"Got a target in sight," the spy-turned-mercenary Hit Boomslang reported. Since the killer doll Bambi stabbed his eye out in the early stage of the battle royale, using the various military-grade tech that he either bought through black market contacts or was graciously given after completing missions for some of the establishments that could get their hands on them was difficult.
Even now, the famed mercenary was examining his target, a young man just knocking his ball up and down and shuffling between world-shaking duels between behemoths of violence and bubbling egos through heat-detecting goggles that were built for two eyes, giving Hit Boomslang some muzzled and staticky readings and demanded some shifting of his working eye from one side to another to read out all the information his goggles provided.
Leaping off a wrecked and burnt-down ship, Hit Boomslang activated a kite in mid-air and grabbed hold of its handle, gliding across the space separating him and his target as he tucked his feet out to knock the airballer's ball out of bounds. The orange-haired rebel in a flashy and colorful sports shirt pounded his ball higher to soar it over Hit's glider before tucking down to avoid the gliding kick himself. Hit Boomslang corrected himself into a proper slide and turned around with a combat knife in hand and ready to engage the young man in combat.
"What's your deal, geezer!?" Danro Barebare, the loudmouth airballer with simple aspirations of just playing with his ball the way he best knew how, yelled out, spreading his hands out to pass his ball up again and gain some time to pummel this annoying mercenary getting in his way.
"Looking for this, kid?" Hit Boomslang extended his hand, revealing that Danro's ball was always in his hands, ever since he glided past the airborne ball in mid-air. Danro exclaimed in alarm, but it was too late to change anything. He could just bulge his eyes out and try to catch the ball that was coming down for a pass. One bump of the tip of his fingers later, a vicious fireball went off, leaving the young man torn up, smoldering, and unconscious.
"Target down. Proceeding to elimination," Hit Boomslang reported seemingly to himself while pulling out another rubbery marble he rolled in between his fingers. It looked a little like a rubber ball when it was sized appropriately and when one didn't have the time or the opportunity to look into it properly. With a roll forward, Hit Boomslang tapped the boy's back and produced a metallic frame that closed up and connected to a hooked artificial arm. From the very end of that arm, a parachute blew out while the other tips blew hot gas from them, shooting the arm and anything it held upward.
With a few flicks and drags on a gadget on his wrist, Hit Boomslang navigated the impressive mechanical air balloon toward an area outside of bounds before extending his hand at it and shooting a steel rod at the balloon which blew it up and effectively dropped Danro Barebare, the Air Ball ace, out of bounds. Meanwhile, Hit Boomslang merely struck a relaxed pose, turning away from a score in his proverbial elimination tab and disappearing beneath a fake plastic stone, patiently awaiting his next target for a potential easy elimination.
"Another elimination and this one's a quick one! Then again, Danro Barebare may have been a bit banged up and tired after his brief encounter with the apprentice magician, Minara Bebe, earlier! To those of you who didn't put it together why the young man exploded out of nowhere, the secret was in the tool that the mercenary spy Hit Boomslang used–the hybrid mine. It's a nifty little grenade that can be thrown aside and blows up on physical contact like an ordinary explosive, but with a rub and an increase in temperature, it can inflate to become buoyant and able to act like a sea mine! Being the legendary spy that he is, Hit Boomslang switched the ball that Danro Barebare passed around with his inflated hybrid mine while snatching his ball to hide it until the last moment. When the reveal wouldn't compromise the switcheroo trick! I'm so glad that the serial killer Bambi stabbing his eye out didn't compromise Hit Boomslang's battlefield abilities one bit so far!" The announcer did his job in both reporting another elimination and giving the necessary background information needed to enjoy the fights.
In a different area of the arena, Fennec's crew mercenaries Shakshu and his chain-sword-wielding comrade still rode atop the shoulders of a terrifying clockwork golem. The same one that snuffed out all hopes of the enigmatic Chaos Factor to proceed to the next stage of the battle royale and deal with their members the best way it could by destroying their statue bodies and swatting their souls aside like sifting through spider webs.
