearly felt that the things hidden beneath the shadows of the city were surfacing, and a certain thick “otherworld” aura was close at hand.
“Is this an invitation to me? A bit interesting…”
The goddess snapped her fingers lightly, and the sports car immediately seemed as if the accelerator pedal had been pressed all the way to the floor.
After emitting a deep roar, it rushed straight forward like an arrow released from a bowstring.
The car crushed, ground, and sliced open the raging curtain of rain, and the invisible barrier within the water color was pierced through almost simultaneously.
The void rippled cryptically, and the dense fog instantly dispersed.
It was as if another world was coming head-on.
Ishtar narrowed her eyes.
The canopy suddenly darkened, and the rain was massive, presenting a scene where heaven and earth connected.
The car’s headlights were like two bright, sharp swords piercing through the heavy gloom ahead on the highway, illuminating rows of dark shadows standing at the side and…
A tall deity riding an eight-legged steed.
With one eye covered, holding gungnir made from the branches of the World Tree, riding the eight-legged divine horse Sleipnir…
This was the supreme god of the Norse mythology’s Aesir clan, Odin!
Ishtar was startled instantly.
So she wasn’t the only divine spirit meddling in this counterfeit Holy Grail War?
Seeing that she wasn’t stopping, Odin let out a low shout:
“How dare you crash toward the throne of a god!”
“So what? Should I avoid your edge?”
Hearing this, she snorted derisively.
What era was it, the Age of Gods had vanished, and what could still appear now were at most the reverberations and reflections of divine spirits.
In other words, they had all dropped from the Challenger tier to the Bronze tier, and the gap between each other wasn’t that big either—
Odin suddenly raised gungnir, fierce might entangling divine aura, pointing the sharp edge of the spear as if an entire world was pressing down horizontally.
Ishtar instantly froze.
Wait, this déjà vu feeling of being targeted by the entire world…
Why did it feel somewhat like back then in the Age of Gods when she forcibly broke into the Underworld and suffered sanctions from Ereshkigal?
But by what right did you directly come with your own entire world at the start!
The Holy Grail War is not supposed to be like this!
You should first build a temple, then summon attendants, occasionally recruit priests and shrine maidens, and then hold a grand ritual on that special…
day to let the Age of Gods return.
Finally, the remaining mystery on the surface would completely revive, all conditions would be gathered, and then you would declare the rebirth of the mythical world to the whole world!
Why did you just directly start with the domain right off the bat?
I don’t accept this!
“Vowing right here!”
Odin was chanting low towards gungnir in his hand, reciting ancient spell words that ordinary modern people could not understand.
But Ishtar understood.
Norse mythology records that vows made facing gungnir will surely be realized, and this even became the origin of the legend of wishing upon shooting stars.
And the instant He spat out the first syllable, Ishtar felt as if she had been struck by lightning—her divinity, divine aura, and divine core (reverberation) began to be rapidly weakened and reduced!
A sense of powerlessness surged like a tide.
Her steps staggered, her body lost balance, and she tumbled out of the sports car.
The Ferrari crookedly crashed into the guardrail on the side of the road.
“The rules of a god…”
Odin continued to chant in a low voice.
The invisible rules of the entire world were being manipulated by Odin amidst his words, pressing down toward her!
“Cough!”
Ishtar felt a bloody sweetness in her throat.
After falling and rolling a few times, she forced her spirits up, concentrated her magical energy on her legs, and pushed off fiercely with reinforcement magic, barely managing to catapult herself away from the spot.
Almost simultaneously, several dark shadows darted out from the dark, pursuing relentlessly.
Beneath their black cloaks, muscles were knotted and torsos were well-built, every move and stance overflowing with divine aura—
These dark shadows were all Heroic Spirit warriors who had received the divine protection of gods!
Odin’s voice was still echoing, “None shall pre—”
“Pre-my ass, what thunder!”
Whoosh—!
An exaggeratedly sized horse-slaying giant saber sliced through the air and struck.
Odin hastily turned sideways, sweeping across with his spear to knock it flying, but he also had no choice but to stop the Yen-ling of “Divine Punishment”.
Rumble!
A pitch-black Maybach abruptly barged into the battlefield, violently crashing through the dense formation of dark shadows.
The car window rolled down, and a hand stretched out.
With a flip of the palm, it steadily caught the horse-slaying saber that had flown back in reverse.
Amidst the gaps of evading the encirclement of dark shadows, Ishtar raised her head with difficulty, watching in shock as that Maybach charged straight toward Odin’s direction!
She saw the man inside the car leap onto the car’s hood, jumping up high with the momentum of the Maybach.
At the same time, he loudly chanted ancient spells in his mouth, invisible spatial fluctuations spreading in all directions—
That was a barrier domain formed with oneself as the center, where laws overflowed and forcefully rewrote reality!
Where the domain shrouded, the rolling divine aura was chaotic and scattered, magic formulas stagnated and collapsed, and the lights of the Rune runes extinguished one after another.
Looking at Odin again, along with the dark shadow guards around him, their momentum visibly declined to the naked eye.
In contrast, that young man who raised his butcher’s knife against the gods saw his momentum not decrease, but increase instead!
There even appeared vague circuit-board-like texture traces on the man’s body.
Magical energy raged wildly within his body, overflowing outward and generating terrifying gale winds!
Ishtar saw it clearly; that was the sign of his own circuits undergoing Overload!
And the spell he activated…
was a Reality Marble?
The effect was to dissolve mystery?
That person actually wasn’t suppressed by the world, and could casually activate such a Great Magecraft in Odin’s home ground!?
“That is lightning, a thunderbolt. The instant it landed on the ground, everything stopped.”
[O you who forget fear]
That was neither a voice nor a sound.
Yet it echoed and resounded in the mind, consistent with the sounds and language heard in the forest.
While everything was still, the sound kept echoing.
“…[The Allfather, Odin…!?] Ragnar cried out.”