The competing genin did not wait long after the beginning of the match was declared to start their courses to crash collision. Just before the end of the sentence that left Oke's mouth stopped resonating in everybody's minds completely, Tankobaji darted off like a javelin, wielding the iron staff with both of his hands and growling like a wild animal.
Kres-T crossed his wrists in a manner that entrapped Tankobaji's iron staff, making it get stuck in between the two axe handles that laid sharpened and maintained at the sides of Kres-T's bracelets. A loud clang ringed as the iron rings attached to the staff kept on moving out of inertia whereas the staff had fully stopped. With a pair of strong motions, fueled from both his shoulders, strong arms and his beefy chest, Kres-T attempted to break the staff and had it been something made of shoddier stuff he would have undoubtedly succeeded.
In this case, he did nothing else but waste his well-earned time to counterattack.
Without telegraphing his movements or letting out as much as a warning, Tankobaji let go of his iron staff and leaped onto it, using the time that Kres-T took to return to fighting position and prepare for a counter to his own gain. Unfortunately, to the ferocious persona, Kres-T read his moves completely and entrapped the young man's leg between his arms before swinging and tossing him aside, making him smash into one of the bone towers.
With a ferocious and sadistic yell of a psycho who had sniffed weakness and blood of his opponent, Kres-T attempted to drive his flying knee right into his opponent, kneeling him in between his stiffened by chakra augmentations knee and notoriously difficult to break Kaguya bone pillar, crushing and grinding his opponent's bones and innards with such a strike. Tankobaji was ready for this attack, however, using his tight grip he pulled his lower body up and wrapped his thighs around the sides of the bone pillar, appearing almost like a spider lurking for his prey before launching himself with a vicious tackle at his opponent who had missed his mark.
The two continued to plummet down as Tankobaji forced the thighs of his opponent up on his shoulders and wrapped his own legs around the upper body of Kres-T, sending both of them spinning and crashing into the rivers of acid below. A mighty roaring whirlpool of acid burst into motion together with stone, dirt as well as rubble from the sheer force of impact. These two appeared to hold nothing back, the ferociousness of the Tankobaji persona matched the psychotic brutality and the thirst for blood that Kres-T displayed blow for blow and even found chances to return it with some bonus.
A splash of acid followed by a blue flare of chakra neutralizing its persisting effects followed in a short while, signaling that both combatants had hit the bottom of the acid pools and jumped out from its corrosive waters, using the bottom of the rivers for support for their wild leaps. Kres-T utilized the String Reeling Jutsu to zip-line himself to a nearby tower, having the steel wire wrap around the narrower parts of the bone pillar while he zipped himself to its surface, sticking to it with the Art of Tree Climbing.
Tankobaji, on the other hand, simply burst from under the acid's surface surrounded by his hellish flames, using the same showy jutsu that he used for his entrance, the blazing vortex arced in the middle, placing him right in the middle of another bone tower where Tankobaji used a matching method of remaining stuck to it with his feet as his opponent did.
The reason why the primal persona of Gentib took longer than his piledriver'ed opponent to surface was revealed once an audience member glared at the iron rod decorated with clanging iron rings that the bestial genin held in his grasp. The spiky crimson wig, however, had slipped off Tankobaji's head revealing the youth's natural, much shorter than the wig he had adorned, brown spikes.
"Good… You've had enough brain in that head of yours to adorn this persona for me, the brutal one, your strongest one, from what I've heard. That's the only way you'd stand a chance against me, after all!" Kres-T smiled.
"He's wrong though." Mana noted. "Gentib isn't taking this seriously at all, after all, he's still playing his persona game. Each one of his personas uses a different part of his own arsenal, doesn't it? That means he is still dividing his arsenal on purpose and not fighting his best."
"Not necessarily", Kiyomi shrugged, "There's power in simplicity. There's confusion in complexity. If you have five different ways to do something, you'll take time to think things through, you'll hesitate and in a brutal brawl like this it might be lethal."
