Jet raced in a blazing beam of light, blitzing right up to his towering opponent and shooting up with a back-flipping kick. Because of the immense speed and the tremendous amount of chi flowing through Jet's body, the martial artist's forearms and calves lit up ablaze, forming a coat of cinders and an aura of flaming tongues around the speedy martial artist.
Darthkama raised his fists and placed them at eye level. It was a strange method of defense, or so it seemed to Jet at first, but then popping Halos of Salvation burst though instead of blowing up everywhere, they spewed a concentrated beam of light toward the other, forming a rod of solid light in between Darthkama's hands that emitted a faintly visible vertical dome of energy around the Salvari warrior, protecting him from immediate harm.
Immediately after reaching the peak of the height he'd ascend to with his flashy backflip kick, Jet turned his leg outward and began rolling in all directions, mid-air, turning what would've been a perilous fall for him that would've left him wide open into a combination of rolling and sweeping mid-air kicks. The glowing-eyed Salvari leaned aside and pushed his hands in the way of each incoming kick with a look of tranquility on his expression. Then he swept his own arm in a hammering motion, forcing another Halo of Salvation to pop and shoot off light in a tunneling rod-like shape. This makeshift staff of pure dharma light sent Jet skidding on the floor, clutching his chest.
After twirling the rod of light around him, Darthkama let it dissolve with glistening, little star drops. Like the dew of starlight. The Salvari waited patiently for the dazzling beauty of his collapsing halos to dissolve before opening his eyes with renewed focus and throwing an invisible combination of ranged fist thrusts. His strikes were so swift that they became blurry and his arms nearly completely vanished from sight at around the elbow. A cluttering star fall of Halos of Salvation hurtled Jet's way. Far too many to count, too many to keep track of, let alone evade.
Jet hunkered down and covered his upper body, spreading his feet wider apart and taking a pose for superior balance. The bombarding halos began pushing at him but with tucked knees, the willpower of a true martial artist, and the toughness of a polished body, Jet grunted in pain, he skidded backward from the force of compact stars made of pure dharma smashing into him at the speed of a beaming arrow of light but he neither collapsed in defeat nor let the cluster of stars shove him over the edge of the arena.
With trails of smoke lingering over his burnt, grazed, and bloodied body, Jet resumed the peppy sway of the martial artist's signature stance. The Salvari opened his chest up to position his upward-pointing hands to his sides at shoulder level. A shimmering star of a halo formed in each of his open hands. In a show of absolute control over such an unorthodox technique, Darthkama drew his hands around him in a vertical circle, forming a ring of light in front of him.
"Halo of Diwali!" Darthkama chanted, pushing his hands out and sending the ring of light toward Jet. The Messiah of Martial Arts rolled through the open hole of the ring, only to become entrapped by the halo as it shut closed tightly around his body. The locked halo immolated in a sky-reaching flame of white and gold while Darthkama stood in a prayer pose just a thumb's length outside the reach of the flame's edge.
It was as if the glass panel of serenity had shattered within the Salvari's mind. He opened his glowing eyes only to see the incoming boot that slammed straight into his face and almost caved his head in. Jet flew out from the flames, half coated by the white burn of dharma. His eyes glowed with intense light, similar to Darthkama's own cerulean glow. Meanwhile, Jet's hair had turned messy and spiky, with the tips becoming one with the dharma flame.
Kicking off of Darthkama's face, the tips of Jet's boot dabbed the ground while the Messiah breathed in deep, flushing the white burn of dharma into his system while his heels hovered over the ground. Enveloped in a calm burn of white dharma flame, Jet flashed his forearm and it dug deep into Darthkama's gut, flinching up the Salvari with tranquil-looking savagery that nearly pushed Jet's fist clean through the majestic God of the Arena.
In a flash, Jet hopped over the head and then slammed down with a downward fist, sweeping Darthkama's legs while the white flaming aura around him formed an ethereal look of a dragon's tail, drastically enhancing the power and the range of the leg sweep. With Darthkama hovering in mid-air, a look of amazement frozen on his face. Jet calmly spread his legs and leaned in, gently navigating an enclosed fist until it was just one inch away from the face of the falling Salvari. Although Darthkama may have been less than half his size off the ground, due to Jet's agility and fluidity of motion, it was as if he was falling forever in terms of how effortlessly Jet stringed attacks together.
It wasn't quite clear if Jet punched or not, but a concussive blast sent Darthkama flying in an uncontrollable tunnel of drilling air, turning around his axis and well on his way out of the arena's bounds. Everything became black. Only the martial artist who had welcomed the flame of dharma into his heart and became one with it instead of letting it burn him, and the Salvari who wielded the light of the dharma remained in the vast oblivion of the black void. Blurring even in the hyperspace of vanished time-space, forming afterimages after each motion, Jet rolled in behind his airborne opponent while Darthkama seemed frozen in time and moving just one hair's length each hour.
