"My hammer…" Smash-Man lifted his massive tool of destruction up to the eye level to show his pride and joy to his opponent and admire it himself too. "It is the absolute pinnacle of hammer-crafting technique, the peak of hammer size and proportions. A larger hammer is a heresy that must be destroyed!"
Intending to show his opponent the awe-inspiring might of his hammer, Smash-Man lifted the hammer over his head while the halo of solid light arrow-pointing bolts became crackling jolts of electricity and veered off from behind Smash-Man to crash into his hammer and create a Lightning Release coating around it. With Smash-Man's hammer lifted over his head, it was as if the hammer's enormous weight affected the very gravitational balance between the Earth and the Moon, extending the Earth into an almost egg-like shape and twisting the proportions of everything around it just before Smash-Man would bring it down for a mother of all smashes.
The tan-skinned, scarfed magician woman looked underwhelmed even in the face of such a calamitous attack. Then, everything around became coated in black, changing the hue of the world around it to a hue of absolute contrasts. Complete black with white outlines to determine the basic shape of all things and nothing else. In a blink, the strange warping effect disappeared and a ripping sound of rending flesh spread through the stage. The noise of a wet splatter followed it shortly thereafter as nails twice Smash-Man's size skewered the superhero's body and left him hanging like a pin-cushioned meat bag suspended and held together solely by their vertical, excruciating prison.
"Curse Technique: Stack Attack!" the enigmatic magician woman weaved her hand seals and chanted the name of her technique, entire seconds after the effect of her technique had already left the superhero crippled and impaled on dozens of gargantuan nails.
"There it is!" the announcer leaned over the rails with a sweaty face and a dire disposition. "The Curse Technique of the magician Vospyka. The dark spell that has left plenty of her opponents crippled and unable to continue fighting, albeit hammered down to the stage and unable to become eliminated, either. No one to attempt to free themselves of these nails had succeeded, it's like their weight is the weight of the world itself! As if Vospyka magically enhanced them to remain hammered down!"
"Now you'll stay out of my way," Vospyka slipped her hands underneath the straps of her scarf and the dark outer robe that extended to her chest as a cover for her shoulders and upper body. Closing her eyes, the magician turned to the side to wander off to another part of the arena and wait until all the brawlers and brutes beat themselves into submission. Her strategy was like that of a venomous frog. She was too troublesome and tormenting to deal with. Those that tested her patience ended up crippled and skewered by the Nails of the World, left humbled, beaten, and bleeding out.
A thunderbolt ripped through the sky, slamming at the pathetic stack of skewered meat and the shell of brass armor. Stunned by the blast of the bolt, the broad-shouldered spell weaver stopped still with a blanked-out stare as the lightning bolt engulfed the location of her curse and left the nails embedded into the ground, yet pinning absolutely nothing down. Smash-Man became the lightning itself. Like a living thunderbolt, he danced around the stage in quick, supersonic bursts before appearing directly in front of the baffled magician. Smash-Man was still somewhere in between being a living thunderbolt and a man. Eyes, radiating lightning, his lower body was just an extension of a thunderclap, emitting ring-shaped concussive shockwaves and shattering the sound barrier with each twitch of his muscles.
Despite the radiant surge of energy and its vivacious luminosity, all became black once more, defined and given shape only by the black outline. Then, in a blink, the color and the light all seeped back into the pastel painting of reality. A slamming rod of a tower-sized nail drilled into the ground, scattering Smash-Man into cowardly sizzles of electricity that scurried away and electrified the very ground underneath the feet.
"A ninja technique called Tenketsu Shinto," Vospyka closed her eyes, though this time it was not out of boredom. It was an admission of the fact that she had taken the superhero for granted. "A technique cast on oneself, to make one's chakra nodes, transform one's very body into an essence of their elemental nature. It is an incredibly complex technique that less than a dozen people in the entire world can use. How in the world did a meathead bruiser babbling about hammers stumble into such a talent, I wonder?"
