Amidst the quiet square, the stepper was... Conflicted. Sure it was happy to have killed its prey but... It felt empty! It was looking forward to torturing Ares a little after winning a hard fought battle but it ended so suddenly. This entire mess was anti-climactic and it felt perturbed by this fact, so much so that it was now considering going on a rampage to quench its mounting bloodthirst. It had no other avenue of letting it all out, and that information broker from before would reveal its existence soon enough anyway, so why not have a bit of fun alongside its shadow before everyone ran away and abandoned this city? If even that Ares person, the strongest person Xasca had ever seen, excluding Sevorus, failed... Who else could stop it? And it hadn't even really been a close fight either as Ares died the second the shadow came out and was utilised. He was a decent adversary but his judgement was clouded and he, as far as the stepper knew, assumed the stepper had nothing up its sleeve that could reverse the tide of the fight. The stepper didn't expect Ares to hit so hard, and it was definitely wounded, but what did any of that matter now that it had won? It was a tad curious to see how much more Ares had in him but the stepper wasn't one to play around when it really mattered, funnily enough. If there was one lesson it learnt, it was not to play with food that could bite back. That one individual who led an army against it all those years ago left a deep impact on it due to how close the monster came to death. It was still in relative infancy and so, despite being different from the other steppers, it had limits.
It's not that the stepper had never felt fear, it felt it once when its life flashed before its eyes, but that was arguably the problem. After experiencing such a bizarre sensation first hand it came to truly understand, at least from its perspective, the raw power such an uncontrollable feeling had. 'Fear' was something it chased for many years after out of curiosity, leading to the monster committing many depraved acts it would usually never bother with just to see people feel fear and help deepen its understanding. Combined with meeting a shadow, these antics eventually drove it to the brink of insanity and its obsession with fear became all-encompassing. This was where its aura came from. Logically it should have had an aura of fear, as auras are closely tied to relevant characteristics of the individual who unlocks their potential, but 'madness' was a far more fitting trait by that point. It understood when and why people felt fear but the stepper lost respect for that feeling over time so its understanding was truly limited. The madness of endlessly pursuing that power, however, was deeply rooted.
Fear had long since stopped being its driving motive and now the madness dwelling within it was all that was left. It simply acted on whims it couldn't erven control, its declining mental state furthered along by the shadow that was twisting its nature even more. In some ways, the stepper was actually quite pitiful. It wasn't supposed to be capable of understanding anything as remotely complex as emotions, that was beyond the average stepper. But, alas, Sevorus' busy hands had tinkered with many steppers and this one in particular happened to have a reaction unlike all the others. Sevorus' pursuit of a perfect body led him to be curious about the nature of 'emotions' and whether it was better to be an unfeeling machine or a sentimental creature who could draw out power from desires. Be they love, to protect, anger, to fight, or other such ideas, Sevorus was inclined to check just for the sake of being thorough. Sevorus had no faith in any of this but his experiment with the stepper threw a wrench into that 'highly logical rationality over feeling' line of thinking. In fact, the reason Sevorus left Xasca, and returned to his well-equipped labs in the upper domains, wasn't just because of Dominus' disappearance freeing him up. After learning that emotions were worth investigating, after seeing the stepper develop an aura of madness despite being so 'young', he abandoned everything to go conduct various emotionally manipulative experiments such as the one involving Candy.
As for the stepper, it was abandoned with a whirlwind of feelings it couldn't really manage and it just so happened to be struck by a particularly negative set of them, after nearly losing its life the second it was thrust out into the wider world, that left a lasting impact. Theoretically this could have been the only 'allied' or 'friendly' stepper in the entire world. Had its life taken a different course it may have been a defender of Xasca rather than a terroriser of it. Though there was no reason to forgive or pity it, as it was still a murderous cretin and nothing more, its not like it wasn't also suffering. The mental anguish it suffered through on a daily basis could only be quelled by giving into the madness so it was a never ending cycle. Even right now its desire to torture Ares wasn't even really its own wish, just what its corrupted brain was telling it to do. It couldn't fulfill the wish anymore, as Ares was dead already, so the somewhat sane stepper was left to just stand around idly and question everything. It had never been unable to do as the madness in it commanded so it was left at a crossroads, confused, and regaining some clarity. This would be short lived, as the backlash of 'disobedience' would drive it to go on a rampage eventually, but it was finally able to feel even a hint of 'peace' again after so long. If it could stay this way it would but it just wasn't possible, Sevorus' experiments ran too deep and had changed too much. Being able to implant 'emotions' was already a ridiculous feat of ingenuity, there were bound to be complications. Though Sevorus intentions were initially harmless this exact result, that led to everyone involved being worse off, was precisely why Dominus, and others like him, were deeply concerned with Sevorus' behaviour and constantly hounded him.