"I think you underestimate these personas, Mana", Stea sighed, "They are not just flashy entertainment for the audience, they are entirely different personalities, a different mindset with which Gentib views the world, can't you see?"
Stea's words made the magician note something of interest to her – from what she remembered during the brief encounter with the persona in the Forest of Death, Tankobaji was all instinct and no forethought. The persona did not speak, while when Gentib was in the other persona, sometimes it would have been preferable that he refused to speak. Perhaps there was more sense to it than Mana thought initially. Only a persona that did not speak or think things through too hard and acted on pure instinct and rage was fitting to fight someone as intimately and painfully linked to Gentib as Kres-T.
Had Gentib been himself, fought the Kumogakure genin with his full arsenal and full emotional and strategic baggage at his disposal he would have faced a young man who was partially responsible for his friend's unfortunate passing. There could have been no way that Gentib would have managed to fight right under those conditions.
Tankobaji roared out as if to vent the built up rage and the pain from his early exchange of blows before making his hand, that which he made free from having to hold his iron staff, weave a bunch of hand seals before clenching it into a fist. The fist lit up with the searing heat that first started as superheated vapor before bursting into actual flames flowing through the youth's pores like sweat would have normally done.
As the overflowing chakra continued to channel through Tankobaji's fist, the construct of flaming fist continued to build up and grow in size and power. Kres-T moved his hand behind him, reaching in for the pouch on his hip before filling his hand with a good grip of small purple marbles, which he proceeded to fling wildly at Tankobaji's direction. Once the handful became short of explosive marbles he removed some more again from his pouch, trying to pin his bestial opponent down before blowing him back down.
With previously unseen, animal-like agility and ferocity, Tankobaji acrobatically maneuvered around the explosive barrage of spheres flying his way, using the cover of the bone towers when him being pinned down made it impossible to completely evade disturbance in the channeling process. Then, out of the blue, Tankobaji leaped out from behind one of the bone pillars and dived down in a flipping arc, aiming to land where his opponent was and deliver the gut-wrenching strike from his channeled Fire Style punching technique.
"Too slow!" Kres-T almost singed out of pent-up sadistic glee as he drove the final bomb he had kept, having played possum this entire time that he had run out of bombs and waited for his opponent to move in close. The little explosive marble detonated right up in Tankobaji's face, blowing the upper body of the poor genin right off clean.
"Wait, where's your staff?" The sadistic explosive expert mumbled to himself, having noticed that Tankobaji was rushing to him without his iron staff, a tool which he showed placing great importance for. With a loud poof and the disappearance of the bestial genin in a smoke cloud, the substitution with the iron staff was revealed as the iron rod swung wildly, having been tossed away by the explosive force of the detonation of the bomb at point-blank.
"Tankobaji: Belphegor!" Tankobaji roared out with a rising fiery punch from his blazing construct, flying up from below, where he substituted with his hidden staff from. The back of Kres-T bent uncomfortably and in an angle that invited the audience to clench in their seats and turn away before the gruesome result of forceful impact was hidden away from them by a powerful firestorm that resulted from the successful punch.
Kres-T darted upward, tossed and toyed with by the forces of resulting shockwaves, bashing lifelessly against the protective barrier as the speed at which he was moving proved dangerous to the audience and the integrity of the arena itself making the genin get treated as a projectile by the barriers. A moment later, gravity did its work, sending the Kumogakure examinee tumbling back down.
The audience jumped up to their feet in shock when the bloodied and burnt up hand suddenly grabbed the tip of the bone pillar, breaking Kres-T's fall and the sadistic grin once again colored the face of the ax-wielding Kumogakure ninja. With brute force alone, the injured ninja pulled himself up and stood up on the very tip of the bone pillar, using what seemed like impeccable balance for his state of injury to balance on it. The young man clenched for his wounds and blood was trickling relentlessly from his mouth, suggesting rather heavy internal damage.
Without uttering as much as a word, the brute removed his ax bracelets and tossed them aside. Not without care, thusly so that they caught onto the other bone pillars, rotating and clinging on them like horseshoes around nails in a popular game for shepherds in the Kumogakure wastelands.
