"Hmmm." Veteran was glad to have his curse removed on his real body but, yet, he still felt it lingering in the background... He was pretty sure this wouldn't work after all but que sera, sera. It was a shot in the dark to begin with and it wouldn't take Ares too long, compared to how long Veteran had been alive up until now, to escape the barrier and free him for real. "Seems this is a no go but, honestly, that's fine. Still, you never know, maybe it worked. There's only one way to check..." Veteran cracked his knuckles and created a sword out of pressure. This fell within the purview of the rules of the pagoda but he personally considered it cheating and never resorted to this. Such a sword was not the one that he used regularly, and it wasn't his legacy treasure by any stretch of the imagination, but that didn't mean he would be any less capable with it so he stuck to this as he felt like it was less a circumvention ot he rules than just straight up wielding a real blade. A veteran sword master was a veteran sword master no matter what form the blade came in. Was he as good as Dominus? Absolutely not, and Ares was tempted to let Dominus take over and watch the duel between dual masters slowly unfold in Dominus' favour, but Ares had to show this guy the peak of pressure mastery. Ares had to show Veteran a fully fledged Garmr, it was basically an obligation he had to teach the previous pressure king who was in charge now and to what extent his dominance prevailed over all others. It was also just the kind of thing that Veteran would be interested in anyway as he was a pressure nut. He didn't just have a passing interest, it was something he'd spend a great deal of time researching whenever he had free time and hadn't been mourning over his lost magic... So relatively infrequently but he had done it! More than most which would explain his previous position. After all, when everything else was taken away this became his only avenue for recourse

"Oh you'll be checking alright." Ares cricked his neck and displayed his arrogance as it was obvious to him at least that Veteran was going to be booted out of this pagoda real fast... But maybe Ares could take things slow and let Veteran demonstrate his new power? Getting 100% enhancement and then getting beaten instantly would be a serious mood killer even if it also happened to be an eye opener. Ares would be at a pretty major disadvantage, as his lowered cultivation would be taking Garmr into account and he wasn't immediately using it, but Ares didn't see himself losing accidentally before he could transform... Screw it! let's do it! Ares couldn't resist his curiosity. He wanted to see Veteran's sword mastery up close and personal because it was one of the things Ares really didn't know much about with regards to this guy. That and his magical calibre. The latter was guaranteed to be impressive, given his affiliation to literally everything, but Ares could check that out when he was actually freed from the curse properly. For now, checking his sword skills was perfectly fine.

Ares winked provocatively to indicate he was ready but Dominus immediately frowned. He was aware that Ares was taking it easy on him because he could see the kid's cultivation! It was about thirty five-ish stages lower than his own current cultivation but that was factoring in his the revenant transformation he wasn't actively using. "If you're trying not to hurt my feelings, I don't appreciate it..."

"Nothing of the sort, I just don't want this to end immediately. No offence but I don't think you'll put up a much better fight than Armageddon did and he kinda just stood there and gave up."

"..." Veteran didn't have a confident response to give to this new revelation. There were rumours floating around, started by the man himself, about Armageddon not surviving one punch, which was pretty crazy, but to think the guy felt so outclassed he'd given up entirely? That was news to Veteran as this wasn't something known at all. It's not like Ares and Armageddon clashed and Ares barely won out in the end as they both gave it their all in one final push... Armageddon just didn't even waste his time resisting? Maybe Ares was more dangerous in that revenant form than Veteran was expecting... He'd seen Dominus' and, sure, it was impressive but it's not like Veteran would shy away from fighting such a thing. Even if Dominus' revenant form was taller and bulkier than a normal revenant it wasn't by a worrying amount and so Ares couldn't be that much bigger, right? Veteran wasn't so sure anymore but, in order to find out and get an answer proper, he was going to have force Ares to play his hand. That much should be absolutely possible given his new 100% enhancement and the sword in his hand, he wasn't a complete chump! He still had it in him to put the younger generation in their place, Fundamental champion or not!

