This floor more closely resembled the average interior of a pagoda. It was hexagonal, open plan, and covered in red and gold from head to toe along the walls. The staircase to the next floor spiralled upwards near the back of the room right behind some weird hill shaped pieces of metal that were roughly twelve feet high at their apex. Standing dead centre in the room was a person wearing a loose robe and a mask, nothing else could be gleamed about them given the way they were wearing their clothes. Not their body build, their face, their race, nothing. They could be a slim female elf or even a tiny male orc. Whoever this person was they were simply a vehicle to move the next trial along and nothing more. Perhaps if Larsh wasn''t so narcissistic he would have been in a similar situation down on the first floor but why on earth would someone as proud as him turn into his human form and disguise himself? He was a mighty creature and his glory should be showcased in full! Etc...
Ares walked up to the unknown and unknowable person and stared at them in silence.
...
...
Ares tried waving his hand in front of their face but there was still no response whatsoever so he walked past them and towards the five metal hills. As he did so, the person turned their head to watch Ares which made him uncomfortable, like he was being stalked by some creepy individual. Ares was reminded of the old horror story about a painting with eyes that followed you as you walked by them... This situation wasn''t nearly as ominous though, the person just didn''t have a scary vibe to them. They were more like an amorphous blob watching their surroundings out of pure curiosity and nothing else.
The metal hills stood tall before Ares as he reached towards them slowly. He didn''t know what these things were or had in store for him so this cautious approach would allow him to react to any unforeseen changes and defend himself. It was only floor two, and Ares almost definitely had the tools to pass with ease, but there was no need to brashly throw himself at every obstacle. Brute forcing these floors wouldn''t necessarily be the best way to go about things as it could prevent him from learning something useful in the process of trial and error. Unlike Enyo, Ares actually wanted to learn to control pressure correctly so he threw the idea of cheating out the window and pressed onwards with his hand.
Shing
The metal morphed and a spike shot out of it at Ares. He tried to disintegrate it but his magic wasn''t coming out so there was only one option left available to him and that was to retreat out of range. The spike chased him back to the centre of the room, until he was next to the mysterious person, before retracting back into the hill and settling down. Ares had at least learnt that, from now on, each floor was going to be slathered with anti-magic and using his pillar would be basically impossible. If the anti-magic was weaker, and even remotely close to Ares'' level of strength, he could probably override it with disintegration and tear it apart forcefully. Unfortunately these anti-magic runes, presumably buried deep within the core of the pagoda, were set up by an expert that could even stifle Gods so what chance did current Ares have? He could maybe pull of some shenanigans involving casting magic from the void if he really gave it consideration but, honestly, that was completely unnecessary and nor was it the point of these trials. There were going to be no ass-pulls here, Ares had to do things the right way, whatever the right way was.
He could probably ask the person watching him for some hints or advice... But screw that! This person was rude! Yes Ares was technically the one intruding on his home but it was this person''s job to manage the floor and explain the challenge! Ares would figure it out on his own eventually, he was sure of it. First things first, Ares chucked a sword at the metal hill closest to him.
Clang
The sword flopped onto the floor after being soundly routed by the sturdy hill. Unsurprising. Ares hadn''t expected this approach to work at all, he was just testing to see if the metal could be cut through and if it would retaliate against attacks made against it. The answer was no to both and that was important. It meant the hills'' spikes would only become active when in close proximity to a living being and not because they were attacked. Ares'' hand stretching towards them earlier may have potentially triggered a self-defence mechanism and he wanted to be certain that wasn''t the case. Now that he''d proved that hypothesis, it was time to figure out how to actually get past these things and Ares had a hunch. Every floor would involve some kind of test relating to pressure, that was obvious, but what was the point of this pagoda? If Ares didn''t know anything about any of the other floors, he would simply assume it was a challenge with a reward at the end and nothing more. That wasn''t entirely the case though. Last time Ares brought out Dominus, he''d heard him muttering about the top floor of the pagoda as he coated himself in pressure. It was a high level technique and probably the height of pressure manipulation. If floor one of the pagoda was resistance to pressure, the most basic technique, and the final floor was the height of mastery in comparison, then perhaps the pagoda''s main goal was to teach. Each floor would consequently teach you the next step in mastering control over pressure and each would teach you a different aspect of it. Yes there was a reward at the top but, technically, every floor cleared was its own reward. The leaflet had stressed otherwise, and there certainly wasn''t any physical reward for the early floors, but experience and competency in what you were being tested on was invaluable in its own right.
