"Was that little present for me? Aw, you shouldn''t have! I much prefer gifts like jewellery and, well, pretty much anything that isn''t hazardous to my health." Thus the eye spoketh. This woman must have been taken by surprise when the golden bullet of pressure came rushing past them from the floor below so the fact they were this nonchalant about it spoke volumes about their personality. Granted they, the floor overseers, felt no pain and were immortal as simulations but to be so unbothered by this borderline assassination attempt painted her as an extremely carefree and happy-go-lucky kind of person to Ares. "Hmm, craning my neck and bending over like this is tiring. I''m a bit of a lazy bones, you see, so I''m gonna go back and keep resting. Have fun down there cutie! Make sure to come up to my floor soon! I''m awfully bored all by my lonesome... And you seem like just the remedial tonic. Ciao for now!" And thus the eye left, leaving a confused Ares wondering whether he should just never go up a floor and accept his lot in life...
Unfortunately becoming stronger was more important to him than avoiding that woman so his fate was sealed. The most he could do was experiment on this floor for a while longer and not ascend yet. He still had to learn to aim pressure, rapid fire it, and even after that he could practice some more in other ways. Was he just buying time? Yeah, maybe, but at least what he was doing was productive! Ignoring Golgo who knocked himself out again, Ares stood up and took a few paces backward. He could walk up to the edge of the moat and aim for the targets from a closer range but that was the easy way out. He wanted to make this task as difficult as possible to gain a good bit of experience. His goals, in order, were as follows: hit a target. Improve the speed of generating a pressure bullet. Hit two targets. Improve the generation speed again. Hit four of the five targets repeatedly until he felt comfortable he could hit them all with one eye closed. Try mixing Echoes with pressure to check the result. Create an art involving pressure. Hit all five targets and then move on up with complete assurance there was nothing left for him to do on this floor. It may have sounded like a lot but most of it just boiled down to practicing for a bit here and there. Really the most difficult part was going to be creating an art but even then his experiments prior to that goal ought to help speed things along. The knowledge he would gain would inevitably feed into the creation process which was partly why he was leaving it until near the end.
Ares aimed for the target that was furthest back, and also zipping around like a caffeine addled child, because all the others would be simple to hit in comparison if he could get this one down pat. Even before he worried about hitting the target, though, he first needed to do something about the recoil plaguing his every shot. Ares could always imbue his finger with mana and that would probably solve the issue but he wanted to see if it was possible to do something about it without having to use even more mana than he already was. He used mana to draw the pressure out, he used it to turn pressure into something physical, he used it control it after it left his body, and now he was going to use it again to steady himself? It wasn''t much necessarily but the small amounts added up over time; it was to the point that a single pressure bullet cost about as much as a Shock Bead. That wasn''t an expensive mana cost or anything, and considering its piercing power it was actually rather quite cheap, but if it could be reduced then why not make the effort here and now? Setting good habits in place early would do him good in the long run as it would prevent him having to dredge up all of his knowledge on the matter just to correct any small inconveniences that could be rooted out for good right now. So, instead of using mana, Ares used pressure! The normal kind provided weight and could keep his finger locked in place if he used the correct amount. It was somewhat disconcerting using regular and physical pressure at near enough the same time but Ares toiled away for about thirty minutes before he managed it. He''d yet to hit the target, and its taunting visage kept speeding around the room and mocking him all the while, but he''d been more so preoccupied with controlling the pressure than hitting it anyway. Or rather, hitting it with his still-wonky aim would be hard to pull off anyway so he was just firing off bullets haphazardly to get a feel for the balancing act he needed to pull to even out the recoil. Now that he''d gotten that settled, it was comeuppance time for that stupid target!
The target zigzagged in an unpredictable way with no pattern to speak of but that was ok. Ares'' bullet was faster than this thing by a wide margin so he didn''t have to lead the shot too much even at this distance. He got into a stance and followed the target with his finger, ready to pull the proverbial trigger when he felt good and ready. For now though he just kept tracing the target in a bid to familiarise himself with its speed and acceleration after making a turn.
...
...
...
BANG
Half the target was blown clean off and the metal fell to the ground in a pile of gooey liquid. Unfortunately Ares'' timing had been rather unlucky as he shot the bullet at the exact same moment in time the target happened to make a turn. As this was completely unpredictable he didn''t feel disheartened as the chances of it happening repeatedly were low. Also, even in spite of the mistake, he''d still been able to do some damage. Not enough for the target to be considered ''hit'' properly but it was still a decent attempt nonetheless. The metal on the floor hobbled its way to the target above it and jumped, merging back up with the other half before it began speeding around the back of the room again. It seemed, based on this, Ares had about five seconds to hit all five targets before they regenerated. One second for each was plenty, especially seeing as how the timer wouldn''t start until he hit the first one so it was more like five seconds to hit four. Plus he was starting with the hardest one so that shaved off a bit of time too. Ares trained his aim on the target again and...
