Survival or Strategic Withdrawal

Lein spoke so casually that it sounded as if he were discussing whether a bamboo rat looked a little too fat and ought to be roasted.

That had once been a powerful pantheon.

Though the Vanir Gods might not have been very famous, that was because they had chosen to ally with the Asa Gods and eventually merged with them almost completely, at least in name, accepting Odin as their God King.

How weak could a pantheon be if it had fought the Asa Gods head-on for over a thousand years since the dawn of Chaos without either side gaining the upper hand?

Even now, more than twenty Vanir Gods had answered Thor's call and gone to the battlefield on Midgard to fight Chaos. Quite a few of them were giants who had been over ten meters tall since birth.

Yet Lein had the power to decide the fate of the homeland of the Vanir Gods with a single word.

His bearing completely stunned both the gods directly under his command and those listening in at his temple.

At that moment, Athena understood a great deal: what Lein valued was probably the Thunder God Thor. A prince of the Asa Gods' royal bloodline, he had lost his divine realm to the Chaos invasion. For Lein, a God King on the verge of becoming a conqueror, that was as good as it got.

The Asa Gods, the main branch, had fallen to their knees, while the Vanir Gods, the offshoot, still possessed their own divine realm and territory. Thor might be able to keep the Vanir Gods in check for a little while, but with their foundations intact, they would one day become a thorn in the side of Thor's rule—and even Lein's.

So Athena guessed that while the other God