Chapter 350: Rock the Boat
Why was it that everyone other than Ares could summon meteors?! Bellona could do it, Enyo could do it with pressure if she really wanted to, Aejaz could do it by stealing Bellona's magic, and now this dumb monster could do it too?! Well it wasn't really dumb but the point still stood that everyone other than Ares knowing a meteor art sucked! Logically, he should also have one and it should be way better than theirs! His meteors should explode, even! Was a meteor shower not destruction? Of course it was! Through and through it was an embodiment of carnage. This monster using some kind of meteor-based attack was the final straw and had just become the impetus for inspiration. Normally Ares would take a long while to come up with new arts but right now he was annoyed at having been left in the dust by seemingly everyone as it looked like all expert cultivators in Sheryashka knew a meteor art! Hell even Hans probably did with his Invisible Ifrit at this point so it was unacceptable that Ares went another day without one! In fact, screw that, he wanted to learn it in the next minute! He'd seen enough meteors, real or magically conjured, to have a pretty good idea of their structure and properties thanks to Omniscience so all he had to do was clump up annihilation magic into the shape of giant rocks and drop them form the heavens! With his Converter's new magic boost, this ought to be very plausible and Ares was more concerned with replicating the Scylla's magic than actually stopping it. To be fair, if he could summon a bunch of meteors then they would counteract and nullify the Scylla's so it was a valuable use of his time, it was just something that nobody in their right mind would try to do on the spot like this. Very few people other than fundamental champions could just do nonsense on a whim like this and actually succeed but Ares came under that category of person and so he'd decided what he was going to spend the next minute or so doing! The meteors from the Scylla spawned high up in the air and descended at a painfully slow rate, as if to almost mock the soon-to-be victims, so there was still time. Actually, this was something Ares refused to allow to be a problem in his own art because slow meteors were just not going to cut it by Ares' standards. Bellona circumvented the slow fall time with her magic and Enyo's pressure meteor would appear closer to the floor so Ares was going to have to think of a way of speeding up his own art on top of the actual creation process in the next minute...
So, how to summon a meteor? That was step one and then Ares could follow it up with how to enable its descent from the heavens. The obvious answer was to just clump annihilation mana together and chuck it like an explosive snowball. The problem with this, though, is that it would appear in front of Ares and not in the sky, causing it to lose out on a lot of potential momentum from crashing all the way down from above. Also, that wouldn't even really be an art at that point as it was nothing more than just bundling up mana. No good! That was about ten seconds wasted on a faulty idea right off the rip. What if... He used nothingness mana to clump together even larger amounts of mana so that each individual meteor could store way more annihilation magic and explosive energy? That was a good idea, even if not the answer to his current problem, so Ares started working on the mana manipulation process for that in the background while his brain dedicated resources to trying to figure out the rest of this creation equation... What if... He didn't create meteors from scratch and instead used Shock Beads as a base? Instead of meteors, he could just summon massive Shock Beads with the aforementioned mana clumping trick. Like this he wouldn't have to invent a way to shape annihilation for the meteor lest the magic go spiralling wildly out of control and become misshapen and explode in mid-air if anything went wrong by even a fraction! He already knew how to summon Shock Beads so this would just be an extension of that and was doable in this short time frame. Another ten seconds were gone but Ares still had more than half the time limit remaining before he really had to start moving his rear.
The next question on his list was how to defend the giant Shock Bead meteors as ranged magic, and well aimed shots from ranged weaponry, would break the fragile glass like casing, prematurely detonating the magic in mid air... Actually, what if instead of defending, Ares embodied the spirit of destruction and redoubled on aggression? What if he turned the Shock Bead Meteor into a giant matryoshka magic with tinier Shock Beads buried inside of it? Sure detonating in mid air would lose a lot of the oomph but it would also cause hundreds of smaller shock beads to scatter above the target and result in a widespread bombing that was impossible to stop or avoid. Sniping one giant magic meteor out of the air was feasible, sniping every single one Ares threw was incredibly difficult, preventing every single one of the thousands of smaller shock beads that came after was impossible. Of course if the meteors fell freely then the havoc they wrought would be unparalleled to anything Ares had ever created before but the expectation was that this would never happen. Ares was trading reliability of the meteors making it down to earth for potentially more overall destruction should it actually happen but it also came with an inbuilt backup plan this way. It would take extremely wide reaching anti magic to prevent an art like this and so Ares was fully on board with this idea. Defence had been thrown out the window, it wasn't needed where Ares' invention was going! This train of thought took up another ten seconds but it was worth it and now there were only two things left to consider and, at the rate Ares was going, he'd be done with time to spare!
