Though many fingertips came within an inch of touching the seated, grinning Ares it was all for naught.
Blink
Like a closing black camera shutter, the world turned pitch black and everyone caught up in the chaos essentially disappeared from the world from the perspective of those uninvolved in the fight. Those affected felt as though they'd temporarily become obedient, silent, unmoving statues as their senses escaped them. This was a bizarre art and they couldn't for the life of them understand what had happened in the spilt second of absolute peace they enjoyed in the empty void. They couldn't see anyone else but, to be fair, they couldn't even see their own bodies. They were nothing more than a conscience floating through infinite empty darkness, subject to the whims of a higher power... At least that was the case until the lights came back on and light returned to the world. For most of the attackers this was a relief but for those who found themselves on the business end of Ares' retaliation an unpredictable nightmare was about to start unfolding.
Ares had looked so helpless down on the ground surrounded by vicious wolves but that last smirk he threw out left a sour feeling in the guts of those who were slightly more combat savvy. It was all far too late to realise he'd lured everyone in on purpose but everybody had already committed to their attacks and resigned themselves to whatever fate came next. Just after the world faded to black, those nearest to Ares expected him to still be seated in the same position once the magic wore off. They believed it to be unreasonable that an art could force this many people into solitude in their own emptied minds all at once while also allowing the wielder to simultaneously move. That wasn't even an art anymore, that was an act of God. Unfortunately for these people, however, Dominus was effectively on the level of a God when it came to the weapon pillar and Asura Rondo was an art that very nearly breached the official top ten arts of all time. Perhaps if Dominus invested more time into it, became a God and worked on it some more with his divine power, or simply allowed the art to spread far and wide beyond his direct tutelage then it might have crossed that threshold.
Regardless, the point here was that when the world returned to normalcy, Ares was standing menacingly in front of the crowd, no longer seated, like some kind of horror slasher with a maniacal grin. Those assaulting him could feel the world shutting down again, slowly inching towards another fade to black, but there was nothing they could do to stop it. It now felt like all movement was out of their control and they were simply following pre-ordained directions like puppets on strings. Ares looked free as a bird in comparison which gave the cultivators to understand, collectively in the span of a blink of an eye, that they were about get massacred. Being forced to follow a strict script while the conductor reigned supreme and flowed freely from scene to scene... It was as though Ares was a higher being in charge of a screenplay, actively pausing his actors in time and personally readjusting their positions before resuming activity in a way that was strictly beneficial to himself.
Ares embraced the oncoming cultivator horde and leapt forward foot first. His boot landed square on the face of the foremost cultivator and shortly after the world faded to black once more with another blink. While the Frozen Throne group could feel their bodies freezing in place, Ares persisted in his actions under the cover of darkness to get ahead of the curve by the time the world faded back in. Everyone's eyes were reopened and Ares had already fully catapulted himself over the crowd. The person he stepped on seconds prior was now buried in the ice head first like an arctic ostrich. He would be staying there permanently, however, as his head had been thoroughly crushed as it was slammed into the floor by Ares' foot all so he could gain an extra burst of momentum. A life had been traded for convenience. Ares, flipping through the air, grabbed the hair of one the attackers and swung back towards the crowd with his knee jutting out. What came next was obvious, someone was about to get their head caved in, but the curtain of black void descended once more as if to cover up the gory display.
Blink
Nothing could be done once the world took a nap other than waiting patiently but that didn't alleviate the anger bubbling away in sone of the stronger cultivators who were being dragged along for the ride and couldn't get off of their own volition. Ares' Quietus was still in effect so arts were off the table and even now physical movement was constrained by Asura Rondo, restricted like a coiled viper around their limbs or a parasite controlling their thoughts. Any form of movement that was actually possible in this state was done automatically as though they were on a conveyor belt, their path, destination, and journey were all in motion and they could do nothing but sit and watch from within their own conscience behind the whites of their eyes. Reality returned once again and the person who Ares grabbed the hair of last time now had a bent knee exactly where their head should have been. During the pitch black period of empty ebony chaos, Ares had splattered the skull of an immobile man with the strength of his thrusting knee and everyone was welcomed back to the real world by this gory hospitality and terrible sight. Ares ignored the anger and horror in everyone's eyes and utilised his remaining forward momentum to slip through the group, landing down on the ground between all those who were all still tumbling forward, and stuck out a leg to trip someone directly in the middle of the pack. Ares didn't even have to do anything special to this person as they would be trampled to death as soon as the next black period descended due to their terrible position amongst the crowd. That person's life and struggles were so insignificant that the world didn't even fade out immediately after he was consigned to death; Ares was able to get a two for one murder deal during this period by sucker punching the jaw of another cultivator while imbuing his fist with Echo. Again, though, the end result was impossible to see as it happened as the world blinked yet again. What came next for the two punished individuals was to be expected, death, but not seeing it gave rise to plenty of gruesome imagery in the minds of those stuck in limbo and still alive. They could do nothing but wait patiently as their comrades were murdered in a space they could not access in a battle they could not gain permission to join.
