Chapter 546: Finning

"Here sharky sharky! Here corrupted sharky sharky!" Ares, currently in the middle of using his war aura flag like a dowsing rod, searched high and low across the frozen lake in search of his prey while leaving behind a small trail of blood droplets as he went. Even though hermits living under rocks knew of him by now there was no way in hell this frozen shark corpse did so the chances of it sniffing out him and his low cultivation base, and falling for the bait of the century, were high. Some mere sensory enhancement cultivator? That was an easy kill if ever the shark saw one. Of course the truth was going to hit the shark hard, and leave it reeling and seeing stars, but by then it would be too late. All Ares needed to do was place a nothingness patch on the shark at some point during the fight and then there would be no way for it to flee no matter how far it ran because he'd come into this encounter with a plan in mind.

After five minutes of searching to no avail, Ares was tempted to bring out Ignizz and dangle some lizard meat over the frozen lake in the hopes he would attract the shark sooner. This proved unnecessary when Ares was made to suddenly combat roll sideways and avoid the ice underneath him being breached by pitch black tentacles. Chunks of ice flew everywhere as the tentacles, now exposed to the cool air, writhed and lashed out in a bid to try and kill Ares who was already long gone. HIs sixth sense, and general combat wariness, had alerted him to a shift in movement under his feet. Pressure? Omniscience? Aura? Divine Sense? Ares needed none of these things to know he was being attacked; the subtle shifts in the air, tremors running through the floor, unusual quiet too strange even for a remote place such as this... Any and all of the above were clues an ambush was lying in wait and believing in his natural instincts proved to be the correct choice.

Ares ran towards the confused tentacles, most of which were still slapping away at the trail of blood bait Ares left earlier as it was working wonders in muddling their senses, hopped over one of the more alert limbs which tried to sweep his legs out from under him, and tagged the most upright tentacle by slapping it with a mark of void before Shifting away to safety. The most important part of this encounter was already done and dusted so now he just had to grind it down, kill it, and then skin it for resources. He'd flubbed it with the fairies earlier, none of them were in a useable or salvageable state by the time he was done with them, so Ares swore to get Allie a souvenir that was even rarer and this would do nicely! Ares got his plan underway and began the testing phase to see how realistic his current goal was. it involved new tricks, utilising combat techniques he was less than familiar with, but he believed he could combine his arts in such a way as to create something extremely unpredictable and troublesome for just about any foe.

"Quietus Edict." After Ares' chant, and as soon as the whispers that hushed any and all noise descended on the immediate area, he clicked his finger and... Nothing happened. His first attempt, at whatever he was doing, was a complete dud. There was seemingly no visual indicator he'd even done anything at all but, perhaps if a keen eyed cultivator were watching this encounter from afar, they'd notice a a faint ripple off in the distance where a ring of wind indicated a non-insignificant magical force had just been deployed. Had that magic been aimed properly and struck its target there would be pain and misery on the horizon for the victim. Though, how that magic ended up all the way over there, a good few feet off the mutated mountain and hovering in mid-air, away from the fighting currently taking place, was anybody's guess. Ares was trying to do something very interesting here and only repeated attempts and a discerning eye would lead to being able to figure out his goal. It was already bizarre for him to be using Quietus Edict here as it's not like the tentacles were going to be chanting magic or anything. Why'd he'd set up this silencing field, and why his attacks were appearing in completely random locations, remained to be seen.

Click

Ares, as he ducked under a rampaging tentacle, attempted to do something again but it was to no avail and he failed a second time. Another click was heard but this time it was his tongue out of frustration because what he was aiming to do was much harder than it looked! He'd rather aim to damage a soul than do what he was currently doing, this was a far greater struggle and making progress was slow and irksome, but he was convinced it was a worthwhile endeavour and so kept up the monotony until eventually he succeeded a single time. As another click resounded throughout the lake, the tentacle Ares had marked earlier randomly exploded at its mid point and burst apart like someone had buried a bomb inside it. There was no gold magic lingering in the air so it wasn't annihilation that had struck down this tentacle and the attack was invisible to the naked eye so it was hard to even be sure of Ares' involvement and pinpoint him as the reason for this oddity. All that happened was Ares clicked his finger over and over until eventually the tentacle blew up completely arbitrarily. It looked similar, actually, to what happens when Ares uses nothingness to stifle a spatial teleport but the end result was way more devastating this time as death was a certainty.

