A colorful Sky Warrior held himself clenched to the side of the ridge separating the two halves of the arena, with a trench in between. He wore a stone mask underneath a red hooded cloak that was made entirely out of feathers. Scattered in between the red were decorative feathers of various colors. Similarly to some of his peers, this Sky Warrior held on using brass claws attached to his feet while his forearms showed off massive pincer-like gauntlets.
"Brave Sky Warrior, I am Guard Woman. I've seen many impressive feats of agility and skill from your peers. I would like to challenge you to a fight!" a tall and burly woman clad in showy armor and donning a Pegasus-shaped decoration on the strongest and densest chest plate of her armor proclaimed. The impressive build of this woman suggested that she'd have been able to pull people out of cave-ins and hold back mudslides with ease.
Giving the bold Earth Country woman who belonged to the group of superheroes a look, the colorful Sky Warrior burst into high-pitched laughter. Given how this behavior was nothing like the heroine expected her opponent to act, she leaned her head to the side with curiosity boiling inside her about what prompted such a reaction. Until now, all Sky Warriors held themselves together as stoic and ruthless fighters, yet this one bawled like a jester.
"It shows how green you are at this whole fighting thing, superhero. You don't ask for permission, you just attack!" the colorful Sky Warrior mocked his opponent, leaning down by his tucking his knees and opening up the impressive clobbering pincers. The oddball Sky Warrior seemed ready to strike. Taking a leap, the colorful warrior glided across the arena with his pincers and brass claws pointing down. Hindered by the wide glide of her opponent, the superheroine had to push and shove through bustling crowds of rowdy warriors to find him again.
The constant distraction of her airborne opponent led the superheroine straight into something rock-solid and hard. Despite her stoutness and physical strength, the brawny woman bumped into something massive and inhuman and got forced on her rear. Once she shook her head and examined what she bumped into, she realized it was one of the Cursed Warriors, comprised entirely out of obsidian and shaped like a bipedal, four-armed dragon with a glowing network of red flames glowing through the cracks in its exterior decorating the titan. Unlike some of its peers, this Cursed Warrior had fingers and toes, they were made entirely out of ruby though as if sculpted that way. The same was the case with its goat-like curled horns that gleamed ruby-red on its head.
"I apologize, I was following my opponent and I appear to have…" the superheroine attempted to excuse herself when the titanic bipedal dragon turned toward her. The ring-shaped mosaic decorating its facial plate lit up with intense red flames that soon engulfed the dragon's entire body. Winding up its fist, the Cursed Warrior brought it down at the naïve superheroine, forcing her to dash on her back foot and evade the smash.
The erupting force split the entire half of the arena where the battle was taking place, devastating the arena grounds with cracks and ruptures from which jets of red flames erupted. The innocent superheroine grunted in pain as the flames brushed against her armored front and tossed her backward, covered with minor burns and bruises. Having dealt with the pesky attacker and lost her track, the Cursed Warrior returned to battle.
Cackling in mid-air and curling himself into a ball from how hilarious he found the prank he pulled on the pesky heroine, the colorful Sky Warrior vaulted over and rolled to the side to return to the mountainous ridge he could grip onto and wait this hectic brawl out until fewer competitors remained. With a snap, a steel wire looped around his foot and the aerial warrior felt a massive weight dragging him down to the heat of the battle, where he wanted to be the least. With a swift and precise eyesight that all Sky Warriors were proud of, the birdman's eye locked upon Guard Woman having tied his leg up and chuckling through painful winces.
Clearly, this lady hasn't had enough yet…
"I use this steel wire to pull out people and entire buildings from underneath mudslides. It's as handy of a tool to have as any weapon. I've also honed my muscles to be able to rescue a sunken building from underneath a mudslide, and I ease earthquakes by moving tectonic plates apart daily. You're not getting out of my grip!" Guard Woman boldly claimed while flexing her right biceps that shined like a round boulder from underneath the armor plate covering her shoulder and connecting to the flashy armor pieces protecting her neck.
