Chapter 346: A New Tool for the Sect

There was no reason to delay any further, as Ares had already heard everything he needed to, so he started charging up his pressure to empower his Esoteric Compression. Though he'd invented the art, he didn't even realise he could do this until recently when he was messing around with his pressure. There was a non-zero chance that the ability to charge this art had something to do with acquiring the Backfire Bindings but Ares hadn't tried experimenting with removing them to see if he could still pull this off. Anyway, this was a fantastic ambush tool as he could overwhelm weaker foes instantly, knocking everyone to the floor and breaking various bones throughout their body while injuring them heavily. As there was nobody in this room above bloodline awakening, and no one was even really close to being at the peak of that realm either, this one art was going to incapacitate this entire room with ease. The real problem was the robot that Ares was eyeing up because it would be mostly immune to his pressure. It would still affect it to some degree but what bones were there to break in this thing? Ares could maybe twist the metal in some spots and slow it down but any meaningful damage would have to come from his attacks on it afterwards.

As for the robot's combat capabilities, Ares was taking a gander at it through the lens of Omniscience as he charged up his art in a bid to see what this thing had up its sleeves. It was about 8ft tall, resembled a sort of bulky humanoid golem, and was made of some kind of strange pitch black metal. The metal was likely a specialty ore from Neo Gear but Ares wasn't aware of the kind of properties it would possess so he was going to have to go in mostly blind in that regard. Thankfully his Omniscience was reassuring him his destruction magic would work on it despite the fact that, seemingly, it possessed some anti-magic qualities. It was good to know if for no other reason than because it meant Ares couldn't really use darkness pillar magic via the Prowler on this thing. He'd been considering using Spike on the way in to lock down the robot by piercing its feet but that was no longer really an option.

Ares kept spying around the robot's frame as he came up with an assault strategy and saw two barrels on the ends of each arm that looked like they'd be firing off flames the second those things got to work. Not small streams, though, more like a wild flame that spread wide but not far. It was quite different from a traditional Flamethrower art in that it seemed more tailor made for rampant destruction and less so for precise aiming at range. That made sense though, if this thing was supposed to be impervious to magic, or close to it, the best strategy would be to attack it physically which meant getting close. At that kind of range the shotgun flamethrower approach that spewed a cone of fire in front of it was definitely the better choice. As an aside, it was particularly fitting that the Firestarters' secret weapon was basically a walking flamethrower tank. Did the name come first or did the robots? Ares put the chicken and the egg-esque philosophical question to the back of his mind and kept analysing the robot.

There were a few other small additions that looked to be mostly structural additions, making it tougher to take down, and very little all else. This thing could probably take more of a beating than Fin did, at least against regular opponents anyway, just because of the absurd amount of layering on this thing's body. It wouldn't be slow and clunky, though, as there were roller skates on the bottom of this thing's feet, allowing to to speed around and either give chase to foes ro distance itself from anything troubling it. The last piece of information that Ares picked apart from his pre-fight scouting was that this had been made by a gadgetry pillar expert in, give or take, the peak of transition realm. Though that cultivation base hadn't translated fully into this robot, and part of it was lost due to the gadgeteer's incompetence, it was still decently powerful for something that had the strength level of about halfway through the transition realm. This thing could very easily beat Fin in a one vs one and would put up a very real scuffle against the krakyrn. Would it win? Nope, not at all, but it would last a decent while and maybe even inflict some damage which was all pretty much thanks to its raw sturdiness allowing it to stay in the fight for considerable periods of time. If Ares had to guess, this thing was about as powerful as someone like Dirk with his monstrous transformation so it was definitely up there. Actually, this thing would beat Dirk because it didn't have any blood to siphon but that wasn't really relevant. All in all, just based on Ares initial observations, this thing could be an elder in a weaker sect! And there were more than likely two of them following Firestarter orders that Ares was going to have to take care of. It was tedious but very doable as Ares wasn't too fussed about what he was seeing, it didn't blow his mind or make him wary. The conclusion of Ares' judgement was that this thing could not stop him so, without further ado, it was time to party!