Thud
The stepper could feel itself regressing to an animalistic state, filled with desire to check off inhumane tasks one after another, when something forcefully tapped it on the back. The stepper had been so preoccupied with its thoughts it didn't notice anything creeping up on it... But this was strange. Nobody other than Ares could even see it so who or what was this? It twisted its heads around, rotating them to observe his back, and its two eye doubled in size when it saw a familiar face that reallyshouldn't have been there.
"Cutting off my head like that, who the hell do you think you are? Do I look like a Dullahan to you?!" Ares complained with a snort as his disintegration coated fist bore into the stepper's unprotected back. The stepper looked down in shock at the fully intact Ares but didn't have much time to work things out as Ares had coated his hand in Black Blossom. The gradual opening of a tear in reality, gushing with dangerous black mana, gave the stepper pause but it was far too late to do anything about this incomprehensible sneak attack from the grave.
ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
"Hallelujah! Finally hit someone with this damn thing!" Ares threw his magic-coated hands in the air in celebration as the stepper vanished form his sight. The disintegration explosion sent the monster crashing through at least ten rows of buildings and it wasn't even visible anymore as it rolled off into the horizon. Its body had been drenched in black fire and Ares couldn't possibly count how many limbs and body parts it just lost as a result of that painful strike. At a rough glace, before it blasted off deeper into the slums: one leg, twenty arms, a chunk of neck, and one of its eyes, were all either gone or non-functional. The stepper's left eye, that usually merrily taunted the entire world, had become dead and sunk to the bottom of its head, unmoving and static, only rolling around as it was carried by the momentum of its head. It looked lifeless like a shiny marble.
But who cared about the stepper's injuries right now? There was clearly a bigger problem here; namely the fact that Ares was no longer dead! His old body was gone and this one he was stretching and taking out for a test run looked fresh out the box. Mana reserves? Full. Health? Perfect? Injuries? None. Aside from Enyo's heart barrier, which hadn't returned, everything else was pristine as can be. This was incredibly strange given the fact that he was literally dead a few seconds ago. It really wasn't a joke, he had died a dog's death after getting assassinated like a chump. Sure he was somewhat willing to let such a thing happen but it had undeniably happened. He felt the pain, he saw his life flash before his eyes, he had no way of stopping it. It's not that he prevented death somehow, he just came back from the afterlife after death. This wasn't a trick involving his revenant bloodline, he wasn't like Dominus who could actually just pop up from the grave whenever and wherever, there was something else at play here that left those in the know stunned.
Ares didn't have much time to celebrate his success, however, as the stepper came charging back over the top of ruined buildings and it was REALLY not in a good mood. The peace it was enjoying was now unreachable as its mind was screeching at it to torture Ares yet again. That same wisp of command, haunting its brain, that it had been able to ignore earlier was no longer an impossible ask so it had to do its duty and obey. Ares could have sworn he saw a hint of reluctance in the stepper's one remaining eye but he refused to believe it. He refused to accept or entertain the possibility the stepper was a victim in all of this. It might be, it might have some sob story of its own, but Ares didn't want to hear it. Even if he heard it, this monster was dying here tonight anyway so it didn't matter. There were no misunderstandings, only mistakes the stepper had made time and time again that it was going to have to pay dearly for. Ares couldn't possibly know this thing's history, it couldn't exactly speak or anything, but that was for the best. If it lived a good life, it didn't deserve it. If it lived a bad life, Ares would put it out of its misery. No other options existed in Ares' mind and that was all that mattered as this was his decision to make.
