A tall and slender exterminator in a bland, sand-colored uniform that, despite a standard size hung loosely over his waist and required crossing belts to secure it around his body leaned left and right, pressing his plastic fingers to a pad comprising a reflective rectangle attached to a highly flexible rubber pad and a thin rubber rod for a neck.
"My, my… If it isn't a snake-monster pit. Not quite my specialty but, I suppose, if no one else is getting to it…" the exterminator leaned left and right, flopping the reflective mirror head around like some insect swatter. "Lemme see, lemme see…" he mumbled to himself while leaning the mirror head down and pressing his hands at the bottom.
With a gentle push, the exterminator unscrewed the reflective mirror head off the rubbery neck rod, which let him push it and send it scrolling into the snake pit. The rubbery rod to which the reflective mirror was attached proved to be malleable as it spun around at impressive angles to help the exterminator locate the alleged "snake monster".
A brown boa looked at the reflective surface with slanted and deceitful eyes. It turned its massive snout sideways in awe as it was peering straight into its own reflection. In a blink, the reflective mirror vanished, and the snake found itself concealed in complete darkness once more with only its flashy lemon-colored eyes emitting a dim shade of luminosity from them. The exterminator outside staggered back as the reflective mirror head secured back in its place and his neck settled in something remotely resembling a human-like length.
"I see… There's your problem. A classic Underground Ninja Boa situation," the exterminator stroked the lower rubbery part of the frame hosting the reflective mirror surface. "As I've said, I usually deal with a different species of monster altogether, but, lucky for you, what fits to smoke out one monster usually does it with any other as well!"
The exterminator spread his hands apart, flexing his fingers as if playing an invisible piano as they turned and unscrewed from the plastic hand. A chilling noise of steel reeling spread through the surrounding area as the fingers unraveled into a network of rubber wires with plastic barrels and, as if controlled by an invisible force, delved into the ninja-boa pit.
"Extermination Technique: Cobra-B!" the mirror-head exterminator proclaimed with excitement as clouds of pine-colored gas began puffing and rising from within the pit, gently hovering above it but keeping it down to the floor level even after some of it escaped from the underground pit.
The gigantic boa burst outward through the tiles instead of leaving from the entryway of its pit. The pine-colored gas pumped from every orifice, leaking from its mouth, the nostrils, and the eyelids. The previously bright and exotic eyes of the snake now proved blanked out and blind as the gigantic boa coughed and wheezed jets of pine gas pumping through its system to ventilate it, but ended up flopping to the side with its tongue sticking out from the mouth.
"Extermination Great Success!" the exterminator reeled back his gas-pumping fingers back into the plastic hand and formed a fist to pump it into the sky as he hopped and clapped his feet like a horse. "The monster is dead! Now, onto the others!" the mirror-headed exterminator struck a heroic pose by pressing his fists to his waist and then pointing his index at the handful of inhuman-looking warriors battling it out in the arena.
Before it could split off, the fallen boa coughed up, spitting out a wet body of a soaked, pale ninja whose entire body had been covered in tattoos. "Ara?" the exterminator turned to the curious sight of a gigantic boa spitting up a dormant human being from within. "What to do, what to do? A monster gave birth to a human… On one hand, it's undeniably been given birth to by a monster, but… It looks like a human…"
"I'll have you know that this serpent you've just knocked out was my camouflage!" Hikosuru Boha, the Kusagakure ninja employing ninja snakes, muttered after rising off the ground without the use of his arms. Thick mucus covered the rising ninja and stuck to the floor, though it was quick to slide off of Boha's skin or get absorbed by it after being exposed to oxygen.
"Now it moves like a snake, but speaks and looks like a human…" the exterminator flip-flopped his reflective mirror head left and right as he found himself in a conundrum. "Ah!" he yelled out, grabbing hold of the side frames of the reflective mirror with his hands. "If my Cobra-B ended up killing a person, I would've kissed my license goodbye!"
"Hey… Do you even hear what I'm getting at?" Hikosuru Boha's eyes twitched as he deflated in disappointment at being ignored by his psychotic opponent.
