Galdva's gem-incrusted eyes looked down, noticing an ink line corrupting the whirlwind keeping his entire frame suspended in mid-air. The shadowy line scratched itself into the eye of the storm, dragging across it and traveling the entire distance to the top, where it expanded into a shadowy bubble and captured the massive detached statue head in a containment bubble of pure black.

"Galdva!" Vatee hissed, looking around to locate the transgressor that openly declared war on the Chaos Factor. The samurai Ishikawa Bando, who was now looking for an opponent after Endo eliminated himself and left so many warriors purposeless, met the snake statue with his eyes, leaping into battle with Vatee and preventing her from assisting her fellow Chaos Factor member.

"You!" Drasko pointed the wrist blades on his gauntlet at a chubby man in a military coat with long, white, and curly hair, curved black mustache, and a goatee. "You're a deadman, pirate!" the newly self-elected leader of the Chaos Factor declared before a shaggy-looking samurai in hobo rags crashed at his side and blasted Drasko away with an excited smile. Waving his katana like a lunatic, the unkempt ronin rushed after his newly chosen opponent, tying Drasko's hands from pitching in to help his associate.

"You are one… Very vicious child…" Poro covered himself up in terror as a short boy of a subtle frame with shoulder-length brown hair and violet eyes used a makeshift net made of sticks, scrap, and his own torn uniform to provide the basis for the net to fling his hi-voltage taser ball at the Chaos Factor member.

"I'm not a child!" the taserballer growled, only increasing the rate and strength of his flings. "You statue-people will pay for breaking my net! Even if the toy man got eliminated, I'll make all of you pay!"

This way, with all the warriors returning to their regularly scheduled slobber-knocking, Galdva was left to deal with his opponent himself. In his defense, he showed he was more than capable of fending for himself, as a blazing wave blasted through the layer of shadows and began slowly melting the black ooze bubble around him. The shadowy orb dissolved like the edges of a burning paper, melting at just the aura of the warmth of Galdva's spiritual flames.

"Did you just pick a fight with me?" Galdva hovered above the chubby pirate in a red military coat wearing a black, triangular captain's hat with a fluffy violet feather covering half the hat in size. "I don't even know you, man…"

"That is common on this battlefield," the pirate, who looked more like a rich lord rather than a warrior, took off his hat and waved it at his chosen opponent. "My name is Long Ben Everyman, and I am intrigued by your value. I shall have you decorating the shores of Gold Country."

To seal this proclamation, Everyman weaved a hand seal with his right hand, expanding a bubbly mass of shadows underneath his feet from which humanoid shapes emerged and charged toward the whirlwind keeping Galdva hovering in mid-air. Galdva's lower jaw let out a resonant crack as it opened wide, revealing a black hollowed-out space inside where the statue's mouth should have been. It didn't remain dark for long, as flaming stars lit up promptly, only for the floating statue head to spit six of them at the rushing shadow-men.

"Sorry, but I'm not some decoration, I'm a human being, believe it or not," Galdva replied after eliminating Long Ben's army of shadow-men. "Besides, you shouldn't go out of your way to introduce yourself if you're going to offer a made-up pirate name, anyway."

"Oh, but that's only gentlemanly," Everyman waved his hat with cheer, almost amused at the fact that his opponent eliminated his army of shadow people. "It's regretful that I cannot offer you my mother-given name, dear chap, but such is the pirate's life. Don't fret about your humanity either, many in Gold Country own people, so I won't shed a tear for using you as the pristine decoration of my home shores."

"I've got no intention of ever becoming a beach decoration!" Galdva proclaimed. The massive floating statue head began turning around with an open mouth. With a breath infused with spiritual chakra blowing from Galdva's mouth, his turbulent rotation allowed him to form a tall spiritual tornado around him. The Statuman stopped at once, continuing his stream of air that pushed the whirlwind forward. "Spirit Art: Vortex Gale!" Galdva chanted.

Shadowy tendrils whipped from the black bubbling area surrounding the pirate captain. They lashed around the captain's flabby arms with the seaman securing an iron-tight grip with surprising strength for someone of his build. Seeing he couldn't escape the pull of the spiritual vortex nor overpower its consequences, Long Ben braced for impact, seeking to weather the storm.

The pirate grumbled from physical strain as the tornado's full force hit him all at once. It threatened to pull him off the ground and fling him all the way to another continent, or so it seemed from the speed and might of the gale. Long Ben's hat took off and vanished in the whirlwind. His military coat began to flap and rip and the seaman's cheeks began flapping at the beat of the wind's drums. Everyman's wig tore off his head, revealing a balding nest of black hair with a notable spiky patch of hair sufficient to form a ponytail in the back of the pirate's scalp.

