Mars was by far the planet with the simplest World Dungeon. So simple in fact that Sam was able to clear most of it in under ten minutes. The System, as with the other World Dungeons, had taken heavy inspiration from the Greco-Roman myths. The world dungeon was simply a series of duels, where defeating one opponent brought a stronger foe up until Sam had to fight the god of war himself, Ares.
The overall theme of the dungeon was a series of arenas, each of which grew larger and more ornate in decoration. The current arena, the one ruled by the god of war, was by far the most impressive. A stadium larger than most cities stretched off in every direction, entirely made out of bronze and red marble. Even the sand beneath Sam’s feet was the crimson of blood, and the sky above was tinged a carmine hue. The sun, much smaller than Earth’s own, looked like a droplet of blood suspended in a beam of light, casting its ominous glow over everything beneath.
Ares stood before Sam, twin swords held in hands that dripped with blood. His skin was an ashen grey, lines of scar tissue covering almost every inch. A haze of red mist hung around him, pulsating rhythmically like the beating of a heart.
The warrior’s very presence warped the world, a domain of blood and fire surrounding him. He was twelve feet tall and clad in a Greek hoplite uniform, the simple armor still looking intimidating on his massive frame. His head was covered with a terrifying helmet, made in the image of a bloodthirsty demon leering out at the world.
The god was utterly silent as he beheld Sam, not even shifting around on his feet. He looked at Sam through the slits in his helmet, and without hesitation, attacked.
Sam slammed the butt of Worldbreaker into the ground, anchoring the weapon. Using one of his favorite tricks, he forced the hammer to grow, acting as a shield against what was to come.
Ares laughed, the first sound he had made in the fight. “Coward,” the false god rumbled. “A true warrior would never hide behind a shield.”
Sam sighed, but didn’t do anything in response. Only a fool would let the taunts of someone they were about to kill distract them. Instead, Sam simply planted his feet, bracing against the impact. When Ares hit home with his swords, Sam paled, feeling as if a meteor had just struck the tip of his hammer.
He started to pulse Dao energy throughout his body, setting up the pathways for his more powerful enhancement skills. Dao Juggernaut and I Am My Vengeance triggered at the same time, and Sam pushed back, sending Ares stumbling away. Worldbreaker shrunk and whipped around in a furious arc, slamming into the side of Ares’ knee. The false god dropped to one knee, snarling in rage. His swords hissed out, but Sam was already long gone.
Sam moved in from behind, moving through a portal to trick his foe. His hammer whistled towards the back of Ares’ head.
Ares still managed to respond, but he was too slow to do anything but dampen some of the force of Sam’s strike with the flat of a sword. He was in too awkward of a position to do much more.
Sam moved back once more, still wary of his enemy’s power. None of the final bosses of the dungeons had been easy to deal with, and Ares was unlikely to buck the trend.
As if on cue, the hulking man burst into bright orange flames, muscles bulging beneath it. He grew and grew, and his twin swords warped, transforming into shorter, oblong weapons patterned after the heads of dragons. Lava dripped from between their sharp, serrated teeth, burning into the ground below.
“You have impressed me,” Ares declared. “I have never needed to use this power before. Count yourself lucky to have seen it.”
Sam shook his head. “Guess what? I’ve been holding back too.”
Portals formed out of the ether, beams of Dao energy that could have torn apart entire cities converging through the network onto Ares. Ares let out a primal howl and slammed his swords together. A dome of flame and lava expanded from the impact point, smashing Sam’s attacks to the side with such ease that Sam suspected something else was at work here.
“You didn’t just block that through overwhelming force, did you?” Sam asked. “There’s no way something like that would have been so trivial to brush away.”
Ares laughed. “I am the god of war, boy. Do you think that I would take kindly to those who try to fight with magic? There is a place for them in any army, but it is a lesser one. Any such tactics that you try to use against me will be completely useless. Only a C Ranker could override that.”
As Ares gloated, he didn’t simply stop to boast. He kept moving, his legs blurring across the sand as he closed the gap between himself and Sam. His swords hissed as they sped through the air, superheating it with every swipe. The sound almost was like that of a snake, lending more credence to the illusion of life created by their design.
Sam himself came rushing in, moving through Ares’ blind spots with the aid of his portals. Or at least, he tried to. A D Ranker didn’t really have anything that could be considered a blind spot, because of their Authority. Sam could only hope that his presence would be lost within the conflagration of elemental power that coursed from Ares' entire body.
As the dome of lava fell, cooling rapidly, Ares burst out, his swords crossed in front of him. They snapped out like a steel trap, coming at Sam from both sides. Sam dropped to the ground, the swords whistling over him. Unlike how a mortal would fight, Ares had enough strength to make his swords do whatever they wanted. As they passed over Sam, Ares forced them straight down like a guillotine, aimed right at Sam’s neck.
