War was a game between nations.
Plane War was a life-or-death game between two worlds.
Unlike the heroic legends of fantasy novels, although individual strength clearly exceeded the average, in this multiverse, war was still a game of "attrition."
It was not that individual strength was unimportant. Rather, no matter how strong you were, you would always encounter an even stronger opponent. Unless you were a God Above Gods comparable to the Twelve Pillars, you were still merely a chess piece in wars between races and planes.
And chess pieces were meant to be expended.
The war had entered its ninth day. In reality, the Western Allied Forces had already been fighting for ten days and had rotated through two waves of troops, while both sides' high-level combatants had gone through countless rotations.
More than a dozen demigods and even gods had already fallen.
Judging purely by losses, humanity actually held a slight advantage. No god-level beings had fallen, and far fewer demigods had died than on the other side.
Aside from their numerical advantage in low-level combatants, which often forced high-level combatants to act early and suffer an absolute disadvantage in intelligence and opponent selection, the greater reason was that they had always been fighting in another world. The "world" itself was their greatest enemy.
Gods could not connect to the world, so they naturally could not freely rewrite its "rules" or bestow "privileges" that required the world's support—Divine Grace.
Humanity had the intelligence advantage. Their low-level forces held a numerical advantage through unmanned equipment, and they carried Divine Grace to counter opponents whose abilities they restrained. Anyone who could still lose under those conditions was probably just unlucky. War always had surprises, intelligence always had omissions, and those powerhouses always hid plenty up their sleeves. Mistakes were inevitable.