A cascade of fireballs, kunai dispensers, and cannonballs arced off toward a towering Cursed Warrior. The mysterious, statuesque, black as coal shape waved its wings in front of it, creating a dome-shaped whirlwind that deflected the dispensed barrage fire, cushioned the detonation of the cannonballs, and walled the curious-looking creature off of the flames. With a shrill howl, the Cursed Warrior spread its wings and took off in flight.
"These Cursed Warriors, what on Earth are they? Never in all my years of voyaging have I seen such a thing…" a fit pirate with long hair of silver, a rich and thick grey beard, and a burgundy bandana stared off at the odd-shaped creature that not only didn't resemble a man but didn't appear to resemble any intelligible shape, even if it behaved like a condor bird.
The Cursed Warrior was a core of black, decorated with glowing neon lights of simple shapes that together connected into more complex networks of dots, lines, and circles. At the bottom of the core, there were two sprouts of elongated tendrils that then branched off into three more quadruple the length for each limb. To the upper sides of the core, there were stiff rods dozens of times longer than the sum of the Cursed Warrior, while instead of a head, the Cursed Warrior just had a smaller core stone that branched off into more rods spiking upward.
"You're a fucking has-been, Careg Northon! No wonder you ain't seen nothing but sailors and civilians whose shipping boats you've plundered…" another pirate standing by Careg Northon's side laughed out in mockery of the old man.
"You seem to know who I am, yet I can't say I know you, lad," Careg Northon scratched the back of his hairy head that hid underneath the bandana.
"Why am I not surprised, tramp? Found yourself a cozy little island to retire in and stayed out of the business for a decade, that's what was going to happen. Can't recognize those that have long since surpassed your work when you're looking at them…" a tall and burly pirate with long and slick black hair and a square jaw, wearing a full plate of metallic armor over his red military-style coat seethed, approaching the old-timer pirate and leaning down to press his face against that of the veteran pirate.
"My, my… Young'uns these days don't seem to have any respect for the legends that had them sailing off to the seas for their own adventure…" Careg Northon scratched his back with the two switching positions to stand side-by-side as the howling Cursed Warrior prepared to take a deadly plunge that'd eliminate an entire handful of warriors if they didn't take care.
"Legends? Aye, perhaps that was the case one day, Careg Northon…" the pirate that didn't introduce himself cleared his throat and moved a battle ax out in front of him to prepare to chop off those pesky coral-like protrusions of the Cursed Warrior when he'd swoop down.
Having deflected the myriad of projectiles sent its way, the Cursed Warrior took a plunge. Most men and women dived out of the way. Even if they could stop this aerial configuration of minerals and flashing light, they chose not to strain themselves in what would prove to be a lengthy battle royale comparable to an actual battlefield. Careg Northon pulled out a large hand cannon and took aim at the swooping Cursed Warrior while his companion slid out of the way with a malicious smile. When Northon's eye wandered off to the side, all he could see was the burly and armored pirate bowing before his legendary predecessor.
"He's all yours, Legend…" the burly and armored pirate laughed off and put significant spiteful emphasis on the last word.
Northon grumbled, and gnashed his teeth, turning to the racing cursed missile that homed in on his approximate location. His face had been twisted by desperation to act as the time to get out of the way had passed now. The veteran pirate fired a single hand cannon shot. His handheld cannon spat out a smaller version of the cannonballs that pirate vessels traded during naval battles, though his gleamed with a blue flare. The cannonball punched through a wing part of the Cursed Warrior, cracking it off and leaving it to fall down outside of bounds. The crack had adjusted the trajectory of the air bombing reef creature as it smashed into a wholly different patch of the arena.
The armored pirate that had mocked his predecessor before now laid on his back, grunting and panting as he had taken a significant blow and had to scramble to prevent himself from falling out of bounds while the veteran pirate smiled. Whatever damage he had caused to the plunging Cursed Warrior didn't seem like it'd dealt any significant blow to him. Since the creature lacked a face or a straightforward way to portray its emotions, it remained unclear if it had suffered any sort of damage. Still, it now missed something that it had before, so old man Northon counted it as a win as charged toward the fallen titan while the rest of the chaotic battlefield moved away from where the living meteor had crashed.
With a croaky roar, the old buccaneer sent an expansive wave of grey hair that kept on growing and forming living tendrils toward the direction of the fallen Cursed Warrior. Initially, merely lone strands wrapped around its separate spikes and rods but more and more iron-tight strands wrapped around one another, forming unbreakable clusters strong enough to lift even the titanic Cursed Warrior into the air. Northon reared his hands, bending his fingers inward like the hungry fangs of a massive jaw while flames engulfed his forearms. The pirate soared upward, thrusting his arms toward the monstrous warrior while targeting not a lone limb that may or may not have truly hurt the sum of it all, but instead the core.
