Serial killers fled bouncing across the battlefield like black specters. With a thunderous crash, it became apparent what had scattered them like frightened pigeons to seek cover behind pillars of debris, various craters, and other shady hiding spots. A tall and sinewy man with a red and black cloth tied around his waist and nothing but artifacts and decorations stood up and flopped a massive golden mace over his shoulder while looking around.
"My, my… I sensed tremendous dharma in this direction, but all I found were cowards. People who flaunt their strength only against the weak are simply the worst," the physical specimen of charcoal-black skin with thick silver hair that grew into lively chops, a scruffy mustache, and a slick triangular beard dragged the back of his fist across his sweaty forehead. Just like with the other Salvari, this one had eyes glowing with the color of midnight, with only a shimmering ring that reminded an ordinary beholder of an eclipse shining in the eyes.
Step by step, quaking the ground underneath his feet with every step, the Salvari warrior walked out from the crater of his own making and gently tapped his mace against the ground while looking around, wondering if he would encounter someone interesting. However, it was as if he was chasing ghosts. "Hmmm… I could have sworn to have sensed peerless dharma here. Could it have been a mistake? Perhaps one of Salvari passed this place?"
Just as the hairy Salvari pondered to himself, a samurai clashed swords against a pirate, chaining collisions in the air with hypersonic footwork and fireworks of sparks. Engrossed by the miraculous sight, the Salvari looked up as two crescent slashes of compressed air flying at him in a V-shape narrowly missed him. These two warriors were getting rowdy, and they seemed to care little about who got cut up by the swings of their swords that didn't find an answer.
A dull thud made the Salvari warrior glance back, but before his eclipse-like eyes could do so, a pair of sliced-off mountain peaks slammed at him from both sides resulting in a crumbling mess of stone and dust. A shout from the bottom of his lungs and a good flex of his muscles later, the Salvari was freed from the stone. It was odd that he couldn't see such a freak accident coming. After all, he saw the V-shaped aerial slash that caused it by passing two rocky pillars and sending them flying, but for both of them to fly in this exact direction at the same time… It was almost suspicious.
"Hmm… Something is afoot…" the Salvari stroked his greasy beard. While initially, his look seemed distracted, focus surged to the Salvari in a blink as he smashed his golden mace as hard as he could and grounded an incoming condor-shaped Cursed Warrior into the ground. Turning to the direction which the Cursed Warrior came from, the Salvari noticed a harsh mountain of muscle with a book in one hand and a diamond-encrusted claymore in another.
"Sorry about that!" the shaggy-haired warrior wearing simple villager's clothing yelled out with an apologetic expression. "Didn't mean to target you with that, just sent that monster flying and it came your way. Are you okay?"
"Hmm… Carry on with your fight, warrior. I will not impede your conquest!" the Salvari yelled back at the flying magician who seemed to be the most out-of-ordinary-looking warrior in his faction as his musculature and choice of weapon would've implied him to be anything else but a spellcaster. "You were wrong, however, my opponent is far more treacherous than you could comprehend and this was no freak accident, nor was that rockslide earlier…"
"Yeah, you've piqued the interest of a very interesting opponent there, champ," the shaggy-haired magician with a three-week stubble snickered while cracking his neck left and right. "I'll leave you to it then, maybe we'll fight after if both of us survive…"
"Oh, so you can comprehend the nature of my foe? I was wrong to underestimate you magicians in that case," the muscular Salvari laughed out and slammed the round and smashing part of his mace into the floor. The flattened Cursed Warrior took off into the air and swooped directly at the flying sword-and-shield-wielding magician. The two engaged each other in an all-out battle while the Salvari warrior was left behind to deal with his enigmatic opponent.
"You must be a serial killer. I found it odd how most factions have signed up ten and more members into the battle royale and yet serial killers seemed somewhat lacking by comparison. That's because you play it sneaky, don't you? That's why this dharma I sense from you is so powerful but also so strange… There's no one else in this arena quite like you," the Salvari laughed out, heaving his tremendous golden mace over his shoulder while slapping his thick belly with the free hand.
