There was definitely something bubbling away under the surface within Ares. It wasn't a new power but instead an adaptation to the war aura he currently possessed. Perhaps it had finally adjusted to its new host and was raring to go. Ares figured if he unleashed it now he was about to make one hell of a scene. Though the war aura restrained itself it's not like the full power of it couldn't pop up here and there whenever it was in the mood to. The first time Ares brought it forth he went above and beyond even what he was capable of using at max output now so there was a depth to the aura he couldn't access on demand. His limit, under the right circumstances, was three flags and little else. That day he fought the psycho stepper, however, things had been drastically different. Auras had a degree of intent, a kind of intelligence and will to them, and that was at least partially responsible for the occasionally erratic behaviour of them. Right now, now that the war aura had accustomed itself to Ares, it seemed to want to go all out a bit. Ares didn't really mind this, he wouldn't receive a backlash if the aura itself was going overboard, but it did feel somewhat wasteful. Bringing forth such immense power to take on these core disciples even though he could do it himself... What was it if not overkill to the extreme? Alas, it's not like he had control over when and where his aura flared up. It's initial foray into this world after being dormant and now that it was intertwining itself with its new host; these seemed like rare catalysts that naturally wouldn't be repeated in the future. Using up these one-per opportunities wastefully was really truly a shame but there was nothing to be done about it. Rather than fret over not being able to command the power in full yet, as Ares would have liked to save this kind of firepower fort he Torchbearer if possible, he chose to just have fun with it instead. Wielding this power was a high quite unlike anything else he experienced, it was a sensation of pure domination and subjugation at his fingertips, so he should focus on the bliss of the moment rather than the lack of need for it. If nothing else, he was excited to see what would become of the scarecrows. They were handy but hardly fitting, Ares wasn't a farmer!... Though he did use a scythe... Still, there were definitely more symbolic totemic possibilities for the aura to carve people into. Ares had a good idea of what it would be, there was an obvious answer, but he was curious to check anyway.
Snap
With a click of his fingers, Ares dissolved the Not Even Light and dropped all the remaining annihilation feathers. In there place, a wave of undulating red aura, hypnotic and manic, spread through the training area. It was so potent it even managed to seep out of the Training Field and curl up snugly in the ears of spectators who were taken aback by the sudden malefic chanting in their brains. War drums, the echoing of thousand of soldiers raising their voices in unison, the clattering of steel and whistling of arrows, the hum of violent, brutal magic, and a buried orchestra of other heavy instrumentation set the tone and drowned all in a wave of incitement. Move, fight, kill. An innate instinct, massaged and forced to flare to life within the souls of anyone with a functioning pulse and warm blood flowing through their veins. Wouldn't it be satisfying to bury an axe in the head of a nearby disciple? Soft whispers encouraged deathly deeds and the disciples became restless, billowing with energy and the desire to flex muscles in combative fashion. They weren't even the target of the war aura but it had planted the seed of intense ferocity and was pushing them to leap into action with no regards for the consequences. Fearless, the war aura could numb negative or unwilling emotions in bystanders and allies alike making in a scary tool for boosting morale at the cost of self-control. Fortunately, though Ares wasn't the one who directed the aura towards them in the first place, he still had sufficient control over the aura and could retract it immediately before things got chaotic. They were weak but the people affected were still cultivators at the end of the day and could resist implanted impulses for at least a little while. If Ares wanted to make them go berserk, turning them into slaves of carnage, he had the power to do it by directing all his thoughts at them but that wasn't the current goal.
The hymnal entourage, the ethereal and unseen choir of barbarism behind his every action, was directed at Ares' foes instead as the world turned into a deep red, void-like hell. buildings and the horizon were all blotted out by a red dome curtain that feel over the area like a battle cage as the craze inducing aura spread like a sickening plague. Those who were the targets of this battle revelry were almost driven to bloodthirsty madness as the chanting in their head was akin to the rage of a thousand warriors. It was as though they were transported into the middle of a warzone, unable to retreat lest those at their back behead them for cowardice but also unable to move forward lest the demonic entity ahead of them do the same. If the fear of this impasse kept them occupied there was a third force, the aura itself, ready to punish them. Before the show even got underway, a few of the more intuitive core disciples, those who could sense danger a mile away, tried to flee. So what if they 'felt' like there was a threat at their back? In reality there were no mutinous allies ready to punish them for going AWOL, it was just empty space and an unnatural sense of foreboding. Those that didn't opt to run were about to regret their own hesitancy until they caught sight of thousands of flags hovering in the sky above. They were unquestionably not there a second ago but the intensity of their disgust resonated with the frequency of the invisible force that prevented retreat. They were the arbiters of the battlefield, punishing those who retreated in fear. Not even a tactical retreat, no goal in mind, no plans for future revenge, just a desire to abandon the battlefield and hide meant those core disciples had become valid targets for the flag's fervor. A thousand flags for a mere handful of disciples was blatantly unnecessary but it didn't stop them from setting an example and raining down on the retreating figures with merciless fury. The descent of the flags was sudden, brutal, and efficient and within the blink of an eye all cowards had been subdued under a barrage of patriotic, resplendent pride. The corpses were mounds, turned into symbols of victory and the power of unrelenting thirst for combat as flags adorned the heap of flesh making it clear there was no escape for those who sought it. The dead disciples mostly didn't even have time to refute this unfairness but even those who had scrambled to raise a weapon, shield, or magic were impaled without exception. They were torn through liked scraps of paper and ripped to shreds.
