Side by side, the unlikely tag team of Poru, the stone totem from the Chaos Factor, and Sarutobi Hiko dashed onward. While the instant that Sarutobi Hiko rushed onward, eager to settle this bout against the Fennec's mercenaries as fast as possible to avoid having to listen to Poru boasting about having to help the Konoha jounin, his became engulfed in a flaming aura that left a blazing after-trail after each of Hiko's moves while Poru's moves irradiated blotch-like traces of green and ink-black spiritual chakra.
Hiko threw a jumping kick upward that the armored mercenary backflipped to avoid before sending the linked chain whip to wrap around Hiko's thigh and inflict a crippling injury. Unfortunately for the scorned mercenary woman, Hiko blinked away, erupting with a Third Gate aura of a green hue drowned by a pillar of flames as he became just an imploding fireball and vanished with a high-speed dash behind the woman. A chakra bomb of a compact sandstorm surrounded by jets of Wind Release chakra hurled at Hiko from the side but Poru's powerful right cross knocked Desert's Heart aside and let it hurl toward the audience before turning upward in an arc and detonating high above the arena.
The clamorous blast forced the stunned spectators to lean forward and cover up their heads as fragmented chunks of sand rained down from above and turned the desert sky murky and the raging, unchained windstorm ripped through the high skies before being snuffed out by the upper atmosphere. Meanwhile, in the arena, Poru threw another devastating cross straight into Vizeriman's chest, leaving a horrendous indentation of flesh where his fist dug into the mercenary's flesh.
Seeing his opponent stunned, Poru struck a flashy dancing stance and began a totemic dance around his opponent. While this seemed like a strange tactic to eliminate one's foe with, Vizeriman's eyes widened not only with the pain of nearly having a stone club of a fist nearly shoved all the way through his body but also because of the astonishment at the fact that his perception of time seemed to have taken an even meaner blow. Time itself appeared to halt while the enigmatic totem from the Chaos Factor danced around the hovering dwarf and wound up his massive arm for another devastating blow. The worst part was that everyone frozen in time and space was aware of each passing moment within the quite literally stunning dance, all the way until Poru switched from a wind-up strike to a push kick and punted Vizeriman to hurl out of bounds.
While the heated bout had destroyed his cloth-flap wings against Sarutobi Hiko, Vizeriman slipped out from his outfit altogether and swung the rags in mid-air, producing an air current that held him suspended above certain elimination. The mercenary's face adequately portrayed the frustration with both his opponents figuring out the fact that while Vizeriman was, for all intents and purposes, immortal and nigh invincible, he could still very easily have been knocked out of bounds and lost the battle royale that way.
Hiko hopped up, throwing both his feet with a jumping double-cross kick that brought a blazing cross upon the chest of the frustrated armored mercenary woman. The woman grunted in pain as her armor segments caught ablaze and flew away from her body in a clamorous metallic scatter, leaving the spotty dress-shaped weave under the armor pieces exposed to the elements and catching a few cinders.
The Konoha ninja transitioned flawlessly into a rising triplet of flaming roundhouse kicks. Having positioned his opponent up in the air in front of him, Hiko lit up his feet ablaze and lashed them from both sides before thrusting a foot in a gruesome push straight into the gut of the mercenary woman and shattering more of her armor away until the woman remained with a trashed and battered mammoth-style helmet and the dress she wore underneath the armor to avoid the steel plates irritating her skin too much. The flame went out for a second while Hiko quickly hook the leg and tripped the mercenary woman in mid-air before flipping with a rolling foot drop that unleashed all the pent-up flame at once.
Like a crashing meteor, the female mercenary smashed into the augmented tile set and left a crater of devastated tiles and ground dirt underneath. The woman laid sprawled out in the dirt while Poru was keeping Vizeriman busy. At last, the unbreakable combo of the two had been beaten and, without each other's support, they were nowhere near as dangerous and irritating.
