Fearlessness was a trait the Vikings could lay claim to but evidently not the Frozen Throne. For all the Nu Kings' faults, and despite them running away when bleak reality slapped them across the face and back, they did at least attempt to do battle with the ginormous Garmr in the first place. Perhaps hiding in their boats above the ground gave then an extra degree of confidence or whatever but, regardless, their ability to actually stand and face Garmr was leagues better than what the hapless Throne disciples were showing. They'd arrived on the horizon like a brave army here to slay to Ares and yet they only found wanton destruction and the grotesquely powerful monster responsible for it. They were unaware that Ares was in in fact Garmr so the sphincters they'd firmly clenched had loosened upon baring witness to the 'new' foe they now had to contend with instead that was in a wholly different league from what they were told. They didn't sign up for this and the degree to which they faltered was a stark difference to the Vikings who sort of just put up and shut up when duty called, recovering their wits faster and getting down to business in spite of the obvious disadvantage.
The Throne had been waiting for chaos over on the Nu Kings' side of the mountain, aware that Ares would be barking up their tree and unleashing hell, but trudging over to capitalise on this moment of weakness and tiredness, after what should have been a long and drawn out battle, proved futile when all they found was a tireless powerhouse who was setting their sights on them next. Hoisted by their own petard, Ares had utilised their pan of action against them by practically inviting them over with the cacophony of exploding boats. They were moths to a flame, misguided into thinking this was a fair fight against humanoid Ares when in harsh reality they were getting far more than they bargained for. Sure they would have lost the upcoming battle regardless but the level of reluctance they had in fighting a human, vs whatever the hell Garmr was, was readily apparent. How they felt moments before seeing him, as they confidently marched upon enemy territory with war songs and flags fluttering in the wind, was nowhere near the timidity with which they stumbled to a halt in front of him and weakly hunched over in fear to make themselves look small so they wouldn't stand out in the crowd and be targeted first.
They were right to fear. This wasn't some kind of misunderstanding, they hadn't stumbled across a wild animal hosting a grudge match with the Nu Kings that they could just watch and peacefully walk away from. Garmr was here to kill everyone and they came directly to him of their own accord so it would be far stranger if there wasn't any sense of regret lingering in the air. They'd full-speed rushed to their own demise and done so double time on orders of their leading cocksure commanders. The upper brass of the Throne were not here either so the one sided slaughter would just be even more cataclysmic as not a single soldier / cultivator here was capable of even delaying this foul monstrosity. Perhaps if the clan's patriarch showed up he could fend off the monster for a few seconds and delay everyone else's slaughter... Maybe? The disciples who thought as such were forced to rethink their unreachable dreams after glancing at Garmr because it just didn't seem feasible to hold out for even a split second against that thing. Who were they kidding exactly? The only reason they even wanted stronger people here was to act as bait while they ran away or found methods to escape this mountain and hide somewhere safe.
Alas, nowhere was safe now that they'd shoved multiple casus belli down Ares' throat since he first stepped foot in Isaz and made their declaration of intent loud and clear. Unless they abandoned the clan and ran away from the region Ares would be persistent in hunting them down and that was mostly irrelevant anyway as he wasn't about to let any stragglers escape him while they were all standing right before him. To make sure nobody slipped through his grasp he was even planning on testing something new. His draconic breaths as Garmr were pretty well established at this point. Annihilation was far, and wide, reaching whereas his disintegration breath was more concentrated but could melt through everything with unrivalled lethality. Ares hadn't tested disintegration at all but he knew roughly what would happen if he tried and so didn't need a crash course as the use-cases for both mentioned breaths were fairly self explanatory. Annihilation for pesky groups, or enemies with tricky movement, and disintegration to kill strong individuals or blast apart enemy arts that were troublesome for his physical attacks to deal with instead.
Then there was nothingness.