"New Found Land!" old man Northon bellowed as his curled fingers cracked into the Cursed Warrior's core, forcing beacons of pure light to beam outward from the damaged core. The damaged core radiated a light that forced even the weathered Careg Northon to cover his face up instead of attacking again. The radiant pulse socked him in the chest like a concussive shock wave. The Cursed Warrior flapped its wing-like structures again, sending a tremendous gale that not only kept it suspended in mid-air but also threatened to flatten all the combatants duking it out in the arena. It was only the fact that Careg Northon's hair still kept the titanic condor restrained that the full force of the gale didn't eliminate half of the competition in one swoop.
"Incredible vitality…" Careg Northon stroked his beard before tightening the grip that the strands of hair still wrapped around his foe had while he drew his arms back for another go. "New Found Land!" he yelled out as his forearms lit up with living flames and he charged for another chomp of his slamming, blazing palms.
This time, the Cursed Warrior appeared to be ready. Something shifted in its core, a cubical-shaped piece slid upward, revealing an opening through which a powerful blowing stream of wind came out. The gale was something different, enchanted by the fundamental creation energy that ignited Careg's own arms. Ninja called it chakra, samurai called it kenki, martial artists called it chi, while the pirates referred to it merely as "guts". Whatever the Cursed Warrior knew it as, the enchanted stream of wind caught up to Careg's arms and forced the surrounding flames to blow out of control, engulfing both sides of Careg Northon in an uncontrollable firestorm.
The old veteran couldn't help himself but let out a pain-ridden scream as the spreading wildfire vortexes threatened to immolate his arms into charring lumps. Careg Northon flopped helplessly on his back after the cruel flames had their way with him. The sleeves of his coat had been torn, and both the sleeves of his coat and the white undershirt had been singed to nothingness while grisly red swelling with black dirt and bruises covered his burnt-up arms. The guts of Careg Northon prevented his arms from burning how human flesh normally surrendered to flames. They had taken substantial damage, but the flesh didn't strip from the bone, nor did it char and sprinkle away like black powder.
Just as old man Northon began picking himself off the ground, he drew strength from his dream. Careg Northon came from an island in the Land of Water archipelago. During the First Great Ninja War, he and the other settlers from his island supported Kirigakure. They couldn't quite fight alongside ninja, but ships operated by settlers provided fire support to the shore battlefront, they also delivered crucial supplies and provided other services to the troops. When the war was over without a clear resolution by a meddlesome peace treaty, Careg couldn't believe it.
His entire time fighting, sailing, and doing his part, he had lost hundreds of men. Careg Northon had seen his childhood friends die on his watch or on their own separate missions. He lived through his sweetheart's death when Land of Sky reduced the medical facilities on the batch of archipelago islands to rubble in an aerial raid. Most of his family had been captured and held prisoner by daring advances of the Konoha military into the Archipelago, forced to re-settle and work to support their own military ventures in the Land of Fire settlements.
And all of that was to end because of some sheet of paper? Was he supposed to forget about how the outlanders had scatted all over his life and tore it to shreds just because some rich and obnoxious fop who started this war decided he had lost enough land and wasted enough money? Perhaps that'd have been for the better, the man Careg Northon was that day knew that much, but the man Careg Northon was all those years ago decided that his war wouldn't end on some peace treaty. If he was to stop fighting, all of those Kage and Feudal Lords would sign their treaties, acknowledging their crimes and apologizing with their lives on the line personally to him…
Careg Northon stood up on two feet and roared a proud battle cry at the descending Cursed Warrior that hovered directly above him. With his messed-up hands, there was little that he could do right now. His torn tendons and muscles could hardly handle the shock of the hand cannons, they couldn't swing a scimitar with enough force to hurt whatever these Cursed Warriors were.
Jets of Wind Release chakra began swirling around a singularity over the upper decorated charm, levitating a tad over the central core of the Cursed Warrior. The concentrated energy gleamed in haunting teal while expanding as a shapeless mass with radiant light eclipsing even the red-hot scorch of the desert sun beaming down at the arena grounds. Careg flicked his head and clapped his burnt hands together, sending a barrage of hair tendrils to wrap around the levitating, shapeless beast. In a desperate struggle, the weathered sea-dog directed the beast's impressive headset to force it to fire its concentrated energy blast upward by wrestling its head and forcing it to shift the direction of where it was aiming.
The blast detonated with ground-shaking repercussions, drowning the skies out in teal light while horizontal whirlwinds expanded in all directions, rippling through the skies and drowning them out in visible hurricane gales. The full effect of the Cursed Warrior's attack was difficult to make out but was the equivalent of the worst cosmic storm imaginable and a mother of all typhoons all compressed into a single mouthful of a blast.
"If you think you'll have me pinned down like that, you've got another thing coming…" Careg Northon barked out, showing his daredevil eyes and a stern expression from underneath his hectic grey hair. "I am Careg Northon, the greatest pirate from a time before even the Pirate Lords ever existed and when the current Pirate Lords still sucked their mother's tits and quivered in terror of mean bedtime stories."