"Holy crap," the mohawk'd mercenary with a spiky chain wrapped around his body cackled while observing the rowdy fights brewing around him. "It was such a good idea to hitch a ride with the big guy! I didn't think much about our odds of moving on to the other stage, but because of this guy, we've actually lasted longer than the likes of Vizeriman and Sharsher!"
"Yeah, and whenever things look grim for this big guy, we can always just ditch him. Too bad that we've lost the big walking garden and the jawless freak. Fewer walking forts we can hitch a ride on," Shakshu, the tall and burly mercenary with a cinderblock on a stick for a war hammer, nodded while stroking his rough grey beard and scanning the battlefield.
The visage of a man with a serpentine helmet flashed before the two buffoons hitching a ride and leeching off another goliath's success, terrifying them to the point of paralysis. Against the instinct to freeze and hope that this was just a nightmare, Shakshu threw his body off of the clockwork golem and fell flat on his chubby belly, sprawling out on the floor while whining and trying to crawl away.
This strategy, while questionable in terms of usage and incredibly undignified, proved to be a successful one for the moment that Shakshu threw himself off of the golem's shoulder and nearly flattened himself on the ground, a large and muscular, shadowy man with spiky black armor and thorns similar to a dragon's head waving on his faceless helmet swung a broad axe and would have split Shakshu into two had he chosen to remain frozen and afraid in his previous position.
"The Twins!?" the mohawk'd, chain-sword mercenary hissed. "What are you doing attacking us? We're on the same team, jackass!"
"Cut the crap, you two!" suddenly, the dragon-headed axe warrior vanished without a trace, leaving behind just the serpent-helm warrior who stood brandishing his sword on the extended hand of the clockwork golem who decided to not interfere in this conflict, although the swing of that cleaving battle axe nearly split his whole arm from the shoulder that time just now. "You're so weak and pathetic that you're worth more if you're dead or eliminated by thinning the numbers of participants!" the warrior armed with a scimitar and a golden serpentine helmet hissed out.
Shakshu tossed his cinderblock hammer off his back and spun it around him. Whether it was a sign of luck, peerless perception, or simply knowledge of his own comrade's skills, the numb-skulled obese warrior blacksmith managed to repel a shadowy form of a dragon-helm warrior swinging a battle axe from behind him and the golden snake helm sword fighter attacking him in front by forcing both of them to block and get flung aside at the same time.
"You traitorous scumbags! Don't tell me that this is the reason you brought us along in the first place!" Shakshu bellowed with the volume of a man with a broken heart, betrayed by the very warriors he saw as his brothers in arms.
"Naturally," a high-pitched voice coming from behind him alerted Shakshu, prompting the hefty warhammer brute to jump and turn to confront the dragon-helmed ax-wielder behind him, only to be greeted by thin air. The snake-helm and dragon-helm were twins born on wholly different dimensions, however, because of the link between their emotions and their very fates, they could substitute with each other and shift positions, one twin replacing the other in their native dimension. While Shakshu fought alongside the Twins for some time as both of them were loyal Fennec's mercs, this only made him freeze with terror, knowing that trying to read their movements was hopeless.
"You, Silsilat, Jundun, and Fatina were all brought along as quick and cheap elimination fodder in case there is a preliminary round. You're far too weak to be kept around otherwise. Fennec has been talking for a long time that he's struggling to find suitable assignments for you four losers. He said that some hired grunts he paid a day's lunch worth of coin for impressed him more than you four sometimes," the snake-head twin hissed with a husky voice, standing directly in front of where Shakshu was looking before turning around.
He would have instantly beheaded Shakshu the moment the anxious giant looked back if a spiky chain hadn't wrapped around his body and locked him in place. Silsilat wasn't sure if this would be enough to keep the twins from shifting, but at the very least, he was content with just saving the life of his comrade from the treacherous blade of one of his own.
