A peal of boisterous laughter filled the mountaintop ridge where a ninja monk of the ruined Stone Temple and the conqueror from the Land of Dreams, Hanmong, met. Having smashed entire armies of ninja monks, the grey-skinned conqueror with ailing, black eyes just laughed it up while drawing a sword from a golden sheath. Somehow, even gold from the Land of Dreams had been coated with corrupting grime, making its color blander and less likely to catch the eye. Even the amethysts and sapphires decorating the sheath had lost most of their colors and had traces of black dust floating and rooting from inside them.
The conqueror dashed at the monk, seeking to cleave the sizeable and daunting ninja monk in two. The monk, meanwhile, stomped his foot down and clapped his palms together. A black iron spike twice larger than either of the warriors burst forth from the mountaintop and collided with the conqueror's saber. The sword of the warlord wasn't what one would attribute to him on the one hand, a slender saber curved at the end. Golden hilt and grimy Land of Dreams gemstones.
The blade's edge had jagged chips to it, demonstrating utter carelessness for the sword on its wielder's part. In that way, this blade was exactly what a man such as Hanmong would wield. An ethereal black shade began leaking out from all around the conqueror's body. The black and murderous evil miasma with occasional traces of ephemeral white streaks coated the conqueror's blade.
The spike chipped and parted. A resounding slash projectile of the unfocused energy oozing from the fearsome warlord split off of his blade and left a blood-spitting gash at the shoulder of the ninja monk who didn't flinch, falter or stagger back one step. The conqueror made haste to run toward the ninja monk with thunderous steps, bringing his sword down to complete the gruesome cleave he had foreseen earlier but the ninja monk simply leaned out of the way and clapped his hands again, producing a central iron spike that splintered off into smaller needle-like branches that repeated the splintering pattern.
Not even faced against an entire tree of iron spikes did Hanmong step back. Pressing his sword against the formation and feeling the spikes cutting and digging into his flesh, the conqueror pressed on, shoving the sword through the iron bark with the brute force of his right hand alone. The conqueror's left ripped the monk from the blizzard of iron splinters after the tree of iron spikes had shattered and pulled him in for a few headbutts before the monk's foot shoved him off of the conqueror's grasp and had the ninja monk planting on his back.
The ninja monk did not rise quickly, nor did it come easily. The gash of red across his right shoulder would continue to trouble him until he would see treatment. Despite that, there was only focus on the face of the blind man. Not a drip of fear. This must've been something that the conqueror found familiar from his time reducing the Stone Temple to ruin since it got him talking while the marauder circled his blind opponent.
"You're a brave man. Most blind folks would lose their focus and will to fight. I've seen people persevering through disability, but none of them that refuse to fear even when you corner them. It's one thing to work through a bad hand you've been dealt in life, it's a different thing to overcome that primal sense of panic creeping in when you are faced with certain death and having no clue where it might come from or how it might strike you," the conqueror taunted his opponent while his squawking vulture flew up the mountainous ridge and landed on the warrior's broad shoulder.
"Cornering me? Is that what you believe you're doing?" the ninja monk smirked. Winding his fist back, he thrust it down. Immediately, the mountainous ridge split with glowing ripples that spat out compressed air. Rampant quakes made the conqueror stagger on his flat rocky platform before, in a mere blink, it all collapsed.
With mad flurries of blows, the ninja monk lashed out at the surrounding stony debris. He struck so fast that his arms multiplied many times over and it became difficult to see the man in the afterimages of his sinewy fists that polished stone debris into perfectly round spheres and then coated them with black iron that massively expanded their size. The two warriors entered freefall with the ninja monk hovering in mid-air, surrounded by a floating rosary formation of black spheres a dozen times his size, orbiting around him like his own personal moons.
"Iron Style: Nenbutsu of the Stone Beads!" the ninja monk chanted out, raising his left hand over and behind his head while he thrust his right hand with an open palm out in front. Fast enough to become surrounded by a field of heated air and turn scaling red from heat, the Stone Beads all hurled toward the airborne conqueror.