Twice the victims, twice the carnage. Vision returned for all and there were two blood fountains caught up in the mix as the remaining cultivators spread away from them. Some cultivators had convinced their muscles to escape this hellish cluster but the process of a actually getting away was a slow one and the world was inevitably going to blank out again before they could fully depart. Still, those that attempted to leave where the ones who were going to survive the longest because gleaming-eyed Ares was working his way outward from the centre of the group and killing people one by one in his immediate proximity. Before, when he was king of the hill, everyone wanted a piece! They all jumped at him in a never ending loop, keeping him firmly on his toes until the end of time. Now, however, he'd carved out another chosen location and everyone was doing their best to give this mad dog some space and not interfere with him at all.
Unfortunately for them, Ares' inner wild side had come out a little. Perhaps it had something to do with his war aura flaring up somewhat. Perhaps the sheer exhilaration of beating people to death with his bare body was driving him forward. Maybe the chill on his extremities was keeping him alert. Maybe the Scaled Insulator's warmth over his volcanic heart was getting him pumped. It was impossible to tell what individual factor caused it but Ares' very being was now reminiscent of how he was back during the one fight he had against Slick when he initially joined the sect. Ares was acting like a combat freak and his every action as exaggerated. He'd jsut reached his fist into the chest of a fleeing man and yanked out an organ with his body curved slightly backwards and his chin lifted high. Blood seeped through his fingers and his fangs also looked a little longer than usual. Bloodline awakening was right around the corner now and maybe this fight was getting him closer to the tenth stage of sensory enhancement hence the sudden change in his bodily features. The inner wolf was coming out and the battle maniac that had been buried for some time now was making a return. It was originally a product of multiple things, namely his latent affiliation for war aura, Dominus' bloodline, and the nature of his destruction magic. All of these things combined were quite compelling for a young and inexperienced cultivator but to see it again now... Now that Ares had the reigns and could take advantage of his bloodlust... Ares was in full control and he was definitely enjoying himself in a way he hadn't done so for a while. He was like an unchained, starved beast. Before the world took another nap Ares managed to kick another person's spine and grip the tail of a white tiger.
Blink
Milliseconds passed and the scene had changed again. The tiger Ares gripped by the tail lay broken on the floor, each of its legs having been stamped and crushed. It was a living pelt of fur that had yet to be executed by Ares stood atop it like it was a thoroughly conquered rug whilst holding the spine he'd ripped out from the cultivator he attacked earlier. The body the bones belonged to was limp and mushy, a pile of flesh with a terrified but motionless dead head attached. Ares ripped the spine in half and threw both sides away, burying them in the calves of fleeing cultivators while his head swivelled to face another incoming tiger. Ares laughed evilly at the brave monster that dared to fight him and...
Blink
From the tiger's perspective, this was hell. It had watched helplessly as it's tiger comrade was half slain and trampled on so it rushed in, throwing both caution and its own safety out the window, to try and salvage the situation as best it could. The world betrayed its courage, however, and faded to black right as it leapt at Ares... But there was now a strange taste in its mouth that it couldn't quite understand or recognise due to its sense being muffled in this void. Something had very clearly happened but until vision was restored there was no telling what manner of evil Ares had done. The tiger almost didn't want to return to reality. This pitch black darkness had become a respite, a break from the mind-numbing madness. Staying here forever might not be so bad but, regrettably, all good things must come to an end and what the tiger saw next broke its heart and shook its resolve. Clasped inside its shut teeth was the crushed head of a polar bear mount. Ares was gracefully swivelling through the air with a crazy laugh after having just rerouted the polar bear straight in front of the tiger. The tiger mount could feel the blood of its comrade trickling down its throat as the last ray of light in the polar's bears' sad and betrayed eyes faded. The tiger had been made to eat its own comrade's skull and brain and drink its blood like a savage but the devil responsible was barely even paying any attention anymore as causing chaos elsewhere had taken his fancy. Ares somehow vanished in the blink of an eye and was terrorising another cultivator a few feet away by catching their arm mid swing and biting into their elbow. It was pure pandemonium and time flowed like a stop and start engine. Reality sputtered to life for a few brief moments before collapsing and blinking over and over again with each scene being one of pure carnage.
Blink
Ares ripped the feathers off a bird mount and spread its beak wide in two opposite directions until its face snapped in half and blood came gushing out all over his chest.