"No, no, no, no, no… That would've been all wrong! I may want to exterminate humans deep down, but that's what's known as a no-can-do situation! A definitely-not-what-you-wanna-do-situation even! If I can't exterminate anything or anyone, I'll be just a mirror-head freak. Even worse–a monster!" the rectangle-shaped mirror-head mumbled to himself while thrashing about, turning left and right, unscrewing, pulling, and turning his mirror-head all over the place in his mania.
"Come to think of it, how are you even talking at all? Do you have a human head and a mouth underneath that mirror? No way… That mirror is too thin for this to be a mask…" Boha scratched his chin. "In any case, I'm going to burrow underground in another gigantic boa, can you please stop exterminating my camouflage?"
"This is what you'd call a no-can-do situation, Sir!" the exterminator popped his rubbery index finger out with a proud and lively proclamation. "The creed of a true Exterminator is to exterminate all monsters of all shapes and sizes wherever you see them! Like pests and rodents, monsters are an awful inconvenience to hard-working people, so we exist to see them purged so that the settler and villager life can go on and the world can keep on turning!"
"But can you maybe exterminate some of THOSE monsters up there instead?" Boha scratched his cheek, realizing that he was getting nowhere with this mysterious and kooky-looking guy. He pointed at the Cursed Warriors that remained an immovable barrier that no warrior yet to challenge them could overcome. It was a bit malicious to tell the exterminator to challenge the biggest and baddest creature in the arena, but it wasn't like there was any love lost between them after that weirdo exterminated Boha's gigantic boa and exposed him to all these challengers.
"This is what is known as a no-way situation!" the exterminator posed with his knuckles by his waist, as if he was proclaiming something worth being proud of. "Those monsters are enormous and very scary, making challenging them a bit of an I-don't-have-how-to-kill-that-thing-situation. I'll leave them to my colleagues that specialize in killing obsidian-dark-magic-apocalyptic-animal-shaped-mountains-come-to-life-type monstrosities!"
"That's a very specific specialization…" Boha squinted in disgust at the exterminator's cowardice and his proud attitude toward being this cowardly. "Well, if you keep insisting on killing my camo, I'll have to feed you to it, then!"
Boha let his shoulder-length spiky hair weigh down over his face as he tucked his chin and lowered his head. The Kusagakure ninja raised his head, peering with slanted, glowing eyes that made the exterminator twitch and freeze in place before him. The pale-skinned Kusagakure ninja spread his slim arms to the sides, exposing more and more tattoos that lit up with a blaze-colored glow and came to life in the form of striking ninja snakes. An entire den bit into and tore the frozen exterminator up, tattering his uniform and exposing more of his rod-slim plastic body underneath.
The lunging snakes smashed together, becoming fluid like water and forming a singular head of a gigantic brown ninja-boa that slammed its bony forehead straight into the reflective surface of the exterminator's mirror-face. A sharp shattering noise made Boha tilt his eyebrows in surprise as he expected to see something interesting underneath, but all that he saw underneath the shattered glass was a plastic board. The exterminator with a shattered face hurled backward and fell flat on his back, stretching out his limbs across the ground and laying mortified.
"I don't get it, this has to be a trick of some sort…" Boha extended his hand, making the tattoos of serpents covering his entire arm light up and wrap together in a scaly, serpentine limb. The gigantic abomination of scales, shed skin, snake muscle, and fangs clasped the fallen and damaged frame of the downed and paralyzed exterminator, munching on it for a while before flinging it aside like a discarded toy. Much to Boha's surprise, the exterminator fell out of bounds.
"Hikosuru Boha, the Kusagakure ninja who has already proved himself superior to a noteworthy spy earlier, keeps finding new factions to feud with! This time he eliminated the Exterminator Model: Reflective Mirror! There are now 130 competitors left to duke it out in the ring!" the announcer declared, making the audience cheer, which left Boha himself primarily confused.
"Jeez, it's not like I'm trying to pick up fights or something. Leave me alone already… I gotta wait this out," Boha grumbled and leaned backward, pointing his chest tattoo of a massive snake's mouth to the sky. With a blaze-colored light, the tattoo came to life, shooting up and then rolling back down to swallow Boha whole and burrow another gigantic boa back underground.
