The ring of competitors tightened more and more, establishing a stranglehold around the towering statue depicting a fabled Tailed Beast, though littered with cracks and stuck full of arrows. Flares of yellow light gleamed off of the statue as it stood over her fallen and injured friend, adamant against the washing tide of the world to protect him at all costs.
In an unexpected turn, the crowd split directly in front of the statue, revealing a sharp-looking buccaneer in a black and golden coat approaching the statue directly, without a hint of intimidation or need for support. Pirate Lord Green, Hideo l'Ollonais, decided to be the one to test his luck against the mad statue first.
"I hope you will forgive my rudeness, beast of stone. I do not partake in battle unless I am willing to allow the madness of violence to consume me. It is therefore imperative to me to take the chance of seizing every opportunity to eliminate all weakened warriors unable to defend themselves. Normally, I might have shied away from attacking someone directly, but you are no human. A beast of stone sheds no blood or tears. You I can crush if it means a faster end to this blood fest," the Pirate Lord drew a dress-sword-like saber and pointed its tip toward the snout of the Five-Tails statue.
The yellow shine of spiritual light leaking through the cracks in Mana's stone prison body slowly changed its twinge, adopting a fierier, blaze-like shade. L'Ollonais' hand moved like a blur, casting hundreds of thrusts of his saber at once, but all it achieved was ripples in front of a blazing force field surrounding the rebellious member of Chaos Factor. The Pirate Lord vanished, becoming a black and golden blur that flashed across the area but every time he struck the statue hosting Mana's spirit and mind, the thrust bounced off, bending his sword while each time he tried impaling and eliminating Endo instead, he received a kick or a headbutt for his trouble which he was forced to block and skid back.
It was a clamorous and violent dance without end. It continued to amaze the crowd of bystanders that didn't want to get caught in L'Ollonais' violent rampage since the Pirate Lord had dropped his façade of a cool head and was slowly tapping into something else. Something mindless and very evil dwelling deep down in his spirit. The rest of the Chaos Factor, who had become part of the crowd, now turned their backs and slipped further to the outer rings of the spectating audience of the crowd vying to eliminate Endo and Mana for her persistence in defending him.
"Tortuga Flail!" L'Ollonais chanted out, with whited-out, savage eyes. His slick and pointy, curved mustache had split into wild, unkempt brushes. His greasy yet tidily combed hair spiked up to the sides of his head as his chakra leaked out from every pore of his body. The bursting energy had flung his black and gold cape wide open and tore his vest and shirt up from the tension of his bulking-up body.
A burgundy pulse split off of the head of the Five-Tails' statue, resonating through the arena and making pebbles dance and debris shift. It was the closest that Mana could muster to a scream of pain as one of many relentless thrusts of the Pirate Lord cracked her orange force field of spiritual chakra and cracked the tip of his saber through her stone thigh. Terror and fighting spirit alike fueled Mana's bolstered resolve to shift her spiritual chakra from a bubble-like force field to a round buckler in front of her. The reduced range allowed her to streamline the spiritual defenses and make them strong enough to defend herself against further counterattacks.
With the final thrust of L'Ollonais' Tortuga Flail combination, even this spiritual buckler shield shattered. Though, instead of leaving Mana's stone form defenseless, her spirit sizzled and dissolved into golden particles that surrounded her with an electric shine. Lowering her horns, the Five-Tails statue blitzed onward, ramming L'Ollonais head-on and throwing his sword swinging through the air, sticking itself into the sandy dunes thousands of kilometers away from Agbarah. This noteworthy impact surprised L'Ollonais enough to widen his bloodshot, white, and fiendish eyes.
Though by the time that L'Ollonais focused his thoughts enough to curse the stone beast that disarmed him, it was long gone. A spider-like Cursed Warrior turned its head to the corner of the arena, noticing a golden ripple where the statue's hoof touched the ground at godlike speed, despite its shape being invisible to the naked eye. The Cursed Warriors appeared to lack any devotion to the idea of eliminating Endo, thus the puzzling group of giants just rounded themselves up around the ring of competitors and snuffed out their spiritual lights, going dark and static for a time, until a fraction of their life force sparked to let the bystanders know they were alive and would not respond in kind toward any surprise attacks against them.
