A red and black blur shot through the battlefield from a perch point, throwing a flexible wind-up kick with a bouncing spring leg that sent an Exterminator dressed in the standard plain Exterminator uniform with a jagged and spiky skin of wooden texture and curly brush of pale white leaves decorating the top of its wooden head skidding aside. The wood-faced Exterminator looked up with eyes that were made of coiled metal springs and raised two flat and wide wooden board arms that served like a sort of shield, though Priskom was no longer there.
Reinvigorated by the aid of his leader, Drasko grumbled and sent a mad storm of sharp scrap pelting and carving the Exterminator up alongside his uniform. Priskom blitzed across the battlefield, appearing above a troublesome battlefield where a blue-skinned Salvari warrior wearing five additional pairs of golden hands flung a myriad of spears coated with Lightning Release chakra at Mana who raced across the battlefield evading the ruination of the body she was trapped in.
Positioning himself above the Salvari, Priskom made his spring arms retreat into the shoulder piece of his toy-like body before shooting out. The thrusting fists socked the Salvari warrior in the back of the head with a cracking thud. Despite it, all this help had wrought was a tip of the Salvari's chin and a disgruntled turn to the airborne leader of the Chaos Factor. Another boisterous crack signaled the follow-up crack as Priskom's wind-up arm redirected after bouncing off and began creating a round network of coiling smashes that irked the Salvari with limited success. Priskom grit his teeth and secured a tight lock of his coiled limbs around the Salvari, tensing the springs up and forcing his entire body to crash down into the Salvari in the springs' retreat.
As the Salvari of thick and fluffy black crescent-style mustache and curly black hair rose from the ground, looking around for either the dolphin-horse statue or the airborne toy-man to impale on one of his thunderous spears, he failed to find either. Joy was thus that this was a battle royale and a Salvari god of war didn't need to wait long for another opponent to present themselves.
A Sky Warrior, clad in a cowl of cerulean feathers with a pointy golden beak for a mask, met Priskom up in the air while the toy-man hovered above the battlefield and sought another one of the Chaos Factor members he could aid. Charging with a headstrong dive toward him, the Sky Warrior left Priskom with very few options. The Chaos Factor warrior had to uncoil his overtaxed arms and sling them around like a vertical propeller shield. A golden halo shockwave boomed from their point of collision, throwing both warriors in opposite directions, but the Sky Warrior performed a daring loop and crashed at Priskom again. The two exchanged frantic flurries of fists before falling into the madness of the battle and losing each other.
"My, my… If it isn't some sort of life-sized wind-up toy soldier. The material, the detail… I'll say, it's simply marvelous!" Hideo l'Ollonais praised Priskom from behind. The untangled and exhausted Chaos Factor leader rolled in evasion of an attack that never came his way and would have put up his dukes had his limbs not laid elongated and noodly in front of him. It was a shock, but the Pirate Lord appeared to be the least interested in fighting Priskom, letting the Chaos Factor warrior retract and readjust his finicky wind-up arms, prepping them for another frantic battle.
"You're not attacking me?" Priskom wondered with a powerful telepathic pulse emanating from his helmet that obstructed only empty shade where two stern, glowing lamp eyes stared through.
"A battle is a grisly affair. I fight to maim, to butcher, to slay. When a sword is drawn, one of those with exposed blades must most certainly die with a blood-curdling scream loud enough to warrant sage advice for those who would seek to follow the fool's steps and poor life choices. Fight without just cause? I think most definitely not!" l'Ollonais appeared almost offended by Priskom's suggestion. Priskom was hesitant to turn his back to the Pirate Lord, second-guessing himself with each degree of his turn, though the Pirate Lord only evaded the countless strokes, rushes, plunges, and blasts ripping around him and showed no ill will toward anyone.
