"Hey look, they're waving at us so politely!" Ares joked as he nodded at the stepper hands outside the Elliot. Sandy rolled her eyes under her clothes in response and just shook her head while opening the door and taking a step outside. Ares followed and his first order of business was to go and say hi to the hands to see what they were like. If Ares didn't attack them, would they maybe leave him alone and just see where he was going? What was their reach like? Was there anything more to them underneath the sand? Would they do anything other than swipe? There were a lot of questions Ares wanted answers to and he found out pretty quickly that the hands were combative and relatively dull. They were like mini sentries that located a target and scratched at it whenever said target walked into their range which was sort of average. If Ares ever got too far away from a hand it would sink under the sand and appear again somewhere nearby. So as long as Ares was near the brood mother these hands would remain a constant nuisance and keep a watchful eye on his every move. It might not seem like a big deal now but when dodging the brood mother's poison flinging outbursts they would showcase their true obnoxiousness. They weren't good for attacking but they were excellent at holding ground and denying space. Space was exactly the kind of thing you'd want against an opponent that covered a lot of it so, in that way, these hands would be a perfect tool for the brood mother.
As for just ignoring the stepper hands, that was somewhat feasible for Ares and approximately nobody else. He actually let one give him a little touch and feel with a nail and, though his skin turned purple in the affected area almost immediately, it shortly returned to its usual complexion without much hassle. Of course this was just a small scratch, and larger ones would be more problematic, but as long as Ares didn't get hit like five or six times rapidly in a row in key locations he would be pretty safe from meeting a toxic end. If he needed to make a mad dash away from the brood mother for whatever reason he could at least partially ignore his surroundings and not come out too worse for wear by carelessly flinging himself towards the surrounding hands. Sandy, however, was definitely vulnerable to this poison and would have to watch out. Her protective gear could maybe resist a few slashes but, once it was gone, she would then be walking a tightrope and have to pay extra attention to the surrounding hands with every move she made. Ares did have some general use antidote pills cooked up by Allie but there were only so effective and could only do so much.
As an aside, Allie could make a Mini Pillie out of general use antidotes. It was a purple pill with a small white lab coat that carried around a small clipboard, diagnosing patients and pushing herbal ingredients into itself to become the perfect countermeasure to whatever ailed the victim. Mini Pillie Checkup was his name but, unfortunately, Allie's Mini Pillies weren't strong enough to last forever if they weren't near her or constantly supplied with mana. Ares figured that he wouldn't need it since he was mostly immune to poisons anyway, and anything he wasn't immune to wouldn't be solvable by Checkup in time regardless, so he didn't carry it with him as it would just be something he needed to keep charged for no real reason. Maybe it could have been helpful here if he borrowed it to Sandy but that hindsight and not particularly helpful right now so he just handed her the general use antidote pills for now instead. If she was poisoned this would at least delay the issue and give them both time to come up with a solution. Namely, if push came to shove, Ares could finesse disintegration through his own, or Sandy's body to cleanse it. Ares had his Converter in addition to his regeneration, though, so he was primarily concerned about Sandy's safety above his own. He reminded her not to worry about him and treat him like a shield if ever the need arose to which she thankfully nodded in agreement without kicking up a fuss. If this had been Enyo then Ares would have had to argue for an hour straight to convince her.
Ares and Sandy walked through the ruins, taking a somewhat convoluted path through half-destroyed buildings and climbing rotten, gnarled stairs. This wasn't a decision they had much of a choice in because the brood mother stepper had a habit of hiding on the interconnected rooftops, or whatever was left of them, and the best way to get up there was to go through a small maze of hole-ridden hallways and tight staircases. You could technically fly up there if a transition realm cultivator knew how to but apparently the brood mother liked to ambush people who flew too close to the sun so walking through the buildings and emerging on the rooftops later was actually safer. Plus, and this was the real kicker, the brood mother could summon poisonous rain for one of its arts and the higher up in the sky you were the closer you would be to the origin of the magic. Running away from it, if you carelessly hogged the sky, became near impossible so it was better to stay at least somewhat low to the ground where there were various obstacles to block out the rain from above if need be. Also also, Ares wanted to get a feel for the lay of the land. He was strong enough to maybe just Voidwalk around as he pleased without fretting over an ambush but he had his own reasoning for checking out these long corridors and branching paths. He had a feeling he was going to need to duck and dive into these buildings quite often during his fight and that was reason enough to familiarise himself with the area.
It seemed like some of the buildings had collapsed directly on top of each other, turning their once reasonable layouts into a mishap of shapes and pathways that were entirely unnatural for a regular abode. Stairways going up which led through a doorway to a staircase leading right back down and some routes through junctions which spiralled back around to the starting point if followed for long enough. These ruins were a convoluted mess. To make matters worse, there were plenty of hands hanging around inside these bizarre, mind bending buildings. It turned out the sand was but one of many ways they could appear out of nowhere as they were also capable of splintering wooden floorboards and appearing form the murky black abyss below or creeping through gaps in the walls like intrusive ivy. Taking a turn without looking into the next room along ahead of time was a surefire way to get swiped and poisoned so Ares activated both Omniscience and divine sense simultaneously to scan every single corner and nook and cranny for hiding hands waiting in ambush to lash out at unsuspecting victims, The worst of it all was any long, extended, narrow hallway as there would always be about ten or fifteen hands popping into the path from various directions and clogging everything up.
