On the broad imperial road, two carriages sped forward. Queen Gorgo and High Priestess Helen rode together in the lead carriage, guiding the way ahead.
Samael drove the second carriage, packed with the women from the mountain stronghold, bringing up the rear.
As the journey continued, the jolting ride naturally led Gorgo and Helen, seated in the front carriage, to whisper cautiously about certain sensitive and obscure matters.
Although they had carefully set up a Barrier, it was effectively meaningless to a certain Divine Spirit hidden within the group. Not a single word of their conversation escaped Samael's notice.
At the same time, through subtle probing of the women behind him and cross-checking their accounts, Samael steadily pieced together the scattered clues. The fragments of information gradually connected, forming a clear picture.
As the missing pieces fell into place, the Ancient Serpent began to outline the current state of the war in northern Greece. His brow tightened further, and his expression grew increasingly grim.
The situation in Greece was far more tangled than expected.
Several months earlier, the Greco-Persian War had broken out.
The Persian army, driven by ambition, sought to swallow all of Greece in one decisive campaign. To conquer the mountainous land, they had to advance by both land and sea. Their navy not only transported supplies for the army but could also launch amphibious assaults when needed, flanking the Greeks.
As rulers long accustomed to leading vast armies in conquest, the dual kings of Persia, Darius I and Xerxes, each led their own forces, coordinating a simultaneous advance by land and sea.
Yet Xerxes and Persia were not mere brutes relying solely on force. Even before the war began, they had dispatched envoys disguised as merchants, scattering wealth along their route to secretly bribe and win over various city-states.
Now, with the army pressing in, this strategy of blade in one hand and gold in the other caused many city-states to collapse with alarming speed. Several hardline rulers were beheaded by the Persians, their heads dried and hung from the envoys' horses as a warning, exerting immense pressure on the rest of Greece.
For a time, a sense of impending catastrophe loomed over the land, and fear spread through every city-state.
However, a betrayal from Egypt dealt significant losses to the Persian forces. Seizing the opportunity, the Greek navy won a brilliant victory at the Battle of Salamis, severely damaging the Persian fleet.
This triumph against overwhelming odds, almost as if aided by the gods, greatly boosted Greek morale. Their will to resist surged to unprecedented heights.
But after suffering defeat at sea, the Persian army quickly regrouped and shifted to a land campaign. With overwhelming strength, they swept through and destroyed more than a dozen peripheral city-states.
Before long, Thessaly, the coastal region in northern Greece, became the next target.
In order to survive, Thessaly called upon Athens, Corinth, Mycenae, Thebes, Macedon, Sparta, and other powerful city-states to unite. In the end, a hastily assembled Greek coalition of over ten thousand troops, along with divine-blooded heroes from various city-states, gathered in the Vale of Tempe near Thessaly. Relying on Greece's complex terrain, they managed to stall the Persian advance and repel several attacks.
However, once the Persians stabilized their position, reinforcements continued to pour in. Their ranks even included many unfamiliar divine-blooded heroes, completely erasing the Greeks' already slight advantage in elite forces.
Among them, three foreign heroes recruited by Xerxes and treated as honored guests repeatedly entered the battlefield, inflicting heavy losses on the assembled Greek divine-blooded heroes.
As Samael listened to Gorgo and Helen describe these three figures, familiar silhouettes gradually took shape in his mind. His gaze flickered with a faint, unreadable light.
If his guess was correct, the three now fighting within the Persian army came from the Indian pantheon: Karna, son of the sun god Surya; Rama, king of Kosala; and Jinako, the girl possessed by the elephant-headed god Ganesha.
Realizing this, Samael's brow furrowed tightly, a trace of wariness rising in his heart.
As far as he knew, all three had reached the level of Divine Spirits. Setting aside Jinako, who was little more than dead weight, the true origins of the other two were especially significant.
India possessed two great epics spanning both the Age of Gods and the Age of Heroes: the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.
The former tells the story of the destined conflict between the brothers Arjuna and Karna, while the latter recounts the tragic love between King Rama and his wife Sita.
More importantly, Arjuna, Karna, and Rama—figures who run through both the divine and heroic eras of India—are deeply connected to the supreme trinity of Hindu deities: Shiva, Brahma, and Vishnu.
Arjuna once received guidance from Shiva, the god of destruction. Karna was granted blessings by Brahma, the god of creation. And Rama is, in fact, an incarnation of Vishnu, the god of order.
Their strength was hardly inferior to that of Gilgamesh.
Now that two of the Three Heroes of India had appeared within the Persian army, Samael had no choice but to stay on guard, and he couldn't help but grow deeply suspicious of the stance of the Indian gods.
Aside from the relative disadvantage of the divine-blooded heroes, the Tempe Gorge, Greece's defensive stronghold, was far from impregnable. It had fatal weaknesses of its own.
A certain young prince from Macedon had once pointed out that there were mountain paths running through the gorge that could be used for flanking. This made it easy for Persian forces to infiltrate from other directions, forcing the Greek coalition to split their troops to defend multiple points, further weakening their overall strength.
As the Persians pressed forward step by step, and reinforcements such as the Meteor Corps and the Lamp Mages joined the battlefield, the situation in the Tempe Gorge rapidly worsened. The defenders could only hold on with difficulty, their effective forces being steadily worn down.
Before long, the very mountain path the Macedonian prince had emphasized became the Persians' breakthrough point. It was torn open by force, leaving the rear of the allied army exposed to enemy blades.
Fortunately, at the critical moment when the line was on the verge of collapse, a certain portly man named Caesar pulled off a bold feint. He brazenly pretended to lead "Roman reinforcements" in a strike against the Persian flank, successfully bluffing the enemy. Thanks to this, the allied forces managed to preserve their remaining strength and withdraw in an orderly fashion, though Thessaly ultimately fell.
At present, the Greek coalition was retreating toward their next defensive positions: the Cape of Artemisium in central Greece, and... Thermopylae!
During the withdrawal, King Leonidas of Sparta, who commanded the land forces, had already sensed that the situation was turning grim. Acting on the advice of a certain Roman fat man and a Macedonian prince, he secretly sent requests for aid to the Areopagus.
However, every carrier pigeon released and every scout dispatched vanished without a trace.
With no alternatives left, Leonidas was forced to send word to his wife, Gorgo, entrusting her to personally travel to the Acropolis of Athens, gather forces, and reinforce Thermopylae.
To persuade the stubborn elders in the council, the decisive and sharp-minded queen not only emptied the royal treasury but also brought along Helen, the High Priestess of the Temple of Artemis, a woman blessed by the Divine Spirit and rumored to have deep ties with a major figure in Athens.
Leonidas, guardian of the Hot Gates; Julius Caesar, Emperor of Rome; Alexander the Great, the Conqueror King of Macedon!
Damn, fortunately Greece might have been lacking in raw military strength, but its strategic command was anything but weak. With two top-tier minds skilled in command and tactics, otherwise, with such limited forces, the army would have likely collapsed during the great retreat from Tempe Gorge.
Yet, the fall of Tempe Gorge came because of a mountain path. And the future fall of Thermopylae would also come because of a mountain path.
Fate, sometimes, truly cannot be avoided...