The stepper arrived before Ares but remembered what happened last time it charged carelessly at him like this and stopped. It had tasted a full strength Black Blossom and was worse for wear because of it. It was more injured now than it had been back during its fight against the dessert dweller army leader way back when. It was finally getting to a point it was nearly healed from that injury and now this? This was no longer at the point where its innate regeneration could keep up anymore. It was going to have to search for more rare medicine to deal with this insufferably agonising black fire clinging to its innards, eating away at it. There was a hole in the stepper's body where the black fire was festering and occasionally flaring that brought it nothing but misery. Plus there were plenty of other injuries it suffered and it was honestly a miracle the stepper could even still move. Even if someone like Sandy was hit point blank by a slow and heavy Black Blossom like that they would be on death's door. Ares could only sigh in awe when he saw this because this monster was well and truly special. He lamented the fact that it was such a despicable creature otherwise he might have pulled a 'Rox' and kept it. Maybe, at this juncture, if Ares tried to reason with the stepper and help it remove the madness rooted inside it things could have been different. There would never be any way of making up for the transgressions of the stepper but it could have probably been saved from its fate if Ares simply bothered to try. There was a timeline, an alternate dimension even, where this happened and the stepper became a second Rox. This was not that story, though, and Ares could not be made to care given everything he'd seen of this monster. This stepper did not have any right to experience the positive emotions it had deprived others of, that was all there was to it.
"Don't look at me like that, I'm not sparing you so put away the puppy dog eyes... Or eye, I guess. That other one ain't working any more? Tough luck, bastard." The stepper snarled at Ares' words, as he spat at the floor in front of the the monster, and the strange light of sanity in its eyes disappeared for good. There was no turning back anymore but that didn't mean the stepper would become some kind of wild beast or anything. It was still the cautious hunter it had been before and so it was carefully deciding how to approach Ares. The mystery of Ares' revival had not been answered and the stepper understood this was a problem it needed to solve before things got out of hand. Ares wouldn't give it the luxury to sit there and figure it out, however. "My immortality is none of your concern, you should be more worried about your own mortality!" Ares leapt forward with the scythe recklessly, endangering his safety just to swipe at a single limb. This was a decision that made the stepper question Ares' sanity but it was happy to give up one arm if it meant killing Ares potentially for real this time. It reached out the arm, practically gifting it to Ares, and then swung another limb to decapitate him yet again. Ares' head, his body, and the severed stepper limb all fell to the floor but this time the stepper watched Ares' body patiently waiting for anything to happen. Did the body heal? Would it happen again? This was a good time to have some of its questions answered.
Tinkle
With a soft glow, Ares' deceased body began disintegrating into particles of neon blue light and ultimately vanished without leaving a single trace.
SLASH
Ares, once more fully whole and in perfect condition, launched an attack with his scythe from the stepper's flank and lodged the weapon into its shoulder.
ROOOOOOARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
More pain for the stepper who was caught off guard. It stumbled back and flung multiple arms towards Ares to make him back off but he committed suicide by rushing headfirst into the limb swarm while rabidly swinging his scythe to take as much of the stepper with him as he could. A chunk of limbs fell to the ground along with Ares hole-ridden body. The stepper didn't even bother looking at the corpse anymore because it was pointless and nothing more than a distraction. It caught Ares making a beeline to him yet again from another angle and retreated as far away from this inhuman freak as it could by clinging to a wall and climbing it. This was impossible. If the stepper understood anything right now, about its current predicament, it was that Ares had somehow made himself functionally invincible...
...
No, it was worse than that. Invincibility wasn't really a problem. The stepper could handle an invincible opponent. All it would have to do is tire them out. Invincible doesn't mean infinite stamina and mana and so there is a work around even if they can't be killed. Ares did not fit the bill, however. Every time the stepper 'killed' him Ares came back with full mana reserves and looked ready and wiling to run a cross country marathon. Even minor details, like the condition of his clothes, his mental state, and anything else that could possibly be affected by everything prior to his death was undone to a fresh state. Invincibility was like a kid's toy before whatever this strange phenomenon was. Ares had unlimited mana, unlimited energy, and unlimited lives to throw at the stepper until it could no longer withstand the eroding tide Ares had become. Whatever was causing this oddity needed to be stopped because the stepper was already losing too many of its tools. Ares would kill it eventually at this rate, as he was still hunting it down and hacking away even now, and the stepper couldn't even meaningfully fight back.