Old habits die hard and so Veteran took off first, trying to take Ares by surprise by laying claim to the initial strike and putting the fight in his favour going forward. The attack in question wasn't one of his usual punches but, this time, came in the form a of a simple lung with his pressure sword. The weapon was made of physical pressure but it's sharpness didn't lose out to any kind of magical engineering or rare materials that turned even the dullest swords in cultivation society into God killers. This pressure sword was the real deal and even came with a free bit of extra weighted pressure to slow down and turn sluggish the opponent who was being struck at. Ares was immune to this side-effect but it was a passive benefit of the pressure sword so it's not like it really mattered whether it was on or off and couldn't be changed regardless. As for Ares, he was able to react in a timely manner to this strike, despite how much he was weakened by his cultivation, thanks mostly to Veteran who was still just testing the waters. It seemed they both had a similar gameplan so Ares played along and, for now, did nothing other than activate his annihilation enhancement and dye the surroundings gold again. Unlike before, when this activation alone could blast Veteran back a bit, this alone was not enough to stop Veteran's assault and Ares was required to take extra measures. That being said, he didn't even raise his hands as he simply directed some pressure towards the incoming sword and weighed it down until it could move forward no longer. Ares' pressure was still unbeatable in a head to head confrontation and he could rely on that trait quite heavily in this fight to deny a lot of Veteran's approaches.

Veteran gave up on the sword, dropped it, and summoned a new one as that was the main advantage of not wielding a real sword here. He could chuck his creations around or abandon them to his heart's desire. A real sword wouldn't have been stopped so easily by pressure but this was the best he was going to get so complaining about it was pointless. It also didn't affect him much as creating a new sword barely even took half a second so it wasn't a massive detriment in terms of losing pace and momentum. Veteran was able to ditch the previous sword, create a new one, and still launch another attack against Ares all in one swift motion without pause. Granted Veteran was one of the few people that could actually make it look this easy but it was a talent he possessed and was free to make use of in this duel.

As for Veteran's second attack, now that he wasn't at lunging distance anymore, he opted for a sweep instead. Veteran aimed for Ares' rib cage with another simple swing but this one seemed to be a little faster, forcing Ares hand literally. He couldn't just dismiss the attack with pressure anymore and was going to have to actually stop being disrespectful and move... Or that was supposed to be the case but Ares expertly deflected the attack with his body and smugly grinned at Veteran now that the roles had been reversed. He'd gotten his wins against the guy, sure, but those victories hardly paid the guy back for all the numerous attempts he spent getting his ass one-sidedly beat while he learnt how to improve himself! Veteran was in a similar position to what Ares had been in as he still had to acclimate his body to all the new power he had. 100% enhancement was there, technically, but how accessible and functional it was in its current state was the real issue for Veteran and was a major reason why he could be freely mocked like this. Did that mean Ares would come away from this fight with an easy win? Not unless he swapped to Garmr, no. Veteran possessed enough skill and mastery to really put Ares on the spot if he went all out but Ares could play around for a bit while Veteran was still getting his sea legs and taking things slow.

Despite Ares' seeming reluctance to move to defend himself, he didn't stick to such a plan when it was his turn to go on the offensive as he lifted his hand to slap at Veteran. This wasn't supposed to hit, so he wasn't surprised when Veteran hopped out of range, but the distance that had just opened up was Ares' real goal from the start. What occurred next was a neat little happening that really went to show that this Ares was very much a segment of the real one because this pagoda clone was about to copy something he'd never even seen before! The clone clasped his palms together horizontally, scratched along his left palm with curled fingers on his right hand, and drew a golden string of pressure backwards like he was readying a bow shot. Ares had done this exact attack on the people assaulting him as he boarded the Federation and, yet, somehow, his clone invented the exact same attack method! One to one, this manipulation of physical pressure was an exact replica of the technique Ares had created. This was pure chance too as it had happened long after Ares' data was stored in the pagoda, meaning the clone couldn't have possibly known about this in the real world. It was a mix of genetics, similar brain wavelengths, and pure luck that had resulted in this! Both Ares would have found this incredibly neat were they aware of this but, given their relative distance and inability to communicate, it would go on to just be a rare event that nobody ever knew about.