Despite captain Everyman's best attempts, the gale ripped him and spun him on a wild journey to the skies. The other warriors froze in terror of the massive whirlwind yet, curiously enough, they couldn't feel the apocalyptic effects of the vortex. Some of them have tangled with the worst calamities natural forces of nature could produce, yet none of them identified any of the destructive tendencies of such catastrophes. None except for the storm's target–Long Ben Everyman.

That was the nature of spiritual chakra. It was just the spiritual, imaginative aspect of chakra that existed mostly on the mental plane. Mana, who struggled to return to her feet with one of her front legs chipped off, and found herself opposed by a spiky-haired, muscular, and round-built man in a white gi, managed to use that aspect of Galdva's attack to her advantage. Spiritual chakra was just an element of true chakra. Similarly to physical chakra, it was just a fragment, and producing and channeling true chakra required both to work simultaneously. Spiritual chakra could produce a wide variety of imaginative effects, though, not entirely unlike genjutsu, half of its potency was in tricking the opponent and using their own body to believe in the power of the technique. When Poru used spiritual chakra to heal, half of it was the full power of his technique and half of it was the belief of the body being healed that it was supposed to recover, using its own power of the mind and suggestion to heal itself.

Long Ben Everyman was therefore truly struggling against a tornado, though that tornado only affected him. To the others around him and the audience, the calamitous gale looked like the end of the world on the physical plane, but they could only feel the measly ill effects of such a gust. Not that it mattered much to Long Ben, who soared high in the air.

"Heh!" Long Ben croaked, slapping his belly that now stuck out through his torn shirt and open coat with both open palms. The round tattoo on his belly lit up, revealing it to be a sealing glyph. With a loud pop, the glyph produced an object sealed inside it — an anchor. One without a doubt belonging to captain Everyman's ship. "I may spend more time living the king's life these days than earning my past reputation as King of Pirates, but these are still not the times when captain Long Ben Everyman will be bullied by a statue!"

Grabbing hold of the anchor with his hands and placing his boots firmly atop its sides, the pirate captain rode the anchor down as it slammed into the ground and raised a tremendous quake around him. The other warriors duking it out around the area where the pirate landed seemed perturbed by this crash, but they soon found a more immediate distraction in their own bouts rather than seek retribution from the boisterous captain Everyman.

Galdva's floating head became rattled by the noisy crash. The massive belfry descended onto the arena floor, grounding itself as the gale suspending Galdva's hover broke from the ripping air streams of the violent crash landing. Before the floating head could open its eyes and focus on the battle once more, captain Everyman shot out from the wall of dust and debris with a fist enveloped in solid gold and blown out of proportions.

"Neo Providence!" Everyman bellowed, thrusting the fist easily twice the thickness of his entire body and dozen times the length, slamming it into Galdva's front and shooting the cracked and battered head drilling through the tunneling air only to crash out of bounds and causing a wicked ruckus in the spectator stands because of the riotous impact.

"Captain Long Ben Everyman has eliminated Galdva from the Chaos Factor! This leaves 149 competitors to duke it out in the arena. Captain Everyman is such a mysterious contestant. No one knew what to expect of him! Back in the day, this pirate used to be one of the Pirate Lords. Captain Everyman raided uncharted kingdoms and countries and assembled riches measuring to around 600 trillion ryo. However, captain Everyman disappeared without a trace before someone could claim the enormous bounty on his head. Because of rumors that he may have settled down on land and ceased all voyaging, he lost his status as a Pirate Lord, though some still refer to him as a Pirate King! The only Pirate Lord to survive his title and not meet a violent end!" the announcer did his job in briefing the audience about the many notable warriors taking part in the tournament, which was meant to amp up their excitement for the event.

"Please don't go anywhere…" captain Everyman stomped his foot, shooting off twin tendrils of shadows from the black mass pooling underneath his feet. With a bright white fizzle, the black tendrils that formed a vague chain-like shape began dyeing in a golden-colored coating. "You are my bounty now."

The golden chains wrapped around Galdva, solidifying into an adamantine mineral form that couldn't be broken despite Galdva's attempts to spit fire through them and melt them, or shoot icicles at them, or beam them with his eyes. Not even creating a whirlwind around him seemed to shake the chains and because of a golden fist construct attached to the chains at the end, Galdva could neither sever them nor fly off since the heavyweight fist didn't budge one bit off the floor.

