Chapter 270: Moody Swings
Ares had seen a couple of arts in his time that he didn't know about beforehand. It was all but certain you would come across unfamiliar and unique arts as a cultivator at some point your life. Unless you were some cannon fodder background character who died the second they smelled the smoky air of actual combat you were going to have to play the 'what the hell does this thing do?' game at some point, it was an inevitability. It could be quite anxiety inducing because one-shot kill arts did exist, and were usually condition based, so if someone used an art and nothing happened immediately then your heart rate was going to climb higher and higher the longer it took to understand what was actually going on. In many ways, cultivators preferred it when unknown arts had appropriate and clear names or when they just straight up launched a large and powerful attack as it was simpler to react to. Anyway, the point of this was that Ares had been there and done that and, yet, the situation he was currently in was something entirely new to him... He'd never cast an art himself that he didn't know the details of.
How was he supposed to move or channel his mana after chanting Timeline Splice?
What did it do?
There were some context clues available to him but, in a roundabout way, that almost made it worse! Timeline Splice was an art of the bestowal aspect, as it belonged to the Primordial Blade, that was obvious. Based on the name, the Blade would show Ares a moment from his future and then Splice the current and future timelines together, enabling him to use whatever trick, attack, or method he was using said vision of the future. Again, obvious... But what the hell was he doing in the vision exactly and how was he supposed to replicate it? That was where things got complicated and Ares didn't have the answer right now. He could feel the vision in the Blade's reflection pouring into his brain, and it had become a little clearer sure, but it was still utterly impossible to tell what he was doing in it! Better yet, he still didn't know which of the two Ares squaring off against each other was even him!.. Although, Ares could hazard a guess with a pretty reliable answer he didn't want to admit to. As the Blade wanted him to wield the scythe right now, he was likely the downtrodden, beaten like a dog, scuffed version of Ares with the rare and unusual scythe in his grasp.
What on earth could have led to a scenario such as that was worrying at a glance but Ares, the more the vision was drained into his head, realised that the 'real Ares', the one with the scythe, didn't seem all too concerned about the status quo. It likely wasn't the case that someone was impersonating him and had stolen everything, nor was he fighting for his life or anything, and while that was a relief Ares was still incredibly curious to figure out what kind of event he was looking at exactly. What was up with that strange white room? How come a second Ares could even exist? Why was Ares unable to use his own magic and possessions? So many questions but Ares wasn't going to get answers on this matter for a very long time to come and so it was better to just forget about it. Timeline Splice did have a limit to how far into the future it could reach but it was a decently lenient limit so this might not even be something that happened until Vraizon. The scythe looked like it might be some kind of legacy treasure so Ares' cultivation base would have to be really far up there before he would wind up in that weird white room, sparring with an identical copy of himself.
Whatever.
Ares shook his head and re-calibrated the allocation of his brain power because his original problem was still poking its head into Ares' business... The attack that his future self just launched in the vision... There were a number of issues here. First of all, Ares literally couldn't see it. It happened far too fast and the vision cut out the second it finished meaning Ares couldn't gleam anything about how he moved around during the attack via observing his ending location. It was a small detail but it would have helped him understand even just a tiny bit more than he currently did. For example, the attack started in the air so if it also ended in the air then it was a swoop whereas if he ended on the floor then it was a dive. Again, minor detail, but somewhat relevant while Ares was still on the 'piecing things together' side of things. Second of all, Ares was not at the level he was at in the future vision and could almost definitely not replicate that attack no matter how hard he tried. Third of all, it seemed like something strange happened to the scythe, probably related to whatever it could do as a treasure, that Ares could not do himself. His scythe was just an everyday object and so whatever the one future Ares was holding did, this one could not also do it. Fourth, and finally, how could Ares launch the attack if he didn't even know what it was still?! It seemed like that was what the Blade wanted of him but he was still none the wiser as to what that art was.
The art looked like it was powerful, as all it took was a short flash of light to kill the fake future Ares, but it was like blindfolding a person, making them 'watch' a chef cook a meal, and then asking the blindfolded participant to also make the same dish in the same way... Ares had no ingredients, AKA steps, and he didn't even know the end dish, the art, so a 'shot in the dark' was perhaps even a understatement right now! Wasn't this Timeline Splice art useless?! If this what it did then it was surely only useful as a sneak peek into the future, right? Or maybe it could net Ares some experience with negative time, enabling him to understand it on a deeper level and incorporate it into his nothingness arts going forward, but even then he'd been hit by this art completely out of left field. Being blindsided by it meant he wasn't able to catch so much of what happened and he was having a hard time keeping up...