A meaty giant with a mask made from multiple stripped and stitched-together faces of human skin and handfuls of curly hair stuck together to the mask through the assistance of band-aids thrashed about like a raving lunatic. Screaming and frothing through the torn opening simulating a mouth that had beaten teeth pushed through the mask and barely hanging by an inch of their black roots. The raging goliath swung around a massive pickaxe with both dulled sides to make the tool resemble a hammer more. The wailing mankurt was not paying too much mind about who he was going to strike with it. Because of the noisy nature and troublesome appearance of the face-wearing serial killer, the other fighters just moved around him and didn't bother challenging him.
Unexpectedly, the giant's pickaxe-mallet stopped mid-swing. With the serial killer being in full rampage mode, he yanked the tool back and did his part in swinging it around in hopes to smash some heads or rip some jaws clean off, a fate that befell many civilians, peaceful villagers, and settlers that have encountered the zombified lunatic but the pickaxe-mallet didn't budge one bit.
"You've got a fine weapon in this hammer here. Back there, I've seen some nails. Man-sized, believe it or not. You wouldn't have nailed them into the ground, would you?" a masculine tone thundered down from the goliath's blind zone, making the baffled serial killer lean to the side and gaze upon a muscular man in a flashy superhero outfit. A drool extended down and tapped at the ground, a leftover from the giant's mindless thrashing routine.
The superhero in question wore a round, domino-style mask made of brass that was crafted to make it look like it was weaved together like a braid. The hero had a charcoal-color armored undershirt with a poncho-style garment of flashy yellow, green and red colors. A knee-long beard and horseshoe mustache decorated the superhero's face while his long and curly brown hair flowed upward, completely defying gravity. Something that set him apart from the rest of the superhero group was a blinding halo of light behind him with arrow-shaped bolts shooting from it in all directions yet remaining frozen mid-flight. Like a lightning bolt caught and preserved in a bottle of suspended animation.
While one of the hero's hands held the upper part of the handle of the pickaxe-mallet, his left arm had a loose grip on a crude brass hammer that had a vague ankh-like shape to it. Almost immediately, the eyes that were hidden underneath an eyeless mask of sewn-together faces fixed on the impractical and rough-looking weapon. The fixation seemed to make the superhero incredibly chipper as he released the pickaxe-mallet and raised his weapon up to eye level.
"Indeed, your weapon looks dangerous. Even with both spikes of your pickaxe blunted by the reckless use of the tool, it is still more than capable of hurting people, though, I believe, that is your intention. Rest assured, however, that my hammer is much bigger than yours, which, in my experience, makes reckless ruffians such as yourself more mindful of the lives and feelings of those a…"
The superhero didn't get to finish his sentence as, shrieking like a maniac, the face-wearing serial flung the blunted tool at the hero and reached underneath his plastic coat. In a flash, followed by a mechanical growl, the monstrous man pulled out a curious machine made of a rotating ellipse with pickaxe teeth pointing on both sides that grumbled and growled as the teeth rolled around the ellipse-shaped belt. The superhero gently shoved his hammer in the way and pushed the carnage machine away from him, leading to it slamming into the tile set and wreaking havoc by spewing sparks, broken stone, and gravel in all directions.
"Through my adventures in this tournament, I've encountered a few injured warriors who have told me a story about a magician woman with a hammer even bigger than mine. They wore crude injuries of nails larger than most men hammered through their bodies, so I would have been a numbskull not to believe them. I am looking for this magician woman and her massive hammer," the superhero explained to the wailing and frothing lunatic who attempted to pull his weapon out from the ground unsuccessfully as his opponent pressed the tip of his hammer to the rolling belt, chipping off all the teeth of the grisly configuration at once. "I don't think any hammer is allowed to be larger than mine, you see. My best friend, a blacksmith, claimed that my hammer is at the absolute peak of largeness and that a larger hammer than my hammer would be highly impractical. That is why I must confirm if there can be a larger hammer than my hammer and, if it truly exists, either confirm its proportions or, if it is impractical, destroy it."