BANG
This time the entire target was blown to smithereens and the metal splattered all over the floor. Ares heard a ''ding'' which must have indicated the destruction of one target to an acceptable degree. A few seconds later, after all the metal droplets reconvened and reformed the target, the sound of a buzzer rang out and signalled that Ares had failed to hit all the targets within the allotted time-frame. This was good. Ares could hit the hardest target with decent consistency and he knew the inner workings of the trial. That meant now he could start going through his list of goals and get some work done on completing them all. Next up was learning to generate the pressure bullets quicker. Currently it was roughly a two second process and that was painfully slow, double the time it took to use regular pressure. He wanted to get it down to, at most, a second before he went back to aim practice. Seeing as how both accessing the pressure and making it solid took a second each, Ares opted to make the first half of the equation quicker for now as that would also benefit him when using regular pressure as well. He hadn''t planned on coming back to this so soon but it seemed the pagoda would leave no loose ends. By the time you reached the top floor you were clearly expected to have considerable mastery over pressure in all aspects and any weaknesses you may have had at the start would be drilled out of you.
Ares poked and prodded away at his heart again, although he really wasn''t supposed to be doing that at all as the intended method was to be safe and slow, and he dedicated some time to accessing the pressure reserves as quickly as possible. The more he repeated this action the more he became accustomed to navigating the tiny pathways that led inside his heart. Although his speed was improving his surgical precision was not but he toughed it out regardless. Through rigorous trial and error, Ares eventually managed to get his time down to half a second if he was careless and about three quarters of a second if he avoided poking himself. Was this enough? Maybe? If he wound up with similar times for the second half of the process he could fire off a bullet per second, and that was absolutely a respectable output, but what kind of half measures would he have to take to enable it? Poking his heart constantly and firing off misshapen bullets? That really wasn''t good enough in Ares'' book so he hunkered down and trained some more. It wasn''t interesting but it was needed... Even if Ares wanted to bang his head against the wall in boredom from time to time... Actually... Ares had an idea!
This little idea of his would take a couple of seconds to accomplish and provide him a reward that would give him a laugh every now and then when he needed it. Ares crept over to Golgo, pulled a pen out of the Primordial Blade, and drew a good old fashioned moustache on the guy! Was it childish? Yeah, maybe, but Ares was a revenant, he was allowed to do silly pranks like this every now and then. For all Ares knew, if he didn''t do something stupid at least once a week he might actually explode thanks to his negligence. There was just an unwritten rule for revenants that commanded they all do stuff like this periodically so who was Ares not to follow it? Actually, now that he thought about it, his ither siblings didn''t seem to act like this often. Fate and Venus were very capable of it, Ares didn''t need to see it to believe it, but whether Scar or Skyzo did too was anyone''s guess... Verv was indecipherable. He was either permanently insane or about to be so whether he was the most ridiculous sibling of all went without saying. he even had Ares topped in that regard, it''s just the way he expressed it was different to Ares.
Ares went back to practicing while stopping every now and then to giggle like a child at Golgo''s glorious moustache. It blended in on his face surprisingly well because of the rest of his facial hair. Given there was no mirror in this room the chances of Golgo ever discovering it and removing it were slim. Maybe if he looked in the water but Ares wasn''t sure this guy ever did anything in this pagoda except give advice and sleep all day so the chances of that happening were equally as low. It was unofficially official, the Golgo clone would now live the rest of its life with a ''stache! Distractions, albeit worthwhile ones, aside, Ares eventually brought his time down even lower. He could now get pressure moving around his body in half a second on the dot! No injuries, no mistakes, no funny business. He knew he could still do better but that was something he would work on some other time. Right now he''d accomplished this goal so he stood up and prepared himself for the next one. Being goal oriented like this helped him come up with a functional plan of attack to put this trial in the dust and be done with it pronto. Next up was hitting two targets in a row. Ares could already hit one with good consistency but having to rush the creation of another immediately after, aim, and fire while managing recoil was something he was inexperienced with.
Bang
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The first shot hit its mark and the ding assured Ares he could move on to the next target. This one was closer and moved slower so Ares repeated the process while making sure to steady his shot. This wasn''t about speed, not yet, he wanted to feel comfortable aiming at multiple targets. Speed would come after this.
Bang Ding
Ares nodded his head to himself, satisfied with the outcome. He was about to sit down again and move on when a thought struck him out of the blue. He waited for the metal targets to regenerate before he lifted both his hands. His left and right pointer fingers each aimed carefully at the two different targets he''d just hit, which took a while to get the hang of as the hand-eye coordination needed was not trivial, and he took a deep breath. He waited like a predator stalking his prey, looking for the opportune moment to launch his ambush on the targets...