"Who do you think you're fooling?!" Kres-T roared out, it was not only pain speaking from the bottom of his chest. It was certain excitement as well. "You dropped your staff when you hid behind the bones to fool me and substitute with it when you needed it. That's not how brutal and mindless animal thinks. That's all your stupid personas are – charades! You're still thinking, you're still feeling deep down!"
"Come, think of your dead jerkoff friend as you choke on the gas he choked on before death!" Kres-T roared out before revealing that the hand he was clenching his wounds with was full of dark purple spheres that he scattered wildly to fall below and burst into thick clouds of poison gas.
The audience covered up their faces in fear, plenty of them wondered momentarily if the protective barriers would hold, if they would protect them from the noxious and toxic gases that Kres-T used to sink the entire lower to middle layers of the arena in a complete, purple shade. This formula was a new one, thicker, almost like it carried more mass and density to it, almost like it was sludgy to an extent, it was as much poison gas as a smashed apple was apple juice.
"Idol: Shooting Hubble!" Tankobaji's voice echoed from somewhere deep inside the corrosive and irritant toxic hell as a powerful concussive windblast split the clouds of gas apart, greatly weakening them in. Kres-T covered his face up, just this minimal protective measure was enough, at the distance he was standing in, to not receive what little of the concussive force came at him.
"Calm your swing, daddy-o," Takemito smiled from below, still in full Tankobaji make-up and outfit, "You're losing your groove".
The genin on both observatories, those that were not using the lucrative services of the local infirmary all collectively shouted out in disbelief. Gentib was changing the rules of his game, switching his persona on the fly, or rather mashing them together as he saw fit as he could have easily used the Transformation Jutsu to change his appearance, but he did not. It was clearly a statement of sorts.
Kres-T grunted before moving his hands away from obstructing his vision. He removed what he still had left of his explosive bombs and began using them to rain destruction from above. Gentib, with whatever persona occupied his mind, leaped aside attempting to evade the relentless raining outrage of his opponent but he met a wall of poison he was unwilling to dive into, getting hit by multiple explosives head on and sent tumbling down into the acid river.
"There you are!" Kres-T shouted out diving like a bird of prey after a measly rat from atop of the bone pillar, catching his opponent by his real hair before sticking his feet to the bone tower and beginning to beat down on the weakened and injured Gentib as he saw fit. "Revealed in your hypocrisy, defying the rules you set for yourself, the way you fight. Abandoning your personas just for the sake of not getting hurt!"
At some point, it was becoming uncomfortable to watch as Kres-T's rampage continued. Both young men began spewing an alarming amount of blood accumulated from extensive internal injuries, Gentib's face had swollen immensely and become near unrecognizable from the amount of surface-deep acid burns, the much more severe explosion caused injuries and seemingly endless pummeling he had received up close. Kres-T even playfully nudged his opponent's face into the closing down clouds of poison gas that were beginning to surround the two brawlers.
Kres-T grabbed Gentib's head firmly, pressing hard on the genin's temples as he toyed around with his opponent's body, smashing it against nearby bone towers and dipping him into the poison fog while cleverly retreating further from it himself to where only his opponent got submerged at his most desperate for air moments.
"You cannot abandon your petty, stupid self and surrender to that dumb persona, can you?" Kres-T looked down at his properly pummeled opponent whom he so easily held in his hand and could have let go and lost in the foaming acid pools below whenever he pleased. "You want to lose yourself in the battle but your jerkoff dead friend keeps the real you surfacing up, is that it? You just can't forget good old Gorm, can you?" Kres-T kept on teasing his seemingly powerless opponent before Gentib's strong fingers dug into his wrist which he held the boy's head with.
"Are you writing a book, actor?" Gentib smiled, at least as much as it was possible to tell from his swollen and beaten expression. Before the iron grip forced his head to be freed from Kres-T's grip as his fingers dug into some sensitive nerves. "You've been a big tickle, daddy! Now I'm gonna cut your gas though."
