Chapter 354: Annihilation

With his eyes firmly shut, Ares chucked the Armillary and silently prayed. He wanted to see this thing blow up, sure, but not right in front of him if it could be avoided! He couldn't shake the feeling that if he dared open his eyes the universe would find a way to play a cruel trick on him and blow up the Armillary early in his face just to spite and taunt him. He was ready to whip out the Canis Stimulant if things went wrong so he could make a last ditch effort to save the Federation but enough time had passed now that he was starting to feel like everything had gone smoothly and without a hitch! The Converter magic boost, as well as the comprehender to some extent, all made this possible so Ares thanked his lucky stars he'd come into possession of both before this thing showed up. The comprehender did increase his knowledge of his own pillar, and disintegration was a pretty massive part of this art to boot so dedicating cultivation must have done its thing and drastically improved Ares' chances of success here. He'd played a risky game but come out the winner so he opened his eyes and watched the Armillary bob and weave through the sky, spinning wildly as it managed to just about maintain its course and sail off into the horizon, chasing down the Scylla.

Ares hadn't aimed specifically for the monster, just in its general direction, and yet he seemed to hit the bullseye and toss the art perfectly... Not that it really mattered. He could have thrown this thing a mile or two off course and, provided it was in the correct cardinal direction, this fight was over and done with. Ares was running low on mana, as this art took nearly everything from him in one fell swoop, so he Voidwalked back over to the Federation, who were still cleaning up the monsters down below with their cannons, and oblivious to the massive shockwave coming their way, and took a seat. He could feel the Converter working its magic and his mana reserve was filling up lightning fast. Under normal circumstances he would have to wait hours for it to return to full again but, at this rate, he would only need about twenty minutes without even killing anything else. Even then that was still a rough estimate and it may even be quicker. Ares could also go and use a mana shot pill, and / or pressure to kill the remaining monsters monsters and refill the reserves with Cessation, so he as feeling good! In large scale battles like this, Ares was a problem. The opposing general? Ares could take them on in a fight and win. The cannon fodder? Ares could annihilate them in minutes flat. Run away? Ares would chase with Voidwalk until the ends of the earth. Once the opposing army showed up, there was no one better in the world than Ares at making sure they never left alive, today had confirmed that absolutely and undeniably.

Ares, in the end, did fire some pressure bullets from afar at the remaining monsters to refill his mana for two reasons. One, he wanted to put up a Quietus Edict around the Federation again because this explosion was going to be LOUD and he figured he would do the mortals and weak cultivators aboard this country a favour. Two, the explosion would actually blind even him if he just stared at it, maybe even with the shades, so he wanted to set up an extremely thin wall of disintegration in front of him, one with the opacity turned way down, so he could spectate his art without making his retinas pay the price. Honestly, as Ares watched the Armillary sail away, he wasn't even sure his own magic would be safe from that thing. His disintegration arts might actually wind up being breached despite the massive distance between the Armillary's detonation point and the Federation. Just because Ares managed to successfully toss the thing, that didn't mean the Federation wasn't going to still struggle as a result of Ares' art. The scale of this magic was going to be monumental and it was the first art Ares had ever used that required a charging time save for, again, No Fear which didn't count.

This Armillary wasn't just 'five Perish Wheels', the scale was going to be more than five times bigger than any individual Wheel which was a very complicated size to imagine in one's head if they'd never seen anything like it before. The mortals on the Federation were going to have their damn minds blown and some of them might actually wind up in a coma due to shock. The Scylla would be very dead though so minor complications like that, which could be healed at the nearest hospital anyway, meant Ares wouldn't be chided for his reckless abandon. The Federation would be more than willing to pay for treatment for those affected by Ares' antics because the money he was saving them, in terms of not having to fix damaged buildings when the Scylla showed up or fork over grievance pay, was extremely significant. The longer the Federation kept sailing the seas and the oceans from this point onwards, the more the hypothetical debt they owed Ares would rack up due to never encountering the Scylla ever again. Giving Ares a one time payment, and treating the injured, was an absolute steal and these money grubbing greedy bastards would no doubt start salivating the second they saw the art go off. It wouldn't take a genius to look at the sheer destruction soon to be happening on the horizon and figure out the Scylla was dead because even twenty Scyllas would bite the dust in this situation.

The art disappeared as it smacked against the back of the retreating Scylla's spine, collapsing in on it itself and coalescing all the mana at a single point in the core, and there was a brief moment of silence that washed over Sheryashka. Not just the planet, that had been named after the domain, but the entire domain as a whole became absolutely silent. There was naught but a few meteorites crashing into each other in the depths of the Sheryashkan domain outside the Sheryashka planet but even they had fallen silent as reality warped around a single point in this domain to accommodate what was about to happen next. Even then it really couldn't do it properly because what came next was beyond any of its capability to control or keep contained in a meaningful way. A small hum pierced the Quietus Edict and a rumbling that shook every ocean and landmass on this planet announced the start of what was to come while making it painfully clear that this was going to be an event that transcended normality.