BANG BANG
Two bullets were fired off simultaneously and both hit their mark... And yet only one ding was heard. Ares had hit them both, sure, but he''d nicked the target further back and not done enough damage to constitute a clean hit. Still, this was a good idea. Ares wanted to do the trial the normal way but he would give this method some practice at home later. Instead of generating one at a time there was no real reason he couldn''t create two bullets at once! With that done, Ares put his rear back on the floor. It was time to speed things up again. He''d already dealt with getting the pressure flowing so now he was going to work on converting the pressure faster. This was inevitably going to take longer to pull off though because if there was one thing annihilation magic was atrocious at, it was being shaped. This could be mitigated slightly by leaning more towards shaping the pressure than the mana but a mix of both was still necessary. It felt like trying to twist metal but, well, Ares was committed. He knew what needed to be done was as hard as it was uninteresting but, when looking at what kind of a cultivation monster he would become after learning all of this, he felt his vigour renew itself. He was taking a pretty major step here as everything he was doing would become a foundation he would keep building upon throughout his entire cultivation career. Dominus may not have thought highly of Ares for rarely training but, when push came to shove and he actually had to, Ares was capable of some serious dedication... Even if he had to take a break every now and then to laugh at Golgo... But he did do it! Less than an hour later he was in good shape and the speed of pressure bullet generation was astounding compared to previously, coming it t around 0.4 seconds. Old Ares took two whole seconds to fire off a bullet but new Ares could do it in about 0.9 seconds. He''d shaved off a lot of excess time on the second half of the process and things were looking good. He stood up, took aim, and fired off two shots sequentially.
BANG BANG
And would you look at that, ding ding. No near misses, no delayed shots, no wayward bullets. Two perfect shots back to back left Ares feeling good about his current state. Now he could push on and aim for four. If he hit all five he would clear the trial and Ares wasn''t sure if the targets would come back so he avoided going all the way for now.
BANG BANG BANG BANG
DING DING DING
"Tsk." Ares kissed his teeth in frustration. This failure wasn''t his fault! It''s not like his excuse was something petty either, like maybe the sun had gotten in his eyes or whatever, he had a genuine reason for missing that last shot! As he was about to fire off the last bullet the target he was aiming at swerved into the path of the fifth target. Ares'' pressure bullets had enough penetrating power to destroy two tagerts easily so he had to veer off course to prevent himself from accidentally finishing the trial! His last shot wasn''t ''bad'', it was the exact opposite! It was so good Ares would have become the first person to clear floor three with only four shots! Resisting the urge to set that kind of record wasn''t easy but Ares'' inner voice, whispering evilly in to his ear, didn''t prevail in the end. Ares took a stance and readied himself to correct the record!
BANG BANG BANG BANG
DING DING DING DING
Flawless. Each shot hit the mark dead centre and shattered the targets. This goal was checked off the list but, before moving on, Ares got used to firing while moving. Up until now he''d been completely stationary so he got off his lazy ass and started running around. Omniscience would have made this a cake walk but that was cheating! Ares stubbornly refused to use Omniscience at any point in this pagoda! Also, he really didn''t need it. Not even five minutes later, no matter how much he jumped, flipped and sprinted around like a kicka with a sugar rush, he could hit any and all of the targets with one eye closed. He''d gone above and beyond but it felt good knowing this attack was now fully usable in combat no matter the fight he found himself in. Plus it was a ranged option and Ares had been somewhat lacking in that department. He had the Biome Eagle but that was a single, heavy shot and couldn''t keep up the pressure after it was done.
Now came the extra goals that he really didn''t have to work towards right now but chose to anyway. First up was combining pressure with his Echoes. The Echo started in his shoulder when he moved it so all Ares needed to do was have the mana and pressure flow down his arm by each other''s side. Joining them together as he moved them was literally the only step that changed here as the formation of magic was already taken care of thanks to the Echo. It sounded simple but whether or not it actually was remained to be seen so Ares gave it a shot and spun his shoulder in a small clockwise motion. "Echo."