Garmr's nothingness breath had only really been useful for discovering a method to turn living creatures into stardust. That was valuable, sure, but Ares reckoned he could also fashion this particular breath into something more versatile for combat usage too. He wasn't limited to one breath attack per affiliation, Ares' creativity was the limit and the limit was theoretically boundless if he got off his lazy ass and gave it some thought. Ever since he first used the nothingness breath, or rather 'Garmr' did, back at the international, he'd been thinking about what exactly it was the made nothingness stand out and how best to incorporate that answer into his breath in the future. Ares had come to many answers regarding whatever it was exactly nothingness was supposed to be, and where it excelled, but, in the end, he came up with a few main absolute factors that were integral to nothingness as a whole.
Time manipulation, space manipulation, and the void itself.
Ares had experimented with the first two, Skip for the former and Voidwalk and Shift for the latter, but not touched much upon the third. Arguably Grim Cessation was a void-oriented nothingness art but that level of usage was still pretty inconsequential compared to what Ares was doing with the other traits and he believed there was room for more improvements there specifically. This new breath attack, however, was not the time for void to shine unfortunately so he'd have to come back to that at a later date. Rather, Ares hadn't deliberated much over which part of nothingness to utilise for this breath as he figured out something worth doing almost immediately. It wasn't even an attack drastically different from an art he'd already made before in Teleopsia, it's just that the 'weapon' he was using to make it work as Garmr was more personal. This time he himself would be the weapon.
Garmr took a deep breath, his eyes briefly glowed a sharp gold as mana swirled in his lungs, and suddenly an eruption of deep red, swirling with undercurrents of the twisting void, spilled forth from his open maw that raced over the terrain and turned the mountain into a land of dark, bloody smog. The Throne army had braced for impact but felt relieved when the fog rolled over them harmlessly. They'd expected much worse from something so ominous but, in the end, it didn't really amount to anything as far as they could tell... But their understanding of void was limited so they didn't truly understand the danger of what it meant to have been marked by said void. Small red rashes appeared over the bodies of those trapped within the smog, which effectively meant everyone present was marked, and that would be the beginning of the end of the Frozen Throne. Garmr was quick, certainly, but why be fast when you can be instant? Why walk, or run, over to your target manually when you can just mark them with a patch of nothingness and then Shift to them directly?
Sure Garmr couldn't use nothingness magic outright but this was just a form of breath attack that circumvented that particular restriction and gave Garmr the ridiculous ability to teleport directly to anyone struck by this red mist. He could also track them for... However long he wanted? Giving a rough estimate of the distance he could track people marked by patches of nothingness was pretty impossible because even if someone here now fled the country Garmr could probably still sense them with the combination of his enhanced senses and the lingering void tinging their flesh. Doom was the only possible outcome now that these people had been marked so it didn't matter if they were in a better position to run away than the Vikings were. The Nu Kings were glued to their ships, in a bid to try and get them out unbroken from the earlier scuffle, but the Throne disciples were all able to move by themselves in a direction nobody else chose to flee in. This would have raised their chances of making it out alive but Garmr had brought out he big guns and now, no matter where they ran, he was going to Shift directly beside them and from there... Not much needed to be said really. Garmr vs a normal, painfully average cultivator, at point blank range, was not a fight that needed any sort of deep analytical thinking to divine the end result of before it happened.
One Throne disciple found out the hard way what was in store for everyone when he turned around, to search for a path down the mutated mountain with which he could run away, when he bumped forehead-first into a thick, black tree that he didn't recall being behind him. Or, at least, he thought that was what he walked into but there was a small hole in head where it had struck a sharp twig of some sort. He opened his eyes and looked upwards to see not a black tree but, rather, the leg of Garmr that had been entirely stationary and not moved a single inch this whole time. The man had run into the leg and injured himself on Ares' fur while he stood stock still and didn't raise even a finger. It had never been more clear that there was mismatch of epic proportions between two individuals but Garmr didn't show any mercy and ruthlessly stepped on the man to begin the killing spree that was now entirely unavoidable.