A Sky Warrior clad in flat, black knives that comprised his entire cloak and cowl loomed atop a perch point on the tail of the fallen and partly cracked Five-Tails statue whom nobody wanted to bother with tossing out of the ring. The other contestants saw just how troublesome dealing with this one was earlier so few wanted to have any part of what it had to offer, on the other hand, the statue looked miserable and broken so some, like the Sky Warrior in question, treated it as a battlefield decoration and part of the arena's environmental hazards rather than a living being.

"Boo!" a rambunctious shout clamored from behind the pale-skinned warrior with lips painted charcoal black. The Sky Warrior turned around, startled by the curious battle cry of the man who chose him as his foe, but the curious birdman could only see the chaos of the battlefield erupting all around him, just like everywhere else.

"Made you look…" a husky voice made the heart of the black Sky Warrior freeze up. A fleshy punch ripped through the air. While the feather-like coat of blades that the black Sky Warrior wore protected him from most harm, the exact, subtle manner of attack from this curious sneaky contestant slipped through. It was neither a hefty wallop nor a sword or a knife that plunged into the Sky Warrior's flesh, but hair-thin needles. The assailant with grievously scarred and crusty skin, wearing simple rags and a western-style hat, flipped off of the way of the thrashing Sky Warrior, who slipped off the side of the statue's body and flopped face-first onto the ground.

Frothing with blood and tiny bits of chipped teeth, the fallen Sky Warrior tried rising from the ground, but something felt off to him. Almost immediately, the Sky Warrior recognized the effects of poison affecting him, though he still couldn't quite wrap his head around how he may have been poisoned or what sort of effects he was in for. No matter how far or how wide he looked for his mysterious, burnt, and dry-skinned assailant, he couldn't see anything.

Even the thrashing figures of warriors all began pulling further and further away from him. The Sky Warrior pressed his hand to his chest, slipping it underneath the cloak of feather-like knives to feel his heartbeat. The man fashioning himself after the crow was no imbecile, but even he couldn't quite catch the exact rhythm or pace of his heartbeat, for it seemed to be hurrying to an early grave. This distance from any living man became choking, haunting, it gained the form of a grey fog that was as biting to breathe as chimney fumes.

A curious concentration of the fog appeared and trailed off into the skies above directly in front of the Sky Warrior. By following its trail, the man noticed something awe-inspiring and frightening in a very megalophobic kind of way as the entire heavens were filled with rolling conveyor belts as wide as the busiest town roads and as long as entire countries, all rolling some sort of crystals along until the grinders and processing plants that dropped a corroding shower of acid that, because of the side of the machines, spread itself out so wide that it barely threatened the Sky Warrior standing on a lone platform of ruined ground.

The pillar of fumes began burning with an intense green flame from which the same assailant that had attacked the Sky Warrior earlier jumped out from. Finally, after all this mind-bending daydreaming, the Sky Warrior found himself something solid to target. He waved his hand, but the storm of black tempered knives only shred through a shape that dissolved into a wall of green flames.

The freaky humanoid appeared again from an aerial emerald firestorm, rolling like a blaze. The crow of the Sky Warriors threw his arm up, attacking the airborne assailant with a storm of black blades, but the airborne fighter slipped through them by bending and shifting his body in a blink in a manner impossible to an ordinary human body. With an excited cackle, the western hat-wearing assailant threw his arm out in a downward swipe. A focused look of the Sky Warrior identified a handful of syringes attached to a ruined leather glove coating a fingerless hand. The hand expanded in size drastically while the missing fingers slithered like leaf-colored mamba snakes and grew in size to fill the fingerless gloves.

Instead, the syringes that he saw before, the kitchen knife-sized fangs of the mamba snaked pierced through the Sky Warrior's arm, squeezing out corroding venom in alarming quantities. The Sky Warrior yelled out in agony as his right arm bloated to the size of a normal human torso and blistered with green boils that sprayed boiling green pus from the immense internal pressure they couldn't withstand.

The right arm of the assailant, whose entire body was defined by chemical burns and crusty-dry scar tissue, shrunk down to normal size. He thrust it upward, seeking to stab the syringes into the Sky Warrior's face or, better yet–his eyes, but the Sky Warrior's cowl deflected the needles and only led to them leaving grazing cuts on the face of the struggling warrior. With a combination of his boa-proportions green mamba arms and his smaller syringe arm, the assailant danced a slick dance. The pain of the sensations he went through from the chemicals that were already injected and the scratches to follow, the Sky Warrior found himself overwhelmed by the flurry of needles, fangs, and venom spits.