Veteran didn't find this quite so neat, however, as he was on the receiving end of what looked to be an incredibly powerful attack. He couldn't compare this to real Ares' version, obviously, but he would understand it to be night and day between the two. Ares, the real one, could only muster a small piercing line at his current cultivation. This pagoda clone, with a massively boosted cultivation, could fire off an entire death beam doing this. If this clone didn't restrain its power, it wouldn't be inconcievable to maybe blow up an entire planet with this 'piddly' attack. Pagoda Ares hadn't experimented much with how powerful his destruction magic was in this kind of state but he was well aware how much power his pressure packed and it was not trifling. His pressure alone packed a punch that even conventional, at least in the upper domains, nuclear weapons couldn't even match. According to the expert in Ares' brain, Dominus, Ares might even be able to squash a planet with nothing but pure pressure. Not even an Esoteric Compression, just directing his pressure at a planet and it would be squeezed out of existence.

Of course pagoda Ares could do basically nothing with this while trapped in the treasure but having that much strength was fun to explore in his down time, at least. Pagoda Ares had been toying around with pressure to make his position in the pagoda completely unassailable, before he moved onto destruction and experimented with that, and that was when he'd invented this physical pressure attack and really come to understand how much damage he could do with even something on the smaller end of the scale. Planets in the higher domains had spent many years absorbing way more mana than planets in the lower domains, generally making them tougher and harder to destroy, and yet Ares could run through them like they were made of paper. This wasn't even a destruction pillar thing, although that would inevitably be able to do it to an even greater extent, this was just the power of Dominus' bloodline and an example of how strong people like him and Veteran could be. Add in a touch of annihilation pressure and, well, this Ares clone was a dangerous individual, to say the least. If this clone was allowed into the outer world it would be able to do almost entirely as it pleased for many millions of years on end before anybody could come close to stopping it and the effort / numbers required to do that would be immense.

Again, though, destruction magic hadn't even come into play yet and that raised the bar even further. It was entirely possible for this clone Ares, in the pagoda, to set up an instant kill zone for every single challenger using his disintegration magic. He never actually had to fight anyone again if he just cheated, his magic would inevitably be that powerful. Spawning headfirst into a planet sized blob of raw disintegration was impossible to survive no mater what measures anybody took and this was even more true if Ares used the enhanced form of disintegration, whatever it was (as Ares had learnt how to use it to some degree but not what it was exactly), to do it. This clone was indicative of the kind of strength real Ares would wield one day but it was still pretty weak even compared to that. Real Ares would find and consume plenty of resources that improved every single aspect of him on his journey, each widening the gap in potential between him and this clone. If the clone had this much claim to the throne of world's strongest already then the real Ares was going to become something truly unfathomable in due time. The reason more people weren't concerned about this outside the pagoda was because nobody had seen Ares destruction magic yet. Hell nobody had even seen him go all out with pressure yet other than Armageddon, to some degree, who barely commented on the matter. Ares was an unknown variable and, though they were interested in his magic, that side of him wasn't really going to end up being well known as that wasn't what the pagoda was about. Him injuring Ject was the only real thing they could base estimates off of but they were being far too conservative in their assumptions about what he could really do. It's not like pagoda Ares really had a reason to show random challengers his destruction magic so this was something that would only be seen in person when Ares actually emerged from the barrier himself. He'd make quite the impression then, though, given how he'd go about it, but that was a future event that wasn't important right now.