Jet shoved a nonchalant jab into Darthkama's back, bending the airborne Salvari giant backward in what would've snapped the spine of any lesser man and punched the very atoms from his sack of bones in a frantic outer shower. Jet vanished, returning the flow of time-space back to its normal schedule while he crashed down from the sky with a diving punch straight to Darthkama's nose, once again indenting the face of the amber-skinned Salvari warrior and flattening him on the ground.
Having landed on the ground, Jet straightened his back and turned to the fallen Salvari warrior, covered in bruises, battered and scraped. With this much battle damage decorating both fighters, they should, by all means, have lost their intimidating shine yet Darthkama looked not one bit lesser of a warrior as he stood up wiping trickling blood from his busted nose and Jet looked as if he had ascended onto the divine plain of martial arts where the Salvari stood and presided over all of their lesser challengers from.
"The dharma of my Halo of Diwali… You made it your own. No… Not even absorbing that technique would not have made you this fast and powerful. You've awakened something within yourself when confronted with your own imperfection within the white dharma flame," Darthkama bargained with the cruel reality of a worthy challenger now standing before him. Every bit a God of the Arena that either of the Salvari were.
"Hmm…" Jet cracked a grin, taking the moment to look down and admire the aura of white flame around him. "This Messiah of Martial Arts thing was never something I wanted to be called. It was what a bunch of old people said when they saw me master their lessons and put a modern spin on them. Martial arts had grown stale, too rigid, and too reliant on tradition. It lost all of its appeal because of that and with the absence of innovators and daring challengers of its dogmas, it became stale. They meant to call me Messiah because, through the way I fight, I would return people's interest in martial arts. Though, I suppose, the ultimate path of a Messiah is always toward godhood."
"You seek to become a Salvari then, like one of us?" Darthkama wondered with a smile, spilling the joy of thorough entertainment at about the same rate that his broken nose was wasting blood.
"No. I can't be bothered to stay in one place, even if this arena and the people it invites from throughout the world are amazing. I can't stay around one place and wait for the world's different martial arts to come to me. I must be the one to seek them out," Jet marveled at his hands, which seemed like they could do just about anything now.
"You've only tapped into the true potential of the dharma and here you go, making bold claims that you've risen beyond those who let it guide them to godhood. Vanity is a sin in itself," Darthkama formed two rotating Halos of Salvation around him that elevated into the air and collided together, forging a sky-scorching pillar of majestic yellow light that engulfed the Salvari warrior whole. Ethereal white arms made of solidified light and armored with golden luster constructs formed out of the illustrious fusion between man and dharma.
Darthkama had merged with dharma and taken a gigantic form far beyond the level to which Jet seemed to operate at with an entire system of grand moons of golden flame rotating around him. "Dharma Mode!" Darthkama chanted, adopting a position similar to that of a bow-wielding hunter as he stretched his legs wide to the different corners of the arena and raised his right hand with a clenched fist out in front of him, then drew the left one behind him. "Astral Starfall!" he chanted again with a voice bolstered by the dharma coating him as the moons of golden flame began hurtling toward Jet's general location, threatening to obliterate all in their path as each moon blazed with the same white flame that forged Jet's new power.
Releasing a bestial howl, Jet flexed his body, forcing all of his remaining chi to explode outward into a pillar of white light as all of the time-space disappeared without a trace again. Only he and his opponent existed in this state of hyperspace existence. White flame raged in a furious blaze that no longer merely formed tongues but became a full-on wildfire around Jet. The martial artist's eyes turned to white beacons once more, while the tips of his hair became flaming white tongues as well.
With a gentle twitch of his toes, Jet sent himself to an accelerating soar despite the ground underneath him having seemingly vanished. One by one, Jet blitzed to each of the falling moons and smashed them into glorious fireworks with one jab for each. In a regal arc of white flame, the ascended Messiah flipped over the pure dharma avatar of his colossal opponent and threw a lone straight kick into his back that sent Darthkama bursting out from his avatar of dharma and flying away like a clump of rags while the avatar of dharma dissolved and joined the rest of existence in oblivion.
Like an arrow of furious lightning, Jet crashed forward and backward, passing the flying Salvari warrior frozen in time many times over and beating him down one dash at a time. Then, Jet skipped ahead to hovering directly above his opponent and smashing him away with a stomping kick. The light emanating from Jet's white flame sparked the fire of ten billion stars, the existence of which was unique to this hyperspace in which these God of Arena-level of warriors fought. With a stoic expression, Jet dashed past his opponent, snuffing out these hyperspace stars in ten billion novae before appearing directly in front of his battered opponent, left hovering in a fetal position in mid-air.
All of Jet's marvelous power surged solely into his right fist, with the white flame and his unique method of chi control vanishing everywhere but the glowing azure fist that was packed with raw power. Turning his rear heel inward, leading his hip forward with the hip and the knee pointing toward his opponent, Jet calmly moved his fist until it was a mere five centimeters away from his opponent. So close that the light shining from the power-packed fist illuminated every shadowy corner of every scrape and wrinkle on his opponent's amber skin and his robes.