The dashing dolphin-horse statue blasted L'Ollonais in the back, shooting him off into the sky while blitzing in a vertical zig-zag, burning with blaze-colored spirit electricity. After reaching the climax of her attack, the Five-Tails statue positioned itself above the stunned Pirate Lord and stomped its hooves, driving the overwhelmed Pirate Lord into the ground with a deafening crack that spread shockwaves and repelled any warriors attempting to slip in and seize the opportunity of eliminating Endo.
In a blink, the Five-Tails' statue appeared in front of a handful of warriors moving in on Endo, placing itself as a wall and warning that L'Ollonais' fate would befall them if they tried pushing their luck any further.
"Her spirit control is impeccable. The Conductor struck gold in turning a ninja into a Statuman. Too bad ninja are too stubborn and entangled in loyalties to their Feudal Lords and their Kage to be "conducted", huh…?" Vatee hissed as the Chaos Factor withdrew and observed Mana's impending downfall with shame and disappointment.
"It goes beyond just her being a ninja. She must've had an incredible skill of chakra control and an understanding of what that energy is made of," Galdva spoke with a high-pitched voice full of regret at having lost such a worthwhile asset.
"She's incredible alright," even Drasko relented. "I've met many noteworthy warriors like her. Putting their own life on the line and bargaining their own life force in desperate need of power. Shaving at their own lifespans, not even burning away their spirit, their very essence, like coal in a furnace, is an obstacle to desperate and devoted people like her. It's too bad that the cause she threw away her life for is so useless. Still, it'd have been an honor to decorate my tent with her head when I still had my old life…"
"Just like Priskom, her obsession will cause her to vanish forever," Poru lamented. "I don't believe we've established which one of us was the third in the row to be in charge."
The grounds of the arena trembled as one of the Cursed Warriors, the glowing kraken-like squid monster, came to life with energy flowing through its mosaic decorations and lighting the black statue up with vigor. The violent breakout of the tide of warriors must have awakened it, and in its rampage, it swatted aside a handful of contenders on its path. Considering the looming wonder of the oceans to be just another warrior trying to eliminate Endo, Mana rammed her loathsome stone prison against the swatting tentacle.
Golden and emerald green particles began drawing closer to the tip of her horns, forming an energy sphere that exploded in a beam of pure spirit essence, cutting through the stone of a handful of the Cursed Warrior's tentacles and traveling up to take a piece of its colossal body. The beam failed to crack through or force the massive lug out of the bounds, though it carved a grievous crack throughout the entire body of the giant squid.
A bothersome noise made the Five-Tails' statue turn and offer its body for support of an incoming stream of leather balls fired from what seemed like armed dispensers attached to a wood and paper glider. Judging from the fact that the man with shoulder-length blond hair riding it wore a sports uniform full to the brim with ads of establishments in various countries, this made Mana believe the assailant literally gunning for Endo to be one of the pro athletes.
The balls blew up with vibrant red smoke clouds on contact, testing the mettle of the stone body of the already damaged statue, but not to where the mind hosted in the body would feel it necessary to deploy spiritual force fields and burn away her very essence for it. After concluding its bombing run, the glider turned to swoop upward and gain altitude before turning around for another bombing raid of raining balls. Kicking her feet up, Mana sent a bunch of rocks from the nearby ridge, hitting the glider dead-on and puncturing its paper wings, which caused the glider to swirl and crash somewhere further away from the center of the crowd.
A thud that resonated throughout Mana's whole stone cell of a body made the dolphin-horse stiffen. The sensation and its suddenness and numbness reminded Mana of having surgery done in the hospital and being numbed. You could still see the doctor getting bloody and there were meek metallic chinks and fleshy rips echoing through the bodily membranes, but you couldn't feel any pain. One of the superheroes with a skin-tight black leather bodysuit and white hair flowing behind him and the meanest grin Mana's ever seen hopped onto her back and latched on by slamming two cleaver-like blades. He rode the Five-Tails statue like his steed with the world's most sick and twisted saddle.