Many times, turning into living electricity, did the ethereal form of a lightning storm wielding an unruly hammer attempt to blindside and smash Vospyka, however, with each formation of an even remotely humanoid shape, a house-sized nail ripped through the air and dispelled the electrical formation into tiny little crackles and sparks. It seemed as if the magician was impossible to blindside and that no matter where one was, there was a nail for anyone Vospyka wanted to be nailed down.
Bruised, panting, and sweating, Smash-Man waved his hammer down, creating a cascade of dancing thunderbolts that rushed arcing toward the magician, only for the scarfed woman to gently glide aside and let the thunderbolts sizzle out shortly after leaving the ringside. It appeared that the superhero's body could no longer keep up with the demands of a Tenketsu Shinto fighting style. What was once a mighty and booming aura enhancing Smash-Man's hammer and his entire body now turned to mere sparks. And the majestic radiance withdrew to the halo hanging behind the hero's back.
"A lot of superheroes… Had a life before becoming heroes… Some of us… Were heroes before we became super. I've seen my fair share of battles before I realized a hammer doesn't always have to smash and break things. Despite being blunt and heavy, despite being crafted intending to break things down and being wielded with reckless force, a hammer can build as well as to help people with a great many things," Smash-Man answered, taking the moment of downtime to catch a second breath. It became painfully apparent that his Tenketsu Shinto technique could not pull him out of another predicament.
Such was the simple truth of the matter. If he had successfully figured out the secret behind the magician woman's spell, and a strategy to break it, he would have surely hit her with overwhelming force and pulled off a victory. However, if he simply burnt out his Tenketsu Shinto to merely avoid the grisly end that so many combatants he had helped earlier with his hammer had met, he was just postponing the inevitable conclusion to this match.
"You should not have interfered with my business, rescue worker," Vospyka cast a grim look at her opponent. A blotch of black, all-consuming ink stain began expanding from a singularity somewhere behind the woman's back. Something was different, however, distraught, Vospyka looked down at her hands. Much to her chagrin, the magician realized some manner of sparkling splendor had affected that her body and it was as if hot needles had punctured her every pore all at once and continued to poke and prod deeper in.
"I told you I'd see your hammer…" Smash-Man smirked with a pain-ridden face while keeping up an intense focus on his surroundings.
"You used the remaining spark of chakra you have to numb my nerve endings, slowing down my movements to a crawl so that you can follow my spell…" Vospyka stumbled onto the realization with a spoken mumble.
"It was as if those nails slammed down in an instant each time. As if they were an iron-clad rule–wherever your enemy was, they'd get nailed down and skewered. Never once could I even see a flash of a hammer, not even one peek and it frustrated me to no end," Smash-Man laughed out at the face of his slowly advancing demise. He wasn't sure at which point the nails would materialize, where they'd come from or how they'd end up skewering him, but those were all things he was bound to find out shortly. In super slow motion, Vospyka's spell continued to cover all in complete black, reducing all to a black void with elementary white outlines.
"I'm sorry to disappoint you…" Vospyka closed her eyes and slowly, one twitch at a time, crossed her arms. They slipped out from underneath her cloak. Seeing his opponent's empty hands seemed to shatter Smash-Man's resolve and left his focused gaze debilitated into a blank look that resigned itself to failure. "Truth is, there is no hammer. And the thing about transcendental hammers is… Nothing's bigger than that. No matter how big you forge your hammer, it will never be bigger than a hammer that, from a philosophical point of view, must exist, but does not."
"B-But… You must use a hammer to nail something down!" Smash-Man lost his composure, flipping out as a dozen of man-sized nails skewered him and left him impaled and slumped to bleed out. Whited-out and completely defeated.