Right now, Veteran was kissing his teeth and preparing to dodge because he didn't feel comfortable taking this incoming attack like a champ. He was making the right decision here by following his gut because Veteran leaped to the side right as a golden beam with the thickness of a mansion blitzed right by where he'd just been standing and tore through the atmosphere of this fake planet. That attack had been, give or take, almost as big and dangerous as Ares' No Fear back in the tournament... And yet it wasn't even magic, just a light application of physical pressure. It was really just the starting point and, even with physical pressure let alone annihilation enhancement, he could still do way more. Veteran wasn't necessarily awed because of the scope of the attack, he could do the same, but the might behind it was frightening and he would lose in a direct clash between two similarly sized attacks. An elephant that couldn't kill an ant was less dangerous than a feather that could poke out your eyes but that last attack was both massive and incredibly lethal. Veteran would have lived if he blocked the attack but boy would he have been in a fair bit of pain afterwards. That was the annihilation factor at play and Veteran couldn't deny that, even in this diluted form, Ares' annihilation was pretty damn horrifying.

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Veteran really didn't want to see the kind of shenanigans Ares could pull if he just outright used destruction magic... Or, more like, he wouldn't even get to see it because he would just be booted out of the pagoda immediately anyway! Instant death and not even a second of spectating before he was consumed by the golden mayhem swarming every inch of this simulated domain. He was starting to feel a tad grateful, actually, that Ares was taking it easy otherwise he would have been outside the pagoda, on his ass, and royally confused right about now. Still, a quitter he was not and he was determined to see this fight through to end. He put up an abysmal showing back when he lost to Ares at the very end and wanted to rectify that by remaining stoic even now that the situation was probably worse than it was at the time. This Ares was stronger than that Ares by immeasurable amounts and yet Veteran felt less off-put by him. Maybe it was because he'd seen this unique type of pressure before, maybe it was because he had his real body here, or maybe it was just him being stubborn and refusing to allow himself to be humiliated again. Regardless, the time for playing around and taking things slow was gone. It had disappeared after that previous beam grazed it and made it run away in terror. No more easy to handle sword swings, professional though they were, as he was being too generous! Ares was not a beginner pressure wielder anymore! Which was an incredibly difficult to accept thought as it felt like just yesterday Veteran had been helping this kid learn... It was truly abnormal how quickly he got the hang of things and then just took over. Veteran felt like a seat warmer on the pressure throne and how easily he'd been made to give it up was still baffling to him to this day. So confusing that he still occasionally had to pinch himself and prove this wasn't all a strange dream. It happened so damn fast his brain had barely caught up!

Inhale

...

Exhale

Veteran went through the motions as he lifted his pressure sword above his head with both hands. This was the precursor to a rather showy attack of his own, one that could slice a planet into two halves if uncontested. It wasn't the strongest attack he knew, not by a long shot, but this was the start of his own escalation in this fight and he was going to prove to Ares that this was going to be a hard won battle if he dared to think otherwise! He was curious to see how Ares would respond to this as defending with pressure was something that Veteran hadn't really seen out of Ares much. Sure he could deflect really well but this was not an attack that anyone in their right mind would try to deflect in the first place... Well, that didn't necessarily mean Ares wouldn't, he was a crazy bastard sometimes, but, for this attack at least, it looked like he wasn't going to try... But that didn't mean he wasn't taking drastic measures of his own. Veteran hadn't seen this before but it looked like he was in the process of transforming into his revenant form... Ares could have absolutely dealt with this attack on his own, without Garmr, but it seemed like he wanted to join in on the escalation and ramp things up even further.

Veteran was interested to see Garmr but he wasn't sure how he felt about this change because he wanted to experiment with default Ares longer. To see how far he could go without the transformation... Unless what Ares was saying here was that it was all irrelevant. He could transform freely, at any time, and such a process could never be stopped because it was an inherent skill that didn't require anything to activate, not even mana. Technically, Garmr WAS default Ares so what he was capable of in his human form basically meant nothing. It's more along the lines that his human form was a vessel for the destruction pillar to flow through whereas Garmr was the real vessel for his pressure related talents. In that regard, his argument was fair... But Veteran didn't feel like that was the angle Ares was taking here. It just looked like Ares was bored and didn't want to keep this farce up any longer because Veteran's attack didn't inspire him. Honestly, Veteran felt a little insulted! Who did this kid think he was?! Veteran refused to believe the gap between them was as big as Ares was indirectly claiming it was by giving up on his own experiment halfway through. He wasn't impressed by Veteran's attack so he was just going to forcefully end this prematurely?! Absolutely not! Veteran had never felt so determined to smack some sense into anyone before and he was going to make Ares regret his carelessness, that was his new goal. As such, Veteran put a bit more oomph into the attack by charging it longer. He was going for speed to catch Ares off-guard originally but if this was how it was going to be then such a measure was unnecessary. Forget splitting one planet in half, now he had enough power to take on upwards of five. Ares' transformation better be as incredible as he was thinking it was as he'd given up on manifesting defences with pressure in favour of this. If his plain revenant body with annihilation enhancement couldn't survive this attack then Ares was losing his place in the pagoda to Veteran here!

