What would be the consequence of offending the goddess of misfortune?
Anyone could figure out without even thinking that nothing good would come of it.
But Night was not panicked.
After all, panicking would not help anyway.
However, though Night anticipated that Eris might make a big move, he did not expect it to come so soon.
After all, she came to seduce him and make him hers, but in the end, she had taken a serious loss and fled in disgrace...
In Greek mythology, Eris was an entity often confused with the Erinyes.
Though it had to be said that this goddess did have a rather petty streak.
In terms of how swift and ruthless her methods of retaliation were, if one said she was not a goddess of vengeance, no one would believe them.
But setting aside the dangerous name of Eris, few people still remembered that she had a special identity, which was that she was the sister of the war god Ares.
She alone did not consider herself a match for the hunting goddess.
But if what she could not have was destroyed, then Artemis would never be able to have it either.
And so, Eris left the Greek camp under the cover of darkness and headed straight for the war god's temple on Mount Olympus.
With very good timing...
Eris found Ares at his temple, extremely bored from the lack of a lover to keep him company.
The goddess of love and beauty had lately, for some unknown reason, suddenly stopped paying attention to him.
Her attitude toward him was also quite perfunctory.
It seemed she had found a new toy that interested her more.
This left Ares very irritated!
Ares, who was already in a temper, was not particularly pleased to see Eris arrive.
Even though Eris was his sister goddess.
"Eris. What are you doing here?"
Ares sat high on his divine throne and looked down from above at this goddess of conflict and misfortune.
"Naturally, I came to bring you some entertainment, Ares!
Do you not think that the chaos and blood in the mortal world right now are still far too little? It is really far too dull."
Eris quietly drew on her divine domain, releasing the side of herself that hungered for conflict, chaos, and war.
The yearning in Ares's heart was ignited.
The two already shared somewhat similar pursuits.
When he saw Eris reveal her true nature, Ares found his own desire to create a grander and more spectacular war increasingly difficult to contain.
Especially thinking back to the great decisive battle between Troy and Greece not long ago.
The figure of the hero who stirred his own desire to fight.
He looked at her and spoke.
"What do you mean?"
"Greece!"
"?! What?"
"I said Greece. The war between Troy and Greece on Earth is burning hot, but now Achilles no longer steps onto the battlefield. The upper combat strength of Greece is suppressed.
And then they lost the decisive battle in the presence of the gods.
If things continue like this, Greece might lose.
And then the war would be completely over. I imagine you would not want to see something that sad, would you?"
The war ending?!
For others, even for the heroes on both sides of the Troy and Greece conflict, that was a phrase they looked forward to enormously.
After all, the end of the war meant the arrival of peace.
Peace! What a beautiful and longed-for word that was.
But this absolutely did not include divine beings like Ares and Eris.
Craving conflict, craving endless and unending battle, until the flames of war ignite Olympus itself and burn on forever.
As war gods, their authority would be forged in those flames into the highest throne, achieving the greatest power.
In the neighboring world of No Game No Life, why did the god of war manage to transcend other gods born from other concepts and achieve the greatest power?
Was it not precisely because the act of contending for the one divine treasure, the supreme authority of the Star Grail, itself had to give rise to war?
And a god who fed on war would grow stronger the more war there was and the more fiercely it erupted.
Like a closed loop...
The more one wanted to put an end to war itself, the more powerful and spectacular a war one had to create.
And the more war was created, the stronger the war god became.
Toward the world of peace arriving like a nightmare that Eris described, Ares was, without question, averse to it.
Just as in the original myth, when Greece nearly wiped out Troy to keep the war going, Ares chose to defy Zeus's orders and help Troy that should have fallen by attacking Greece instead.
Help the weaker side, attack the stronger side.
Help whichever side was weaker, so that the war could achieve a balance and continue forever without end.
This was the purest will of the war god, and for humanity, the greatest malice with no malice intended.
Of course, for Ares, in the original myth, helping Troy also had another factor.
His old lover, Aphrodite, was on the side supporting Troy.
But the current situation was somewhat different.
The goddess of love and beauty had lately grown cold toward him.
Who knows what she had been sneaking off to do every day.
And on top of that, Greece was growing weaker by the day.
Ares looked at his sister and spoke. "You want me to go help Greece? Eris!"
"Of course! Ares. Do you not want to lead the heroes of Greece and storm the walls that Apollo and Poseidon personally built?
I imagine that would be the most supreme enjoyment.
The heroes need a true god to lead them. And in the process, I think you could even try to recruit the most heroic Griffith into your ranks, to fight under your banner.
Before the victory of all of Greece's war, and under the will of the God-King Zeus, even that Artemis would willingly offer up her own ward to serve under you."
When Eris mentioned the name "Griffith," it was as though a switch had been flipped.
The war god finally opened his eyes fully, and a trace of a different light flashed through them.
Everything said before seemed not to move him as much as that final line.
Seeing this, the corner of Eris's lips curved slightly.
She already understood.
The war god was interested.
Then what followed would not need her involvement.
Things would develop in the direction she wanted to see on their own.
She always knew that there was no god in all of Greece who could witness that battle not long ago and still remain unmoved by that perfect, beautiful, and heroic son of man.
If there was, they were only restraining themselves on the surface.
She was not like the goddess of beauty, who, after suffering a defeat, chose to go directly to Troy to help it against Greece.
Even now that Greece was weak, with the God-King Zeus and the other gods secretly helping, the final winner would still be Greece.
Eris went the opposite direction and instead instigated Ares to help Greece.
If anything, it was precisely by using the name of helping Greece to demand Griffith that made her glee in delight.
So Artemis...
Facing this move, how would you respond?
Would you, as I told the war god, willingly offer up your own follower?
Of course not! Having just been "bullied by Artemis" once, and knowing how much that woman treasured her own follower, Eris at this moment could already picture the scene of her falling completely at odds with Ares.
And Ares's strength was not so easily handled as this petty little goddess of conflict and misfortune!
Get ready to taste the bitter fruit of being hated by the goddess of misfortune.
Ar-te-mis!!
.
.
.
(End of the Chapter)