Bellowing like a pig in being butchered, the raving psychopath let go of his tool of carnage and grabbed hold of the superhero standing before him, seeking to smother or break him with grand physical strength that could easily maul not only a man but any large animal encountered in the wild. The rescuer with a horseshoe mustache seemed to be mostly amused by this attempt as he grabbed hold of the giant's rubber gloves and pressed harder at his hands. The mentally impaired butcher shrieked in pain while the hero forced him to his knees by manhandling him in a power struggle.
"I am beginning to think that even if this woman of a hammer larger than my hammer, which, as we've established, is peak-hammer-largeness-class, exists, and you have indeed met her, you wouldn't be of sound mental capacity to explain it to me… A pity…" the armor-clad superhero lifted the goliath off the ground with his crumbled hands and prepared to heave him out of the arena in one go. It was at that moment, in between the time that the chipper superhero closed his eyes to blink, and opened them back up, that the raving lunatic he held suspended in mid-air became skewered by nails longer than the burly man they were pin-cushioning and thicker than a grown man's arm.
"The serial killer Flayface has been eliminated! Although… I'm not really sure who eliminated him… Well… It appears that Smash-Man was the last one to fight him so I'll dot this elimination down to his tally! It's your lucky day if you bet on him!" the announcer made the audience get rowdy as the feisty and majestic appearance of the hero truly had many in the audience betting for him. "This leaves 129 contestants still left in the arena!"
Excited by this sudden turn of events, the superhero flung his opponent whose weight had doubled because of the number of nails hammered all throughout his body, out of the arena and turned to seek the mysterious magician woman who was hammering these tremendous nails into people.
"A superhero with a massive, ankh-shaped hammer?" the magician woman, a tall, dark-skinned lady with meat on her bones and a brown scarf wrapped around her head, spoke. She wore a dress made from animal furs with a night-blue outer robe which gave her an even thicker perceived body build than the magician truly had. "I was looking for you. People I've skewered told me you used your weird hammer to smack the nails out from them and fed them food pills to keep them in the competition."
"You're the magician woman with the bigger hammer than my maximum-size hammer? But I don't see any hammer on you. Not a large hammer, not a small hammer, not even a mallet, which, as we both know, is just a hammer for children," the superhero scratched the back of his head, refusing to believe that he met the right person he was looking all over for.
"I am a magician. My hammer is magical. As someone who can see yours plain as day, I can confirm that mine is bigger than yours," the magician woman raised her right eyebrow as if demeaning the superhero. "What is your business with me and the competitors I defeat that you must go around liberating them from my curse?"
"I am Smash-Man, a superhero from the Land of Peaches. It is my sworn duty to rescue people needing a hammer, be it a hammer that smashes or gently removes gigantic nails from their bodies. Besides, what better way to get your attention than to undo what you are working toward?" the tanned superhero flipped his hammer over his shoulder while shooting a flashy smile at the magician woman.
"So, what you're saying is that if I want you to stop stalking me and start eliminating people, I need to deal with you first…" the scarfed magician woman sighed in frustration and rolled her eyes.
"Don't misunderstand me, ma'am, I'm not into any creepy intentions, however, I must inspect the hammer you use and its proportions. My hammer is the largest hammer in the world that can be wielded safely and practically, so if your hammer surpasses the proportions of mine, it cannot be safe and is a danger to everyone around you. As such, it is my sworn duty as a hero to smash it to bits!" Smash-Man pointed his hammer of size, matching that of Smash-Man's own thick body at the magician woman.
The fight between hammers and nails was about to break out, those thrilled by both the sight of the previously eliminated serial killer, his wild behavior and the tools of his trade now transferred their reserved focus onto the spontaneously ignited pairing that was boiling before them and just about to flip the lid and spill all over the place.
Author's Note: Sorry I'm late with this chapter. It just so happened that my laptop broke down Monday evening. I had the majority of this chapter typed up and I lost none of my data, my laptop's back from being repaired, however, I couldn't post the chapter yesterday and, because of the delay on my schedule, I won't be able to post Paradise Lost tomorrow, sorry. The only reason I'm posting this so soon after getting my laptop back after missing out on a few days of work on my stories is exactly that most of this chapter was complete before the "break". Anyways, just letting you know that circumstances mucked my schedule up and I won't be able to post DB tomorrow, sorry.