Next on the to do list... How to get the giant Shock Bead meteor up into he air to begin with. He had to create them down on the ground, unless he Voidwalked up into the sky and dropped them but that was lazy and not ideal, but then he also had to have them drop from above... The obvious solution here was the involvement of nothingness as a portal. Ares wasn't yet strong enough to just summon multiple meteors all the way in the sky beneath the atmosphere. Maybe he could make some amendments to the art down the line but he still wanted to get the base of it down pat because redoing everything would be a nightmare and Ares was better than that! He wasn't going to cheap out on the art just so he could get it up and running right this instant! So with that set in stone, the question remained, how to get those damn things up in the air... A nothingness bead? Ares had already created Shock Rocks, which were annihilation oriented, Block Rocks, which were disintegration oriented, so why not create 'Drop Rocks' which were nothingness oriented? The entire purpose would be to throw them into the air and have them detonate to create portals through which other objects could be dropped. You could maybe even use them to move around or throw other people through! You'd need two, though, one to act as the end destination and the other to act as the entrance. Still, this was something Ares could create quickly, as it was just standard nothingness being trapped inside a Shock Bead casing, and it was a viable solution that technically meant he was creating two arts here and not just one. Efficiency! As for just directly summoning the meteors, that was something he could work on when he actually had the power to accomplish it.
That was another ten seconds down and all was going well so far with no hiccups in sight. The mana manipulation for everything he'd come up with already was going smoothly and he'd just begun working on Drop Rocks now so he was basically already caught up to the other half of his brain and maintaining lockstep with it to facilitate this seemingly impossible task in real time. The final question, of the obvious ones he had initially, was how to speed up the fall of the meteors and, once that was answered, everything would presumably fall neatly into place and the art creation would be officially over and done with in under a minute... Pressure? Before Ares dropped them through the Drop Rocks, he could slap some insanely powerful pressure on them and weigh them down. This solution was simple and it was technically the solution Enyo would use for her pressure meteor which was why this idea came so quickly to Ares. Hell Ares barely even took a single second to come up with that fix because of how easy it was to spot the glaring fix.
Now Ares had plenty of time to spare for any unforeseen mishaps or problems he needed to solve. Actually, he'd already come up with one and so it now became the centre of his attention... The size issue. If they were going to be meteor sized then how was Ares supposed to deal with them before he dropped them? They were too big to lug around, as well as shove through the small nothingness portal to the sky, and so he needed them to start off small before enlarging after transporting through the nothingness portal... This one was a real headscratcher and made up for the easy puzzle he'd just solved ten times over. Could he maybe find a way to shrink objects with nothingness as it was negative space and very much capable of this? The Blade was an entire shrunken universe for crying out loud so it must have been possible!... But wasn't that too much to ask of himself in just a mere nineteen seconds!? He was smart but Ares was no genius either! Rewriting the laws of the world on such short notice was really pushing it! That was something he would figure out eventually but right now he needed a more immediate, and easy to implement, solution... The Puny Prisoner was too small to fit a meteorite, let alone multiple, in as even the fire tanks from before only barely fit and they weren't even half the size of what Ares had planned for this magic... ten more seconds passed and Ares was seriously stumped here! He was nearly ready to create the meteorites but had nowhere to put the damn things! Was he seriously going to have to Voidwalk up into the sky and just chuck them for now? That was so lame!
Ares didn't give up and kept thinking through his available options... In other words, currently, Ares' head was blank because there were no options. Still, he wasn't daunted by this as he was familiar with this rodeo and so his head being blank didn't impede his calmness about the situation. Time was ticking so Ares made the rational choice and swapped focus, diverting his attention to creating the meteors instead while the part of his brain with less resources allocated to it kept working on a solution. Until then, Ares was going to just create the meteors inside the Blade as they wouldn't all just be rolling around in reality that way and falling into the ocean... Wait a minute, isn't that the solution? Am I an idiot? Though Ares could probably find a way to shrink objects inside the Blade for his own convenience, and he was even planning on doing as such in the future for something specific anyway at some point, the key idea he'd stumbled upon was that nothing needed to be shrunk at all! inside the Blade, the meteors took up zero space so all he had to do was shove the Blade through the portal, hold it above the sky, and then release the pressure-enveloped meteors!