Ares watched the Echo tumble into the moat and disappear with a splash. There had been faint traces of gold but the pressure clearly didn''t merge with the art in time. It had worked, Ares just wasn''t quick enough... Even after all the effort he put in to get quicker it still wasn''t enough for this just yet... What a pain. He could struggle to eke out a few extra milliseconds for God only knows how long to make this work, or Ares could leave it for a later date and so he chose the latter option. He wasn''t going to stubbornly cling to the extra goals, he mainly just wanted to find out how feasible each of them were with his current tools. Even just being aware that Echoes containing pressure was a possibility was mission accomplished as far as Ares was concerned. It did bother him slightly having to give up for the first time since entering the pagoda but there was nothing to be done about it. Rather, this had been a good experiment because now that he had the feel for it creating a pressure art wouldn''t be as tricky. He already knew the direction he wanted to take too. The biggest complication for this art was going to be the fact that it required normal pressure and physical pressure at the same time... Ares was going to have to segment the pressure and only make one half physical while still releasing them together. He''d done this to an extent earlier when using normal pressure to reduce the recoil but this was going to be a little harder to make work. This was fun for Ares though! It reminded him of technical and rune creation what with some of the unexpected puzzles he had to solve before he could create and use the end product...
Actually, now that Ares thought about it... Why was he able to cast Echo in the first place? Weren''t there anti-magic runes in this place? He tried casting a Grand Annihilation to check but it was snuffed out before it could even be spawned into reality. It seemed only arts that utilised pressure were allowed... As for how that was woven into the runes Ares didn''t know. The person responsible for them must have been a real genius to be able to specify such a thing... Ares was jealous! If he could get a peep at the runes he could steal them with his Omniscience! It didn''t look like that was going to be possible though so he gave up and returned to his current task.
An hour later, after countless failed tests, Ares felt confident he was on the brink of achieving his goal. His last few attempts had solidified his vision for the art and he''d been progressively inching towards success with every minor change he implemented. He was now at the point where he was convinced it couldn''t possibly go wrong because there were no avenues for failure he hadn''t already sealed off with his myriad corrections to the art. Ares aimed off to the side as the art hit in a decently wide area and he didn''t want to accidentally complete the trial the wrong way. He jutted his whole hand forward and spread it. This was needed to get the masses of pressure out cleanly as a single finger was too slow.
"Esoteric Compression."
Waves of golden pressure rolled over the designated area and crushed the nearby targets into the floor, shattering them near enough instantly. The full power of the art couldn''t even be discerned properly because the targets couldn''t resist it for even a fraction of a second. Essentially, the art was a technical that combined the weight of Ares normal pressure with the weight of physical pressure, both of which smashed into the foe from above and flattened them on the floor. It was similar to Enyo''s barriers crushing people into paste and a fairly simple art overall but highly effective nonetheless. The force behind this art was enough to outright crush a human being at the same cultivation as Ares if it wasn''t dodged. It was a slower art but did some real damage at minimum. Even if it didn''t kill or injure the other person the sheer amount of weight resting on their shoulders could probably lock them down until it ended. Better yet, if they tried Blinking out using the space-time pillar then Ares could snap his fingers and break them on the spot. It was an art that was extremely hard to escape from if you didn''t dodge it completely from the get go... Of course that also required the opponent to have not been squashed to death immediately as that was very likely with an art this strong. Also, as it used normal pressure, Dominus'' bloodline trait kicked in and auto adjusted the pressure to be effective regardless of the other person''s cultivation. Even if Ares used this art on a God tomorrow it would still work. This was the main benefit to his pressure that he would exploit fully and with reckless abandon. He didn''t need to be as fearful of people out of his league anymore as there was still potential to either run away or take them by surprise with his pressure if things worked out perfectly. There were limits to what could be done in this manner, sure, but it was better than having no options whatsoever. Also, unlike the Primordial Blade, he could use this freely and openly right now so Ares was really happy with how things had gone so far in the pagoda. He went from having no idea how to control pressure to being the primo pressure producer in Red Sun within a few hours. There wasn''t much competition but it was worth being proud over nonetheless! As there was yet more to learn on floor four Ares was feeling just about ready to bid this floor, and it''s mustachioed overseer, adieu.
BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG
Ding Ding Ding Ding Ding
DING
A celebratory Ding informed Ares he''d passed the trial and it was music to his ears, especially after having heard that infernal buzzer on repeat for God knows how long every time he ''failed''. Ares watched the drawbridge lower while walking over to Golgo. Leaving without so much as a word felt like bad manners so he was going to wake him up first. He also had a question he wanted to ask so now was as good a time as any. After all, this guy came from the outside world and so Ares wanted to know... What was the general consensus amongst the public about the fundamentals? Obviously they would be grateful for the whole ''saving the world'' thing but surely there would be some resentment? Countless planets plundered of their resources to aid in the upbringing of these champions, people born with a free ticket to the good life... If Ares was going to be looked upon with scorn in the wider world just for existing that was fine but he at least wanted to know ahead of time. He would prepare himself, not to pretend to remain unphased, no, he would prepare himself to fight back! These people clearly didn''t realise the consequence of annoying a revenant was getting annoyed by said revenant tenfold in response! If they wanted petty, Ares had enough petty flowing through his veins to form a meteor of spite!