Sam summoned a portal, but Ares crushed it with a flare of his Dao. Instead, Sam raised Worldbreaker above his head and blocked with the hilt. While the hammer was intended to be a weapon, it was so well crafted that it was nearly impervious to anything at its Tier. Sam didn’t plan for it to go the way of Terra’s Will anytime soon.
Ares’ other sword flicked out like the tongue of a snake, drawing blood along Sam’s undefended midsection. Sam was too far away from the false god to actually suffer much damage, but it was still a sobering reminder that his foe far outskilled him in terms of weapon mastery.
Sam pushed away the other sword, making some room. If he was to win this fight, he would need to grow as a warrior, and not just in power. He could not use his normal arsenal of abilities against Ares. While he was most certainly a close quarters fighter above all else, Sam’s unique opportunities and nearly peerless strength for his level allowed him to branch out. A good portion of his strength was on account of him being able to establish both ranged and melee supremacy on most battlefields.
As Ares came in for the kill, his swords moving in such complicated patterns that Sam didn’t even try to analyze them. Instead, he relied on instinct, his stats filling in the gaps that his skill could not. Thankfully, Ares was not so absurdly above Sam that his martial abilities overwhelmed anything that could be thrown against him. This World Dungeon had been designed by the System to test a civilization that had barely escaped the apocalypse a few months ago. There was no way for anyone to reach the higher rungs of weapon mastery, no matter how talented they were.
Sam recounted his battles with Gordanus during his training session in the Andromeda galaxy. Gordanus had seemed like a godlike figure, going so far as to counter Sam’s attacks without using anything more than a mortal level of power. His weapon mastery had been built up over centuries, and in a far more organic fashion than Ares. Sam suspected that this dungeon was a bit different from the others. It wasn’t made up of a society or ecosystem like the World Dungeons of Venus or Mercury. All that was here was an arena and enemies that Sam had to defeat.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
Wounds piled up on Sam’s body as he battled Ares, fighting back not through skill but through sheer determination. He was just as strong as Ares was physically, perhaps even a bit more so due to Dao Juggernaut. Unlike a battle at a mortal level where a single well placed blow could be fatal, skill at the higher Ranks was more about limiting damage taken while dishing out as much as you could. Just because you had a higher level of mastery written in on your stat sheet didn’t mean that it corresponded to automatic victory. While Ares’ ability to nullify Sam’s ranged abilities was annoying, it was far from fatal.
Sam snuck in blows of his own as the battle progressed, growing more and more adept at reading Ares’ movements. If anything, Ares seemed pleased with his growth. Sam almost felt like the false god was guiding his own strikes to more optimal places at times, as if Ares were playing the role of a mentor.
The clash of steel on steel became a constant background to the battle, fading out of Sam’s notice. Instead he focused on honing both himself and his hammer, finding ways to counter the much more skilled Ares with all of the tools at his disposal. It was a bloody and brutal lesson, every insight coming at the price of pain.
After the first minute passed, Sam’s weapon mastery ticked up by a single point. Suddenly, everything seemed just a little more manageable, his strikes more polished and his evasions more precise.
“Good,” Ares said, his leering helmet looking like a rictus grin. “You can at least somewhat keep up. How about we up this game? I will no longer hold back.”
Sam frowned, just as he parried an incoming strike. He never saw the next one coming. One moment he was swinging his hammer back towards Ares, the next he was tumbling through the air, a hole in the side of his abdomen the size of a human head.
“Too slow,” Ares whispered in Sam’s ear, revealing that he had not only followed Sam, but had moved too fast for him to perceive.
Sam tried to teleport, but Ares’ hand reached through the portal just before it closed, and pulled him back through. Sam took a devastating blow to the side of his head, tearing off a good portion of his face in the process.
Ares let Sam drop to the ground, hovering over him like the god that he was named for. The scars on his body had lit up with a crimson light, tracing out designs that Sam had previously missed. Entire wars were laid out in loving detail with scars so small that a mortal couldn’t have even seen them. Millions of soldiers clashing under unfamiliar skies in battles and places Sam couldn’t recognize. In the center of it all, right in the middle of Ares’ chest was the warrior himself, far larger than any of the other designs.
That scar network was by far the brightest, nearly outshining the others.
“Every scar tells a story,” Ares declared. “At least, that is what many warriors believe. In that case, what do mine tell? Not just a single story but an entire mythos. The mythos of War itself. How can you defeat me? A living incarnation of battle itself?”
“You aren’t a god,” Sam spat through broken teeth. “You’re just a man that the System juiced up to defeat me. All that stuff about the mythos of war is just your arrogant delusions. How could a D Ranker think himself to be something divine?”
“A true god has no need of a mortal’s adulation,” Ares proclaimed smugly. “It matters not to me whether you think me to be a god. I am one regardless.”
“Gods still die,” Sam replied. “Eventually, their day will come. For you that day is today.”
Sam rose to his feet, shaking slightly. While his various buffs ensured that he was in peak physical condition, he still was actively regenerating his flesh as he spoke. The peak condition brought on by the buff was only ever relative to his own state.