Though it wasn't the most elegant solution, as it didn't fix anything long term, it was good enough for now. The base functionality of the art was locked in and the rough edges could be smoothed over later. The appearance of the meteors, the summoning method above the sky, changing their size even, and maybe just creating actual meteors with a similar matryoshka effect instead of just repurposing Shock Beads. All of these improvements were in the cards but, as of right now, Ares had a plan and it was finally a workable one! Though to the spectators it looked like Ares was just standing around, dumbstruck with his back to them and his head staring at the impending doom sailing down the red sky, he'd just pulled off a miracle feat of magical mastery and was a mere few second away from displaying it for all to see. There were roughly two seconds left until the Scylla's meteorites reached a range where people could start firing cannons at them, which was dangerously close, but that was acceptable as Ares' meteors would not be moving slow as molasses! They could catch up and, more importantly, they could win easily in a direct clash against the Scylla's. The meteor explosion alone would suffice but all the hidden Beads within would only serve to make that win a more dominant one and the red tinted rocks stood no chance whatsoever.
The real issue here was that A; Ares wouldn't be able to see crap because this art was about to spew golden chaos literally everywhere and, B, he might miss some of the meteors with his own. It's not like he could aim these things incredibly well or anything. His pressure lingering on them would allow him to direct them to a degree, thanks to telekinesis giving him remote control, but this was his first time doing this and said control was highly limited both due to the rushed nature of the art as well as the fact that this was his first time using it. Cut him some slack here! This was hard! In short, the Federation was going to get rocked a little and all too literally at that. It was a better fate than having all of the meteors land, though, so Ares just needed to solve one last problem before he could save the day. He needed a name for the art in order to chant it. The Drop Rocks could be thrown and detonated silently so he landed on the top of the Federation, chucked one sky-high, thanks to annihilation pressure, telekinesis, and the Converter's strength boost, before he then cracked another one on the floor. A reddish smog erupted from the bead and formed a void portal at Ares' feet as he shoved the Primordial Blade halfway in and then stomped on the handle with his right foot. High up in the sky, through the reddened clouds, emerged the Primordial Blade in all its splendour with its tip pointed straight down at its targets below. Ares pointed his finger directly up to line up with the Blade's tip and spoke with a small, victorious laugh mixed into his voice that not so subtly revealed the pride he had in his new creation.
"Auriferous Subjugation!"
Some of the more keen observers would take umbrage with this name because there were no rocks involved, currently, in this art! The Shock Beads were more glassy in appearance but, to be fair to Ares, he'd named this in advance for what it would be, not necessarily what it was! Also, naming things differently to what they actually where was a very niche trick used by weirdos but, though Ares could absolutely do weird stuff every now and then, this was not what he was attempting to do right now! He did find it funny that people would misname arts just to get an edge over their opponent who had no idea what was happening in do or die situations but there was a limit to his 'creative methods' and this was going a step too far. Misnaming an art would sometimes even reduce its output / power so, yes, you would have the element of surprise but what you could do with it was drastically reduced. In this case, though the name was close to being inaccurate, it was still close enough to the truth and the actual intention behind the art. It's like the mana in the air had a tacit agreement with Ares that it was ok so long as he fixed it eventually. One day Ares would rain down actual meteors with chunks of golden annihilation in them properly, and it would be a far grander art than this one he was currently deploying, but that could wait for another time when he possessed the means to do it comfortably.
As for the art itself, the Blade had just spat out around forty 'meteors', each of which were like gilded baubles and made one hell of a racket. It couldn't be heard from all the way down near the Federation but the sound of nearly a thousand Shock Beads rattling away inside those meteors was deafening and, honestly, a little horrifying. Just the relatively small handful Ares dumped inside the mecha dryad way back when was enough to leave its mark, and then some, so this... This was going to be really problematic for the environment... The Federation was going to have to adhere to Geordie's orders and brace for impact twice as hard because, at this point, Ares' art might have honestly posed a bigger threat and it was descending FAST. Ares' pressure was dragging the meteors downwards in coordination with gravity at a rate that was terrifying to behold. The Scylla even had a look of hesitation on its face as it was just now understanding the scope of its opponent. Where had this golden freak come from? Was he not originally from this domain like it also wasn't? Suddenly, the Scylla had more questions about Ares than he did about it. Who was the real alien lifeform here? The innocent monster just looking to defend itself and its territory so it can grow up in peace or the invasive bomber man throwing mas destruction meteors at it?!