Ares fell through the the boundary between the prowler's Ebon Nightmare Zone and reality, appearing in a free fall directly above everyone who'd yet to notice him. Ares thought he was going to get a clean ambush but the robot stood to attention, clomping forward and scanning Ares as he fell. This thing had quick reactions times, far faster than the rest of the people in this room, but it wasn't going to be enough to stop what happened next. "Esoteric Compression!" Ares fired a massive wave of pressure straight down that landed on a cluster of the Firestarters who were only just now realising something was up. Ares. Ares was up! Directly up! There was nothing that could be done about the incoming pressure bomb, though, so it landed on their heads and sent out a massive shockwave that tore through the crowd and blasted everybody around the room like they were snooker balls. The people closest to the centre suffered the most but everyone was either knocked unconscious, when smacked into a wall, or had their legs and arms broken and could no longer move. They'd been thoroughly scattered and pushed away from the middle of the room for Ares to use and square up against the robot in. It would have been mighty inconvenient if they'd remained immobile in the middle as then Ares would have to move them for their own safety lest they get burned alive by the robot mid fight. He was still trying to keep them alive and get some extra moolah out of his efforts!

As for the robot, it picked up a chunk of metal that had been lying around on a nearby shelf, presumably a left over from when the boating business was still operational and miscellaneous items like this actually had a non-violent use, and chucked the projectile at Ares who was still mid fall. Firing off the Esoteric Compression had pushed him upwards a bit and killed all of the momentum of his dive so he was still hanging around in the air even now. That being said, Ares had a million and one ways of navigating through the air as freely as a bird so he took stock of the situation, decided he had enough time to cast an art, and summoned a "Crystalised Void: Wall" directly underneath him. The chunk of metal was closing in fast so Ares kicked off the newly built wall to dodge it before using double jump and recalibrating his direction so that he went sailing past the robot's head and wound up behind him while still in the air. Ares didn't have time to deliver a slow attack otherwise his momentum would carry him away from the robot and he'd miss so he just threw his Converter boosted and pressure enhanced foot out while chanting "Stamp Out". It had been a while since his Utilitarian boots had seen any action but, now that he had the Converter, there was no good reason not to be using it in conjunction with his massively improved physical strength. Though Ares was kicking out at the back of a sturdy metal machine's head region, his foot collided with the robot and won handily, blasting the robot across the centre of the room and making it collide directly with the Wall Ares had just set up. He'd used it as both a platform to kick off, as well as a pre-emptive trap to push the robot into and make it suffer, so what came next was fairly obvious. "Detonate!" Currently Ares only had one type of art in his arsenal that could be blown up remotely so it was no surprise he was targeting the wall with his chant. Maybe if he had multiple such traps he could make it so that Detonate could be used as a mind game tool, forcing the opponent to guess which explosive was about to blow, but as is it was just a simple switch he could flip to follow through on the Void arts.

SHATTER

Disintegration tendrils Burst out through the wall and impaled the robot in multiple locations, easily piercing through the magic resistant armour like it was made of cardboard. Already Ares was coming out with a dominant start and the fight had barely even begun. This was just the difference between him and a brainless machine but he wasn't done just yet as he was improvising now and coming up with attacks on the fly to really rub it in. 

BANG

A chunk of the robot's head was blasted off by the piece of metal it threw earlier as Ares had used telekinesis to bring it right on back and attack it from behind while it wrestled with the disintegration tendrils. The robot was taking a battering and had yet to even fire off a single attack towards the culprit so the faces of the Firestarters, who'd finally gotten over their shock and understood who was raiding them, were rather crestfallen. All their plans, machinations, and handwork up until now, setting up people in positions of power and manoeuvring behind the scenes, and a single person was capable of ruining it all by himself. They'd expected Hunter to be a nuisance, and maybe Geordie too but to a lesser extent given that they were already on the Federation and that was the captain's weak spot, but Ares showing up had been a devastating set back. Actually, at this point, it was a lot more than just a mere 'setback' as their entire plan was going up in smoke right before their very eyes.