"Silsilat… You spineless dumbass. This wasn't yet your turn to die. We merely wanted to kick the fat pig to the curb, but you've just earned your spot in the coffin by meddling! Knowing how worthless you two are, you'll probably be dumped in the same one, because no one in their right mind will waste a coffin on each of you. Although… Shakshu will probably have to be chopped up and dried out before being dumped. No way fatso like him can fit into a cargo container, let alone a coffin," the snake-twin cursed both of the loser pair of mercs as they tried coming up with a plan that let them stay alive and on Fennec's good graces after everything just went to shit so fast.
"If we eliminate one of them, the other one will be out as well. Shifting is of no use if the person you're shifting with is nowhere near the battlefield," Shakshu bumbled to Silsilat who only nodded and stomped his dominant leg onto the ground, putting his shoulder into the effort to pull his opponent and turning them into a rag doll enveloped in a spiky chain.
"You fools! Just what do you think you're doing here? If you fuck everything up, you're dead meat anyway!" the cobra-helm twin hissed while Silsilat swung him out and began twirling the hefty chain and the warrior trapped in its wraps over his head.
"You're the fool!" Shakshu exclaimed, pointing his massive cinderblock hammer with one hand as an impressive show of physical strength for someone in his warrior class. "Sure, Fennec might think little of us now, and he will kill us for sure if we eliminate you and make things difficult for the crew. However, if we advance further onto the second stage, or even further still… Moreover… If we win the whole thing! Fennec will have no choice but to admit our worth! Heck, if we win, he won't care about a mistake or two or that we're not as strong as the likes of Vizeriman, Sharsher, Kanoka, or Rere!"
As the final seal on his statement, Shakshu kicked up into the air an impressive distance and altitude given his weight and build and swung his cinderblock hammer to crack into the entrapped cobra-helm warrior to force the chain to reel off from Silsilat's hands and hurl toward the area outside of the arena. Shakshu and Silsilat both pressed their shoulders together to see if they'd defied their lousy odds and defeated an opponent they considered to be worlds ahead of them in terms of combat potential but only the shrill, high-pitched noise of chain clanging and slamming against the protective wall out of bounds only to flop into the artificial lake and drown reached them.
Shakshu felt weightlessness taking over. He tripped and fell on his front while Silsilat scrambled to roll immediately after pushing him. The black dragon-helm axman swung his cleaving murder tool along the ground in a grim attempt to cripple the pair by removing their calves and feet by the knees. Instead of standing there and mocking the pair or continuing the attack, the dragon-helm mercenary vanished without a trace only for the cobra-helm warrior to swing his scimitar in an upward trajectory and scrape Shakshu's face, slashing his left eye out and carving almost a pound of his facial flesh off.
The shadowy dragon-helm warrior kicked Silsilat from the back only for the fallen and unarmed mercenary to scramble and roll aside to let the cobra-helm twin slam his scimitar into the ground in a gutter shot. Wiping the slobber off his face while checking up on his pal with a shifty glance, Silsilat rose on his feet and picked up some chipped piece of Cursed Warrior armor lying around.
"I don't know why Vizeriman thinks you two are such hot shit," Silsilat mocked the pair. "That shifting trick is honestly all you've got. It's so damn easy to read when you get the hang of it and accept the fact that you're twins stuck on different dimensions."
To show his point, Silsilat turned around and extended his arms, still clutching to the armor plate to absorb the axe swing he should have had no right foreseeing. A bloody gash carved into his back as the dimensional shifters repeated their trick again. The golden cobra-helm warrior swung his scimitar around to splash the blood on its edge around as a show of brutality and sword maintenance.
"Just because you can predict us shifting doesn't mean you're fast enough to intercept. You two represent everything wrong with our profession. Just two goons picking up anything around your hands and thinking you're proper mercs. It's exactly why no one takes mercenaries as seriously as they do ninja or samurai or even pirates," the golden cobra-helm twin hissed.