"You're annoying, wench, get lost!" the Sky Warrior shrieked out in a high-pitched voice while leaning down and snipping the wire with its pincers. Despite a strong chakra coating, the Sky Warrior's pincers seemed to ruin the wire by crushing it into a messy configuration of thinner wires that scattered and muddled separately without cutting the strand itself.
"What incredible pinching strength!" Guard Woman gasped. "My chakra coating held when I corrected the trajectory of the moon to ease the tides in the Stone Gulf!"
"Of course, all of us Sky Warriors have invented unique fighting styles based on birds of prey we've observed in the wild on the flying islands of the Sky Country. I've fashioned mine after the deadly macaw so my pincers could smash your head like a macaw's beak crushes nuts and carapaces of wild insects!" the Sky Warrior claimed, pointing his massive pincers that could've easily served as hammers if he pinched them together and swung them around like maces.
"Macaw? That's not exactly a bird that inspires fear…" Guard Woman squinted.
"Belittle me at your own peril, pest!" the macaw-like Sky Warrior shrieked, turning around and charging right toward the superheroine. The macaw moved so fast that it left afterimages in its trail and its own image became blurry enough to be impossible to tell from the illusory doppelgangers. Even worse, the Sky Warrior began dancing around his opponent, utterly baffling her with the number of afterimages left in his wake and hypnotizing her perceptions with his colorful chakra-coated feather cloak.
"Spirit Art: Roundabout Chatter!" the Sky Warrior exclaimed, spreading his arms to the sides while almost pulling his hands out from the pincer gauntlets, only to open them wide and spin them around at incredible speed. Then, the macaw-like warrior stuffed them back in at once and pinched them with a violent sonic boom. Guard Woman exclaimed in surprise when her opponent manifested two solid discs of thin air and noise that spouted sparks as they spun around in the Sky Warrior's grip. With a shrill yell, he lobbed the two buzzing discs of compressed air and noise toward his opponent.
True to her name, Guard Woman hunkered down and put her strongest armor plates out in front of her while augmenting her toughness to the limit. Despite that, the buzzing discs slashed clean through her guard with shallow, bloody cuts and then detonated with a sonic boom inside the open wound to widen it drastically and splatter blood all around. In a blink, the Sky Warrior vanished and appeared in front of Guard Woman with his pincer hands completely out of the range of human perception.
Brief images of the macaw-like fighter swinging his open pincers about and using their jagged edges for rough cuts flashed as the Sky Warrior may have slashed the childlike superheroine a good dozen times in just a single blink as with what felt like a single stroke he delivered multiple strikes at once. "Spirit Art: Macaw Crash!" the Sky Warrior yelled out, spreading his whole arms out wide and pinching his gauntlets to form tunneling airwaves of compressed air and noise. Then, the warrior slammed both his spread arms and his gauntlets together to slam both tunneling airwaves full of violent sonic booms together with Guard Woman caught in the middle.
"This is looking rough!" the announcer stated the obvious, then again, with how utterly incapable the audience was in following even the broadest strokes of the Sky Warrior's speedy blitz, he needed that level if not greater clarity for the tide of battle to be clear to them. "Despite impressive physical strength and toughness, Guard Woman's inexperience with battling leaves her at the full mercy of the Sky Warrior Papagei. Not to mention that Guard Woman is one of the physically strongest, toughest, and fastest heroes in the entire world! This is looking grim for the heroes' chance of establishing a headquarters here at Agbarah!"
Guard Woman's armor began shattering and chipping off chunk by chunk. The incredible concussive and compressive force of the two colliding airwaves made the hefty armor chink off with dull thuds as the chipped pieces hit the ground. Guard Woman collapsed on one knee while panting heavily and showing some nasty bruises and bloody shiners all over her body. However, just as Papagei dashed airward and positioned himself over Guard Woman, wanting to clutch her in his brass claws and throw her out of the arena, the superheroine vanished before his claws could clutch together.
"What the…!?" he yelled out in a high-pitched voice.