Blink
Those same feathers Ares plucked earlier were used to pierce and blind the eyes of another two cultivators while Ares broke the leg of a third with a swift kick.
Blink
Ares had dragged the limp cultivator, leaving a line of blood in the snow, and thrown him onto a nearby protruding shard of ice to end his life. Ares spun and dodged an attack from behind while kicking the face of the ambusher trying to punch. The cultivator he smacked was blasted towards the spike and...
Blink
Ares was no longer directly beside the spike but there were now two corpses piled up on top it and soon to be a third. A man and his tiger mount tried to attack Ares together but Ares ducked under the tiger's paw and gripped the rider by his trousers, yanking him off his ride and using him as a human shield. The tiger tried to move cautiously, so as not to strike his owner as it kept swiping at Ares, but Ares puppeteered his captive expertly and before long the tiger had accidentally slammed into his owner and sent him flying towards the spike too. Ares shoved his hand forward and grabbed the tooth of the distraught tiger and...
Blink
Three bodies piled up on the spike and a dead tiger laying nearby with one of its own fangs lodged tightly in its skull. Ares was nowhere to be seen this time and panic ensued amongst the remaining hand full of cultivators with broken wills. Despite their fear they all still had to scan the area to find the monster lurking around but their distress only grew worse as Ares simply wasn't here. Like a ghost, he'd departed from this earthly coil and could no longer be found by the naked eye. Nobody knew where he was but if they thought that meant their troubles had also disappeared alongside their tormentor...
Blink
...
Everything seemed normal this time... Until a sharp cry from a female cultivator was heard and everyone turned to look at what she was screaming at. Two individuals stood still next to each other but there was something amiss about them... Upon closer inspection, the top halves of their bodies had been swapped with one another. Ares had broken their bodies in two, snapped them at the waist, and replaced everything from the crotch up with the body of their comrade like some kind of chimeric monstrosity. They were already dead, nothing more than experimented-upon and defiled statues of demise. The woman who originally noticed this first had fallen onto her rear in fear and what made this situation that much worse was that Ares had expertly wielded his Quietus to allow that earlier scream and nothing else. It was a harrowing cry in the midst of a losing battle. Morale dropped even further, down to an all-time low, as Ares was still lurking somewhere and nobody could seemingly locate him... At least, that was up until he willingly revealed himself standing behind another cultivator who was none the wiser about the reaper creeping up behind him. Everyone's eyes widened and pointed but there was nothing the cultivators could do in time to prevent the inevitable.
Blink
Ares had borrowed the power of Visitation temporarily to make himself an ethereal ghost that drifted across, and eerily haunted, the battlefield but he'd had enough fun and returned to having his presence be known. The man he crept up behind was still stood in place but his eyes were gone and a creepy smile had been carved into his mouth by sharp nails. His arm had been broken and was stuck in place, forcing his limp hand to dangle as though it were waving at everyone now that he'd unexpectedly become the centre of attention. His heart was visible on his chest because Ares had ripped it out and stuck it to the front of his clothes and he was like some sort of unnerving science experiment doll that had been tampered with by a psychotic individual. It was almost impossible to believe that corpse had been a living human being not even mere seconds ago.
Usually Ares wasn't this brutal but he was trying something out here and made an exception. Still, for what it was worth, he killed the person before messing with their corpse; he hadn't made them suffer any egregious pain while alive or anything so he wasn't becoming some sort of demon in real time. As for what he was experimenting with... The war aura could pick up on the sense of fear. Usually anyone who fled from the war aura met a tragic end at the hand of merciless flags and, while that was still true, it could do nothing to those who felt fear but didn't retreat. It knew of their fear, very clearly, and this sensation was transmitted directly to Ares who could feel power bubbling away pointlessly. all that energy was being wasted and he didn't want things to stay that way. He was collecting that essence of fear now and toying with it as he killed the cultivators to see what he could make and do with this wealth of power. The gruesome corpse he left on display was a means to an end and nothing personal nor was it something he would ever really try and replicate going forward because it made even him feel a bit sick to the stomach and it was his own creation... A new aura based attack seemed imminent and he'd done an excellent job at corralling these cultivators like livestock for the purpose of learning it.
Blink
The man who originally rode over to Ares on a tiger, and threatened him with inhumane torture, was dismayed and his arms had fallen limp by his side. He watched on wordlessly with an empty expression, blink after blink, as the people surrounding him met painful ends one by one. Ares was practically teleporting around at the speed of light, appearing and disappearing like a corrupted mythological trickster in a rabid fever dream. The old man's head spun and he could feel his own pulse quicken as saliva got stuck in his throat. He could no longer lift even a hand in rebellion against the monster he'd picked this fight with and, soon enough, he was the only one left. The lingering Quietus Edict finally ran out of steam and faded but what did it matter? The man was still stuck in the centre of a pop-up graveyard. Blood stains were everywhere, dismembered body parts were still sliding slowly across the ice, animals lay battered and broken, and bones formed odd non-Euclidean shapes as they were crammed together under piles of snow. The Asura Rondo had ended but silence remained save for the biting winds howling across the sky. Ares stood directly in front of the man and stared right back at him wordlessly.