Turning around and whipping his kick with brute force, merely to send an aerial shockwave down and suspend his sky-walking, Sarutobi Hiko made a series of rapid arm signs by rapidly moving his arms around like some exotic, flashier, and more overblown version of hand seals. The Konoha jounin concluded his combination with his arms extended with the thumbs and index fingers touching each other and forming a diamond-like shape.
"Morning Tiger!" Sarutobi Hiro howled out, bursting with a more powerful blast of flames and the emerald radiance of the Eight Gates all at once, returning to the Fourth Gate opening as he rolled over the head and stomped his left foot down with immense quickness and employing a tremendous amount of air pressure that left howling and drawing in surrounding rubble and dust, also forming a draft that seemed pull the loopy and battered mercenary woman closer into the jaws of the tiger's jaws composed of nothing but air pressure.
Before the woman could collide with the aerial tiger jaws construct, however, Hiko twirled around his axis, lighting up his shin ablaze and sending a mighty pulse of flames toward the aerial tiger, lighting it all on fire and making the tiger's jaw flash with a lively orange blaze just before the collision. Everything went silent mere blinks before the calamitous resolution and then all hellfire busted loose, howling and roaring, demolishing and incinerating in a relentless firestorm.
With swollen and unhealthy, ash-colored skin, Hiro panted mid-air before gravity took its toll and sucked him back into the dissolving hellfire. The Konoha jounin felt his eyes becoming heavy as they weighed down and demanded to close without opening back up for a while. Even the ruined tile set and the burrowed, unraveled dirt underneath felt soft and welcoming. In his mind, Hiko imagined it being as warm and cozy as his wife's embrace.
A shock made the Konoha jounin rip his eyes wide open and power through the fatigue, as in front of him he saw not the battered body of the mercenary woman but Vizeriman himself. It took a few blinks for the high-ranking ninja to realize that the two mercenaries had substituted with each other, switching positions in an instant with Vizeriman resolving to take the brunt of the Morning Tiger that was too widespread in its destruction to threaten the Heart of the Desert and his female partner taking on Poru. It was not usual to see mercenaries employing ninja techniques, but if they were to nab some of them from their eternal rivals and better-paid targets, it would be basic Academy techniques that actual children could pull off.
This realization proved to be ultimately fruitless as the ax-shaped segments of the trunk chain wrapped around Hiko's waist and swung him around while the foot of the female mercenary stomped onto Poru's face, flinching him for the moment she needed to attack both temporary partners. Swinging Hiko wildly over her head, the beaten-up mercenary flung him slamming into the protective wall outside of bounds while exploiting the small period of weary that Hiko had after using his Eight Gates for such a high-caliber technique.
"Aww, come on...! I was fighting that guy!" Poru minced his word in a telepathic signal while hosting the armored boot in his decorative jaws.
"The unstoppable team of Khinzira and Vizeriman eliminated Sarutobi Hiko with an unexpected switcheroo! One wouldn't think that sworn lifetime partners would use each other as human shields but, I suppose, if your partner is invincible, what's stopping you, right!?" the announcer scratched his head before turning back to the spectators with his arms raised over his head. "That leaves it at 138 remaining competitors!"
"Now you have no more quarrel with us, Chaos Factor," Khinzira panted while staggering on both shaky feet that struggled to keep her standing at this point. "Normally, I'd feel inclined to slaughter any man feeling entitled to getting head at the expense of a woman, but… Look at you. You're not even a man, are you?"
"And you're one very mean lady…!" Poru dived forward with a wound-back right forearm, ready to smash it into the shoddy guard of his opponent and blast her clean through it and right out of the ring. That was until he stopped in place with powerful pressure mounting around his chest. Baffled, Poru looked down, realizing that the Desert Heart had smacked into his core and had been drilling through. Picking him up and elevating him into the air, it detonated in the skies and made it rain ruined chunks of rock while a golden vapor shrouded in the air.