Hanmong roared out, swiping his sword in a horizontal slash. His clamorous energy leaked out, surrounding his entire body and coating his blade too, creating a slash that manifested in a long-range crescent-shaped black, grey, and white projectile and split a stone bead clean into two. This instantly snuffed out the heat within, making it fume with vapor as it turned black and crashed down below into the arena. Having devoted so much force to this single slash robbed Hanmong of his chance to slice more beads. He had to use his free arm to backfist another red-hot iron bead coming his way with the back of his hand, then headbutt another one to shatter it to a supernova-like star fall of hot stone.
Despite impressive physical force and unflinching determination in the face of overwhelming odds, the following stone bead slammed into Hanmong before he could bolster up his bulky body and prepare. The plummeting stone ball engulfed his entire body and brought the conqueror down with it while it crashed down at the outer edge of the arena. Just when it seemed like the crashing stone bead would flatten the conqueror from the Land of Dreams into a watery plunge outside of the arena, the crashing of the bead stopped and Hanmong stayed flattened and hanging atop a shattered piece of debris of another fallen stone bead.
"Hey, what's the big idea?" a young woman with jean shorts a cerulean-colored hoodie and a yellow hood slipped over her black and orange cap turned to the ninja monk who landed beside the conqueror whom he turned the tables on with his ace technique. "Other people are fighting here, no need to cause a ruckus and make problems for everyone…"
"This man is a warlord from a remote island in the deepest reaches of the northwest. A place so dark and so desolate that it had rendered his heart much colder and harder than even my iron. A man who instead of making the best of the land he was born into, gathered his people and spilled them over to the Land of Earth, leaving nothing but fire, corpses, and ruin in his wake. In my home, they call him the Sandman, because wherever Hanmong and his people walk, he dooms people to eternal sleep. A blood lusted monster that flattened the Stone Temple and left every ninja monk that was there at the time slain. Against such a man, I will take whatever means necessary to foil his ambitions and send him running back to the miserable, hellish island he came from," the ninja monk replied by calmly turning to the martial artist and explaining his point of view.
"Not cool, man!" the martial artist objected. Despite her eyebrows pointing downward, her half-asleep eyes made it almost impossible for the young woman to look angry and forever branded her with a goofy look. "This is a tournament to determine the strongest fighter, not some political trial. In here you need to shove your beef with other people down and just fight everyone you see, I'll show you!" she declared by adopting a fighting stance. Before she could, iron wires wrapped around her arms and feet and bound her utterly, flopping her on the ground while an exterminator with a large metallic radiator head approached from behind.
"Damn! Sorry, m'man… Kinda all tied up here… Raincheck?" the quirky martial artist chuckled to herself after falling onto her side bound by tight and arm-thick iron wire from all sides.
"If we are destined to meet in the future…" the blind ninja monk shifted his focus to his rising opponent, who had been covered in shallow burns of his skin from contacting scalding red stone and rips to his skin coat.
"You see yourself as the victim here, am I correct?" Hanmong wondered while wiping traces of bloody slobber off of his lip and feeling up the burns on his cheek with a light wince in pain. "A poor holy man whose sanctuary was flattened and swept off the map by a cruel horde of brutal invaders. Senseless marauders and pillagers, is that about right?"
"Do you deny it?" the blind monk made a mean grimace, refusing to believe that Hanmong, the Nightmare of Dream Country, would refuse to accept the honor of conquering the Stone Temple. To a pillager such as himself, a razer of civilizations greater than that which he himself was born into, such a feat should've been the crowning achievement of his life.
"I razed your pile of stones, yes, but I didn't do it just because. I did it to guide my people through the Rocky Pass. It was an insurmountable wall on the continent to someone just landed from the Rocky Gulf. Sitting there and waiting for a party of ninja to pick us off and commit to our genocide wasn't an option. It was either move over the Rocky Pass or die for us. The Stone Temple, famously, is based on the peak of the Rocky Pass and serves as its fort. Razing your temple wasn't a matter of pride for me, it was essential for the survival of my people," Hanmong said before pointing his finger at the Ishigakure ninja.