Seeing what even a single flag could do, knowing there were thousands more at Ares' beck and call, took all the willpower from a large chunk of the remaining disciples. They instinctively knew only death awaited them if they didn't get their act together but what was even the point? If death was an inevitability either way then at least not dying at the hands of those unthinking, unfeeling, purpose-driven murder machine flags was preferable. Who cares what kind of other death awaited them? Surely it couldn't be worse than a hail of spears cracking your skull, burying into every organ, piercing every ounce of flesh and turning them into human pincushions? This was just a poorly thought out battle and a mere simulation at that. The Field meant death wasn't real so why fight for a gruesome end when they could just accept a peaceful one instead? Picking a fight with Ares was evidently a mistake but one they could still walk away from relatively unharmed if they just gave up, quaked in their boots, and waited for a swift end... Or so they thought. Those who felt fear and ran were impaled but those who felt fear and couldn't bring themselves to move had, up until now, been turned into rigid, broken scarecrows. Their bodies would contort and crack, killing the cultivator in a rough manner before weaponizing their entire existence. It wasn't pleasant but that wasn't quite the experience in store for them anymore. Something different was going to take place and it was equally unpleasant.
Pop
One disciple, frozen in fear like many other, was the first to suffer. His back suddenly exploded and a fountain of gold burst forth from the hole in his hunched form and hung in the air, defying gravity. His face, etched with agony, froze over and began turning gold at a rapid rate. Other parts of his body also erupted but the golden waves that sprung forth all clung to the air like motionless flames basking in the misery of the person they broke free from. Eventually the battered cultivator, with body parts blow apart galore, was turned into a solid gold statue with a grotesque form. They were partially tripped, falling over with one leg holding their body steady in mid-air. What really stood out, though, where the numerous spots on their body that had been torn open and were spewing golden, solidified flames. They looked fearful even petrified, as though they were trying to flee from a golden parasite within their own body. There was no escape, however, and so the chaotic form of an exploding human was solidified and enshrined within golden brilliance. Honestly, the human side of this carved statue was barely even visible beyond the six or seven ruptures. It looked more like a swarm of golden spikes emanating from an obscured core, sharp to the touch and laden with a destructive energy. Was the human beneath it all dead or not? That probably depended. Some would die immediately but others, who could resist the creeping claw of death after having their internals blown up as though they came into contact with a landmine, would suffer a prolonged death. The feeling of having several body parts explode would constantly torment them in perpetuity until the light within their eyes eventually faded. They were trapped within an homage to Ares' brilliance, made to embrace the agony brought about by their own defiance, and paraded around in the final moments of life like spectacles. This disciple was merely the first and, soon, a whole slew of other disciples were exploding all over the training area and becoming statues of despair. A majority were stricken with grief, their faces contorted into ones of pure distress and anguish that would haunt all who came across them, but there were some who experienced a bizarre sense of rapture. There was an ominous beauty to these statues, the frailty of life snatched by the glorious golden tide like a reverse cocoon. Instead of breaking free and evolving they were being wrapped up in a unbreakable casing and regressing to the point of non-existence. Some of the statues had an artistic quality to them. Those that kneeled and prayed to the skies above, with ravaging golden flames frozen halfway out of their backs, was like a scene of repentance straight out of rapture.
Ares wasn't surprised. Golden statues... What else was it going to be, realistically? He was shocked to see people exploding while still alive, and acknowledged it must have hurt to spontaneously burst like that, but the end result was within expectations. It functioned the same as the scarecrow power and effectively instantly killed those without the desire to fight back or survive. There was s slight change, though, in that Ares could feel a welling energy in the statues that was superior to the scarecrows. That was only natural, the amount of annihilation energy flowing through a pure gold statue was inevitably going to be higher. The result of this change was pretty easy to guess. If Ares blew up these statues the resulting explosion... It wouldn't exactly be small scale, that was for certain. Ares could probably wipe out this entire training area and then some with the click of a finger. It wasn't just that they were individually deadly, that was an understatement as they packed power only slightly inferior to a Grand Annihilation, it was that they'd set off a chain of energy that was hard to contain. Annihilation energy, even when rampant, did its best to avoid itself and not collide. If this much energy ran rampant in a space like this it would spread far and wide and expand beyond the scope of what this much energy should normally encompass. The more annihilation there was the more problematic it became, yes, but it also mattered that a lot of it was from different sources. A single Grand Annihilation was equivalent, in terms of raw energy, to about ten or eleven Shock Beads. That being said, the Shock Beads would cover a wider area even if each individual blast did less damage. Either the energy was condensed into a single blast and hit harder, like with Grand Annihilation, or it spread further and did less damage like the Beads. Ares was thinking about combining annihilation with annihilation, he'd thought about it during Isaz, but decided that was a rabbit hole not worth exploring yet as it was a pretty intricate and complex process. It's not like he still couldn't muster immense power and range without it, Armillary was proof enough he wasn't in a position yet he had to expand his knowledge, but it was incredibly tempting to know he could be making even more dangerous explosions than even that...