Another fleshy punch made Mana become more frantic, though because it was a twofold sound, it also confused her. It was only when she truly began thrashing like she's lost her mind that she saw the black and white superhero having burst bony protrusions from his feet and kicking his bone claws into the sides of the stone statue he rode. Mana sent a jolt of spiritual chakra that transformed into vital electricity but the leather-clad knife fighter hopped off of her with an elegant backflip and sneered at her from further behind and avoided any damage from an attack that shaved off Mana's own life force.
Sensing figurative blood in the water, the Haunt snuck up to Endo and lifted him in the air by the throat. Sparkling with spiritual electricity, Mana sent a jolt his way as she was beginning to feel as heavy as the composition of the prison of her mind. Uminawa Derk stood tall as the spiritual electricity hit him in the back and engulfed his body, but this turned out to be a winning gamble as the Haunt holding Endo in his grip made Mana have to restrain her electricity to refrain herself from killing Endo.
Derk drew his knife back, ready to plunge it, but his arm froze just in time. The serial killer turned around and swung Endo's body like a club, smashing it into the forehead of the rushing dolphin-horse statue before it could impale the serial killer on its horns. With Mana's beaten and weakened body slumping to the ground, the Haunt swung and bashed her with Endo's struggling body over and over again for what seemed like forever.
The Haunt turned to Endo and prepared to enjoy his kill. It didn't seem like any of the surrounding vultures looking for easy eliminations were going to stop him, even though most of them likely would've preferred seeing the young man eliminated rather than butchered. The Haunt's head jerked and weighed back, staring at the murky desert sky while his eyes rolled back.
"What the heck happened? Why did the Haunt stop? I was hoping he'd leave the stone monster alone for me…" an Exterminator with a white, square-shaped plastic mask with visible bars that concealed three visible lights underneath in a shining from a cover of darkness spoke up to the ring of interloping competitors.
"You want the statue?" an orchid-haired magician with full metal white body armor and a sleeveless violet jacket with leather straps covering his body and obstructing his eyes turned to the Exterminator in curiosity. "I don't think anyone will compete against you for that. Most of us are here for the beaten down ronin-boy. I'm just waiting for this hogwash to end and for the fighting to pick up again though…"
"It's the stone beast's curse…" L'Ollonais rose from the crater in which the Five-Tails' statue had stomped him. He wore a few grazes and had a black miasma lingering around his whole body while his fiendish transformation from before had gone nowhere. "It's clear that the butcher has no interest in the stone beast. No life to extinguish there, no blood to shed. And yet… It seems like the stone beast has power over him right now."
Mana opened her eyes. She was in a place entirely unfamiliar to her. Worse still was the fact that it was drowned in darkness with no way to illuminate it. This was definitely not a place that she brought the Haunt into with her desperation move of probing into his mind. That was the only way she knew how to stop him at that moment. She was down and had wasted too much of her spirit and mind to move around too much, risking burning out the Mana inside of the statue and remaining just a lifeless decoration in which the Conductor imprisoned her mind until the statue broke down.
Mana took a light baby step, looking down and fixing her eyes on a sight that made her tear up. Skin. Pale and soft, silky-smooth human skin. A pair of hands and a pair of legs. She'd even take her old body of just one leg over being imprisoned inside of that statue and feeling the disgust of her own image. The baby step ended prematurely when Mana bumped into the bed corner and whimpered out, pulling her leg back and sitting down on a square cushion by the bed to caress her hurt toe.
The floaty mental avatar of Mana's snapped her finger, dreaming of igniting a baby flame that could light up the room somewhat, but nothing at all happened. It became pretty much undeniable that Mana was not the master of this mental fort. That much she could have implied because she didn't drag the Haunt onto her stage but entered whatever dark, warm, and moist location he dragged her into. Slowly, Mana acclimatized herself to the night and approached the round window to peek outside.