As for how all of this helped Ares here, if he could figure out what the next step after resisting pressure was, then the floor''s trial would become that much simpler. Given that this was only the second floor Ares imagined there wouldn''t be any complicated tricks just yet and so his guess was a tame one. For now, he probably just needed to be able to control pressure himself! Being able to take pressure head on was floor one, being able to force other people to take it head on would be floor two. This was a basic ability, and the beginning of every technique that came after, but it wasn''t something everyone possessed. Even Ares currently had to jump through a few hoops to achieve it. The last two times he''d used it were due to extreme annoyance back during the alchemy competition Allie attended and the auction bid for the golden seed. One was intentional but required effort and the other was unintentional but hard to replicate as he hadn''t been himself during that time. Things would be slightly easier this time as Dominus had used pressure quite freely when he took control earlier, and Ares got a lot of second hand experience from it, but that didn''t mean things would be smooth. Enyo had been directly bullied by Dominus and even she struggled to control pressure properly. Somehow Rox had gotten it down pat but that was probably mimic-related and not a method Ares could make use of. In short, although Ares could sit here and make himself annoyed to easily clear the trial, he wanted to take this opportunity to learn things that he wasn''t knowledgeable about. Taking a shortcut here would be detrimental to him on future floors, he could feel it. So regardless of whether it was truly the ''correct'' goal or not, Ares wanted to figure out how to unleash pressure the normal way.
Before Ares started his practice proper, he did want to check what the overall goal of even using pressure here was; as in why would it even help him pass the trial. Clearly the stabby hills needed to be dealt with but Ares wanted to know the manner in which pressure affected them first and foremost so he had and end goal to strive towards later. Now... Now for the hard part, annoying himself! Ares was a dab hand at bringing about that feeling in others, no one could or would deny it, but what was he supposed to do to set alight his own inner rage? This wasn''t like last time he''d done it intentionally as he wasn''t already in a somewhat foul mood prior. There was nothing going on his life currently that irked him so he was going to have to think outside the box on this one and come up with a reason, or multiple, no matter how preposterous.
Ok, let''s think about this. For starters, my Shock Bead traps buried underneath the city were exposed by Aejaz'' stupid family and now I bet they''re being dug up by concerned citizens and Maro''s goons. My area of influence will be diminished in places I don''t have any Beads so that''s already a pain in the ass. I''d been planning on waiting until I was strong enough to take Chen Lo to unveil that secret but the cat''s come out of the bag prematurely and I no longer have a trick up my sleeve to take him by surprise with. I also don''t know where he and the other Chen survivors are so I have to make sure my family is careful when they''re out and about lest they run into him and his cronies hiding away somewhere. All because Aejaz'' idiotic family wanted to pick a fight! And on such an important night no less! Really put a damper on everything... I could have spent some more time with Bellona instead and maybe understood her problem that night without having to argue and make a fool of myself... Also, why the fuck is Bellona my sister?! What kind of atrocious development is this! I see my father''s been a busy man!... Although I can''t be one to judge considering my own situation... Still, point being I''m dating my own flesh and blood... What a nightmare... And she hid it too! What else, what else... Oh yeah! Sadie stole my fucking plate again! That BITCH! And, uh... Aejaz stole one of Appa''s Snappas! Damn him!... Ok, this is going nowhere and fast...
Ares had to give up with this line of thought because he wasn''t feeling even remotely perturbed by any of the problems he''d listed. The closest he came to anger was feeling mournful over the stolen plate that he might as well have held a wake for considering how unlikely it was to ever return. It had made the trip to Hades and back once already so its chances of pulling off a miracle and doing it twice in a row were slim. And as for Aejaz stealing Appa''s food, Appa itself had already frozen Aejaz for his unforgivable sin and smacked his forehead with its rope. Despite this Aejaz had still muttered ''worth it'', presumably because he''d been fiending to try a Snappa ever since the first time he saw one. As for Ares'' Shock Beads being unearthed, it was annoying but unavoidable so why fuss over it? It''s not like they could remove all of them anyway, there were far too many to ever accomplish such a feat, so as long as Ares stuck to his own comfort zones laced with traps he would be fine. Lastly, Bellona hiding her relation with him was whatever. She shouldn''t have withheld the information at all really but Ares wasn''t too fussed as long as he knew about it before going all the way with her, that would have been a problem. Ares understood her way of thinking on the matter though. If she''d said it sooner. before their relationship grew deeper, she was likely worried it might have affected the way they interacted going forward. It was ungrounded speculation but that was just human nature to worry about things like that. Enyo must have understood this and just came right out with it because she, as a bystander with a neutral perspective, could tell Ares would get over it quickly... Get over it but not forget it, anyway. Ares wasn''t going to blame Bellona or change his mind about anything regarding her but it was tough not remembering their newfound sibling dynamic every time he saw her. Not to mention the worst part about it all, the fact that his dumb revenant brain kept coming up with moronic jokes non-stop about it all! He had to resist the urge to say them and that was really his greatest trial in recent times. The desire to kiss Bellona and tell her that you couldn''t spell skinship without kinship was truly overwhelming but he absolutely mustn''t! The only person who would groan after would be him! It would damage his brain and it would be a self-inflicted wound just for the sake of seeing Bellona''s eyes roll!... But maybe it was worth it? NO, FOOLISH BRAIN, IT IS NOT!