"My body feels so light suddenly…" Guard Woman stood farther away from where Papagei wanted to fling her overhead and out of the arena. The stone-masked Sky Warrior could only shake in place, unable to believe that someone could have blitzed him. He was one of the five fastest and most agile Sky Warriors around. Definitely in the upper echelon, and yet he couldn't see a trace of that woman's movement.
"What's with that aura…?" Papagei exclaimed in surprise, noting a blue glow that waved with tendrils around Guard Woman's body and an azure flash that gleamed from her eyes.
"My armor…" Guard Woman muttered before becoming just a blue flash of light and blinking up in front of the Sky Warrior. Before Papagei could even gape his mouth, the desperate heroine delivered a single nonchalant uppercut that reduced the Sky Warrior's mask to a mash of pebbles and pierced him through the clouds with the sonic boom emitted from his flight nearly matching the ones produced by his pincers. With a mere twitch of her knees, Guard Woman channeled enough strength to pursue her airborne opponent.
"It takes willpower augmentation for me to wear it and move around at a pace necessary for a hero who has to be everywhere all at once," Guard Woman said in an emotionless tone. Papagei thrust his pincer with a horizontal pinch, looking to catch and crush the heroine in his iron grip, but she was gone long before the pincers could snap her shut.
A sharp and lightning-swift jab to the gut made Papagei blank out and fall lifeless onto Guard Woman's fist which was the only thing holding him up. "This has never happened before, but since I wasn't aware I lost my armor, I kept up the augmentation necessary to wear it. Now, all that energy went straight into augmenting my body, without the armor to bog me down. I've lost the toughness necessary to protect everyone, but I've become much faster and stronger than ever before."
As a testament to her point, Guard Woman crossed her arms on her chest and began spinning around in place, manifesting a cosmic-class storm around her and forming a whirlwind that attracted clouds toward it from the other side of the world and entirely different continents, slurping them up like noodles on a turning fork to form a white anticyclone centrifuge. Guard Woman wound up with a half-assed punch and shot it out. A concussive outburst sent Papagei flying off into the horizon, yet until he'd landed somewhere, the elimination wouldn't count.
A shrill battle cry filled the sky as the scorned Sky Warrior recovered and halted himself, emitting a sonic boom from the collision of two conflicting forces while he struggled to stop the backward flight that'd have fired him straight out of the orbit without resistance. In a flash, the macaw-man appeared in front of Guard Woman in a grisly image of a moment, frozen in time. He gritted with a nasty expression with his left pincer gauntlet wide open and aiming to squish Guard Woman's skull in-between.
The heroine of the radiant blue aura extended her hands, stopping the two pincers in place. Papagei gnashed his teeth in a mad struggle to force his pincers to close and splatter the woman's hands, but no such thing occurred. Without signs of much physical trouble, Guard Woman spread her arms to the sides, shattering the left pincer gauntlet and making Papagei's painted face twist because of the jolt of stress this induced.
With her opponent wide open, with the pincer fragments still scattered, Guard Woman delivered a roundhouse that hung Papagei on her leg like wet clothes on a rope and blasted him off to the side. Further aside, a Cursed Warrior was fighting against a woman in a black leather bodysuit and a ponytail of dark hair who was scaling the monumental body of the flying titan. Their hectic aerial struggle made Papagei's limp body bounce off of the Cursed Warrior's flapping wing and hurl right back to the pursuing heroine.
The azure aura around Guard Woman's body began blinking, and the intense light beaming from her eyes signaled on and off. With intense focus, the desperate heroine preserved her amp of chakra augmentation and focused it solely on her forearms while delivering a vicious flurry of blows that battered Papagei. With the last ounces of her chakra aura amp draining, Guard Woman threw a roundhouse to knock Papagei as far away as possible and ring him out with the last of her strength. Having spontaneously lost her ability to sustain flight and being severely drained of stamina, the heroine began plummeting back down to the boisterous arena.