"The mercenary Vizeriman eliminated Poru from the Chaos Factor! This came straight outta nowhere!" the announcer bawled out, grabbing his balding head.
"Poru! You bitch…!" Vatee hissed, coiling her hind body into a spring-like form, ready to throw herself at the Fennec's crew of mercenaries, eliminating challengers left and right. Drasko's armored gauntlets crossed the path of his comrade, shooting out three blades from each gauntlet that formed a trident-like weapon out of each armor piece and warded off her path.
"Don't be rushing to your end. We're in no condition to fight a trained crew of mercenaries that have worked together their whole life. We've barely been fighting together for a month," Drasko sent an imposing telepathic signal at his comrade.
"B-But… Look at that golden shroud! That's Poru's spiritual chakra! That means that his body got destroyed and his spirit is loose! Soon enough, he'll vanish forever without a body to host him!" Vatee objected with a desperate plea for the self-appointed new leader of the Chaos Factor to pick this fight.
"Exactly, we can't help him anymore. Remember what we're fighting for. If you follow that oaf, you'll just end up like him. Right now, it's just the two of us and we must survive at all costs," Drasko thundered down. "It's just the two of us left now."
"Not quite," Vatee turned to the fallen and crumbled statue of the Five-Tailed dolphin horse. "Haven't you noticed it yet? No golden steam came out of that statue and the announcer didn't count her out yet. A few fighters seemed interested at first, but everyone got so distracted that they just forgot Mana's been laying down in the middle of the ring this whole time. They treat her like a background decoration."
"She made her choice. She chose the Allied Ninja over us. That traitor got what she signed up for," Drasko hissed while the uninhabited helmet turned to the fallen and run-down statue serving as a fighting stage background to those duking it out in that region.
"You said it yourself, it's just the two of us. We can't be choosers," Vatee leaned to the other side and slithered toward the fallen statue, positioning herself around the slumbering, lifeless statue and betting it all on the chance that Mana's vanished spiritual chakra would recover and the Chaos Factor would return from the brink of elimination.
"Lord Wulithmes!" an authoritative masculine voice spread through the ranks of many colliding warriors, reaching the broad and bulky shoulders of a man of golden skin color which had been so accustomed to sunlight that he shared it with the rest of the world in brilliant, golden shine. The golden-skinned behemoth donned leather strap waist cloth and leather boots as the only piece of cloth decorating his body. The conqueror's wrists and heels had chunky armor bands around them. The chiseled chest of the mountainous man had azure blue carvings of an unknown dye that had stayed underneath the scar tissue, forming fleshy blue markings, and wore a silver collar with a reflective diamond plate hanging loose from the center.
"Who addresses the King of the Universe?" the bulky titan turned around, having to turn his entire head because of the sizeable and flamboyant pharaonic headdress of a sandstone helmet with red and blue stripes he wore. Despite his immense size and physical thickness, the golden-skinned behemoth spoke with a slightly hissing, low-pitched voice. His night-blue dyed lips moved subtly, revealing lines of square-shaped, well-maintained teeth that contrasted the dark lips greatly.
"That is quite the imperious title you've adopted," a swordsman with hair so blond that it seemed to almost glow and ruffle from the slightest breeze hovered above the ground. He was dressed in a black dogi spanning his entire body and reaching the ground and wore steel shoulder guards, yet the most peculiar feature of this man's attire was the system of golden rings wrapped around his body like belts with rubies etched at matching intervals across each ring. "Then again, perhaps I am the one to talk."
"Oh, you're that showboat from before. The one that threw a flaming asteroid and obliterated that pesky forest," Wulithmes pointed his finger at the tall and handsome swordsman addressing him while stroking a false blue rubber beard accessory stuck to his chin. "Not a bad show, but I hope it didn't give you any false impressions of being worthy to stand before me."
"No false impressions…" the blond swordsman closed his eyes with a tranquil expression and began approaching the sun-kissed titan as if he had no retaliation to fear from his side. "I stand before you, do I not?"