People hiding in trees were cut down and clawed in half, those trying to fly away were hammered out of the air and lay broken and buried inside the snow as they struggled to breathe their last, and anyone burrowing underground was fished out by a giant hand unearthing and squishing them like bugs. Garmr spontaneously appearing and disappearing all over the mountain, emerging from the fog like a demonic being was enough to give anyone PTSD so he took the kinder route and killed them all to prevent such a horrid fate from befalling them. This way they wouldn't have to live with all those awful memories and they could rest eternally as fuel for the Extinction Converter which was surely better!.... For Ares, anyway... Actually, Ares could have also turned these people into stardust to get a feel for how much he could earn from wiping out clans or sects but he was too preoccupied with having fun with this new breath type. Between his innate speed as Garmr and the ability to literally drop in unannounced on marked victims before they could react, Ares was 'blitz' personified as he freely dove in and out of combat to brutalise foes one by one. Any Thorne disciple who blinked would reopen their eyes to the sight fo their closest comrade having bit the dust in one gruesome fashion or another with limbs and organs missing with no culprit in sight.
One Throne disciple had to do a double take when his best friend's head vanished mid-speech about how they were 'going to make it out of this alive'. Evidently not. The surviving friend barely had time to call his deceased comrade a 'liar like always' before he too was rendered a lifeless corpse. in fact it didn't take long for every single Throne disciple to follow suit as Garmr cleaned up the last remnants with a mean trick that rendered them all helpless in their final moments. Ares took another deep breath and spewed forth a disintegration breath this time as he rapidly Shifted behind the last few disciples and burnt them all to a crisp. Every time he appeared behind a disciple they would b incinerated in the black inferno Garmr brought along with him in a matter of milliseconds. Ares, all in the same exhale, would keep popping up out of the blue and disintegrating the survivors instantly. This was a surefire execution method that was simple but highly effective so Garmr's kill count rocketed explosively towards the end of the 'war'.
It was safe to say that getting marked by nothingness when Garmr was on the loose was a fast track to dying a dog's death. Perhaps it was unnecessary to do this, as Garmr could have wiped them all out regardless, but testing out the tool itself was still valuable and Ares learnt a lot about how best to utilise this going forward. In addition to marking living creature he could also create nothingness patches at remote locations using his breath and then Shift directly to them without having to cross the gap first. The use cases for this were probably quite limited, as he could just jump wherever he wanted to go, but it was worth keeping in mind in case it ever mattered for whatever reason. As a combat tool, though, it was a neat way of constantly enabling Garmr to stick to a target no matter what means of obnoxious mobility they possessed in their arsenal. On the off chance Garmr was being endlessly led around by the nose by a spatial magic expert this breath would come in handy to skip the silly chase and bring the hurt. Also, clearly, it was a good tool for preventing large groups from evacuating. Even if one of the Thorne disciples managed to break free and make it off the mountain Ares would have been able to appear right on top of his head and crush all hope and bones in their body simultaneously.
That aside, ripping puny humans in half, biting heads off, blasting peons off the face off the universe with draconic breath, and crushing ants with unstoppable force was very satisfying! Ares felt like a rampaging monster tearing through humanity and it was undoubtedly fun! Ares didn't know much about video games but he did see mention of the first ever one created in a history book back when he used to sneak into the Red Sun library. Apparently it was a game in which the playable character moved constantly down tiny hallways and eating pips while avoiding cute shades. It was possible to reverse the tides via a powerup and become a shade devouring threat, though, and that was sort of what Ares envisioned himself as in Garmr form. The weaker disciples were the tiny pips that offered no resistance and couldn't run even if they tried while the slightly stronger elders of the clan were the ghosts running away as Garmr gained on them and crept up behind them while they had their backs turned. The fear in their mad scramble gave way to a delight in Ares who was a bit sadistic in Garmr form when it came to crushing little pebbles that shouldn't have offended him in the first place. This was retribution, fully deserved and served up in a way that entertained Ares greatly.