At the rate Ares was going he could probably take on both of the robots at the same time if he had to and that was a humbling realisation. This endeavour had been doomed to failure from the get go and, instead of getting their lives together and putting the past behind them, these lot were going to become slaves for the people they hated to their cores for trying to start a war they'd already lost the second Ares boarded this damn country. They had some specks of hope in their heart that Ares would make a mistake and get scorched to death, or at least be forced to flee so they could recuperate and find another angle of attack, but it just wasn't looking likely. It didn't help that Rox had come sauntering into the building with the two lookouts from before being dragged along behind him while unconscious. Though Rox was idling about and not getting involved in the robot fight, as Ares sent him a mental message not to, his presence alone was enough to crush the Firestarters dreams. Ares felt confident enough that he didn't even need to gang up on the robot, he was just having fun here while his backup sat off the the side and the robot was fighting for its life. Everything about this, from top to bottom, was disastrous...

For what it was worth, the robot had finally freed itself form the clutches of the disintegration tendrils but now its broken body was revealed in full and let's just that any of the Firestarters with trypophobia were probably squirming on the floor in disgust right about now. You could see clear to the other side of this thing in several locations and sparking wiring was dangling about in places they really shouldn't have been. Many wires had been severed and were hanging loose but, if nothing else, none of them seemed critical to keeping this thing functional so it was still looking for a fight.... AKA, more of a thrashing because what was happening to it really couldn't be considered a fight in any objective viewer's opinion. It skated over to Ares and blew fire bursts from its barrels that threatened to reap Ares' life. Unfortunately for the robot, Ares had dealt with a LOT of fire in the last twenty four hours so something of this calibre really didn't phase him at all. Ares calmly used a Shift to dodge to the side before firing off a "Grand Annihilation" and watching the chaos unfold from the side-lines.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM

The end result was, unsurprisingly, another win for Ares as the machine was thrown onto its back and sent sliding across the room until it hit its head against a wall and came to a crashing halt. The robot's hull was dented and warped in places but, to its credit, only the parts that were already damaged really suffered in any meaningful way. The holes, that the tendrils had created earlier, had been widened by a decent amount but the actual magic resistant parts of the frame that were still intact were holding on. This was Converter boosted annihilation so this thing definitely deserved praise for holding on in the golden storm that Ares had just chucked at it. Still, it couldn't withstand them forever, like it could against weaker and more common magic, and Ares could throw out maybe even hundreds of Grand Annihilations in a row now... If he took it slow and spread out his usage of the art, he could absolutely keep chanting this art for weeks on end if he had to and the robot would inevitably crumble under the onslaught even without the use of disintegration to soften it up prior. Ares was satisfied with this annihilation experiment so next up was a bit more disintegration testing. The Wall had already proven itself to be extremely lethal if Detonated against a regular human, as the magic resistant robot stood no chance, but, then again, most disintegration was lethal anyway so that wasn't a great comparison. Still, what it did to the robot was undeniably impressive and Ares was appreciating the Converter more and more. Had this fight happened before his acquisition of the treasure, he might have struggled a bit here and had a fight that went a lot like the mecha dryad one back in Baja. It would have taken him a decent amount of time to breach the hull and start doing real damage but, now, his disintegration was deadly enough to perforate this thing and even slice it in half if Ares wanted to. Funnily enough, that was his next order of business as he pulled his scythe out and activated Voidwalk. 