So what to do? The statues, numbering around sixty, were sort of awkward. Ares wasn' going to detonate them, he might destroy the Training Field runes and actually murder them with no way of bringing them back. Leaving them as is, though, was troublesome because of the space they took up. Worse still, the longer he left them there, the more people became susceptible to fear and followed in their footsteps. At this rate Ares would kill off everyone via his aura alone. That was fine and all but the war aura hadn't even really done anything yet and it was still looking to cause more mayhem... Ares closed his eyes and concentrated, putting the melody of war and rhythm of death to the back of his mind, and connected himself to the statues. He could detonate them carelessly but what he was trying to do now was a gentler release, something less showy. This could go horribly wrong if he was messed up so he prevented the worst case scenario by experimenting with a single statue first. He blew it up and... Failed. The explosion was massive and shook the earth, even making some people fall over from the rumbling. By trying to contain the explosion he just supercharged it and made the release that much more deadly. If he'd blown up multiple statues, and made this same mistake, everyone in this area would have died then and there. It was a good thing he held back so everyone was still safe and he thankfully didn't murder any of his core disciples. Ares tried again but took the opposite approach this time letting the energy out unrestrainedly while making sure to direct the energy to be as sparse as possible. By flowing the energy out in multiple directions the explosion did shrink considerably but it was still bigger than a Bead explosion and that really wasn't what Ares was aiming for...
Meanwhile... "What cruelty is this?!" Jaffa couldn't believe his eyes! immense power aside, Ares was like an evil demon purging the statues one by one! From any perspective other than Ares' he was currently acting like a demented freak and torturing the disciples without reason! The other disciples around him were those that hadn't succumbed to fear so, rather, they only felt angered seeing this and redoubled their convictions. This man could never be their sect master! there were only about twenty or so cultivators left but if they didn't take a stand who would? Aside from Jaffa, who was still channeling his mana into a black talisman with oozing green runes on it, the remaining disciples all stood up and marched towards a pondering and distracted Ares with the intent to at least end the misery of their comrades. Those who were trapped in the statues weren't being given the relief of respawning outside the Training Field because they weren't dead yet! Even trying to free them resulted in the statue exploding in their face so either killing Ares or everyone dying to him were the only ways to get them out!... That or letting Ares figure out how to peacefully detonate the statues but it's not like anyone knew what he was up to. With the war aura still surging around his form, the myriad devilish flags reverberating in glee at the death and destruction below them, and the murky red dome surrounding everyone, he didn't exactly look like someone who could be talked to. Plus he was still individually blowing up the statues like a cat scratching a half dead mouse so nobody wanted to try and talk to him anyway!
Ares was getting fed up! Work damnit! Alas, no matter how hard he tried, there was seemingly only one way of having these statues do as he commanded... He'd been hesitant to use his Backfire Bindings but they were the obviously correct solution. Ares could shape annihilation freely with them but he was getting real sick and tired of being unable to do it without them. This was something he was seriously going to have to figure out at some point! He might not even be able to reach the transition realm until he did as this might pose a wall / mental obstacle he had to overcome what with how much it was bothering him. It was fine if the Bindings helped speed up the shaping process but, right now, they were basically mandatory for it and Ares was not happy. Sure enough, the first attempt at controlling a statue explosion using the Bindings worked flawlessly. The statue was like a mini firework, or perhaps more like someone waded into a bed of golden flowers with a leaf blower and created a stunning scene of tranquility, and the beauty of it gave even the angry disciples pause as they stared at it until the golden dust faded. It really was quire the sight...
But Ares wasn't satisfied! Not one damn bit! He kissed his teeth and begrudgingly detonated the other statues harmlessly as well, creating a sea of shiny sparks and sweet release, the sighs of the damned trapped within the golden casing could be heard on the shifting winds as they melded into the chorus of the war aura's surging might. It was really starting to ramp up now and the slain and fallen joining its ranks to bolster its passionate chant gave rise to an unpleasant feeling in the guts of the disciples approaching Ares. They had a feeling things were about to get really troublesome, more so than they already were, and they were correct. The war aura's flags were one thing, the statues of fear and golden reverence were another, but that wasn't all there was to this aura otherwise it wouldn't be a one of a kind and legendary ability. There was still a lot more to uncover but, in terms of what Ares knew about at least, there were the loyal, obedient soldier incarnates. The giant red void soldiers that caught lightning from the very sky and wielded it as a catastrophic spear of ruinous oblivion. Ares could tell they were about to make one hell of an entrance, even more so compared to last time. This was his aura now, after all. The previous owner was special but in comparison to Ares? A fundamental champion receiving an aura of this calibre was going to result in a power magnitude the likes of which were unthinkable. Even Ares himself felt a level of might within him that was a 'bit much'. He'd never handled anything quite like it so this was going to be a first and he was really genuinely wondering what on earth he could possibly ever need this much strength for! And this was coming from Ares, of all people...