"One-Twitch Punch!" Jet chanted while snapping his chi-packed fist straight into his opponent's chest with an all-encompassing forceful eruption of raw force that engulfed the entire hyperspace in a flash of white light. When the blink of light subsided and retreated to its source, all of the existence returned to normal as if no transgressions against the fabric of time-space had occurred.
"How unexpected! The martial artist Jet, the so-called Messiah of Martial Arts, has eliminated Darthkama, the Avatar of Positive Masculinity himself! This leaves 123 contestants still competing for a spot in the top 16!" the announcer yelled out while the audience rustled with mixed reactions. The Salvari were the clear favorites amongst the audience, who became accustomed to only seeing each member of the Salvari fight once in a while and now saw all ten of them fighting together, with two of them having been eliminated already.
"You fucking bastard! I'll rip your fucking head off and beat every motherfucker here with it!" the Salvari woman to whom Darthkama referred as Shakali earlier stepped up. Her black robe rustled from the pressure of the dharma surging from her body, while the black dharma formed two shadowy arms over her original pair of muscular and pale ones. These new arms even wielded identical shadowy sickles to the ones that the woman brandished before Jet as an intimidation tactic.
"Calm down, Shakali," the second of Darthkama's woman companions stepped up to her fellow Salvari. "You know Darthkama hates vengeful responses. He wouldn't want you to do anything bad to this young man. He challenged Darthkama and defeated him fair and square."
"You should feel lucky, punk!" Shakali snarled, pointing the tip of her steel sickle at Jet who panted slumped, and hunched over from every single cell in his body, feeling like it was being burnt to the point of popping like popcorn. "Darthkama is a powerful guy, but he fights softly and doesn't like violence. He keeps slinging those ridiculous stars at people and fighting with ranged attacks because he's afraid of his own strength. You'll find nobody else like him amongst the Salvari. When I see you again, I'll challenge you to a fight and it won't end pretty for you!"
"Sorry, but in that case, could you leave this place instead?" Jet panted out through severe strain as it began feeling as if his heart could crawl out from his body at any point.
"Heh," the fair-skinned Salvari woman in a red dress and golden armaments and thick, brown hair chuckled. "I see, so the fight has left you winded and unable to move…"
"Oh, come on, Manshuri! Are you really such a fucking pansy that you'll let this asshole walk all over us and just run away from him? I refuse! I'm telling you, I absolutely refuse to run away from anyone, let alone this bag of dicks!" Shakali objected with a violent swipe of her sickle that put distance between her and her fellow Salvari.
"Look at him," Manshuri gestured with her hand at Jet as the martial artists remaining in the competition who have just observed the end of the grandiose battle of a Messiah rumbling against a God to scoop up the crippled and burnt-out Jet and drag him off to safety where he could be safer from Salvari retaliation. "He's all tuckered out and the wounds he sustained from the Halos of Salvation are severe. If you were to attack him, it wouldn't be a fight worth a Salvari. It would be a slaughter fest. We don't fight like that, we don't serve as executioners, we're a main attraction. If you would stoop this low, feel free. I, meanwhile, still have a shred of Salvari dignity left in me."
"Man, fuck you always so high and mighty…" Shakali sighed with grumbling disappointment as, despite seeing red, she simply couldn't raise her hand to pursue the fleeing crowd of terrified martial artists and cut them up just so she could execute some crippled guy who could barely move on his own. "Tsk… Fine, I'll give him a count to ten, then I'll go hunt for him! No… Wait, ten's a hassle, I'll count to eight! No, fuck that, eight isn't fair. Fine, I'll count to sixty-four, then I won't have to listen to your bitchy plights for mercy!"
"Do as you want," Manshuri nodded. "Now that dear Darthkama is eliminated, I have no reason to stick around this place either. Everyone else here is so rude, I'd rather find a quiet corner and lament poor Darthkama's elimination. Matrani first, now Darthkama…"
A slender man in a tight blue and burgundy colored bodysuit looked at his perforated kite-like harness made of wood and paper-like membrane that usually allowed him to ride the gale and hover. The man had a thick-looking helmet with an armored vizor protecting his eyes and a bag full of metal balls wrapped in a plastic decorative shell that gave them red color.
"My harness… It's all ruined!" the pro athlete lamented before hearing an irritating wasp-like flutter in the vicinity. He dived for the side, falling over his duffel bag of bomb balls while a kid in a hummingbird costume covered with pink and teal feathers swooped in with a hollowed bone knife and slashed his perforated harness to pieces. The pro athlete's jaw dropped and his eyes would've popped out of his skull had his helmet not protected him from such an eventuality.
"L-Listen kid… Do you have any idea how much this equipment costs!?" the slender athlete shook his gloved fist over his helm.
"You use that thing to fly over the skies, pretending as if you own them. Let's fight to the death so that we determine who truly owns the skies!" the plump little Sky Country girl dressed in a suit of hummingbird feathers pressed her hollowed bone knife closer to her chest as her little wings fluttered as hard as she could flap them to keep her hovering with a wasp-like buzz in mid-air.
"H-Huh?" the fallen athlete shook his head in disbelief. His opponent didn't share his hesitation to attack and dashed at him first with a ruthless stab at his chest.