"This is what happens to minds too feeble to understand the laws of the world, they break," Vospyka turned around and threw the strand of her scarf over her right shoulder as she walked away. Having defeated the biggest detractor of her success, the magician woman walked off to wait for the conclusion of the battle royale while punishing all those targeting her for elimination by making them into living pincushions.
"What the… Who the fuck could do something like this to a tough guy like you?" a round-belly man dressed in a full-body yellow bodysuit covered with plates of blue armor padding around the vital areas grumbled out as he examined the grisly scene of Vospyka's crime that left his fellow superhero skewered with nail-shaped rods and humbled in a way that Quill-Man had seen no one humble his fellow hero. The plump superhero bent his knees and transitioned into a squat as he scratched his rough stubble. Steel blades following the color motif of Quill-Man's armor stuck out from the back of his head, his shoulders, back, elbows and wrists, though the shorty looked accustomed to his impractical and edgy, in a literal sense of the word, suit to where he didn't need to think too much before committing to a movement without the fear of cutting himself.
In a blur, the yellow and blue superhero twirled around, positioning his head, shoulders, elbows, and wrists at the exact right angle to slice up the nails that held his fellow superhero pinned down and liberate him from the predicament. Black chakra crawled up the blue and yellow blades in a thin coating, drastically extending their length but also enabling them to cut even the unbreakable and immovable nails of Vospyka that only Smash-Man could pull out before and only using his hammer.
"Aw shit, you're all fucked up," Quill-Man ran his hand up his forehead until it met the edge of one of his blades at the back of the head. Carefully, the sharp-edged superhero pulled his hand away from the blade's edge without cutting his glove and his hand and paced forward and back a few times. He leaned down to check Smash-Man's vitals. "He's alive… But might not be for long," Quill-Man realized.
"What a beautiful treasure…" a low-pitched voice filled with malice chilled Quill-Man to the core, prompting the superhero to turn around, only to see the immovable juggernaut conqueror King Wulithmes himself admiring Smash-Man's hammer. "I like the shape, I'll admit. It's not that I need a hammer, but this one is splendid, so I will take it."
"How did you even lift that? The blacksmith that forged this hammer had countless Iwagakure ninja seal their Heavyweight Boulder Jutsu within every ounce of ore it's made of…" Quill-Man grumbled with a frustrated and desperate expression. He had neither the need nor the want to see this troublesome conqueror in front of him while he was figuring out how to help his fellow superhero. The last thing either of them wanted was to have this asshole claim Smash-Man's treasured hammer.
"Is that true? Marvelous!" Wulithmes played with his new toy, swinging it around. "It must be a myth, how come this hammer hasn't sunken into the ground and through the Earth's core if that is the case? The sheer gravity of this thing should crumble everything around it. No… Wait, it does seem quite hefty. Is it because I picked it up and it reacted to my supreme power, sapping it to sustain its own ability? Interesting… As expected of me, to choose a treasure so worth my time. First the secrets of that samurai, now this. This tournament proved to be more than a treat!"
"Look, buddy, I'm going to ask you to put that hammer down and fuck off to wherever you came from nicely," Quill-Man leaned his upper body down, flashing the fearsome blades attached to the armor plates on his back and the wrist and elbow blades. One thing Quill-Man had nailed down to perfection was his posing game. He knew how and when to turn what body part to showcase his armor and the chakra coating so intense that it hummed passively each moment it was applied.
"That didn't sound very nice to me," King Wulithmes' red ring-shaped irises wandered down the black eyes to the bottom, where they fixed on the foul-mouthed superhero watching out for his comrade. "In fact, it sounded like an insult. One that deserves a stomping of the insect that throws it around. Oh, I'm just in luck, I just needed an opportunity to test this lovely new treasure of war."
"You want war, buddy, I'll give you more than you can handle!" Quill-Man flexed his short body, stretching the surrounding bodysuit to its limits and exuding as much of his chakra coating as possible. Black rays surrounded each of his blades and lengthened the artificial quills by almost twice their original length.