...
...
Also, why was Ares floating in the air right now?
He hadn't even realised it but, for some odd reason, Ares was not on the ground anymore and he genuinely had no idea when this happened. It wasn't some external force keeping him hovering like this, it was something he himself had done but he didn't recall taking such measures. Or, rather, he didn't know such measures! He wasn't using Voidwalk right now and, unless Ares had hit his head and forgotten or something, he didn't remember knowing any other method of hovering around like this. Telekinesis could maybe do something similar if he tried but there was no pressure involved in this strange form of flight... Actually, that was exactly what this was! Flight! The art than could be learnt in the transition realm, Flight, enabling cultivators to finally start calling themselves experts relative to the riff raff around them. It was expensive on the mana front, which is why they didn't use it often, but it was an art that was a cut above most others just due to the sheer advantage it gave in a wide variety of circumstances.
Now, why Ares 'knew' this art at the moment he didn't know. Not as in why he was able to use it currently, that was just likely some shenanigans involving the Timeline Splice, as in why he'd ever learnt this art at all, as he clearly had in the future, when he already had Voidwalk! Was it a result of what happened today? Was the future affected by the past affected by the future? Did that even make sense?!... This whole negative time thing was not going to be something Ares understood the inner workings of for a long time to come, that was for sure... Did this mean he had to learn Flight going forward so that his future self could use it in the vision he saw earlier so that he could then use it now? What a convoluted mess! This is why you don't mess with timelines!... Actually, that last train of thought made Ares realise something. He now understood precisely how Timeline Splice worked!
Ares, the current one in the arena, wasn't using Flight at all, it was his future self. It's just that, right now, his current self and future self were overlapped in different spaces at different times. Nothingness enabled two things to be interconnected regardless of distance, as it effectively removed distance, so negative space ought to connect distant time periods too by removing time. Combine both and, regardless of when or where an object or person is or was, Ares could technically access it remotely. What was happening here is that the current Ares was, in a twisted way, future Ares. He'd transcended time, skipped a few tens of years give or take, and had his future body travelled back in time to be borrowed by his past self's mind, if that made even a lick of sense... Simply put, the body from the future that knew Flight, and whatever attack it was launching, and the mind of current Ares, who was completely clueless, had combined to create this bizarre experience that was strange beyond belief. It was sort of like back when he lost control of his body to Dominus just that this time he was completely unwilling, as the Blade had hoisted this art onto him, and he was being controlled by himself from the future.
Long story short, even if Ares understood nothing else about what was happening right now, he knew that he didn't have to do diddly squat! It was a fully automated process and he was along for Mr Blade's wild ride. The attack he barely saw in the vision of the future would happen all by its lonesome with Ares needing to contribute literally nothing to making it happen!... Maybe... This was a strong art and Ares could put two and two together to figure out there would be repercussions for the actions he was taking right now. HIs body was about to perform above its current limits and it already looked like the Blade was 'switching off' in a way. If Ares were to throw out a guess, this art had stronger kickback depending on how far into the future it reached, what art it borrowed, and how long Ares used it for. Plus Timeline Splice would have a long ass cooldown, longer than even that of Dominus or even his Astraeus summon. It honestly might even take years for that art to be usable again. Also also, the Blade wouldn't be usable again immediately after and, as such, for the rest of this fight at least, it wasn't going to be summonable. Ares had pretty much hit the nail on the head with these guesses and he was basically right about all of it. The only slight difference was that the Blade would be functional again as soon as the match ended due to the way the Training Field worked. The art wouldn't be usable again, Timeline Splice that is, but the Blade could be summoned instead of having to wait a week or so for it to return to form. Not that it really mattered as Ares wouldn't have a use for it again immediately anyway as his next outing would be the Freeride Federation and that was a little over a month away. Still, having it be accessible was nice anyway and he wasn't going to complain. It was also good to know for the future in case he ever needed it, highly specific though this information was.
But that was all miscellaneous compared to whatever it was Ares was doing at the moment. He was about twenty feet off the ground and in the air, his Zephyr felt and looked completely different compared to usual as it was like a weird interdimensional cloth of some kind, and... Actually, that was all Ares saw. For some strange reason he was standing on the floor again and he didn't know when it happened or where he was. He spied Mako, and so could guess his position relative to the elf so... If his calculation was correct, he should be standing behind Genesis with his back turned to him!? This was terrible! Ares swivelled around on the spot and collapsed to the floor as his knees gave out and some of his veins exploded. He thought he'd been struck by Genesis for a split second but, when his bloodied eyes could finally see again, Genesis was nowhere to be found. In its place where a bunch of strangely glossy white blossoms that were all slowly drifting to the floor. Ares, like everyone else in the coliseum, was enamoured by the oddly soothing and delicately calming sight.