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Ares had been quietly sitting around with his eyes closed for quite some time now and he was clearly making zero progress... Although the fact that he wasn''t actually doing anything at all right now was the main reason for that. He''d gotten side tracked hard to the point he''d basically gone completely off the rails, causing his experiment from earlier to have run out of steam. It almost looked like he was going to stay seated and keep dully distracting himself from the task at hand until the sun came down outside. However, the mysterious individual at the centre of the room, a couple feet in front of Ares, wasn''t aware of what Ares was mulling over. As far as the individual was concerned this pathetic cultivator walked in here, refused to speak to him, failed to walk past the hill, tried pointlessly launching a weak attack with a piece of trash sword, and then got stumped trying to figure out what to do next, all the while stubbornly ignoring him. The mystery individual was content to let this bastard rot and wallow in his failure on the floor for all eternity but he did also feel the need to make a comment on the off chance it encouraged Ares to leave, getting him out of his sight. "No talent. No brains. No brawn. No composure. No hope. No drive. No chance. You are worthless and lacking in every way. I recommend leaving and not coming back."
...
"Excuse me?" Ares had been minding his own business only to be repeatedly degraded for... No apparent reason? What the hell had he done to deserve this?! This piece of crap refused to speak to him, ignored him, sat around doing nothing despite being ''at work'', and felt the need to break the silence by being an asshole?! How rude!
"Do not pretend you didn''t hear me, wretch. You have quite the nerve strolling in here like you own the place, especially considering how unimpressive you are. I have no idea how you passed the first trial but you clearly do not belong here. I''ve never seen a performance on my floor quite as sad as yours. This room would smudge its paint to look as though it were weeping if it could."
"Who pissed in your cereal?! The hell have I done to deserve this treatment? You know what? Fuck you!" Seizing the perfect opportunity, Ares let his emotions get the better of him. He could have taken the revenant route and fired back with insults but getting hot blooded here fulfilled his earlier goal too so that was a wiser choice. He was letting himself get mad but he wasn''t so loopy as to not make the most out of the situation.
Rumble
As the entire room trembled, Ares aggressively spat at the robed person before him, "You want to see some real pressure, amateur? Let me enlighten you in a way not even this pagoda ever could."
Rumble
The mystery individual started floating but not of his own volition. He''d seen waves of pressure and even tsunamis but this was different, something utterly incomprehensible. Every inch of the room was filled with pressure that surrounded him in a sea of misery. Crushing weight twisted his limbs as though he''d sunk to the depths of the ocean and pressure was drowning him by flooding his lungs until they were fit to burst. The person had never seen pressure of this quality or to this extent before and he wasn''t sure how to get rid of it. He couldn''t attack the trial taker and his own pressure was dwarfed in comparison whenever he tried to match it. It was like comparing the cute anger of a toddler against the rage of a thousand marching soldiers during the height of a war. The only upside here was that, as a simulation, he could feel no pain and would be revived inside the room after his ''death''. He regretted talking down to his strange cultivator but he couldn''t understand for the life of him the actions Ares had taken up to now. If he was this gifted with pressure why was he throwing a weak, rusty sword around and sitting aimlessly like a buffoon?! Yes he shouldn''t have judged a book solely by its cover but, in all fairness, he hadn''t! He''d judged this particular book by its cover, its blurb, and even the first ten pages and yet he kept coming up stupid! To think he stopped reading into Ares right before the twist on the eleventh page and opened his chatty gob, only to make a damn fool of himself... He had no complaints about his end because he knew he deserved it but he did feel somewhat indignant at the way in which he was going to go. He was like a fish drowning in an aquarium. Not only was he a pressure expert being done in by pressure, floating in a sea of the stuff, but he was being watched inquisitively from the other side of the glass by Ares. It seemed his killer himself didn''t even understand the full extent of his powers as his stare was clearly one of interest. It was a hawkish gaze that caught every change in his body as it contorted under the pressure. Every break in his bones and every crushed organ was a learning experience for this kid.