"Don't be shy! Really drink it in, man!" the mysterious assailant encouraged the terrified and overwhelmed Sky Warrior as he swung his arms up like a conductor of an orchestra, prompting the ground underneath to crack open and spray with chemicals of pumpkin color and thick consistency. With a teasing gesture, the venomous attacker revealed that the points of his syringes had turned jagged. He dragged his syringe fingers together, igniting a flock of sparks that quickly caught on the black cloak of the terrified Sky Warrior struggling to defend himself against this toxic and illusionary warfare.

The fallen Crow-like Sky Warrior began rolling with his legs tucked and his arms covering up the pale skin that had swollen and bubbled with pus as it became wet and droopy alongside the flesh of his exposed face to the point of melting clean off. The corrupted right arm of the frightened Sky Warrior inflated like a balloon and burst, splashing the same eroding venom from before all over the black cloak and cowl of the crow-like Sky Warrior.

"Come on, now…" the assailant took off his hat by sticking the syringes attached to his gloves into it and pulling it off. "You looked so tormented, emotional, and edgy. Surely you should enjoy this at least a bit, right?" the man with a frightening visage pinched his fingers in a cruel tease. "A guy doesn't paint his lips unless he's into either some really kinky or some really self-loathing shit, right? I mean… That skin looks like it hasn't seen sunlight in some while, so it's great for you to put some red on it, right?"

Seeing his opponent rolling around, the venomous assailant thrust his arm into the ruined wasteland, phasing it all the way up to the elbow. The ground underneath the fallen, rolling and screaming in torment Sky Warrior burst outward with a sky-reaching mountain of needles that tossed him up only to land and roll all the way down its ridges. Had it not been for the adamantine cowl of the Sky Warrior, the pain alone might have caused his heart to stop.

"Yeesh… Tough crowd. Getting some really mixed messages from you, buddy. I mean, if you don't like it, just tell me to stop, 'kay?" the grievously burnt man crept up to his opponent as the mountain of needles withdrew back underground in a cartoonishly exaggerated manner, leaning over the trembling Sky Warrior and putting his stubby hand slipped into a fingerless syringe glove by his missing ear where only a black ear-hole that leaked some sort of bodily secretion all the time remained.

"I'll take your whimper as a yes," the man shrugged, excited to continue the hurt. Just as he turned around and raised his arms, erecting a metallic wall with a demonic face formed out of metal bars and gaps and a decorative mask, a black flame lit up behind the sadistic assailant, prompting him to glance back. "Well, shit…" he muttered to himself, in reaction to a colossal crow form that rose from the pathetic image of a half-molten and grievously injured, crippled man he was abusing before.

"You seem to enjoy dragging people into the darkest confines of their own minds and toying with them," a reverberating, almost regal voice filled the endless, industrial monument of corrosion. "But you must not be aware that Sky Warriors train with shamans of the Sky Country and breathe in mystical dust that brings them to their own fears as part of their training. It is time that you face the same fate to which you subject your victims now, don't you think?"

The shadowy crow expanded its wingspan to surround the entire endless dimension of wasteland void. Hugging it from around and filling it from within. The ragged, burnt assailant whited out and screamed, distraught with bottomless fright as he dragged his bony, handless stumps across his face, tearing the scarred flesh off because of intense friction with leather. His eyes burst with blood and his skin became moist and melted off his face like wet paint.

Out of the mental plane, the spooked serial killer fell down and rolled off the busted Five-Tails statue, planting down on the ground as the Sky Warrior rose from the ground, gazing at his right hand that had its vessels popped and torn as it swelled with unpleasant rot. Thusly, he found out that whatever transpired within the confines of his mind was not entirely without its consequences in the physical world. The crow-man swiped the edges of his cape, severing his rotten arm and dropping it down on the floor. As much as he wanted to finish off this mischievous and sadistic monster that writhed on the ground before him, he needed to tend to his missing limb before he passed out and died of blood loss.

To signify the value of his decision, the rotten arm that had fallen off released a goop of molten and mashed flesh that reminded of crushed cherries yet smelled of century-old milk. The Sky Warrior did not flinch once before turning away and sacrificing his ruined and corroding limb and kicking off the ground to glide away to a more peaceful perch point where he could treat his wound.