Dangling from the roof above,
peeking out of dilapidated couches,
or bursting out of desks and cupboards.
They weren't the scariest thing ever but could be quite a shock to the system if Ares happened to miss one during his scans and they leapt out at him. Ares eventually managed to spy a path leading sufficiently upwards and back out into fresh air so he relished the night sky above and thanked his luck for finding a way out sooner rather than later. He was getting sick and tired of being poisoned over and over again by stray hands as, sure, it wasn't life threatening but that's not to say the poison didn't hurt for the few seconds it was allowed to run rampant in his body. If a single drop of poison fell onto the carpet beneath Ares' feet it would dill straight through and work its way through multiple floors before finally melting a hole in the dessert too. It was not a gentle or slow-acting poison by any means and that just made Ares even more worried about how potent the brood mother's poison would be when he came face to face with it. At least, if nothing else, the brood mother wasn't invisible!... But that might honestly not even be the best outcome.
Ares would probably rather have the brood other be the size of a regular stepper, or even the same size as the evolved psychopath, in exchange for being invisible. According to Sandy, the brood mother was the size of a mansionand the poison that something that big spewed was going to be near impossible to dodge depending on how much it could let out proportionate to its size. Between that or an invisible but smaller stepper... Ares definitely knew which he'd prefer! Forget sidestepping a jet of poison magic, such a thing would probably be big enough to drench an entire city gate thrice over! Ares had a feeling he was going to have use Not Even Light a fair few times this fight as that really was one of his better options for dealing with wide spread magic like this.
The one solace here, though, was that the brood mother wasn't the fastest thing ever. Again, it didn't have as many limbs as its spawn, Sandy counted roughly fifteen to twenty the last time she ran into it, so it couldn't dash around or crawl quickly like the psychopath did. It could leap, and that gave Ares conniptions internally because these damnable things still looked like spiders no matter how much he tried to pretend otherwise, but it would be slow and sluggish at least and Ares could Shift away with time to spare. In summary, according to what he'd heard from Sandy, the brood mother was a big, clunky, immobile monster that had devastating range and was very good at hitting things all around it. 'Omnidirectional, wide range, poison spewing heavy tank' was the short and simple explanation... It was kind of like a worse Ares, actually. Ares' destruction was the de-facto leader of all wide area arts but Ares was small, quick, and nimble so he had advantages the brood mother definitely did not possess.
This environment actually somewhat suited Ares too thanks to his quick footed nature. Being in a completely open environment might have given him more space to move freely but there would be no cover to dart behind in such a hypothetical situation. Sure the poison could probably ooze and melt through the walls of this ruin but walls were still walls at the end of the day and would slow down the arts even if only a little. The real hassle here was the hands as hasty retreats would wind up getting Ares scratched a lot by the hidden pests but that was the trade-off he had to make. Dashing through broken windows and scurrying around in the whacky buildings to encircle the brood mother and doge its poisons was going to be the plan but those hands were really not fun... Plus they alerted the brood mother to Ares' presence so he was either going to have to fool the hands by hiding, or taking weird routes, or be too quick for them seeing him to even matter. Either way, whatever happened, Ares had his work cut out for him! He was prepared, though, so he placed his hand on a dusty railing and climbed up onto the rooftops to look around for his target as Sandy followed along behind him.
... The brood mother wasn't exactly hard to spot now that Ares was on the same elevation as it. Sandy hadn't been kidding about its size in the slightest as the damn thing was well and truly huge... Disgustingly so... It had come out to greet its guests and the first thing Ares noticed was its giant eye, crystal clear like a second moon hovering in the night sky, that possessed a degree of sentience, awareness, and intelligence that outclassed every other monster Ares had slain in this country so far. This eye was bigger than the Roving Elliot, bigger by about three times the size, and it was far cleaner than any off its offspring's. A pure white, flat circle with a black line neatly dividing it in half. As soon as Ares appeared, the thin black line rotated until it was perfectly horizontal and then split open a tiny bit, allowing a handful of stepper limbs to reach out from within and turn to face Ares. One by one the limbs were stuck together messily before the full entity, a newborn stepper, was spat out onto the floor. The newborn stepper, laying still and curled up on the floor as a bundle of limbs surrounding an enclosed eye, flickered in and out of reality as its permanent invisibility began to manifest. Eventually it disappeared from view fully and all that was left was a roundish imprint on the sand where it had been dropped and birthed... So that was the function of their eyes? Perhaps if any of these steppers lived long enough they would grow to the size of this brood mother and then they would be able to do the same... Ares thought back to his conversation with the information broker who mentioned that the taste of those eyes was particularly foul, akin to mouldy jelly, and it sort of made sense now why... It was their reproductive organ! Ew...