The hunter had become the hunted in inexplicable fashion and it was on the run now while Ares activated Voidwalk and, for the first time this fight, actively chased the stepper. He ran along walls, parkoured over stalls, and Shifted to cut off the stepper while mercilessly throwing his own life away with every swing of his weapon. It didn't matter to him if, time and time again, his body was wrecked, slashed, poked, crushed, ripped in half... None of it mattered and he didn't bat a single eye. He looked like an insatiable demon with a sardonic grin that gave rise to a familiars feeling within the stepper that it hadn't felt in a long while. It didn't quite remember it properly just yet and it was still able to subdue that feeling within the sea of madness so nothing came of it right now... For now... Ultimately, this was all a sleight of hand, a magician's parlance covering up a silly prank at most. Ares did not possess this power innately, it was impossible. Once the stepper figured out the trick behind the scenes Ares would regress back to a powerless little human, incapable of fending off the stepper and his shadow leading to an inevitable death at its hands. It would, at long last, fulfil its wish and torture Ares until the damnable madness quietened down and retreated for the night.
Things might look dire for now, as he stepper was actively refraining from using the shadow during this period as it was pointless, but the stepper had noticed something odd... Ares was reluctant to use arts... Why? Why not just endlessly hurl 'Perish Wheels' at it? With infinite mana he could... Unless doing so affected his plan in some way. He was freely using more precise magic, like Voidwalk and Shift, even coating his weapon in disintegration as he slashed it at the stepper, but showy magic seemed to be off the table right now... The stepper swiped at Ares, killing him off again at the cost of some limbs to buy it a moment of peace, and it looked around while paying attention to every little detail. The only thing it could see, though, was the perplexing white chalk... It had, up until now, assumed Ares would use it to launch an attack, or maybe seal the stepper, but it had been suspiciously 'inactive' up until now. Now would be the perfect time to use it, while the stepper was helplessly on the run, so why didn't Ares use it? Why was he so intent on luring the stepper here just to not use it? Wasn't this whole immortality nonsense incredibly strange? It's not like Ares acted so confident anywhere else except int this square... The stepper had figured out what was causing the issue but not why. The stepper had been too preoccupied with escaping the undying zombie that was Ares to realise it sooner but now it roughly figured things out. Still... If setting up an immortality field was so 'easy' everyone would be bloody well doing it!... What on earth had Ares done here?
Ares revived once more and looked around, showing a small frown when the stepper finally started escaping towards the outer edge of the runic formation. It looked like his unstoppable fun was going to be over soon but this rune magic had done him many favours. It allowed him to draw out the shadow for a split second to confirm its existence and invalidate the surprise factor it held. Ares now knew roughly how fast it could operate, and to what degree it was a problem, so he wouldn't be ambushed again like that going forward. He'd also chopped off enough limbs that now the stepper was visibly starting to run out. There were a lot more to go through, yes, but there was at least a hundred unusable and severed limbs strewn around the black market thanks to Ares' persistent pursuit over the last minute or so. It was unfortunate that the stepper wasn't going to play his game anymore but this whole thing, from the start, was really just a pathetic stunt that should never have worked. Getting this far with a magic that had no business doing any of this was already good enough and Ares couldn't possibly complain.
With a heavy sigh, Ares walked towards the stepper now standing outside the chalk. He shrugged and chuckled as he spoke to the monster. "Finally got a clue, huh? And here I thought I might get lucky and just kill you before you put two and two together." Despite Ares taunting, neither he nor the stepper crossed the chalk line and just stared at one another form a few inches away. They were within arm's reach, and could freely strike, but there was no point to such an action. If the stepper attacked Ares inside this 'immortality field', its efforts would be undone. If Ares attacked the stepper, he would need to reach outside his safety zone and potentially risk an actual injury this time that couldn't be recovered. "You've lived many years, seen many things, and killed many people. Bet you never thought you'd be, at least temporarily, bested and kicked around by basic tier magic though?"