Honestly, the individual didn''t know what to think anymore. This kid was far too young to be killing someone like him. Mental accumulation was still practically baby steps compared to this individual''s cultivation and yet he couldn''t stop this death at all. Yes it was because of his inability to strike Ares but still... Where was all this pressure even coming from? How could such a tiny and inexperienced body contain all of this?... It actually reminded him of Dominus who was said to have had a special ability with pressure that always adjusted itself to be effective regardless of who it was used on... Was this kid a revenant with Dominus'' bloodline? No wonder... How unfortunate this all was... Whatever, he was doing his job. The kid could use this opportunity to learn more about how to control his unfair power.
And that''s precisely what Ares was doing. The ability to kill near enough anyone under the right circumstances was a powerful tool. He had underestimated just how strong the pressure side of his bloodline truly was and this had been an eye opener. The stars had aligned to enable this situation but that didn''t change the fact that it was happening. If Ares could summon pressure at will he could force any and every opponent into a similar state to this. A normal foe would obviously fight back in some way but what if Ares used Quietus Edict? What was anyone supposed to do then? Strike him physically? As he dashed around with Voidwalk? All Ares needed was an art to restrain people and what he was doing here and now would be replicable even against cultivators who were well and above his realm. The problem was that creating an art that restrained people using the destruction pillar was going to be quite a task. It didn''t really do the whole ''restraining'' thing and more so focussed on killing people instead. Still, the idea was one absolutely worth entertaining if this was the result awaiting him.
Ares stopped paying attention to fully clothed individual and directed the pressure towards his original target, the hills. As soon as he curved his aim the hills received the brunt of the pressure and instantaneously sunk straight into the floor, looking as though they had melted into silver puddles. Unsure of the specifics, Ares hazarded a guess that this was a kind of metal that could shapeshift but was countered heavily by pressure. It was solid but lacked structural integrity so pressure wound up being highly effective in a somewhat similar fashion to what would happen to a shade. Its physical form couldn''t resist the weight because it had no foundation to support itself. Although he was fairly confident he already knew the answer, Ares lightly tread on the sunken metal hills to find out if there would be any response. Naturally there wasn''t and that cleared things up for him. The test required the examinee to be able to summon enough pressure to simultaneously crush all five hills so they could get past them safely. And thus, that would be his goal from now on!
Ares dropped the pressure, and in turn the floating individual who smacked against the floor with a thud, and calmed down with a deep sigh. Throwing a hissy fit to enter that state all the time was not conducive to a consistently functional strategy so he was going to have to sit here and figure things out the hard way. He had advantages in Dominus'' previous showcases and the feeling of what he''d just done, so it shouldn''t be impossible, but that didn''t mean it would be a simple task either. It was like starting a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle with thirty pieces placed already. Convenient, and not something he would ever complain about, but nothing that would give him a free pass without having to put in at least some effort. The foundation was there he needed now to build upon it.
Ares sat down on the floor and closed his eyes again. This time, instead of concentrating on irrelevant nonsense, he actually put some thought into the matter at hand. There were a few things he needed to figure out before he could control pressure. Unlike mana manipulation this was not a process that came naturally. He boiled it down to three separate steps. Detecting the well in him that contained it all. Unleashing it. Directing it. If he could do those three things then this trial would be easy as pie. Sure there was more to learn after that but Ares just assumed the following trials existed for that purpose and he didn''t worry about anything more advanced than what he was already doing just yet.
Ares felt like a gravedigger the way he was invasively rummaging around but kept at it because he could sense some pressure somewhere within him. It was faint but, now that he was actually looking for it, he could sense some traces of it. He followed said trail with his nose to the ground, not literally otherwise that would have looked incredibly weird, and eventually narrowed down the possible locations. There was no way to accurately predict which path would lead to his well of pressure so he picked at random and paid his heart a visit. He was fairly familiar with this part of him as he''d been chopping it up here and there as of late when he''d been making the jewel for Enyo''s ring. He never noticed anything pressure related until now mostly because he hadn''t been trying to sniff it out in the first place. It was sort of like frequency illusion except he was actually correct! Of all the options he could have searched through it seemed the well of pressure was, in fact, hidden somewhere in his heart. And to think he''d been so close to it the entire time! What a blunder... Actually, now Ares was curious. If he ever removed his heart would he lose access to his pressure reserves? He couldn''t test it now as removing it would probably kill him but it was worth keeping this question in the back of his head and testing at a later date. Right now he had a different problem... What the hell was he supposed to do now? He''d found his target, and could tell there was a boundless reservoir of pressure hidden deep within his heart, but step one had always been the easiest part to begin with. Step two was where the struggle began... And he wasn''t even there yet! He was on step 1.5 trying to even access the pressure so he could circle it through his body before unleashing it! He''d found the lock but didn''t have a key! It seemed Ares was going to be sitting here and twiddling his thumbs for a little while longer while his monkey brain went to town on the type-writer that was the slew of ideas bubbling in his head...