“What are you going to do now?” Ares asked. “You have no hope of defeating me.”
“You think you sealed off most of my power by depriving me of ranged attacks, didn’t you?” Sam asked. “I can still channel all of those through my hammer. All I was trying to do earlier was stall. I’m ready to fight now.”
“Bold words from a man about to die,” Ares said. “Come on then. Finish your saga by trying to do the impossible. It will make for a good story.”
Sam took a deep breath. “You think you are a god, but there is something that even gods are not above.”
“Oh? And what is that?”
Sam grinned as his Dao surged to life, spectral armor covering his entire body. Plates of dark metal locked into place around him, growing until he towered over even Ares. “Karma.”
Descent of the Heavenly Judge, Sam’s most powerful attack skill, filled every last inch of Worldbreaker with its power. The weapon was no longer just a hammer. For a few moments it was a conceptual manifestation of Karmic Retribution. It didn’t matter what tried to stop it. Karma could not be avoided. Not by man or god.
Sam used all of his available speed, his skill branches triggered as he did so. Relativity Engine boosted his velocity while Reality Tinkerer let him use his Authority to do the same. Ares was still a lot faster in his current state, but that didn’t matter.
A tidal wave of karmic energy washed Sam across the sands towards Ares, following an unerring path to the false god’s torso. Ares raised his swords to the sky, letting out a primal cry as he did so. The sun above exploded, the supernova sending a wave of brilliance across the dungeon. Ares’ swords filled with solar flame, turning them into living breathing metal dragons that snapped and hissed at Sam.
“Damn, that seems like overkill,” Sam remarked as the glorious display of flame tore across the sky. “All that to make your swords go on fire? What a waste.”
In reality, he was quite impressed by the theatrics, but didn’t want to inflate Ares’ ego any more than it already was.
“These swords are no longer simple armaments of metal,” Ares explained. “They are now imbued with the very power of the sun itself. As such, they deserve names.”
A strange pressure bore down on Sam for a few instants, slowing him down just enough for Ares to say a few more words.
Ares raised his right sword, and held it where the sun had been a moment before. “I name you Helios.” The blade let off a wave of heat so intense that every grain of sand in the arena not only melted, but evaporated entirely. Still, Ares wasn’t finished yet. “And you,” he said, raising his left hand to cross the blades together. “Shall be Apollo.”
Something lay beneath Ares’ words, a hidden power that had emerged when he named his swords. It was something Sam had never seen before, but would likely see again. It was as if Ares had given actual life to the swords through a perfect confluence of Dao, elemental energy and conceptual power, and the names served to finish the process.
Ares slashed his blades downwards and the world parted before them, the singed edges of reality bleeding into an infinite abyss of darkness. Then the pressure keeping Sam back stopped, only for Ares to intone a final few words. “I call upon the mantle of War itself to lend me strength! Sunset on the Final Battle!”
Every drop of light in the world collapsed in towards the center, rushing into Ares’ twin swords. Sam couldn’t even see himself, only the hulking god and his blades. Just the light from those swords would have killed an F Ranker. They were so bright that Sam actually had to look away from them, something he had never had to do since reaching E Rank.
Ares brought Helios and Apollo together and slashed. That single slash held every iota of energy that this broken world had once contained. Sam struck at the same moment, Worldbreaker slamming into Ares’ swords. For a moment the force was evenly matched, then the dungeon came apart at the seams, the arena washed away in a sea of flame.
Had Ares truly been channeling the power of an actual star, Sam would have died then and there. However, that was not the case. The dungeon was just an elaborate facade, constructed to tell a story. That sun was no more a real celestial body than a cutout on a movie set. It had been created to allow Ares to showboat a bit, but the power he had been able to draw from it was still relative to his level.
Sam baked under the intense heat, his body barely holding together. Flesh blackened and flaked off before his regeneration could repair it, and the constant, looming force of Ares’s actual strike threatened to force Worldbreaker out of the way and cut Sam in two.
The longer the struggle took, the stronger Sam got. The continual damage empowered his Dao, sending a greater and greater amount of potency into his hammer. Slowly but surely, he started to push Ares back, the flaming swords moving inexorably towards the false god’s head.
Ares growled and bore down with all his might, managing to stop Sam for a moment. Then Sam’s strength continued to build, and he kept going. What felt like minutes passed, Sam further developing his edge.
When the end of the battle came, it was quite unexpected. Ares’ arms suddenly buckled, and as his defense faltered, Worldbreaker finally hit home. With so much Dao energy imbued into it, the weapon erased Ares’s flesh as it struck. His head vanished, and the rest of his body soon followed, only the detonation of his Dao Core ending Worldbreaker’s path.
Sam leveled up as the dungeon collapsed, still wreathed in essence as he appeared back on Mars. Only Jupiter remained now. It was a race to see whether he or Jacob got to it first.