"A mansion?" she muttered. Though the palm tree woods and sandy shores with only light brushes of grass were a mystery to her, she could identify the type of house she was staring at from the bedroom window. The distraction of trying to identify the location of the mental fort made Mana realize only far too late that the Haunt was staring right at her from the yard. Peering straight through the darkness of the room and looking right into her eyes.
The fleeting mental remnant of Mana's essence staggered back, startled, but she bumped into something solid on her way back. A gloved hand muzzled her and leaned her back over the Haunt's knee. The flayed face of the Haunt's most recent victim now stared right at Mana from directly behind her. Thusly, the serial killer demonstrated he was the master of his own mental fort, at least when competing against this withered and self-loathing avatar of Mana's essence. Unlike when the Haunt was bashing the stone prison Mana wanted him to shatter just as much as hard as he worked on accomplishing it, this time, as the butcher manhandled Mana's mental self, a gleeful light gleamed in his eyes like a pair of jewels stuffed inside the flayed mask.
A snap! The Haunt broke Mana's neck at his knee, dropping her body down on the carpet and looming over it. In the world he knew and lived, slamming the back of one's neck against the knee would've killed them. The Haunt seemed like a child that walked into a candy store for the first time when he realized that Mana's paralyzed mental avatar was still blinking. He may have had some post-mortal butchery in mind, but the look in his mostly concealed eyes revealed he preferred savagery on a living victim.
The Haunt had no idea for how long this strange young lady in his dreams would be alive for, but it seemed like she'd live far longer than countless other people he'd slain and that felt like his birthday to him.
Mana wanted to close her eyes but tune out like she could when being tortured in the physical plane. Sadly, in the mental plane, one only vanished when their mind gave up and perished, and shutting oneself off like her conscious brain demanded her to do would've meant exactly that–the end of Mana's mind. Under normal circumstances, that would mean being left in a mindless, catatonic state until the end of one's days. Though given how worn-out Mana's spirit and mind already were from her burning away her literal essence and life force to fight against the entire world, or so it seemed, she'd just be disappearing for good.
No! She needed to persevere through this. Whatever horrors this sick bastard had in mind, for however long it would take! Even if the monster wearing human skin realized how to dilute time in the mental plane and forced Mana to endure slaughtering for years and decades on end just to live through one blink of real-world time, she had to endure it all. After all, she wasn't the only one trapped in the Haunt's mind with the serial killer, broken and at his mercy. As long as their minds were fighting each other, the Haunt was trapped in his own mind too. That meant he wouldn't kill Endo out on the physical plane either.
Vision became strained with black patches of corrupting rot stretching out and slowly snuffing out Mana's light. The closest comparison to this chilling feeling could've only been getting choked out of one's breath. Though the Haunt hadn't cut her once yet. It was just her terrified and tired essence fading in and out of existence. Mana was fighting her resolve to withstand the Haunt's depravity as much as she was fighting the serial killer's own mind.
The ground crumbled underneath Mana's feet.
The Haunt looked at his hands; they were trembling with excitement at having his own helpless doll to play with for as long as he pleased without the premature finale ruining everything and showing him exactly how big of a mess he had made. Besides that, the serial killer realized he wasn't holding Endo's body in them either. Confused, the butcher looked around and saw Endo panting on his back, all the way out of bounds.
"I give up, you hear!?" the apprentice samurai yelled out. "Now stop throwing your life away for me already. I don't know why you're a stone statue now and I don't care, just make it out of this alive. Don't make all of our work pointless. Forget about me…"
The Five-Tails statue laid motionless and the light of its leaking spiritual chakra had dimmed completely. All except for one tiny sprinkle dropping from the dolphin-horse's eyes and cracking when it reached the floor, sizzling away into the void.
"Competitor Endo from the Allied Ninja conceded, as well as throwing himself out of bounds! This was inevitable since so many of our contestants appeared possessed with the thought of eliminating him. This leaves 150 contestants still fighting in the arena!" the announcer clamored while cloaked, bald Sun Disc staff rushed to take Endo away and treat his wounds as the honorable guest of the Sun Disc arena that he was.