"Look at that! Papagei weathered the storm! It seems like the shocking effects on Guard Woman's body from the chakra augmentation amp were only temporary and lasted until her body got accustomed to its normal stress after losing the armor!" the announcer explained what had occurred to the audience to the best of his ability. He was a veteran who witnessed many much more technical battles than this, so his educated theories often came as close to the truth as they got.
"Damn it!" Papagei cursed, rolling in mid-air and sending a pulse of chakra across his cloak of macaw feathers to grant himself the ability to glide in the air. "I can't afford to hang with a monstrous opponent like that! Even if she doesn't massacre me, there's no way I'll survive the later stages of the competition in the state such a battle would leave me in!"
A muscular figure in curly strawberry-blond hair and deep blue eyes took a mighty bound from the surface of the arena. He had to backhand a rushing martial artist who dragged across the entire arena and then kick aside a rushing condor-like Cursed Warrior before using his body as a platform to kick off and jump from. Because of his red bodysuit decorated with thick black outlines, he looked like a red blur when rushing to catch his fellow superhero in her time of need and safely bring her to the ground and fending off cravens rushing for a cheap elimination until she recovered.
While the strongman of a chiseled jawline and boulder-thick muscles lacked the technical capacity to match the warriors, assassins, and fighters of all sorts around him, his boundless physical strength let him out-wrestle them and his toughness that was second to Guard Woman's alone let him tank their best shots with a smile that made the enemy reconsider their ambition of taking care of the rescue-oriented superhero team.
"Where did that sudden burst of power come from? With that much speed, you could pull people out from every calamity in the entire world at once and that strength might give me a run for my money and I showcase my guns for flair!" the square-jawed superhero smiled to his friend who panted and leaned down, showing signs of grievous battery across her entire body.
"I think my body became accustomed to me no longer having my armor on. If you wear something heavy and then lose it, you'll only feel featherweight for a couple of seconds before your body becomes accustomed to it and the lightweight becomes your new normal…" Guard Woman struggled to straighten her back and return to fighting form.
"All that fancy talk went right over my head, Alte!" the Adonis in a red jumpsuit laughed out, beaming extreme confidence for someone who was this oblivious. "Don't worry though, if time to recover is what you need, you can count on me!"
"I… Didn't say anything fancy at all…" Guard Woman's right eye twitched as her friend's casual use of her civilian name alongside his usual aloof attitude struck a nerve.
A hulking man of spiky, dark plum-colored hair danced around a handful of scuffles around him. The man wore a red bodysuit and a brown flak jacket–signature features of an Iwagakure uniform, though his showed signs of battlefield wear as it hadn't been changed since the Iwagakure capitulation. The man had whited out eyes and a tiara of beads around his forehead, while his hands were armed with brass knuckles of red steel.
"A ninja!?" Guard Woman's simpleton friend gasped in surprise before slipping in to his friend's defense.
"Sorry, but this land will mark the restoration of independent Iwagakure. With my homeland's freedom at stake, I'll target even an injured woman without hesitation!" the shinobi donning Iwagakure uniform didn't hesitate one bit before colliding with the chiseled titan of power who stood as a staunch defender of his colleague and friend in her time of dire need.
"In that case, foul villain, you'll be smacked aside by Hero Man!" the buff superhero in the short-sleeved red and black bodysuit that tightly wrapped around his strapping features proclaimed.
"Hero Man? I thought you guys make these nicknames up. You couldn't have done any better than that?" the ninja in Iwagakure uniform reared his teeth as the two titans collided in the middle in a struggle for power as their muscles ballooned out of proportion and littered with veins while the ground around them shook.
"I am a simple man, so I label things as they are!" the curly-haired superhero proclaimed proudly as if his limited mental capacity was something to be present and be in awe about.
"Simple? More like simpleton…" the Iwa ninja barked out through severe physical stress while blackness crept up his body and colored his skin dark as dirt. "Earth Style: Iron Skin!" the ninja proclaimed, freezing in place with dark and hard as diamond skin. Because of this X-factor, the interloping Iwagakure shinobi became rigid and entrenched like a stone mountain and became the immovable object to match Hero Man's unstoppable force.