Casting an art, while still in sensory enhancement, that could shake the foundations of a planet was mind boggling stuff. Ares had created pillars of magic that shot up and into Vraizon and left an impossible to heal crater but actually causing the planet in its entirety to tremble before his might? This was a new one. He liked the feeling of fear he'd imbued into this non-living object. It was much like how a plant could technically 'scream' when its leaves were plucked as the resulting vibrations made tiny, imperceptible sounds. It wasn't a true scream, much like how what was happening now wasn't the planet actually 'shivering' with its life in the balance, but Ares still couldn't help but feel as though he'd shown this entire planet who was boss. Ares was in charge and he could wipe this thing out if he put enough effort in over the course of a few days! As for the art, it was finally time for the annihilation core of the Armillary to detonate. As far as Ares could tell, the spiked disintegration edges, before they collapsed inwards to amp up the core, had torn the Scylla in half while the nothingness spread that pain all over its body, even the parts that weren't directly hit, while locking down the space around the Scylla to prevent it from Blinking away even if it happened to know the art. This was overkill already but the fact that the major component, the annihilation core, was still waiting in the wings for its time to shine was ludicrous. The monster was already deader than dead and, yet...

Booooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

While the art was expanding outwards to cover the entire northern horizon, Ares' jaw slackened and he was gobsmacked he could still hear this damn thing! He had a feeling his Quietus would get breached but to the extent that it was more than a muffled burst of sound?! Evidently even he'd undersold this art but, at least now, he could finally see the real scope of this thing. Put simply, it was a country destroyer. That thing would have eaten the Federation for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. You could stack a couple of Federations on top of each and Ares could still wipe them out with this abhorrent art. Sure he'd get interrupted if he tried charging this thing, and people could blow it up prematurely before it arrived at its destination, so the use cases were actually rather slim... But who the hell cared when this was the result?!

If you were on this half of the planet, you could see this massive explosion no matter where you were. In fact, Ares could already feel his rings warming up which meant Enyo and Bellona were acknowledging this very fact! They were across an ocean and in another country and this thing was still in their line of sight without even having to use divine sense or even really try at all to spot it! In fact spotting it was one thing, but Vraizon dwellers could literally touch the thing! It was an aurora of gold that dwarfed the entire horizon, yes, but it was also tall enough to create a golden wall up in the next domain that lingered in space... Ares was getting Converter souls from this thing that weren't even of this domain! He'd just accidentally killed some space-dwelling monsters above the planet! He could just about see a sudden veering of a large chunk of the art up above, which meant an expert had probably smacked it aside in agitation so they could continue with their journey, but the fact that Ares had become an interplanetary nuke launcher was not lost on him! There were unironically people in the later stages of cultivation, that were available in Vraizon, that would hire a sensory enhancement brat to conduct orbital strikes on the planets their foes lived in... That was a crazy statement to make because some of those people were more than six realms ahead of Ares and would still turn to him for what he was capable of that they weren't. Ares sincerely hoped Mako could see this from wherever he was fumbling about on his own adventure in Vraizon right now. See it and weep, weakling!... That or he might falsely assume Ares used No Fear in panic and bit the dust, meaning he was wearing a smug smile right now which was the complete opposite of what Ares wanted that plonker to be feeling... Oh well.

The art had formed yet another wall of gold but this one spanned a much wider range and you had to actually turn around to stop seeing it unlike the previous one which you could just shuffle around if you wanted to. Anybody on either of the far ends of the Federation could see beyond the previous wall but this one was actually just a curtain over the ocean that was impossible to look past in any way. Not that anyone could 'see' anything anyway; Ares had been right to raise a dampening disintegration wall otherwise his eyes would have suffered a little even with Omniscience and that was truly something. Ares had finally found a limit to what his Omniscience could do and, unsurprisingly, it was his own magic that broke that limit. Anyway, Ares was one of the few people able to look at this golden glamour for long periods of time so he was enjoying it thoroughly. The few seconds of peace were short lived, however, as the blast waves were finally rearing their heads and shaking the Federation, rocking it around on the Run Aground while threatening to bash it off the giant rock if no immediate actions were taken to prevent this fate.