Now, though, as he stood tall amongst the small army of over a hundred defeated disciples and elders, he realised his fun time was over and standing around any longer was meaningless. The warlords of the Nu Kings, and the grand elders and patriarch of the Throne, weren't here. Ares had no idea where they buggered off to exactly but he could always look for them after he finally found out what this mutated mountain was all about! His curiosity regarding the inner workings and complex pipe layouts had been eating away at him in the background of his mind all this time and there was nothing stopping him from, at long last, getting to experience every inch of this spiralling mountain Dominus left behind. Better yet, the Moongate Mountain was waiting patiently with his name on it so he wasn't going to dilly dally and delay any further now that he'd killed everyone who'd gotten on his nerves as of late. He couldn't ignore the upper braes of the two clans, they each posed separate issues that need to be dealt with, but if nothing else finding their location wouldn't be too hard after Ares was done here. The Nu King leaders had a giant ship that was observable from afar, so Ares' divine sense would locate it lickety-split if he just walked around the region for a while, and the Throne's clan location was set in stone so they were a stone's throw away at most. For now, it was time to drag out little blood clot Dominus and have hm lead the way!
Yeah? Well, when I get my body back, I'll be 'dragon' my nuts across your face!
...
...
...
Apparently Dominus and Ignizz were arguing again... Every time Ares muted these two idiots and came back to them later they somehow managed to always be mid 'debate' each and every single time, without fail, and it was honestly impressive they found this much spare time to bicker back and forth like this. Then again, there probably wasn't much entrainment to go around inside Ares but was this really the best they could come up with?! Just play tic tac toe or something! Ares shook his head, sighed, and summoned forth Dominus whose form was much clearer now than prior to bloodline awakening. He wasn't a formless blob anymore, he was a small humanoid figure. Dominus could take the form of his upper body previously but it was hard for him to maintain and so he opted not to. Now, though? He was a hand sized revenant clad in his traditional red samurai garb and fully fleshed out. Ares didn't know if there were wolf or humanoid features under the armor but either way the bloody mini-me was fully capable of standing on two legs, walking around, and even holding things in its makeshift hands. Tiny Dominus! If he didn't win the pipsqueak battle against Ignizz before he definitely did now! Of course he wasn't beating a human like this, even an mortal child could knock him over with a swift kick to the dome, but he was making observable progress and that was something at least! Ares picked up the small revenant and put him on his shoulder as he ascended to the very tippy top of the mutated mountain. He would have conversed with Dominus but he was still grumbling away at Ignizz who he couldn't even hear anymore now that he was outside Ares' body. He was just moaning because he knew Ignizz could hear what he was saying so he took advantage of that to verbally harass him without getting an earful in response. One sided communication, basically.
Ares made his way up and up until he reached a flat surface at the top of the mountain that was unlike anything else he'd seen on his way up here. It was a stony circle with a hole in the middle that looked like it could fit some sort of key inside but Ares had seen no such thing on his journey up here. Also, Dominus was a bit of an ass sometimes but he would have at least mentioned it to Arse if he passed by something he'd need later on. In short, the key was probably something highly specific that prevented anyone other than Dominus, or those permitted by him, to enter this floor gate. Being a revenant was likely mandatory just as it was with his mansion back in Baja and thinking as such brought back memories to Ares who crouched down and dropped some of his blood into the hole to see if his guess was correct. He watched the droplet go and, since Dominus made no effort to correct him, Ares figured he was on the right track. No matter how faint, it was almost guaranteed a revenants blood would link back to Dominus' ancestor given that he was the progenitor of the race. Every revenant could access and open this stony grate but anyone else would be stonewalled for all eternity without knowing how to get by. This was definitely the obstacle that the Frozen Throne and the Nu Kings were bothered by and assumed Ares could lend a hand with getting past, willingly or otherwise. They didn't know what lay on the other side of it but Ares' insistence on walking through hell to get here, and challenging both their clans fora crack at this gate, meant it was worth pursuing in their eyes. That failed miserably, and they paid the ultimate price of effectively having both their clans be demolished in the span of roughly half an hour, but they were on the right track at least so kudos to them for thinking things through.