It was unknown even now what Ares did, exactly, and the shark hiding underneath the Frozen lake was starting to get fed up of this entire charade. Playing cat and mouse with Ares, who was nimbly dodging every tentacle that came his way, while its own limb was randomly popped like a balloon was unacceptable. Ares wasn't even at bloodline awakening and so this shark refused to believe it couldn't kill him if it took matters into its own hands and freed its body from the cage of ice. It didn't opt to use its body over its tentacles often, the parasite wanted to preserve the corpse as best as t could to keep using it for as long as possible before discarding it for something else, a bigger and better body, but this cultivator it was going toe to toe with seemed to be worth eating. There was a strange energy about Ares and the parasite recognised the potential gains it could make by devouring it and / or maybe even taking over the corpse. Perhaps it had finally found its new favourite host? Regardless of whether it ate or parasitised Ares the tentacles alone weren't going to cut it anymore, clearly, and it needed to do something more drastic so it dragged its body upwards through the ice. The shark's ominous black form, save for its dull yellow eyes which were the only remaining piece of the original shark still left at this point, drifted seamlessly through the solid state of frozen matter as though it were a liquid.

This was one of the parasite's traits, allowing it function like a golem depending on the affiliated element of its host and have incredible elemental manipulation. Though one would expect a shark to have a water pillar affiliation this one had been born on the mutated mountain to a generation of acclimatised sharks and so it was the first of its kind to adapt and truly thrive in this habitat. Perhaps that was why the parasite chose this shark as a host and presumably killed it; it was a monster with an ideal set of traits for secluding itself and cultivating in secrecy. Water on the mutated mountain was risky business; what was a lake one day would inevitably freeze the next so living inside one was a hazard not many were wiling to put up with. Growing one's power in such a lake was pretty unfathomable but precisely that had happened which gave the parasite enough room to become the problem it was today.

The shark breached the surface of the lake with a blend of grace and ferocity that was born of the mix between its inherent nature, from when it was still alive, and the refined control of the parasite piloting it. Its motions were fluid but raw as it lashed out at Ares who was oddly grinning at it in defiance as he wielded a deadly weapon. The shark wasn't wary of Ares, however, so it threw itself forward and aimed to ravage the human with its teeth but control over the body was lost at the moment of collision and its view was slashed in half. Ares stood motionless after the swing of his Primordial Blade, revelling in having split the oncoming shark in two as both halves skidded across the ice behind him until their momentum finally died out. Ares had long since predicted the frustration of the shark reaching a boiling point and spilling over into desperation to end the fight quickly. All it would take is a single poorly thought out, and highly defenceless, assault and Ares would launch a brilliantly timed counter attack; that was plan A. His backup plan, the reason he'd marked the shark with nothingness, didn't look like it was going to be relevant anymore unfortunately so he'd have to keep practicing it elsewhere on other enemies. It was a shame too as he felt like he was starting to get the hang of it...

Gloop

Ares leapt forwards while spinning to face the surprise attack that almost caught him off guard. He'd mistakenly believed this fight to be over but he had to remind himself he was dealing with a parasite here and not a real shark. Under normal circumstances, against a traditional opponent, him cutting the foe in half would win Ares the battle no questions asked. As he swatted aside a tentacle using the sheathed Blade, however, he caught sight of the two shark halves being sowed together by intricate tentacle stitching. The two halves were wrapped and cocooned by tentacles, dragged towards each other across the ice, and reformed into a single whole as the black flesh ripped, stretched, and teared to accommodate the unholy procedure. It was extraordinarily gross, the rotten flesh was reminiscent of a decaying zombie, however Ares couldn't help but think the material he would gain off this thing's corpse would be exquisite and highly valuable! Allie would get a rare parasite to pill-ify and Dabble would gain some elastic-like, highly flexible material to toy around with. Ares' desire to win was redoubled as he clicked his finger and blew up another attacking tentacle with his mysterious new power. 