Geordie must have been tempted to remove the Run Aground and drop the Federation back into the ocean but both doing as such and resisting the blasts were equally terrible options in their own right. If things went wrong on the Run Aground then this entire country would fall lopsidedly into the ocean. If he lowered it, and put the country back on the surface of the water, then the turbulent waves below might drown some of the citizens. With the Freefire art up and running that was less likely but still plausible so there were different risk factors here he had to take into consideration before ultimately making the choice to throw down every anchor and hold steady up on the rock. Even the metal anchors were being rocked about though, and so Geordie had to create earthen ones to make up for the slack. He was having a rough time bracing the winds howling in his ear as he rapidly manoeuvred about the Federation but he persevered and managed to steady a good majority of the Federation after about five minutes of struggling to get move around freely.

The blast waves weren't remotely done, and likely wouldn't stop for another thirty or so minutes at bare minimum, but Geordie had done his part, bringing some stability amidst the annihilation storm running riot on the horizon. Ares had also done his part and was throwing up some physical pressure walls to block off whatever he could. The monsters in the ocean weren't having such a grand time of things, though, and were getting torn apart by the violent winds and even thrown a few miles away when they were caught in particularly rough gusts, leading to their deaths when they crashed head first into the water from multiple tens of feet in the air. The water the monsters were residing in was being run ragged too and tsunamis galore were appearing in every single direction, meaninglessly leaping at empty air and creating mini whirlpools due to the confused spiralling the water was being forced to do thanks to the bizarre force pushing it around in ways it couldn't resist. A water tornado was also forming in between the Subjugation bowl from earlier and the Armillary horizon because the water trapped in the middle was fleeing in circles. The mana wanted to run away from both but was stuck in the middle and its repeated backpedalling was causing a natural disaster but, honestly, it paled in comparison to everything else around. It was unironically the least dangerous happening in this large chunk of ocean and so a good majority of the monsters were actively fleeing towards it for some kind of shelter. Something was definitely amiss if you considered a tempestuous water tornado raging across the ocean as a safe haven but that was just the current state of things. It was undoubtedly safer than braving the aftermath wrath of the Armillary which, to make matters worse, was slowly spreading towards the Federation.

According to Ares' off the cuff calculations, the explosions wouldn't reach this place, and touch up the country's foundations by eating away at them, but there was the slight possibility he'd been wrong and so he as keeping a keen eye out. Also, this art explosion not being at full size already, and still growing, was enough to, as predicted, knock out a few mortals who would clearly rather pretend this was all a bad dream than continue living through a waking nightmare. Their brains had shut off as a defence mechanism because there was a point in which witnessing something so despicable would leave a permanent paranoia etched in the back of their minds. What if they just randomly blew up one day? Where they going to have to check the news daily to make sure the country they were living in hadn't made enemies with Ares? Were they going to have to become gossipmongers and keep their ears down low to the ground to make sure them and their families weren't nuked out of orbit in their sleep? Ares would become a constant fear in the back of their minds that just wouldn't disappear until he did from the domain. Hell, even then, what if he came back?! Living every day with PTSD from this, wondering if any day would be your last and you wouldn't even know it because you were turned into meat chunks in your sleep... Actually, that was being generous, there would be zero proof off the deceased ever existing if they were hit by this magic. That Scylla was G.O.N.E from reality and there was no doubt about it. It had died a death a thousand times over and was somehow still dying multiple times even now! Killing it this many times over was bullying the likes of which nobody in Sheryashka had ever seen before...

There was nothing else for it, though, so everyone just had to brace themselves for the next hour or so and wait for this raging catastrophe to vanish from this world. Things got progressively worse until around the ten minute mark, when the danger peaked and everyone was at their most tense, before things stated settling and dying down which led to morale on the Federation improving drastically with less people crying or screaming that they were going to die. When the magic finally dissipated, there were two things to note. First of all, the monsters were gone... That didn't really need to be explained but, long story short, they were either dead or NEVER going to bother the Federation ever again if they were one of the few lucky survivors of this impromptu cataclysm. Their leader was dead so they wouldn't mobilise as an army ever again, and attacking the Federation individually was off the cards, but none of that was the real point. The point was that this devil in human skin, AKA Ares, existed and that was more than enough reason to be dissuaded and never run the risk of coming to this infernal country ever again. The monsters were all perfectly content to go look for lost sailors to eat instead. They were far easier prey and this country just wasn't worth it in any way so they would be gone from this hellhole forever, effective immediately!