Gulp
The old man wanted to run but didn't want to turn his back because he couldn't even fathom the type of death that would follow if he took such a stupid action. He wanted to fight but his arms had never felt so weak and unresponsive. He wanted to yell but his mind couldn't think of any words that would mean anything or carry weight in this situation. He was still stricken by fear but he wasn't retreating and this was arguably the worst situation he could have found himself in because Ares was after precisely this. His indecision and confusion was the birth point of a new war aura attack and this one was going to be Ares' first proper mental attack, it seemed. Ares didn't really have any up until now, other than formlessly chucking disintegration at people's mind realms, but now he'd come up with a new tool.
Ares could tell this new attack had two properties. One was that it could stimulate fear in those who didn't already feel it and property number two was to set up a hurdle. A sort of challenge that everyone and anyone fighting on the same battlefield as him, on the opposing side, had to face head on. Put simply, if they couldn't overcome their fear of Ares they would die. It was an instant death art much like Grim Cessation but this one came with a warning. The old cultivator could feel death creeping up on him, and he knew what he had to do to avoid it, but he simply couldn't steel his nerves sufficiently no matter how hard he tried. If anything, the more he tried the worse it became as his breaths became shallow and his eye sight dimmed in panic. This tool of Ares' was going to be another fly swatter type attack, fantastic for clearing out large groups of weak enemies, but the mental instigation of fear was also helpful at slowing down tougher opponents. In a way, it was practically similar to Esoteric Compression in that it served a good purpose even against foes it wasn't designed for. Excellent against the weak, purposeful against the strong. Plus if Ares was in a tough fight and took the edge there was a chance his foe might might really fall into despair thanks to this ever present war aura attack and cause them to die to it. This mental war aura attack was a permanent fixture that never left during the fight, so long as the war aura was up and running, meaning anyone who was scared would face death regardless of whether they ran or stayed. One needed to truly embrace the essence of war and battle and fight on in the face of a foe as overwhelming as Ares. If they couldn't there was simply no point to even fighting to begin with and, as such, there would be no fight because the war aura and its owner didn't deem them worth their time. It was possible to lose without feeling fear and anyone who couldn't at least do that would be subject to the aura's wrath. Those, fuelled by fear, who ran were impaled by flags and those who stayed...
The old man's bones cracked and he lost control of them. His body's movements were no longer his own much like what happened during Asura Rondo but this time it was different. It was worse. He could tell he was never getting control back if he didn't overcome this war aura but he really just couldn't do it. There was no coming back from this as the next step was death and there would be no comprises, the old man knew this. Until the bitter end, the man tried to tame his fear of Ares but it just wasn't possible as he'd witnessed too much here today. As soon as that realisation hit him he lost consciousness and died but that wasn't relevant. He was dead but his body kept contorting and became usually stiff, undergoing some sort of transformation process. Disintegration formed loose and baggy pants over his legs while nothingness took the shape of a red top that covered his upper body. Finally, a golden mask donned itself on the dead cultivator's face as countless war aura flags surged forth from the ground and hoisted the old man's corpse a few feet off the ground. the golden mask sprouted even more war aura flags, all of which unfurled as if they were claiming this dead body as their own.
The old man had become a scarecrow of destruction's bidding, spreading fear and terror by unwillingly donning the flags of war aura that fluttered in the wind. The chaotic spiralling effect of the flags' fabric intensified and the tied up border guards who saw it for even a split second were dipping into insanity and rabid fear. If Ares didn't control the spread of this fear properly these guards would also be infected by the war aura mental attack and become scarecrows themselves. put simply, those who felt fear turned into effigies that then further spread the excess fear of the deceased to others in the vicinity in a knock on effect. It was an avalanche. It was a plague that could start small but wipe out large settlements just by becoming an omen of the inevitable future in store for those who opposed Ares. One scarecrow might not be much of anything but if one became two, two became four, and four eventually became thousands every second... An entire army could be withered away in mere moments, leaving behind a barren wasteland of flagged scarecrows, just by spreading this cursed mental attack and watching it feast on a single weak willed individual. Watching comrades become some decrepit obstacle of humiliation would be enough to allow tinge of doubt to seep in and then all would be lost and mayhem would spread far and wide. Put simply, Ares' new war aura attack was a waking nightmare.