"Come, let's test this fancy heavyweight hammer then!" Wulithmes shined a cocky grin Quill-Man's way. As Quill-Man pounced at the conqueror and wrapped himself up in a human-cannonball position, the conqueror dashed at Quill-Man with Smash-Man's hammer wound back and ready to slam the edgy superhero out into the atmosphere.
The wild swing hit absolutely nothing as King Wulithmes stopped in place after a missed swing and Quill-Man unraveled on the other side, behind the golden-skinned conqueror. Wulithmes' skin began cracking as more and more shallow lacerations opened. Quill-Man, meanwhile, landed on his feet on the other side with all his artificial quills pointed outward and beaming elongated and focused black chakra blades in all directions.
"Impossible!" Wulithmes looked down to examine the wounds he had gathered. Creamy mustard-colored secretion with bright sparkles began drooping from the cuts before bursting forth like geyser streams. The ankh-shaped hammer slipped from the twitching grasp of the conqueror and the hefty slam of the weapon against the ground provided the shock needed for Wulithmes to collapse into a bucket load of sliced and diced cubes.
"Shoulda blasted me away with your own fancy fusion flames, punk," Quill-Man smashed a few of his wrist blades against one another, producing flocks of sparks as the black chakra coating vanished without a trace and Quill-Man was left with a ridiculous-looking yet immensely dangerous armor. Approaching his friend's hammer, Quill-Man rammed his shoulder into the handle, trying to move it from the place, but it didn't budge.
Just like Wulithmes described, the moment that Quill-Man felt his shoulder touching the handle, it began draining Quill-Man's chakra and activating all those storage seals that supercharged the hammer's weight to no end. Giving up and falling on his front from inertia, Quill-Man picked himself up and placed his comrade by his back against the hammer for support.
"Wh-What an upset! The superhero Quill-Man, a pariah amongst the superheroes that wish to be known for their rescue work, eliminated the conqueror King Wulithmes, who was a definite favorite to win the whole thing!" the announcer bawled out, risking losing his voice, though the shock of the moment definitely deserved such a sacrifice. "This appeared to be an instance of the world's hardest shield against the world's hardest sword, and Quill-Man's quills sliced King Wulithmes up like a slab of butter!"
Quill-Man panted, leaning over his knees while looking at his bleeding-out and pale ally. Veins popped out on Smash-Man's forehead and his brown hair, which usually floated in the air, weighed back down, surrendering to the laws of gravity. Seeing signs of certain death in his comrade, Quill-Man sighed.
"Sorry, bud, unless you get some doc to look at ya, 'fraid not even you're gonna make it. You're lucky you bumped into me, of all those other posers. They'd have thought you had a chance if you just willed hard enough. I'm just the type of hero that always does the right thing, whether or not people like it," Quill-Man wrapped his hand across the front of his mask before grabbing hold of Smash-Man's cape and throwing himself rolling through the air like a cannonball again. After completing his roll, Quill-Man heaved his weightless and bleeding-out friend out of the ring.
"What is going on!?" the announcer hammered his palms down at the railing. "Quill-Man just eliminated a fellow superhero, just like War-Man did before! What is this schism between different fractions of superheroes that's forcing them to throw each other out of bounds!? With this shocking elimination, 127 combatants remain to determine the best 16 of them all!"
"You dumbass," Quill-Man mumbled to himself while staring off at the rushing staff that scooped Smash-Man up and hurried him off to the infirmary. "This isn't about the bickering between War-Man and Hero-Man. This is about being a good bud and letting your pal know he's had enough. He won't be thanking me when he wakes up, but at least he'll be alive to shove my teeth down my throat…"
Turning around and clanging with the ridiculous elbow, wrist, and back blades, Quill-Man walked back into the boiling fray of the battle royale. Growling, he threw himself right into the middle of it, finding himself new opponents to challenge so that he could forget about having just committed casual murder and eliminated his own acquaintance.