Thrusting his hand forward, Ares shot out a wave of nothingness that harmlessly rippled over every living entity. This wasn't an art, just a simple spread of magic that marked everything it hit. It was easy to avoid or block but the main body of the shark was still fixing itself and the magic-less tentacles could no nothing but take the hit. This was perfect as Ares now had about ten more tentacle targets to toy with to his heart's content and use as aggressive dummies for his training. As for what his training was exactly... Skip, Echo, and nothingness markers. What he was dismantling these tentacles with was a combination of all three, and Quietus Edict as an added bonus, to remotely detonate Echoes on faraway targets. Quietus allowed Ares to silently cast Echo, nothingness markers allowed Ares to Shift the Echo at the marked targets, Skip allowed the Echoes to arrive practically instantaneously. Throw all of these individual combinations together and Ares was effectively, silently, exploding things remotely. His Echoes, when they hit anyway, were detonating inside the tentacles milliseconds after he clicked his fingers from multiple feet away, nowhere even directly near them. As long as he marked a target with nothingness he could fire an endless barrage of Echoes at them from a safe distance. Usually Echoes struggled at ranges, they were easy to see coming and avoid so could be considered impractical and inefficient compared to other measures, but this method complicated the status quo and made them a consistently lethal and persistent force. Echoes were Ares' cheapest art by far currently and, thanks to all his passive mana regeneration from the Extinction Converter, and any extra mana gains from Grim Cessation whenever he killed anything, he could use them effectively infinitely. The mana cost was so insignificant he could cover the cost in the time it took him to fire another one. To that end, Ares had already put the Blade away and was merely hopping across the frozen lake while clicking his finger at the tentacles and yet he was still demolishing them one-sidedly.

Quietus' new ability to enable silent casting on any art was both relevant and irrelevant at the same time here depending on how you looked at it. Echo could already be silently cast, and what Ares was doing was technically possible even without Quietus Edict, BUT it also did alter the output of the art in a way that mattered. Silent casting an art typically reduced the power it could display; only a few exceptions such as Aejaz' bloodline, arts designed to be silently cast form the ground up, and maybe some rare treasures here and there could prevent the loss in art quality. Echo suffered from this and, though the drop off in power was minimal, a silently cast Echo was definitely weaker than a fully chanted one. Quietus, like all the aforementioned mentioned methods however, also broke that barrier and didn't touch the effectiveness of the art. The Echo Ares usually silently cast, and the Echo he cast under the effect of Quietus, had two entirely different power levels. Ares could replicate this performance without Quietus but he would struggle against stronger cultivators without this combination because the Echoes might no longer cut it if he relied on the weaker version.

Quietus was an extra added layer that was wholly applicable on a regular basis, from fight to fight, because Echoes were as cheap as they were. If Ares tried to do this Skip remote bombing strategy with multiple Grand Annihilations, for instance, he theoretically could but mana would leak out of him a unprecedented rates. He'd need to kill army platoons per second and abuse Grim Cessations' mana restoration to upkeep the mana cost of such a powerful combination and keep silently firing off teleporting Grand Annihilations without end. Echoes, though? They were fast, small, cheap, and appropriately lethal so Ares could launch them like litter without breaking the mana bank. As long as nobody noticed the Quietus this was also not a terrible assassination tool. If Ares set up a Quietus in advance he could Echo bomb people from outside buildings, and beyond the visibility of guards, with his Skip trick and nobody would be any wiser. Even the parasite shark still couldn't figure out why Ares had become some clicking God of death and it was the direct recipient of this trick that could watch all his movements directly. The only solace for the highly confused and agitated shark here was that Ares was still in his infancy with this new technique and couldn't aim consistently for love or money. Some of his shots hit dead centre, blasting apart the tentacles ruthlessly, but most couldn't hit the broad side of a barn and even that was being generous. A drunken man could piss straighter than Ares was shooting and that wasn't even an exaggeration because the Brotherhood disciple Ethan occasionally used his pee as a lethal weapon.

Ares fired off many Echoes as he eradicated the tentacles slowly but surely. There were a lot of them but Ares had infinite shots and wasn't holding his punches. His aim improved rapidly over the course of the slaughter and soon he was hitting more than half his shots. It didn't sound impressive on paper but given how difficult the trick was to perform even once, let alone with any consistency whatsoever, it was actually astonishing he could maintain this sot of percentage at all. It also resulted in him breaking away and outpacing the tentacles that couldn't reform quicker than he could kill them. Each destroyed tentacles had to be reforged by the main body but it was still preoccupied fixing up the bisected shark and couldn't focus on both tasks at once. Ares took advantage of this and began his mad dash over to the main body. He sidestepped a tentacle, slid under another and threw himself onto his back to spin like a top and fire off Echoes in a three hundred and sixty degree radius. He blasted away all the incoming tentacles and cleared open a path as he slid right beside the main body which was on the verge of repairing the damage he'd dealt to it earlier. Ares, instead of finishing the fight and killing the desperate parasite, took up a lateral lying position with one of his legs bent and his head resting on a fist as though he was some cocky calendar stud modelling for a photo shoot. His grin, threatening to break off the sides of his face, was what greeted the reanimated shark parasite along with an obnoxious cooing that sounded all too familiar. "Hey sharky sharky."