The sword residing above Veteran's head, gathering all the nearby swirling pressure into a maelstrom, began to topple down in Ares' direction. It started off as a cumbersome descent but rapidly sped up as gravity took hold and Veteran's hands finally used force to empower the swing. This was easily the single greatest attack Ares had ever seen but he was too busy transforming to care. This was an attack that dwarfed every known level of cultivation in Sheryashka to the point were not even every single resident of the domain could combine their strengths to overcome this one attack... But Ares practically ignored it. As far as he was concerned, the solution to this was simple so, under the waves of pressure assailing him and hiding his transformation, he quickly became what could be considered a miracle amongst living creatures and shrugged off the strike crashing down on him. Veteran couldn't exactly see beyond the destruction he'd wrought but he could tell the simulated planet he and Ares were stood atop had not been cut in half... Which meant that Ares had successfully taken the entirety of the blow with his bare body... That alone was enough to give Veteran second thoughts but he hoped beyond hope that maybe Ares was injured underneath all the lingering silver pressure... Though he hoped, he didn't necessarily believe so he quickly threw on his silver pressure cape, to try and give himself whatever edge he could, and took steps back to avoid getting ambushed as his pressure faded. He gripped his sword and fuelled it with even more pressure, drastically raising it's lethality for ordinary strikes as he had a feeling he wasn't going to have enough time to launch slow but mighty attacks like that anymore in the upcoming fight.

Rumble

Veteran's heart jumped for a split second as the entire planet groaned under the presence of the now awoken beast. The earth rattled and shook as the last dregs of silver pressure covering the hidden revenant began ripping apart like soft fabric fighting for its life against a pair of scissors. A futile effort if ever there was one, and it didn't take long for the hulking behemoth that was the draconic wolf titan to burst through the seams with a piercing roar and three coloured fire pouring from its mouth laden with impossibly sharp and pure white fangs. The fire was black, gold, and red, signifying the three colours of destruction, and painted the entire domain in the colours of the fundamental champion who wielded them effortlessly. The mountainous monster came in at around 200ft tall as Ares didn't feel the need to completely restrain himself anymore. Sure he wasn't going to appear as his borderline domain sized self, as that might even cause a problem within the simulation and break the pagoda, but he didn't have to stick to his 30ft form either. He wanted to show Veteran the scope of the issue he, up until now, still didn't understand.

Ares, the wielder of destruction, was not just the only God in this soul, Garmr was too. He wasn't really the God of anything specific but it was undeniable he was one. If anything, he was the God of all living things because that was his magnificence; he outclassed every other competitor and even reached divine status in that regard so it was an appropriate title. Not one that came with any actual benefits regarding affiliations or mana or magic but the point was that Garmr didn't need any of that to claim the title regardless. He won the 'magicless God' competition and would inevitably become the de facto representative of what it meant to be a perfect creature from birth without needing anything else.