The featherless vulture accompanying Hanmong opened its beak. With pathetic squawks it puked out a bone almost its own size and clamped down on its center, wielding it as if was a mace. The bird of prey took off in mad flight, seeking to ram the bony mace into the Ishigakure ninja's head and crack it open. The monk clapped his hands, producing a field of black iron spikes from underground. The featherless vulture was nimble, ducking and rolling away from impalement, but its bone was nowhere hard enough to trouble the ninja monk either as he blocked the incoming swipe by raising his arm.
This all proved to just be a diversion. Hanmong crashed with a shoulder charge, knocking the ninja monk who was focused on his bird all along away to roll and crash into some rocky wreckage further away. Swinging his sword around with one arm, the conqueror regained his senses and recovered from the numbness of the iron battery he endured earlier.
"You may not believe me, but I couldn't care less if you do. The very reason I gathered my people and sailed them across the Blackstone Sea was to settle them in a better, more hospitable place. The Feudal Lord may have seen us the same way you see us, pillagers, barbarians, invaders… But in just a few battles, he found out the depths of our resolve and how useful it might be to him. I'd have much rather taken this land from you spoiled sheet-wetters, but I'll sleep calm having negotiated my people's new home with your gemstone-handed shot-caller too," Hanmong swung his sword about, feeling himself and the state of his body up before the upcoming collision.
The black beads of the Ishigakure ninja's rosary came in, wrapping around the blade. They shined with brilliant green light and not even the crudest yank or the sharpest sword seemed like it had what it takes to sever the threads holding the beads intact. The ninja monk reeled the conqueror in while soaring through the space between them. The two slammed their foreheads together with the ninja monk's forehead dyeing with the black coating of Iron Release armor and the black, grey, and white miasma surrounding the Hanmong's body as well, washing like a sweeping tsunami of energy but meeting stalwart resistance from the monk opposed to him.
With forceful twitches, Hanmong began pushing his opponent back. Then, with all of his force focused on the motion, he slammed the ninja monk back-first into the ground by winning their destructive power struggle with a decisive push of his forehead. The quake sent rampant quakes across the arena and the friction between them was literally electric as it produced charcoal-color lightning that shot out in all directions.
The vulture flapped its wings over the conqueror's head, forming a massive whirlwind that swept up the fallen Ishigakure ninja inside it and hurled him along for the ride it offered. Meanwhile, Hanmong found his sword and picked it off the ground. He gazed at its chipped edge that couldn't take that much more punishment and closed his black eyes. The conqueror asked his people for support at first. But this only left him unable to hear anything else but the chaos of the battle royale raging around him, the tornado of his own pet's making included, nor could he feel the bitter chill, the acid rains nor the noxious atmosphere of the Land of Dreams that raised him or its people.
He was no mere leader. He was not some lord or a politician. He was a commander and a conqueror and while he may have been ruthless, while he may have been the Bane of Dreams, it would all be worth it if, in the end, his people found their place that they could truly call their home. One that didn't make them feel like they'd been dumped, abandoned, and forgotten. Punished by the society they've never seen and left to their own devices to deal with their own merciless land.
"Give me your support, that is an order!" Hanmong bellowed, clenching the hilt of his sword tighter in his hand and feeling the black-and-white miasma raging around him. The raging conqueror swung his saber vertically, sending a black crescent slash with white lightning jolts crackling around it to slice the whirlwind clean into two. The airborne ninja monk yelled out in pain as his uniform ripped into tatters and a gruesome laceration opened up in his chest cavity. Tattered, bloody, and broken, the monk flopped onto the ground with a wet slump. Like a sack of bones and leftovers.