Eventually, Ares' blood was scanned and analysed by some manner of contraption under the floor and the stone circle rumbled. Ares stood up and moved off it as it slid sideways like a manhole cover and opened up to let him in. There was a faint clicking sound which Dominus said was a timer that counted down to the door shutting, after which there would be a day long period in which it couldn't be reopened. Ares had no interest in waiting around so he prepared himself to leap into the dark abyss below and undergo this test of faith. Dominus kept repeatedly telling him he was in for a treat but Ares was fifty fifty in terms of being convinced. Either A, Dominus was like a kid trying to show off his favourite toy and he was being completely honest about this cool thing he invented and had a passion for... Or B; he was lying through his dirty teeth and just wanted to amuse himself with Ares getting put through the ringer because he was bored.
Ares turned back into his humanoid form and figured there was only really one way to find out what lay ahead so he bent his knees and readied himself to hop in. As he was doing this, though, his preparations were interrupted by the short and brief sound of some sort of large object cutting through the air behind him. Ares looked up and around but couldn't initially see anything so he activated Omniscience... "Whoa! Where'd that come from?!" Ares was now privy to the presence of a humongous wooden airship floating a few tens of metres away from him that he nearly missed entirely. Had he ignored his gut instinct, and treated that sound earlier as a mere sharp gust of wind, he would have potentially been ambushed while heading down into the inside of the mutated mountain and that wouldn't have been preferable in the slightest! As it turned out, the Viking warlord's ship had excellent cloaking technology and could even silence the hovering mechanism that enabled flight. Silent thrusters were pretty impressive and not even just by Sheryashkan standards. Somebody really went all out with the creation of the boat... Though why they bothered when this thing was also rigged to explode was anybody's guess. Perhaps they really wanted to sell the illusion that Neo Gear and the Nu Kings were in some sort of meaningful alliance. Unfortunately for the latter, though, they'd been thoroughly betrayed and were in cahoots with backstabbers.
The warlord in charge of the Nu Kings was standing at the bow of his floating ship, about to chase after Ares by ramming him and leaping off his ship to do glorious combat, but what he didn't realise is that his ship's core was overheating and amassing a worrying amount of energy right underfoot... The Torchbearer must have realised the smaller ships were all impounded and wrecked and not eligible to blow up anymore so he probably sent the warlord a message to go hunt down however was responsible. Knowing it was Ares, or at least having a 99% chance it was him, meant the Torchbearer could direct his final, biggest explosive to somewhere it might actually matter now that the rest of the pan had fallen apart. This ship couldn't, on its own, blow up the mutated mountain but killing Ares if it caught him in the blast? That was feasible, and given his level of interference valuable too, so directing the warlord to fly on over to him was seemingly the approach he took. Not that the warlord was aware of this, he was just a vehicle to pilot the explosive and his life was forfeit from the get-go.
This mountain was screwed. Again, Ares knew his explosives and the one inside that ship was no joke. It was about as powerful as a stack of four or so Perish Wheels so about half the strength of an Armillary. This entire mountain was getting turned to dust and so Ares Ignored the war cry of the warlord, threw a preventative Not Even Light behind him to stop anyone from giving chase, and dipped into the opening in the mountain looking to both escape and get the last leg of his Isaz journey over with. He'd timed his jump inside the mountain perfectly and the stone door rolled back into place behind him, stopping the angry warlord from pursuing him any further while the Not Even Light swallowed up the projectiles aimed at Ares' backside. The warlord, in frustration, was word-vomiting some kind of foreign barbaric dialect and roaring at the stone door but, unbeknownst to him, he had bigger issues in store. His prided ship was about two seconds away from obliterating all life within a large radius and he was at the dead, emphasis on dead, centre of it. This was a rather anti-climactic way for this hulking brute to go but it was his own fault for messing with people who were shady to begin with. Bonus mistake points for then picking a fight with Ares on top of that as he wasn't capable of beating Ares at all anyway. It was a comedy of errors, like repeatedly stepping on a rake, but it ended with a catastrophic BANGat least as, for the second time today, massive explosions could be seen in the sky from down below. The citizens of Isaz must have assumed there was some sort of celebratory display happening up at the top of the mutated mountain...