And now what? Veteran had the nerve to think he could beat this thing? At all? Even if this Garmr before him, stomping across the planet like a giant kaiju, didn't use pressure he could still flick Veteran into oblivion and maybe even accidentally destroy his soul too for good measure. With pressure, with destruction magic, while tapping into his draconic heritage... Garmr might have honestly been a better God of destruction at that point than even Ares! Though they were technically the same person but, still, the difference between human Ares and revenant Ares was night and day at this point. If the creature Veteran saw before him was let loose into the outside world, it could do whatever the hell it wanted for the rest of time. No amount of Gods or experts could ever tell this thing 'no' and it would honestly best be treated as a natural disaster with legs. This thing was the kind of existence that would have legends written about it but it wasn't even a mythological creature, it damn well existed in the flesh! There were various sentient, but unintelligent, creatures of this magnitude that roamed empty planes but they were still nothing in comparison to this... Garmr looked to be stronger, smarter, and capable of wreaking as much destruction as it pleased. It wasn't pitifully slow like the massive entities that endlessly walked in straight lines with no goals either as it looked more than capable of sprinting to the other side of the planet in a quick burst of need be. That much power, that much speed, and that much intelligence all in one being was not something that should have been possible at all and, yet, no sacrifices had been made on any of those traits to accommodate for the others. Garmr had it al because Garmr was just perfect, end of story.

"Oh." Veteran couldn't really describe what he was seeing in any other way and, suddenly, a lot of the conversation he'd had with Ares earlier fully clicked and needed no further explanation. No wonder Ares was bored! There could be a hundred Veterans in here right now and this titanic Garmr would still not give a crap! One ant or a hundred made no difference and this was not even it's full size... And it was being hampered in the cultivation department by the pagoda... And it didn't have any resources ingested as this was just a simulation of baseline Ares... It just kept getting more and more ridiculous the more Veteran thought things through here. It was for the best if he just went back to his previous train of thought, disregarding Ares' unfair existence entirely and competing amongst the other people who lived in a rational reality that did not include this anomalous thing. The fist coming towards Veteran, on its own, probably held more power than ten Gods put together... Reality had played a really sick joke when it invented the destruction pillar and moulded Ares... There was no way in hell the other fundamentals reached this level ever. They might also be ridiculous in their own ways but Veteran refused to believe that destruction wasn't an egregious outlier amongst other egregious outliers. This was definitively the peak of cultivation and Veteran felt truly humbled and thankful having now witnessed a fraction of it. Much like Armageddon, he simply did not bother raising any defences because, really, what was the point?

CRASH

For the second time as of late, a body came flying out of the pagoda with incredible force, crashing into the planet and ripping a chunk of it to shreds. Veteran left a large amount of dredged earth in his wake before finally coming to a stop a good few miles away where he then picked himself up and dusted himself off without much of a fuss. Journalists flocked to his location, hoping to catch him mumble something to himself just as Armageddon did, but instead he just silently walked back towards the pagoda to try again! Veteran still wanted to get 100% enhancement down pat and Ares, NOT GARMR, was a good way to do it! Plus that was a rather rude way for his friend to abruptly end the conversation! Armageddon left because he got his answer, Veteran was staying because he was still a bit bored. Lifting the curse on his magic had failed which meant he had no reason to really run around right now and so staying here a little longer was fine too...

Provided that damn wolf monstrosity didn't rear it's head again, that thing was way too much...

Veteran felt less awed in the presence of Gods and would rather stand before a committee of them than deal with that monster again. The regal ferocity oozing off of that thing was enough to make him want to go home and curl up into a ball wile feeling impossibly worthless. 'You cultivated for all these years and you still are this weak in comparison to me' is the sort of vibe Garmr gave off. It was disappointed condescension that was brutally honest and dismissive. It wasn't smug, it wasn't mean, it wasn't derisive, it was just sad you weren't enough to entertain it and that was probably the most hurtful attitude it could take. The sense of worthlessness Garmr passively imbued into everyone was not easy to deal with and that overbearing expectation of Garmr wanting you to be even remotely a challenge for it was suffocating. 'Why can't you destroy domains with the flick of a wrist? Why does a planet not look like a snack to you? Why could a single one of my arm hairs beat you in a fight? Why can I nibble a Gods' head off without even trying? Why. Are. You. So. Weak?' It was an impossible to answer question because, really, from anyone else's perspective the right question here was, why are you so abnormally strong?! It just didn't make any sense and likely never would.