"Only because I allow you…" Wulithmes smirked with a full-teeth smile, staring down at the approaching samurai who, despite being taller than most, only measured to about half the conqueror's monumental size and bulk. "Make your case now before you overstay your welcome."
"I wish to visit your valley. I am somewhat of an explorer and I have visited most of the spiritual temples around the world, yet I deem your Emperor's Valley to be worth seeing and memorizing," the samurai clad in brass rings addressed the towering conqueror.
"Ah, yes… My crowning achievement. The foundation that will one day be hallowed ground to the country that I shall find with the recorded history of my accomplishments and the history of my tribe. It will only grow more and more spectacular once the inheritors of my crowning achievements build upon it and place new monuments with their achievements recorded on their walls within the valley. You are right to fear treading there alone. A fragile outsider such as you would soon meet the wrath of my guard and I make it my business to obliterate any outsiders stomping on our sacred heritage myself," Wulithmes spread his arms as he postulated with a rich and demeaning to his conversant smile. "My achievements are so many, that we are running out of space for my towns and the valley, so this lovely little ribbon of desert land would do nicely to expand my territory into the northeast."
"You misunderstand, Lord Wulithmes. The reason I make this request is not that I am afraid of your retribution or the wrath of your foot soldiers. It is quite the opposite, I do not wish to have to eradicate your blossoming culture in self-defense and leave a rising toddler empire in flames before it can establish itself," the samurai shook his head with a stoic expression, looking somewhat disappointed that he was misunderstood by his regal acquaintance.
The black eyes of Wulithmes looked down, sinking most of the visible face of the desert conqueror in shade. It was scorn that was reflecting in the man's expression and both he and the daring samurai clad in ruby and brass rings both knew it but, daringly enough, the samurai still stood within an arm's reach of the one proclaiming himself the "King of the Universe".
A golden fist nearly the size of the daring swordsman's entire body knocked him aside like a rag doll, shooting in a blink at his directions and seeking to scatter the samurai's body into bundles of stray atoms. Despite the impossible-to-measure force of impact, the blown aback swordsman skidded across the tiles with blazing trails and an odachi sword positioned in front of him. A round, golden halo of a resounding shockwave radiated from the blade's edge until dissipating fully.
"You little rascal. When did you draw that?" Wulithmes turned his deep-blue lips with a sheepish grin. The frame of time-space in which he was frozen cracked with a split down at the upper leftmost corner. Another slice, then another, it wasn't the physical titan of chiseled, golden physique that got cut in an instant, but the entire fabric of time-space he stood in. It was as if the King of the Universe was just a character on a paper page and his opponent was a menacing kid with a pair of scissors.
However, while devastating gales and chain explosions ripped through the cut space, only wild flocks of sparks shot out where the grand sword etched into Wulithmes' skin. The emperor stood in place, marveling at the many cuts and grazes that his opponent inflicted in the split instant in-between of him drawing his sword and Wulithmes' punch connecting with the block. The blond samurai straightened his back and moved a strand of hair out of his way while stabbing the ground under his feet with the tip of his blade. The coating of kenki across the sword ensured that stabbing stone was as easy as cutting marshmallows.
"You may recall my earlier statement about my title being equally presumptuous as yours, Lord Wulithmes. You see, I am called the Heavenly Sword. Usually, the four finest swordsmen in the world are referred to as the God Swords, I did not misspeak earlier. I am referred to as the Heavenly Sword, because I am in a class of swordsmanship of my own and nobody, except for the God Swords themselves, deserve to cross blades with me," the daring swordsman explained before drawing his sword and adopting a Ko Gasumi sword-fighting stance with his odachi.
"Interesting, entertain me and perhaps I will allow you to see my Emperor's Valley unimpeded, outsider!" a deafening laughter echoed from Wulithmes' side.
Note: Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and Happy Holidays everyone! 3