Priskom uncoiled and sent his spring hand extending through the battlefield to grab hold of a stone pillar that could aid his return to the upper skies. A layer where the battle was still very much alive, as it was on the ground and down under. Priskom's glowing cerulean ring lights for eyes gleamed in a brighter flash of focus as his spring arm turned to the side and coiled around a thick neck and head of one that attempted to strike the spring limb clean off with one hammering smash of an ax.
The leader of the Chaos Factor dug his feet into the ground, having thought of forcing his simple-minded enemy to pass out or snapping his neck if they persisted to resist. It was a childish thought. One crude yank had Priskom hurling like an armored rocket, swatting all aside until his head-first trip to his inhuman foe was complete and the Chaos Factor toy-man found himself face-to-face against a masked mountain of bulk dressed in settler's clothing that must have come from centuries past and spent at least half of that time burrowed in a coffin on a rotting body.
The powerhouse took no time at all in widening Priskom's spring arm grip around his head and throat and leaving Priskom's right arm all untangled and messy on the ground. In need of swift rewind if it was to be used. Priskom did just that, reeling the uncoiled noodle of metal back into place so that he could wind it up for use. His foe didn't seem determined to wait. He rushed onward with a settler's fork and began thrusting it with a mad stare from black eyes that stared through tears in the sack he wore over his head.
"A serial killer?" Priskom signaled with his mind while using his spring legs to make his body roll and flip backward in hasty and lively dashes that'd be impossible for anyone not gifted with wind-up spring limbs. "I'm not someone you can kill. Nor do I shed blood. Find your entertainment elsewhere. I've got a job to do here."
It didn't seem like the sackhead would heed Priskom's advice. Like a man possessed, he dashed onward for more thrusts of his scat-picking fork. In a flash, Priskom hopped into mid-air and swung his spring legs vertically like a buzzing saw, cracking the fork into two and whipping the middle of the sack. As more and more spinning whips accumulated, the sack gathered subtle tears, and the weave loosened. Positioning himself in mid-air after his spinning kick, Priskom dive-kicked his opponent's face, but after hitting it like a brick wall, he had to bounce off and reposition himself.
Priskom's left leg threw him with an audible bounce, skidding across the floor and slamming the full weight of his body into the calves of his opponent. With a chilling pop, the knees shattered and the tibia bones popped through the flesh and the settler jeans, slathering the entire lower half of the giant's body in wet and rotten paper mass. As if this man was a scarecrow stuffed with paper that had, over the years, rotted and degraded and mixed with his blood that starved for oxygen as the giant forgot how to draw breath and let himself rot from the inside out.
Not feeling like asking his enemy for his life story, Priskom switched the position of his body and delivered a rising uppercut as his right spring leg shot him up into the air. This smashing impact severed the giant off of his lower legs completely, shooting his core body into the air for a ride as Priskom's mechanized fist dug into the sack and the face hiding underneath. Having his dismantled and maimed opponent right where he needed him, Priskom uncoiled his hands in a lightning-swift barrage of blows that was impossible to avoid even if his opponent wasn't lacking his calves and feet at the moment and under the Chaos Factor leader's complete control.
Priskom rolled in mid-air with a springing vertical kick and bounced his opponent's body off the ground, breaking his forearms backward at the elbows. Yet again Priskom's fists vanished in a blur as he thoroughly unwrapped both his arms and legs by finishing his merciless act of battery by stomping his thrashed opponent into the ground with both spring feet and landing on his back, untangled and in need of a wind-up but victorious.
Or so he thought.
Whatever rotten paper mush leaked from the broken settler powerhouse, the mush from his lower legs connected with the rest of his body, and in a blink, the giant stood tall again. His sprained and fractured elbows cracked and splashed with black ooze and wet, degraded paper stuffings but in the time it took for the crack to spread, the giant stood tall again and scooped his woodsman's ax off the ground, raising it over his head with black eyes that stared wide and wishing bloody murder.