Unlike the spectators, however, Ares was close enough to reach out and grab these mysterious petals in the cusp of his hand. He was interested in getting a closer look at them so he extended his upturned palm and, when a blossom landed in it, Ares' eyes immediately widened for two reasons. One, the weight of each individual petal was considerable, at least as heavy as a small wheel which, for what was supposed to be a petal, was hefty. Two, and this was the big one... The petal was made of metal? Metal petal? Ares was pretty certain he understood what just happened but he felt the need to double check with his Omniscience so he gave it a once over and, sure enough, his assumption was correct... Whatever attack he'd just launched was too quick for Ares to follow, even though he was the one doing it, and it had just obliterated Genesis on the spot, turning it into a beautiful swarm of harmless petals... No, that wasn't the entire story. The attack didn't turn Genesis into petals, it had been sliced so finely, in so many places at once, that Genesis' shape had been deconstructed on a borderline atomic level. If every single petal was gathered then Genesis could be reconstructed from the pieces like a floral jigsaw puzzle.
What the hell? Future me is killing it! Ares felt like there was probably more to the unknowable art he just used but, considering the outcome, he didn't feel like he even needed to know the rest of it! Future Ares had mastered the scythe through and through if this art was any indication! This was all highly motivational and Ares was going to double down on using this thing for sure! He wanted to use that art again and properly next time. He wanted to invent the art and take in each and every step one by one because it honestly felt like he skipped over half the art while he was on autopilot. There was also some other details he was curious about, like what happened to his Zephyr (although this one he could guess based off his own plans for it), why the scythe felt like it had split into multiple parts, and what this strange mark covering his right arm was! It looked as though Ares had a sleeve tattooed onto his arm in the shape of a giant skull... He had no idea what he was looking at but he heard Dominus mumble 'The Reaper's augury denotes a fate sealed'... Whatever the hell that meant. Clearly this mark was evident of something that Dominus found impressive so Ares assumed it was a good thing and ignored it!... Or tried to but Ares could have sworn he just heard some kind of growl directed at him and it sounded as if it came from a distant plane of existence, like it had come from a few hundred billion light years away... What a weird few minutes this had all been...
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Elsewhere, approximately a few hundred billion light years away, a cloaked skeleton was snarling off into the void. It too possessed the strange mark that Ares did on its own bony arm but, unlike Ares', his never faded. This individual was well enough known as Charon, the Reaper... Well he was at one point. Unfortunately Dominus had taken to referring to him as Mr Moody and the name had stuck ever since because the number of people that hated him was far greater than the number of people that respected him even slightly. Simply put, this skelly was a douche! He ferried the dead to hell, which did in fact exist (although that was a complicated matter), but most of the time he was the one who's fault it was his targets were headed there in the first place... Sometimes he was asked to go deal with various issues, and nobody was going to blame him for doing his job, but, annoyingly, most of his kills were on people minding their own business and learning how to wield the scythe. Simply put, being the Reaper was keeping him alive and he didn't want to croak so he was adamant about defending his title even at the cost of other people's lives. Anyone who trained enough with the weapon, who had the potential to become the current Reaper, gained a Reaper's mark that was temporary in nature, much like the one Ares 'had'. Current Ares didn't have it but future Ares did and so summoning future Ares to the present had triggered Charon's senses, alerting him to a new threat. He would have gone and dealt with it but there was some strange barrier in the way affecting his method of transportation, and the person was in such a low domain anyway and probably not worth the effort, so he opted to not bother right now. He was also still dealing with some other shmuck who thought he was hot shit and Charon wasn't one to leave a job half done.
"OI! BAG O' BONES! WHERE DO YOU THINK YOU'RE LOOKING?!" A rather colourful individual with a mohawk and a red robe was currently yelling at the back of Charon's skull. This individual was a 'scythe exemplar'... Kind of... Due to Charon's... Unpleasant and nosy personality, having a scythe exemplar even exist at any given point in time was a pretty rough task as they would likely wind up dead soon enough. Rather than have it as an official position, the weapon exemplars tried to create a single scythe exemplar and keep them hidden and protected from this maniacal skeleton. Tried to, anyway. Charon was resourceful when it came to hunting targets, him noticing Ares' mark from however far away was proof of that, and / or sometimes the exemplar in question would get overconfident. This was an example of the latter as this mohawk man was very assured in his talents. He'd never met Charon before so this bizarre level of confidence was entirely misplaced.