Without warning, the black and spiky dragon-helm ax-wielder pulled the rod of the axe in for a strangling trick around Shakshu's neck. Despite Shakshu being a physical brute first and foremost, he found himself unable to overwhelm and repel the dimensional shifter while he was strangling him almost to the point of Shakshu's lights going out. With a senseless battle cry, Silsilat flung the Cursed Warrior armor plate to the front of Shakshu, deflecting the scimitar that would've disemboweled the choking big man the moment that the twins shifted again.
This interception left the startled golden twin wide open and Shakshu slammed his forehead straight into the helmet, busting his own forehead open and making a mashed mass of crimson out of his own nose but ringing his opponent's bell proper. Silsilat charged forward, ramming into the side of the black dragon-helm twin as the duo shifted again, predicting exactly where the twin would appear before the shift even took place.
"I fucking told you! I've seen your trick a thousand times and I've got you figured out!" Silsilat growled while vainly attempting to shove the shadowy dragon-helm twin off balance. While Silsilat's tackle was ultimately pointless and couldn't take his much taller and bulkier opponent down, it effectively disabled his battle axe and forced the dragon helm to pick Silsilat up for a powerbomb instead.
Shakshu swung his hammer at thin air, figuring that he hadn't seen the twins ever perform two moves in quick succession without shifting. His heart began rattling like a holiday church bell when he felt a crunchy thud at the other end of his hammer that shattered the cinderblock at the other end into powder. Bloody and dazed, the golden twin was on wobbly legs when Shakshu grabbed him from the rear and snapped his neck, leaving his darker half forever trapped in whatever grim place he was born in with nobody to shift with.
"I tried telling him…" Silsilat wheezed while writhing on the ground after a botched powerbomb from the shady dragon-helm powerhouse. "They're so obsessed with their one fucking trick that they can't help themselves but abuse it all the time."
"It doesn't matter if they're two crazy tough guys tagging out with each other. Neither of them can beat two buds watching each other's back, even if they're individually seen as expendable junk," Shakshu panted while bleeding profusely from his smashed and cut-up face and caressing his bruises. The chubby merc extended his shaking and bloody hand to his partner. "Come on up, we've got a battle royale to win, or else Fennec will skin us for this stunt."
"I won't lie, we've been doing better. Our ride's gotten sick of waiting and walked off…" Silsilat accepted the help and got up on his feet only to stare at the back of the clockwork golem who was walking off and abandoned the pair to being ground up, chewed up, and spit out by the cutthroat world of mercenary business.
"Maybe it's the dozen of concussions speaking, but… I don't give a shit," Shakshu shook his head, spilling so much blood that poured from his mauled face that it made his grey beard turn all the shades of red and pink at the same time. "We'll face those monsters together, just like we've kicked the Twins to the curb together. Neither of us would've counted on pulling that off at the start of the day, that's for sure."
"Not that I feel too hot about that option, it's just that I don't see any others," Silsilat leaned to pick up the scimitar that his deceased superior left behind after passing away.
"The shifty Twins from the Fennec mercenary group have been eliminated by a pair of underestimated mercs from their own faction! Who could have predicted that these two who were brought along only as an additional bump to the numbers, just weight to be cast away when the time was right, would end up kicking accomplished Fennec's mercs to the curb!? This leaves it at 45 competitors still competing!" the announcer reported to the rather indifferent audience that looked almost disappointed that the flashy and unpredictable Twins got beat by a pair that used plain and unimpressive weaponry which they've squandered in the middle of the battle.
Silsilat and Shakshu didn't earn a single fan in the audience with their gruesome performance, but that was the way they've made their doughnuts their whole life. They were fine being treated like crap and underestimated, as long as they survived, had a place to kick their feet up in, and some food to fill up with. This was what it meant to be a mercenary, after all.