The ax came crashing down with rumbling force. Spewing debris in all directions and threatening the eardrums of anybody close enough. The wooden rod of the ax dissolved into chipped needle-thin strings while the top of the ax melted down and burnt up into cinders with the infuriated serial killer powerhouse looming over what he thought would be a crushed enemy. In front of him was only the scene of his devastation. A round crater with tiles and gravel thrown around it like a halo of a destructive afterthought.
"Thanks…" Priskom turned his head to acknowledge Mana clasping his noodle-like spring of the arm in between the two horns on her head. She dashed in at the very last second and moved the Chaos Factor leader out of the ax's way since he had no way of either winding his limbs back up by himself or moving out of the way without their aid.
"You've overextended," Mana stated the obvious. "You should leave at least one limb wound up so that you can use it to reset any of the others."
"If things go well, I won't ever need to worry about it ever again. None of us will…" Priskom replied while something shifted inside of his massive shoulder pieces and began slowly winding up his arms all by itself. This was something Mana wasn't aware of. She thought Priskom needed to wind up his unraveled springs back himself, though it appeared that his mechanical body had a mechanism that wound them back automatically, though it worked at a turtle's pace. "I'm not sure what this guy's deal is. I thought serial killers were after carnage and murder. He can't murder any of us in our statue bodies."
"This isn't just any serial killer. It's Mizumi Kesho," Mana replied. "This one doesn't think or want, as much as he thrashes and rages to destroy anything he lays his eyes on."
"You know this man?" Priskom seemed taken aback as the giant in front of them fumbled about armless before clasping his hands together. A bright red light lit up in the center of his black eyes. "Is that… A hand seal?"
"You should try shaking this one off. It's not an opponent we can defeat," Mana warned her superior out of a dire need to repay the few favors she owed to the fellow misplaced warrior soul as well as common courtesy.
"If that is the case, now is exactly when we should eliminate this man. How do you know him?" Priskom wondered, using the time while Mizumi Kesho plunged his forearms into the ground. In a curious turn, the solid sandstone tiles and the gravel underneath all turned to mushy sludge under his touch and his arms disappeared halfway into the bog of the killer's creation.
"I know him because he is a sore historic figure in Konohagakure's history and a dreadful part of every Bingo Book. Out of the 435 entries in the standard Bingo Book editions, Mizumi Kesho is the only one under his own signature category. The protocol of any ninja encountering Mizumi Kesho is to flee on sight. Despite being a part of the Bingo Book, Mizumi Kesho has no bounty for his head and not even the black market dealers want anything to do with him. Your best odds of survival upon encountering this serial killer is to flee and hope that he sets his sights on someone else, that's because Mizumi Kesho is a buffoon that thinks only to slay that which he sees in front of him," Mana pointed out.
"I find that hard to believe. Even if I'll admit to never have read the Bingo Book in its entirety, but if this man was as impressive as you make him out to be, he'd surely have a bounty either by the ninja village authorities or on the black market…" Priskom resonated with a determined telepathic pulse as his arms and feet set back into place with an audible thud. Almost at the same time, Mizumi Kesho roared with a wet and slurpy sound, spraying what looked like black mud through the tears in the sack over his head. The giant pulled his forearms from the bog, raising his arms over his head and showing off a long stick with a detachable wooden club end that had razor-sharp metal teeth sticking out of it. A modified farm tool that would've brought a gruesome and bloody death in this killer's hands.
"Mizumi Kesho does not, because he is effectively immortal. I don't have the time to explain it to you, but you cannot put him down. You'll just end up wasting your spiritual chakra and fading your essence away for nothing," Mana warned the leader of Chaos Factor.
"Hmph… An oversized hick that fights with farm tools? Either way, I trust your warning enough to make this man my priority. I will not allow him to move past the first stage and risk one of us or all of us falling to him in the final stages of the tournament," Priskom proclaimed, setting his arms into a position raised behind his back as he shot forward like a rocket.