A quick combination of blows aimed at various sensitive vitals confused Kres-T with its unexpected nature. The Kumogakure brute desperately leaped back to run away both the enclosing gas clouds and the out of nowhere rising second wind of his opponent.
"Idol: Babcock Stream!" the battle-worn yet still intimidating nonetheless voice of Gentib reached Kres-T right before a powerful wind pressure enveloped Kres-T and started sending him flying wildly upward, towards the tips of the bone pillars. Gentib's hands raced with hand seals so that his opponent did not finish this trip.
"Tankobaji: Chantico!" Gentib's voice took the former ferocious and almost bestial tone for Tankobaji momentarily as the entire body of the young man got enveloped in flames that he breathed out before he dashed at his opponent, aiming to reach the still enveloped in the gust of Babcock Stream Kres-T. The aim was clearly to use the highly volatile reactive nature of both Wind and Fire Releases to finish off his opponent, overwhelming any possible leftover chakra he had to invest into his augmentation and to show the amount of power that would break a ninja had they tried to augment themselves to tank it all in.
The result of the collision of the two techniques, both the Tankobaji's fiery Chantico tackle and the resonating gusts of Babcock Stream was a devastating blast of white light. The flare was so intense that it matched the blinding powder that Nanaba used earlier despite it being only the aftereffect of the combined techniques. What remained of the forest of bones and rivers of acid was revealed not when the white flare faded but when the audience emboldened to confront the results of the match.
It was almost like the forest of bones had melted away, it was still unclear what the bones were made of as it resulted in the pools of acid, which had evaporated completely in the blast, become filled with an odd black and blaze colored sludge that awkwardly rustled with weak flames on its surface in the place of the acid, meanwhile only small sharp charcoal stumps remained of the once astonishing pillars of white.
Slowly and with increasing boldness overseer Oke stepped into the protective barrier, firmly laying his eyes on the standing on his two own feet Gentib and his passed out opponent. Gentib rushed up to the tall Kumogakure brute and carefully nudged him with his foot so that the giant did not slip into the fiery sludge of the molten Kaguya bone material before looking at his unconscious opponent from his upright position.
"You were right, you know", he mumbled out, barely audible to the audience and, more importantly, to the Ninja Council area. "The only way I could have matched you up close was if I embraced my brutal Tankobaji persona. However, I found a better way. By confronting what happened with Gorm, I managed to move past his death and forgive you and Jean-D for the role you played in it. You did not care much if he lived or died, you were disrespectful after his passing and, I could see it then, you enjoyed knowing that he died. Fighting with that burning inside me would have been unbearable so I managed to become the better man and move on, forgive everything that burnt me up. Only because of that forgiveness could I embrace all of my personas at once, instead of facing you as just Tankobaji. Your only mistake was assuming had not moved past my friend's passing and enjoyed the rage, the power that my desire for revenge may have given me for a cheap yet empty thrill of payback. No, I moved on, that's what true ninja are and what they do."
Gentib left his opponent downed at that, his victory was confirmed and officially declared as he walked away and approached the edge of the protective barrier, stepping into the corridor and disappearing there.
"Yeah… We're probably going to fix this place before we proceed to the final match of this year's Chuunin Exams!" What began with a confused and unsure mumble ended up with a declaration full of hype and intention to inspire it in the audience. Oke comically jumped around trying to wipe the easily flammable sludge that kept getting stuck on his feet and coughing on the toxic and nauseous air of the evaporated Vinda's acid before a pair of staff ninja rushed in to begin cleaning the air inside the barriers and fixing the arena.
"The flash of light after the two jutsu collided… You did not display anywhere nearly as painful reaction to the light as you did before. Good. Perhaps you will keep your promise after all…" Stea politely smiled while avoiding looking at Mana as she spoke to her before turning around and heading toward the maze of corridors. She still had some time left as the arena was being repaired so it was unlikely that she was heading straight to the final destination. Either way, Mana was better to worry about her own matters if she was to keep that promise she suffered and worked for so long to be able to keep.