The stepper's last eye narrowed into a small rectangle as it tried to verify Ares' words. It wasn't unfamiliar with some of the more basic runemancy arts out there but the shape of this one, due to the odd optical illusion nature of it, thanks to the varying heights of the lines, made it hard to piece together. In fact, most people were familiar with basic runemancy arts so Ares' next words blew everyone's minds because he uttered a pretty common name.
"To be fooled to this degree by a mere Training Field... Must be pretty shameful, huh?"
...
...
...
Training Field? Everyone still hiding nearby looked a the runes again with a renewed perspective and their jaws dropped. Even the stepper froze on the spot and its eye trembled a little as it finally saw the truth of the matter. Training Field, a mere practice tool... Couldn't hurt a fly... Had turned a person into an immortal?! No, it could technically always do that. People inside a Training Field were unkillable, after all... Its just that such a thing typically applied to everyone inside it... But Training Fields could be easily edited by anyone who understood runemancy. Ares had to add revenant runes to Training Fields to prevent that weird interaction turning him into a child, for instance, so he definitely knew how to fiddle with these things... So how simple was it to just have the Training Field only affect one person? Ares was a part of the Field's simulation, nobody else in the area was. It was such a simple change, even a basic runemancer with a week or two of experience could do it... But who would think to set up a Training Field and use it to ambush a person?! Ares' cunning was astounding as this move was admittedly quite genius.
This should never have worked, because such a basic rune was identifiable to anyone who'd been a cultivator for longer than a month, and yet he'd hidden it flawlessly. Covering up the rune by using the environment, and drawing unconnected lines by utilising the stalls' height, was a plan so utterly despicable only a revenant could have come up with it. If a normal person tried to set up a Training Field the 'victim' would spot it immediately and scoff before destroying it with a flick of the wrist. Such a trap had no business working ever on absolutely anybody. And yet the only people who understood what was happening this whole time were the experts hiding on roofs with a clear view. They were speechless watching Ares resurrect infinitely in perfect condition, giving him an edge in what appeared to be a difficult battle. Training Field was a 'weak' rune with zero combat application, that was what it should be, and yet somebody had, before their very eyes, turned it into an 'immortality' rune... They were baffled! There was not even a single record throughout all of history of a person ever attempting this because the level of deceitful scheming and artful manipulation needed to pull it off was unthinkable. Plus nobody had ever though to use it like this to begin with.
This night was a story that would spread like wildfire and not just because of the stepper when is existence was revealed. Somebody using Training Field as a weapon was news worthy enough to become a global sensation... People were seriously going to try and replicate this feat but who on earth, other than this wily moron Ares, could possibly make it work?! This was why Dominus was so impressed earlier. Ares had a lot of things going for him. He was talented beyond belief in many ways but so may of those talents were pretty much gifted to him at birth. He didn't really earn any of them and, yet, here and there were sparks of greatness that had nothing to do with these innate talents. Absolute reversal was a pinnacle technical that came out of nowhere. Ares' scythe mastery could not be explained because Dominus didn't even have scythe mastery or affinity for the weapon to that same degree. And now this? Ares was a smart kid and that wasn't exactly anything that could be 'innate' in any real way. Unless he was the reincarnation of some ancient wise deity, this stunt was all a concoction of his own devious brain's making and Dominus couldn't believe his eyes. Forget the lower domains, even the higher domains had never seen an antic this preposterous. There was a person referred to as the 'unofficial God of trickery' and their greatest exploit didn't even measure up to this Training Field bonanza! Still, fun though it was, now that it had been identified there was no more use for it. The stepper could scratch away the key lines and disable it. It was too busy reeling from the humiliation, though, so Ares had a chance to sneer at it and gloat. He'd been pushed around earlier and the tide had turned quite nicely. First the explosions, now this. Again, out of combat the stepper had an advantage. Ares would cede the title of 'despicable king' to it begrudgingly. He couldn't match up to it. In combat, however, there was nocompetition and never would be.