There was a general understanding that Ares' art was going to trump the Scylla's here and so everyone everywhere was running to find a safes spot to hide. Realistically there was no such thing and you would need a bunker hidden in the core of the earth to avoid feeling anything from this. As that wasn't even remotely possible, every single living creature begun erecting whatever defence they could muster. The monsters swam away as fast as they could while diving deep into the ocean and the humans barricaded doors and windows in preparation for the end of days. They thought the Scylla's meteor storm on its own was Armageddon and now this? It was like watching Armageddon vs Armageddon 2.0! No wonder people likened expert cultivator fights to natural disasters, they were just going at it without care for anyone else! Sure the Scylla and Ares would live to tell the tale and go through this with ease but what about everyone else?! At this point, both the monsters and the humans on the Federation all wanted these two combatants to go fight each other somewhere it wouldn't bother everyone around them. The humans and monsters felt a strange sense of comradery in this moment and looked at one another from a distance, sparing each other glances of pity because the maniacs in charge of leading and / or defending them were spiralling out of control!
The meteors were syncing up to crash into one another in the air roughly two hundred feet over the ocean, halfway between the Federation and the Scylla, so it was looking like the spread of chaos was going to be neutral and affect everyone equally regardless of what side they were on. Sort of, anyway. The blowback from the meteors would be roughly equivalent but Ares' meteors packed that extra surprise in the form of the Shock Beads so they would scatter down into the ocean like mines and go blast fishing for monster hide. The Scylla was too far away to be hit by much of the blasts and Ares was immune to his own magic now so the result of this wouldn't affect them in any meaningful way and was little more than introductory greetings between two high class foes. For everyone else, however, this was a nightmare come true and they were all hunkering down in corners of rooms and praying for their safety during these dark times. Though it wouldn't make a massive difference, to help everyone feel at least a tad safer, Ares threw up a couple Not Even Lights in front of the Federation as that would reduce the overall level of chaos that reached them directly. He'd all but spent his entire mana reserves with the Subjugation and these multiple black holes but he had enough to keep himself standing in the air and wait for death to be dealt at large. His Converter meant he could sustain Voidwalk without losing mana and his Grim Cessation was about to strike it rich with a jackpot. Mana payday was just around the corner so Ares had no qualms with being a bit of a spendthrift.
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM
The very first collision took place and it was a foreboding omen of what was yet to come. The explosion was a mix of red ash and golden energy but the latter easily dwarfed the former, swallowing it whole in under a second flat and spreading out even further, eating up nearby meteors and swallowing them in their entirety too. From the expanding golden cloud devastating the Scylla's meteors, nearly fifty smaller Shock Beads were flung into the air in random directions like scattered pellets from a 360 degree shotgun blast, some of which tackled other meteors, taking them down David vs Goliath style, and some of which fell down into the ocean and broke upon impact. Spouts of water were rising everywhere as explosions detonated throughout the sky and the water simultaneously, leaving no environment safe or untainted by raw destruction. One single meteor of Ares' had caused pure pandemonium and deafening disaster and yet there was still roughly another forty of these things all in waiting line to cause even more mayhem. One meteor had had taken out upwards of twenty of the Scylla's so the outcome of this magic trade was already a foregone conclusion, it was just matter of going through the motions now and watching everything get obliterated. Monsters were already dying to these smaller random explosions landing on their heads, or being pushed around by the blasts and swung into one another, but the Federation was still going strong, despite the foundation shaking somewhat, thanks to their preparations and Ares' black holes. This was just the beginning, though, and the hecticness of the situation was about to rapidly increase to unfathomable levels as multiple collisions were about to happen all at once. At a quick glance Ares saw roughly fifteen meteors, on either side of the battle, about to bash into one another. These would probably be enough to blot out the entire sky, and destroy the remaining meteors from the Scylla's portals, but that wasn't even scratching the surface just yet. The Shock Beads inside them would still be doing their job afterwards and then the remaining meteors Ares had summoned were also still yet to participate... This was not going to be pretty.
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Author's note: Due to a lack of interest, I've removed the Patreon and won't be bringing it back. Nothing else ought to change for now but I will be taking a short break once this arc is done with as I'm starting to feel a little burnt out. I may make a longer note explaining things in length or I might just leave things as is, it will depend on whether I feel its worth addressing at the time. Regardless, I won't stop writing this novel so there should be no concerns about that. It's really nothing serious and, for now at least, won't impact the regular schedule of one chapter per day up until the break which won't be longer than a week at most.