If all steppers had this eye then logically all steppers had the ability to become a brood mother after sufficient time had passed... It must have required many thousands of years to reach that stage, otherwise there would be a lot more brood mothers, but it was somewhat concerning. All it would take was for a single invisible stepper to wander around aimlessly and never get caught and, in however many years, it would become an invisible brood mother... Ares had complained about the size of this monster, and how he would prefer it to be smaller with invisibility, but what about both at the same time? What about a giant, invisible, poison spewing brood mother? What about multiple? There were abundant steppers in this desert and each of them had the potential to become an improved version of this thing creeping over the rooftops before Ares? That was a serious problem, actually, and Ares decided to come back to Xasca in a few years, after becoming more powerful, so that he could wipe out their entire population. If left unchecked they would slowly devour the entire country and, eventually, Sheryashka as a whole.
This was arguably a far bigger deal than anything else Ares had seen, be it the torchbearer plot or the psychopath stepper, but there was no feasible way of wiping out the entire stepper population right now. He would need to become a planet destroying entity whose divine sense could scan entire continents before he could realistically resolve this issue without wasting multiple years doing so. It wasn't so bad when Sevorus himself were still here, as he must have seen Xasca as a controllable farm of sorts for his experiments, but now that he fucked off without a care in the world it had become a domain destroying inevitability... That idiot was so invested in his experiments he didn't understand the scale of the disaster he left behind because to him it was nothing... He and his master were truly insufferable! Thankfully the process of maturation for a stepper was seemingly a long one, and even one or two more brood mothers in the short term wouldn't be too damming, but Ares made a note to come back to this domain in the long future and fix things up. He would have returned anyway, just to see how this place was doing after it integrated with the world outside the barrier, and to see who picked up the Black Ice Bane from the mini whirlpool hazard he left behind during his Federation trip, but now he had a real reason to have to return no matter what.
Also... This gave Ares an idea. While the brood mother was slowly standing up, and revealing the enormity of its limbs hidden in the ruins to Ares, he was coming up with a rather radical idea... Or, to be more accurate, he was thinking of roughly copying somebody else's radical idea but with a different end goal. If Sevorus could treat this brood mother like a farm animal... Then so too could Ares! He'd been pretty despondent the last couple of days because he was aware he would have to give up on stepper limbs! He only would take with him, from this country, a finite amount but.. If he could capture this brood mother... Jebben was an enslaved farmer for his crimes so maybe Ares could somehow rear steppers on Jebben's planet and turn him into a stepper wrangler? Forcing the brood mother to give birth to steppers only to murder them was a bit cruel for Ares' tastes but if it was just limb harvesting, and the steppers were allowed to from freely, then Ares could turn one of his planets into a stepper world that became a source for ingredients... The steppers didn't really get hurt when their limbs were severed and removed, if at all, plus they could endlessly regenerate them if given the time and space to do so...
Ares was considering becoming a stepper limb connoisseur and doing something that would be seen as mad to most other chefs. He was actually really interested in the unique flavour of stepper limbs so he was trying to work out how best to capture this brood mother! It was ugly as sin, Ares despised it and was particularly bothered every time he laid on these horrid creatures, but that didn't mean he didn't see a massive profit and chance for greatness before him! Also he just wanted to keep eating stepper limbs, him and Sandy, and this was a great way of procuring a never-ending source... All Ares had to do was take the fire Federation tanks out of the puny prisoners, now that they were lifeless thanks to their batteries running dry, and then slap this defeated brood mother inside one and he'd be good to go. He would have to try and communicate with this thing, and make it understand its role in life going forward, but he would treat it well, actually! It could become the ruler of an entire planet dedicated to its kind, maybe even a domain one day, doing whatever it desired so long as it offered up a few meaningless limbs every now and then! It might even develop Stockholm Limbdrome! It was either that, oddly convenient slavery, or soul-evaporating death so the obvious choice was clear as day. Further more this brood mother really did seem highly intelligent, enough to understand the position it would be in after Ares kicked it around a bit so... This ought to be good, actually!... Maybe not for Jebben though, his farm planet was about to be infested with spider aliens... Ah well, punishment wasn't supposed to be enjoyable... Who knows, he might even form a good relationship with them as fellow inmates in Ares' worldly prison? Whatever, it wasn't Ares' problem. He'd make sure Jebben wasn't murdered, at least, but the rest was up to him and his survival skills. It was about time he became useful to Ares in one way or another as his effort sup until now only really benefitted himself. What was the point of an inmate if Ares didn't get any free inmate labour? He worked his own brother to bone, why should Jebben get a free pass?!
Ares decided he would try to reason with the brood mother first but, if it didn't go well, he was more than prepared to use force. He was getting his wish one way or another and this brood mother was going to have to offer up its babies to the madman Ares to devour!... Maybe Ares was the bad guy here...