Feeling numbness moving down his body from continuously calling forth the deepest reaches of his untapped reserves, the conqueror stumbled in his turn around. Before he could recollect himself, a booming pillar of spiraling violet flames shot off into the sky. Shocked, Hanmong turned around with blood vessels pumping thick merlot-shade blood shot out in his black eyes.
The Ishigakure ninja brought himself back up like a raging demon with a swollen body and black markings littering him from a nexus point in the neck. Diamond-shaped black markings comprising a more complex mosaic network that spanned the ninja monk's entire body. Even if the conqueror wasn't aware of what a Curse Mark was, he knew it was trouble. Nothing this vile could ever mean anything good.
"Your people? What about MY people!?" the blind monk raged with a twisted show of his teeth and a vicious scowl to his face that betrayed the fiendish nature of the mark he adopted for a chance to rip the Bane of Dreams apart limb by limb. "Did they deserve to be wiped out, their entire legacy reduced to ashes and buried under an avalanche? All for doing their duty and protecting the pass… For following their faith and practicing their arts!"
"Don't be a sour loser," the conqueror turned around with a sluggish stumble, but it was nowhere near fast enough to react in time to the shooting bundle of iron beads. On their light-ray-swift trip to the warlord, they boosted in size several times and shot up with iron spikes that smashed into Hanmong's face and left grievous gashes that splattered blood and teeth and sent the conqueror skidding across the arena all the way to the edge. "Our people went to war… When that happens, someone's bound to lose and take the fall…"
"War?" the monk seethed. "My people were to win that war! If it weren't for a cowardly initiate showing you a way around the pass, hoping to avoid further bloodshed that would've led to the end of the people you've dragged with you on this pointless crusade for bloodshed and conquest."
The two men charged at each other, giving their everything with reckless abandon, shooting off stray shockwaves and rampant quakes in all directions. As eager to tear their own armor off and engage in a berserker brawl as they were to gouge their opponent's eyes and rend the flesh off of their bodies in the process. Spiked morning star beads went swinging from all directions while the Ishigakure ninja monk was overflowing with a new brand of raw power in the crazed exchange of blows. With a vicious crack, the morning star bead smashed into the left side of Hanmong's head, caving it in from the left side and crushing his left eye while sinking it in a tide of thick merlot-colored blood.
"Don't bullshit me about some stupid survive-or-perish crap! When that coward showed you the way around the pass, you didn't just walk around the temple. You even betrayed the traitor, butchered him, and then went out of your way to flank the Stone Temple from the rear, cornering us off and killing everyone you could!" too angry and burnt out to keep swinging, the blind monk bellowed with a bestial roar that stiffened his entire body up in rage.
With the morning star bead still stuck in the left side of his head, Hanmong drove his forehead with a morning star headbutt. The slam caused a white singularity to blink out at the point of impact that then expanded into a bubble flash of all-consuming light filled to the brim with electric sizzles. When the flash died out, the limp and de-powered body of the blind monk laid out of bounds on the other side of the arena with his skull caved in from the front, surrounded by a pool of his own blood and a company of his own teeth and chipped skull.
Staggering and dripping with blood from the left side that had a morning star bead smashed into it, the conqueror straightened his back out and cracked his back, which had taken a real beating after all those spinal power struggles. Carefully, the warlord tapped the foreign object stuck in his skull from the left, realizing that it got stuck well and prevented him from dying of blood loss for the time being. Feeling lucky more than anything else, the Nightmare of Dream Country walked off, dragging his leather boots across the bloody tiles in search of his next opponent.
"This gruesome blood feud between Hanmong the Sandman and Tetsubisu Seinoku has concluded! While 146 competitors still wage bloody war in the arena, once they tire out from their incessant trading of blows, the conclusion of this grisly battle royale will be instantaneous!" the announcer pointed out while the servicemen of the Sun Disc arena dragged out the demolished ninja monk to check for signs of life and see if he needed to be taken to the infirmary or the body pile to be burnt after the battle royale.