Ares had spotted a major flaw in this robot's design in that its arms lifted incredibly slowly and it had trouble aiming directly upwards. He noticed this when the robot was sent tumbling across the room as, even then when it needed control over its body to kill its momentum, its arms looked like an old man's fumbling about as it tried to stop itself from tumbling. The Federation was mostly flat, as building vertically required extremely expensive boats that could take the load and so only the elites had such tall shops, which meant that this thing would never need to aim up for any real reason. people couldn't fly at cultivation realms that were this low and the few that could wouldn't be able to overpower this thing in direct confrontation anyway. Those flamethrowing barrels were heavy and difficult to lift but it wasn't expected to ever be a relevant drawback considering the type of opponents it would be facing. As for Ares, though, he could exploit this easily. Voidwalk, Double Jump, Wall, Gamble, and the Zephyr all allowed Ares to stay in the air forever and move around unfettered by gravity. Point in case, just as the robot got up, it scanned the room and realised Ares was standing upside down on the ceiling above it and so it started 'running away'. What it was really doing was repositioning so that its arms didn't' have to lift so far to aim at Ares, which meant this thing was clever despite not being sentient, but all Ares had to do was follow its movements and sprint after it on the roof. With his Converter boost and annihilation enhancement the robot was never moving faster than him even with the skates on. The robot had no answer for this and it seemed like Ares had found a bug in the code because it simply would not stop trying to run. It had been programmed to repeat the optimal strategy indefinitely, not to adapt and overcome whatever plagued it. It was actually a bit of a let-down because it was decently tough, at least against anyone who wasn't Ares, but a machine was still an unthinking object at the end of the day and so it had clear limits.

Ares stopped messing with the broken bot, fell from the ceiling, and, with a twirl of his body and wrist, slashed his disintegration-coated scythe diagonally across the robot's arm. He'd aimed for the body but it managed to swivel out the way with its skates with a last second dodge. It really did have fantastic reaction times, actually, and this was the second time it had been relevant. Ares almost felt jealous! This was one thing it could do better than him, react at ludicrous speeds. It didn't have that little thing called human limitation so it could pull of impressive feats in that department and make it look easy too. It was a rather obnoxious combination, actually, because you could never move quicker than it could keep track of you so if you tried to blitz it from the front you would always get a face full of flames for your trouble without fail. For most ordinary cultivators, this thing was pretty much unassailable. Fast to move and swivel thanks to the skates, impossible to take down at range with conventional weaponry or magic, and up close and personal you would get barbequed. A real nightmare to deal with if you were weaker than it.

The robot was the perfect tool to crush a weak country like the Federation but against an expert cultivator it fell short in many ways and Ares had just found another shortcoming in the long list of them that already existed. The robot did try to fight back after losing its arms, so that was decent of it, but the fire that came out of its severed arm was just randomly firing in every which direction, unleashing nothing more than tiny puffs of fire like a dragon with a blocked nose. Evidently there was no failsafe regarding damage to the flamethrowers and that weapon was mostly unusable now. It could get lucky and randomly hit Ares but that was incredibly unlikely as that thing seemed to be firing in every direction other than towards him right now. If Ares was actually moving as well, and forcing the robot to 'aim' with the broken stump, it wouldn't be able to hit him even if Ares were drunkenly stumbling around. Those flamethrowers were crafted to act like shotguns but, evidently, not sawed offs. That was a design space the gadgetry pillar expert who crafted this should really look into... Although it was kind of a doomed matter either way, realistically. If somebody was capable of leaving the flamethrower in that state to begin with then fixing that small issue that was only relevant after would do basically nothing. You could either win against this thing, at which point a marginally more consistent flamethrower meant nothing to you, or you couldn't beat it and such a change would be irrelevant and something that you never even saw. The rest of the robot could do with improving first before worrying about this weapon specifically.