Speaking of being gone, that led nicely onto the second change... The ocean was gone. The bowl Ares left earlier? That was completely dwarfed in comparison to this new change because he'd created a canyon this time... In the middle of the ocean... There were waterfalls at the side of this massive bulldozed pathway, that extended for miles on end, but none of the water was ever falling in. Instead it just sort of curved in on itself at the watery precipice and fled back in the opposite direction, creating a weird current at the edge of the canyon wherein any boats would be sucked in but also repelled immediately after and flung far away. It was less of a death trap than the bowl but far, FAR bigger and more obnoxious to have to sail around because it could delay a journey by upwards of a day. There might be some daredevils who treat this anomaly like a ramp and try to fling themselves over, which Ares respected, but that could very easily wind up in many deaths so Ares didn't want to concern himself with it. People would do whatever people would do and it had nothing to do with him.

What really bothered Ares was that he'd outdone himself already! He left behind a mark on Sheryashka, via the bowl, only to go right back and leave behind an entire graffiti instead. This was a far more noticeable 'gift' he'd engraved into Sheryashka and, actually, unlike the bowl, this might stay here forever... The mana didn't look like it was disappearing as it was just sort of stuck in an infinite loop and funnelling itself around the edges of the canyon over and over again. In other words, Ares had just created a permanent landmark in Sheryashka... Whoops! Ares grimaced briefly with a wry smile but went back to normal after because, again, it wasn't his problem! Rather, right now, he was thinking about how the art could have misfired and things might have actually been fine! If it created a canyon that wide and long, then the Federation being destroyed wouldn't have even meant anything because everyone could just wade through the wet canyon until they found a nearby island or whatever. It would have been completely safe because the attack was just that monstrous that it could potentially match Garmr's output in terms of creating a walkable path through the ocean floor. Ares had gotten his wish and, now, his magic was once again on par with everything else he could do. Of course some aspects of him would lag behind here and there in the future, as upgrades could never be consistently evenly spread out, but having everything be in sync right now, or when he got Garmr at least, was satisfying.

Clap

The art was gone now so Ares clapped his cheeks and brought himself back from la la land. He'd had his fun and now it was time to go sort out the various other affairs that needed to be addressed now that the war... Now that the brief skirmish... Now that extremely short and one sided execution session was over. He wanted to chat with Geordie and Hunter to make sure there was nothing else that needed doing, he wanted to go investigate the bowl and the canyon, he wanted to chat with Onno about Jebben, and he wanted to maybe finally find out who those mysterious two people were in Aejaz' group from before. There were a lot of things to sort out but, predictively, it would all be rather quick as there weren't really any complicated decision to make other what to do with the traitorous, fire-starting Jebben. The trouble he ended up causing was limited thanks to Aejaz' proactiveness, and he didn't even get a chance to spread the claim that he was Cash's son thanks to timely intervention halting him before he could arrive in the middle of a populated area, so there was a chance Onno might want him to be spared in some way... Ares didn't really want to, though...

Ares simply kissed his teeth and put that matter to the back of his mind for now as there were other things he wanted to do first. Dominus was telling him to head over to where the Scylla died, as there might be something there for him, but Ares figured he would go and chat with Geordie real quick to make sure he wasn't needed to help the Federation get up and running again. The Run Aground needed to be lowered, the Freefire Federation art needed to be cancelled, casualties needed to be addressed and counted, and the checking of the Federation's structure as a whole was in order after such a huge battle. Ares had done most of the damage, if everyone was being completely honest, but he'd also saved the Federation multiple times over so it evened out. He was definitely due a reward but that was up to the rulers to decide what he would receive and they really couldn't afford to be stingy here after seeing what Ares was capable of. 'Yeah, sure, let's shot change the guy that can eradicate our entire country in its sleep'... Obviously none of the idiots running this country would be stupid enough to say that other than Cash who might purely out of defiance of the kid that had caused him so much trouble to date. Regardless, there was work to be done and so Ares Voidwalked up to the quarter deck to get the ball rolling and chug right on through these miscellaneous tasks. He opened the metal door, stepped inside, and found everyone already staring at him in disbelief... There was nothing for Ares to explain here, it wasn't his fault they didn't get the sheer scope of his magic! This is what it meant to be a fundamental champion! "Stop staring, staring is rude!" Ares' words fell on deaf ears though because they really couldn't believe their eyes regarding that art earlier. To think these people had been afraid of the Scylla when there was a far greater danger lurking not even five feet away... Oh well, at least Nibbler was being his usual happy self and waggling his but as he trotted over to Ares to nuzzle his leg. As far as the sharkdog was concerned, they'd won the fight and that was a good thing! Every other detail was irrelevant to this cute little animal so Ares picked him up and played with him for a bit, a game of reverse whack a mole wherein Nibbler kept trying to chew the finger Ares was retracting, while everyone else calmed down. They'd get over it eventually but the impression he'd left here and now would definitely never fade, that was for sure.