With determination exuding from the buccaneer's whole body, Careg lifted two hand cannons. One in each arm, and aimed them both at the hovering opponent. Without hesitation, the weathered sea-dog fired both of them, sending miniaturized cannonballs ripping toward the airborne Cursed Warrior. A splash of blood splat from both sides, dyeing both of Careg's cheeks as his burnt and weakened arms failed to withstand the aftershock of firing two handheld cannons with both arms. Both radial bones broke at once and the fractured halves thrust their way out through the veteran's arms, but that was okay with him. As long as he got to pin that flying, inhuman asshole down.
The two explosions resonated, hitting the Cursed Warrior's core head-on. Mysterious noises emanated from the core. They didn't sound like human speech, nor were they some sort of bestial howl. It was more like a vocal representation of intense light gleam. A humming that picked up and died out just as fast. The audience held their breaths, wondering if they'd see the Cursed Warrior just spring back to life or if it would it keep plummeting and crash at the arena, squishing half the competitors and greatly cluttering it with its massive carcass.
A howling gale of accumulating jet winds answered their questions as without as much as a flare of its neon lights, the Cursed Warrior began charging up its devastating whirlwind cluster attack. Grinning with a blood-soaked face, Careg Northon beamed a psychotic expression at the hovering beast that prepared to wipe the slate clean with a single concentrated blast.
"You impudent chick of carved stone!" Careg Northon howled by squeezing both his arms and clenching both his fists with enough force to make the open fractures splatter blood from the tension in his muscles and for his burnt flesh and skin to rend and tear from the internalized pressure. "If you think I'll cave in, lower my hands and accept defeat, accept the death of my dream, you've got another thing coming!"
Intense flames flared up around Careg Northon's entire arms. This differed from the previous New Found Lands he had performed as he had put every ounce of his remaining guts in this following strike, even though his body was in no condition to handle it. The flames took a little while to light up. Nothing like the incentive of flashing back through his tough times continuing his one-man war against vessels of all countries, pillaging the civilian carriers, and slaughtering the military and operative ones, all for the sake of fighting a war the lines of which he had lost the track of.
Pointless wrath and violence were something Careg Northon used to excel at. It was the spark of those old times lighting up in old man Northon's head that made his skin and flesh sear off the bone with a grisly sizzle as his collapsing arms lit up with New Found Land's flame. The size of his arms inflated with tension at first, but as he burned up every sprinkle of body fat in his body with one go, Careg's arms became feeble and pathetic little stumps before charring alongside the bone.
He had fought his war for decades, never knowing what he fought or why he kept going on. It was his generation of defiant adventurers and spiteful, abandoned soldiers that had begun the age of piracy that had never ended and continued to this day. It took him meeting someone special that questioned the reason for all this violence and bloodshed and pillaging for Careg to realize his folly and change his ways, to gather the lost and those fleeing the constant feuding and the warring and settle them on an island in the Archipelago where Careg took care of their every need and took charge of the settlement. After long years, Careg Northon, the pirate legend of age before the Pirate Lords, settled down and became a settlement chief.
Now before him, Careg had a chance to fight his way through the strongest warriors in the world and claim with his own two hands a settlement safe and sound and deep within the continental bossom. He could bring the settlers here and at last free them of the pirate raids and tributes, free them of constant Kirigakure watchdogging and having to pay tribute to the Feudal Lord. After all, the Sheikhates considered themselves separate from the Feudal Lord and all saw themselves as unrecognized Feudal Lords of their own. This was the only place like this in the world for his people. This was their promised land and their paradise!
With bloodshot, whited out and wild eyes, and a blood-soaked face, Careg Northon roared while performing a kata and igniting his arms fully, before supercharging his ninjutsu-taijutsu combination and increasing the size and volumes of the fiery blazes around his crispy arms dozens of times. The merciless and inhuman Cursed Warrior spewed out a jet stream of teal gale toward the arena but Careg Northon took off at the same time, thrusting both of his arms that had burnt down to charred powder and sprinkled off of his core up to the shoulder as the two energy masses collided with one another. The stunned warriors stopped their rampage to observe the aerial collision and marvel at the valiant struggle of the dragon-head-shaped flare that drilled into the teal stream of a compressed whirlwind.
However, the flame only provided a struggle for a few meek moments before beginning to die down. The stream of Wind Chakra flowing from the headpiece of the Cursed Warrior took no time at all before overwhelming Careg Northon and snuffing his flames out. The crushed pirate veteran coughed up blood and rolled his eyes back as his armless frame blasted off and slammed against the spectator stands, leaving hundreds of wounded to wail as the unconscious and trampled pirate laid sprawled out and motionless in the crater.
"Hmph… Careg Northon, you really did still have it in you, old man… What a fucking legend…" the armored and bulky pirate ran his hand across his slick neck-long hair before laughing out loud. "If I had a keg in my hand right now, mate, I'd salute you."
"Careg Northon the pirate has been eliminated. The remaining number of competitors now is 175!" the announcer's yell overpowered the lamentations and horrified wailing of the audience. A sizeable chunk of them fled the arena in terror after realizing how little protection the spectators had against this clash of the world's most ambitious, famed, and powerful warriors colliding with each other in the arena.
And their bloody battle royale had just gotten started…