Charon was strong enough to be a decent match for the God of the weapon pillar, let alone some random exemplar shmuck that hadn't even been fully trained. Dominus had gotten split into two by this skelly and, though that was because Dominus tried to fight him with a scythe and make things 'even', it had been a resounding victory with no room for the expectation that things would ever go differently. The mohawk man was oblivious to all of this and had gone around strutting his stuff openly, practically begging Charon to come to him. He'd gotten his wish but he was about to realise how very dumb this whole decision was. Charon simply huffed at the man. This wasn't because he disdained him excessively and refused to speak to a lower creature or anything, although he definitely felt that way at least partially, it was because skelly had long since lost his voice. He could half-communicate at times but it was pretty hard for him to do so and, as such, grunts were his modus operandi when it came to conversing. Dominus had taken the piss out of this extensively after getting cut into two as a form of revenge, spreading the whole 'Mr Moody' thing far and wide. Had Charon actually been a beloved and upstanding Reaper, like the justice oriented individual before him, then maybe people would have rejected Dominus' stupid nickname. Alas, here Mr moody was, grunting away at a man with a red mohawk... This was seriously not a normal sight but, then again, far weirder stuff happened regularly in the higher realms. The long list of oddities in a situation like this was better just ignored honestly.
Though the situation looked comically strange, it was worth remembering these two individuals were extraordinarily talented in their own rights. Thought the mohawk man hadn't finished his training he was still in the position of exemplar. There wasn't really any competition, because of Charon, so the position was easier to secure but you still needed to be decent enough at a base level and pass some tests so he was no joke despite his appearance. Then there was Charon who's prowess with the scythe was unmatched throughout all of history. Typically, each Reaper had a fighting style all unto themselves that was never repeated by any subsequent Reapers. This wasn't a pre-requisite but it was a sort of unwritten rule that the universe seemed to enforce heavily. Wielding a single, plain scythe had been done already and nobody else that became a Reaper after also did that. The justice oriented Reaper before Charon had a transforming scythe that could extend its blade and hook people, dragging the innocent to safety and helping them escape the jaws of death. That Reaper's main method of combat heavily revolved around using a ranged scythe, thanks to the extending transformation capability on his weapon, and it functioned more like a chain and sickle than a regular scythe.
As for Charon, his scythe was a treasure that, at a glance, made no sense. The scythe was a dark green, and encrusted in green jade in various places, but what really stood out was that the blade was blunt. Completely incapable of slicing anything. The only thing this treasure did was enable the blade to become sharp for a fraction of a second. No really, that was all it did. The catch here was that, while it was sharp, it was S.H.A.R.P. Charon had a very one and done style of combat wherein he just murdered his opponents with a single devastating swing that couldn't be opposed. Block? Can't do that. Dodge? When his swing was capable of covering an entire dimension at times this was clearly not possible. Retaliate? You weren't overpowering his swing ever so no. Honestly, most people weren't even sure if this skeleton had any skill with the scythe whatsoever. He just swung once and ended basically every single 'fight' he was a part of. The only indication he used his weapon regularly, and could wield it at a high level, was the occasional flourish he did before or after swinging his weapon. He had excellent control, and his movements were fluid to a degree that was inspiring, but it took a real scythe master to appreciate them and the number of scythe experts overall was pretty tiny. Ironically, Charon was at least partially responsible for that so the lack of recognition of his skills was his own damn fault for killing everyone who could understand them in the first place! He wasn't solely to blame though, scythes just weren't popular in general. It seemed like every kid nowadays wanted a flying sword or a shotgun spear... Damn kids! Why can't they appreciate the finer weapons in life?! That was what Mr Moody grumbled to himself every now and then when he saw some kind of whacky weapon crop up. He was a bit of and old head, he was literally a walking skeleton for crying out loud, and so he didn't really get all this new fangled crap. He had a scythe, he swung it, people died, he lived. End of. That was his cultivation ideology, and it worked like a charm, and right now this mohawk punk was seriously asking for it! Charon was going to make a scene again. This was a common enough occurrence and usually required an expert cultivator or a God to clean up after but that was strictly in regards to environmental damage. What he was about to do to this Mohawk man was not something that could ever be undone. Punk Humpty Dumpty with an attitude problem was never going to be put together again.