Kesho slammed his wheat-beating flail while Priskom vanished from his initial location. In a blink, the toy soldier plunged down with a dive kick that sliced Kesho's legs clean off by the knees in a smooth gliding slice. Resetting his right arm into place, Priskom unleashed an uppercut that smashed with so much force that the sack disguising Mizumi Kesho's head snapped apart into cloth scraps, revealing a smooth and swollen face ravaged by rot and centuries' time with completely black eyes. The fleshy pieces had been segmented on Kesho's head as if his head would've been flayed, soaked in oil, and then sewn back together. Strings of greying black hair stuck out through some cracks at the top of the malformed man's head. Whatever granted the giant his supposed immortality had also made him a miserable existence.
Rumbling with the telekinetic signal becoming visible as an indigo-colored halo around Priskom's helm, the Statuman unleashed his spring arms in a long-range rapid flurry of shooting fists that fully utilized the advantage of his spring fists. The air friction of them thrusting and cocking back into place made even the sturdy materials that Priskom's forearm gauntlets were made of searing red with heat. Each of thousands of impacts released a pulsing shockwave that was equal part an expulsion of heat as it was a booming concussive force. The killer's body splattered, bent, and mangled; limbs fell off drooping with black goop as the entire structure began falling apart. The dissolving paper sheets gave the deoxygenated blood splattering from the collapsing body of the serial killer a thick, mud-like texture. Priskom's fists left grievous holes in the quartered abdomen, treating it no better than a punching bag.
With his arms elongated and hanging by his sides fully unwound, Priskom began turning vertically with lashing spring kicks. With each rotation, he bounced the wet and ruined remains of his opponent off the ground before stomping with both feet, repeating the super-heated ignition flurry of his arms except on his boots this time. After all of his limbs had unraveled, Priskom wrapped them around random chunks of debris and pulled himself in with a devastating headbutt smash that splattered Kesho's remains all over the stage.
"Immortal? We'll see about that…" Priskom mumbled to himself as his supposedly invulnerable opponent, whom Mana feared so much earlier, was now as wet and splattered as the created bog he pulled his clobbering mace from. Once again, his arms and legs began winding back in a sluggish process of one rotation a second. It might have taken a full minute for each limb to be wound back into place.
The black mud began bubbling and slapping together. Dissolving and messy paper sheets slammed one against the other and shuffled like handfuls of clay that were used to forge a tall humanoid shape. The fighting around the fabled serial killer whom very few had encountered and lived to tell the tale stopped to witness in awe his dreadful rebirth, the likes of which no one had seen before and likely would never see again.
Mizumi Kesho roared with his fists raised over his head as he reformed. Having reduced his opponent to a wet stain and seen his wicked return to form, Priskom had to agree with the conclusion that ninja have drawn about this man.
"Interesting! No one expected someone to find and challenge Mizumi Kesho, the slasher of Rice Country!" the announcer directed the audience's attention in case they struggled to find points of excitement in the miraculous brawl that simply had no wrong spots to look at. "Mizumi Kesho is the only missing ninja in the Bingo Book without a bounty, just a warning to flee for one's life on sight! That wasn't always the case, however, at least sixty years ago, Mizumi Kesho indeed had a bounty and many have attempted to claim it, but the mindless butcher gouged and ripped apart every black market dealer and bounty checkpoint owner he's been brought to, which made his bounty banned in checkpoints all around the world! Formally, he might still have a bounty, though no dealer will pay it out or accept any terms related to this vengeful spirit. Thankfully, he only haunts a single small island of Rice Country and serves as a living warning of why Impure World Resurrection must remain a forbidden jutsu!"
"Chaos Factor! Find your openings and assist me. Eliminating this serial killer is now our priority!" Priskom signaled telepathically to all struggling members of the Chaos Factor, drawing their attention to their unraveled and unwound leader standing in front of a destructive goliath of sheer murder that dealt death out using farming equipment.