Ares had seen enough. He'd hoped that maybe this thing would put up a fight and let Ares have some fun with it but the results spoke otherwise and they spoke loudly too. This thing could not hang in the cultivation big leagues and served a better purpose as a gatekeeper of sorts. In fact, this thing gave Ares an idea... It was unfortunate that this robot was broken already but maybe it could be fixed up and used later on? Ares was planning on capturing the robots and handing them over to Lizzy so that she could reinforce them and maybe even create more if given the appropriate materials. Ares didn't want this thing as defence measures for the sect, though, he was thinking about making these bad boys the trial to become a core disciple! It did somewhat screw over cultivators with other skillsets that weren't directly combat related but they could be dealt with on a case by case basis. If you wanted to be a core disciple in Ares' sect, beating one of these things was a necessity. Did that mean fewer people were going to become core disciples? Yes, absolutely. In fact there would only be a handful in the sect currently as is if this change were implemented right now... But it was worth it. Distinguishing the greats from the plentiful above average was going to be imperative with how many people were going to try and join up in the upcoming year. Ares might even have to create another tier or two of disciple just to accommodate the sheer variance they would all offer in terms of skill level and talent. What this did mean, though, is that destroying this robot fully wasn't in the cards... 

This was a tricky situation but Ares had an answer to the problem somewhat. It would require dealing more damage to the robot but Lizzy would manage, he was sure of it. One of the holes in the robot allowed Ares' Omniscience to just about pinpoint the fuel tank for the flamethrower so if Ares could bust that thing up, and make it non-functional, he could shove the then harmless robot inside the Puny Prisoner to make it tiny. It would have no real way of breaking out so this was a very workable strategy. Ares would then rinse and repeat the process with the other one and he'd have two captive mini robots at his disposal! They'd look like tiny toys that the kids of Red Sun played with which was neat so Ares got to work and laid the trap at his feet while Shifting around the robot to shepherd it into the correct location. Ares took repeated swings at the robot which was now wary of the disintegration coated weapon and backing off just as Ares wanted it to. Of course Ares was intentionally slowing himself down here, lest he accidentally break more of the robot, but this was needed because the robot could not keep up with him at full throttle. It had the reaction speed to see the attacks coming but not the actual speed necessary to escape or dodge if Ares went all out so right now it was stuck in limbo as Ares intentionally controlled the output of his swings so that it was forced to keep dodging without any room to retaliate or take a break and reposition.

Ares abused the programming again and managed to drive it precisely in the direction he wanted, eventually forcing it right onto the trap. Before activating the Puny Prisoner, Ares turned up his annihilation enhancement to max and dashed right past the robot in a golden blur, splitting its fuel container in half and disabling the flamethrower. It had tried to stop him but the clunky arms just weren't capable of it and so the fire it spewed in vain was the last of its fiery attacks from then on now that it couldn't access the fuel reserves anymore. That wasn't the only issue as the fuel was used not just for attacking but also to keep the robot running and so it was visibly powering down right now. With the Puny Prisoner finally activating and shrinking the robot down, as well as it being in a weakened state, it was now impossible for this thing to break out from behind the bars that caged it. The mini robot kept slowly swinging its arms at the bars but it couldn't even make a slight dent and so it was fully trapped for as long as Ares wanted it to be. He wouldn't be able to use the Prisoner for anything other than robot storage for a while, at least until the robots' fuel completely ran out and they shut down completely, but that was fine because this was a great use of the gadget and Ares didn't think he'd need it for anything else coming up shortly. This was robot numero uno down and so next up was the second one. All he had to do to find it was Voidwalk up into the sky and take a good look around with his Omniscience but first he had to do something about these Firestarters... Ares was going to have to take a minute to go look for those guards he saw earlier outside the premise but, thankfully, it seemed like that was unnecessary as the guards were already arriving! Ares thought that maybe they'd overheard the commotion but, actually, it seemed like Rox was giving him a thumbs up which meant this sneaky guy had acted on his own accord and lead them here knowing they'd be needed. Rox 2, Eagle 0! Well, actually, the eagle did help Ares get in here so he should really give it a point for that. Although if that were the case then Rox was probably up by a couple hundred points after the krakyrn fiasco. Ah well, both his summons were useful and Ares was glad to have them.