Irritation was buried under fear of the insufferable madman that threatened the shark parasite's existence. It was briefly usure whether to avenge this mockery and bite this guy's head off or retreat as soon as possible and never look back. Foolishly, overcome by anger at the arrogance of its prey taunting it less than a foot away, in a completely unguarded position no less, it lashed out once more with its teeth and jumped off the ground at Ares in a bit to snap his head off. Ares' grin somehow managed to find room to widen even more as he swiveled on the floor like a break-dancer and threw his feet out in front of him to catch the shark's two rows of teeth while chanting "Stamp Out". The combined force of his art and annihilation enhancement allowed Ares' kicks to hold open the shark's jaw while he leant his upper body forward and aimed a flick straight down its gullet. He could faintly see the writing black mass that was the parasite, he missed earlier with his Blade slash, squirming about in a panic as it understood what came next would be the end of it. Ares might have missed his Echoes on the tentacles earlier but that was because they had room to wriggle about and make themselves a hard target. The parasite, stuck inside the shark with no way out except for a path which led him directly to the devil in front of him, was in a hopelessly dire situation.

"Echo." Ares held nothing back as he clicked his fingers once more. His well placed shot barreled right through the centre of the shark and ripped a hole out where its rear would have once been in a violent burst. A black gooey mess sprawled out across the floor as though the dead shark corpse just shat out its indigestible lunch and the propelling force was enough to make the parasite slide away a short distance. Surprisingly, the parasite was more resilient than Ares expected and it managed to start limping away to hide under the ice. Such an escape wasn't possible, though, as Ares had already marked the parasite with nothingness during their earlier scuffle without it even realising it.

Ares, still back over by the shark corpse, ripped off the fin and coated the edge in disintegration. The shark might have been dead but, thanks to Ares' assistance, it was about to get some posthumous payback! Ares winded up a throw, let the fin fly, and activated Skip in tangent with Shift to rocket the fin at the parasite who was already halfway inside the lake again. It never made it back underground, unfortunately for it, as the fin pierced it right through the middle of its body mass and ended its existence on the spot. It was capable of toughing out a direct blow from an Echo but it wasn't invincible enough to resist being pierced through its core by disintegration and, thus, the matter had come to a close.

The parasite had been close to worming its way under the ice but, to be honest, even that wouldn't have mattered. Ares' nothingness marks were nothing to scoff at, they were a tool hunters would kill to have access to and use as their tracking was impeccable, and he would have killed the parasite eventually anyway. It was only a difference of whether it happened now or later and Ares wasn't in the mood to play hide and seek with the parasite. Sure he was using the monsters on this mountain as training, and that slowed him down a little, but it's not like he still didn't want to go home! Tracking the escaped parasite down over the course of the rest of the day was a huge waste of his time so he gave it no quarter and ended its reign of terror. Naturally this thing wasn't a threat to Ares, who barely even touched upon his arsenal of death to eradicate the parasite, but it had caused many locals a lot of loss and so he'd done his good deed for the day! Xasca was arguably Ares' real challenge on this trip and now he was just doing a victory lap before he returned home. Ares couldn't for the life of him think of anything here in Isaz that would act as a roadblock considering how powerful he'd become and this shark, which was a menace through and through for even early transition realm cultivators, proved that. He toyed with it the entire way through the fight so he was once again reassured that he was near untouchable in this domain barring any unexpected anomalies.

So then, given Ares' immense power, it raised the perfectly valid question of why some ignorant Viking, who'd been watching Ares fight this whole time from behind a nearby tree, was eyeing up the parasite and dead shark body like he'd just found his next meal ticket? The Viking was alone, probably a scout, but did he seriously think he could take Ares in head on in a fight and steal his heard earned stuff!? Ares changed his mind, he hated the Vikings more than he did the Throne! The latter were arrogant but they weren't stupid, they knew of Ares' prowess and respected that by trying to have him pick a fight with someone else to weaken him first. These idiot Vikings, however, really thought their men could beat him in a one on one?! Or at least this one in particular did and that was insulting enough! Ares was already planning on killing them if they were really involved with the Torchbearer but now the actions of this one Viking had guaranteed Ares was coming for them first!