A cascade of explosions rippled around the palace complex of Agbarmahal, shocking the audience and forcing them to turn their attention to the horrific accident. With the grand bash occurring in the arena, there may not have been many people hurt or killed in such an accident, maybe just some servants tending to the palace, then again, even those were more likely to have been confined to their chambers as there was simply nobody to whose needs these servants could tend.
A vicious whizz filled the air as eleven pipes from Agbarmahal's piping system whizzed in from every side, which was blessed by an accidental freak gas leak. The Salvari warrior flexed his muscles, becoming tempered like iron, which caused these high-speed plumbing system missiles to bounce off of his adamantine muscles.
"I knew it, you don't want to be exposed, do you? Now it's just the matter of figuring out the rules by which you operate…" the Salvari let out a hearty chuckle. "Usually fighting powerful foes isn't really up to my liking. I prefer to smash to pieces pretentious fools that abuse weaker competitors, but once in a while, I have to prove that I belong amongst the Salvari, after all. Not to mention, you've tried to kill me three times now, fiend. It's only right that I return the favor."
"Hmph!" the Salvari clutched in tension, looking up and reacting in a split instant to another freak accident of an intense ray of sunshine reflecting from the armor of the airborne Ryoku Genshi, the Fusion Ball player. The little ray of sunshine danced in reflection, bouncing between multiple shields or armor plates, until casting itself in the compound glass panel of the Agbarmahal's dome and bouncing off of multiple other domes, picking up size and heat as it grew larger when focused by something as absolutely massive as the Agbarmahal's dome.
Scorching like a tunneling heatwave, a white beam of light engulfed the Salvari, transferring a 6000-degree blaze that, after slamming into the almighty warrior to immolate him to a charred skeleton and reduce him to a handful of ash, flew off and split into thousands of puny arrows of light that harmlessly showered the parched desert of Wind Country.
"What is the meaning of this!?" the Salvari coughed out smoke after the horrific accident went its course and left his body hair utterly singed and his jewelry and armor pieces bubbling and melting off. Even the impressive golden crown collapsed into a formless mustard-color mass from the momentary flash of absolute heat. While patches of minor charred spots bedecked the Salvari's body, it didn't look like he had suffered much lasting damage. "This is most unorthodox!"
The Salvari warrior landed on the ground and closed his eyes, shutting his dharma sight off and beginning to feel with his entire body. Seeing dharma felt utterly useless with this entire palace complex, utterly drenched in the ethereal dharma pressure that this cryptic opponent transmitted. It was of much greater use to employ his bodily senses and, instead of trying to comprehend the incorporeal nature of his puzzling opponent, following the tide of horrific accidents that this enigma tried claiming his life with.
"Wh… What the…!?" multiple ninja from various countries scattered all across the battlefield jumped up as if bathed by a washing wave of boiling water. They turned their attention to their sparkling and sizzling weapon pouches that all activated at once. It was as if every single explosive tag therein was about to go off at once. Being trained wielders and masterminds of their own hip-placed arsenals, the ninja with malfunctioning pouches scrambled and dropped them just in the nick of time.
A booming flare of chained explosions covered the arena, forcing the Salvari warrior who was competing with an invisible, almighty terror capable of causing horrendous freak accidents all throughout to run away as, somehow, most ninja thought it would've been best to dump their malfunctioning pouches exactly where he was standing at that moment, with the slower ones on the draw actually choosing his exact location to dump their sizzling packages exactly where the hairy Salvari was fleeing from death's ire to.
The disciplined and burly Salvari warrior raced, jumped, scrambled, and dashed like a monkey, employing all fours and highly agile to his brawny body build movement style. It would've been quite simple evading an explosion after it set off, but before it reached him normally, however, the one-in-a-trillion chance of these freak accidents all occurring at once made his task more complicated. Not to mention the fact that, despite not wanting to do so, every freaked-out ninja just flung their burning and about-to-explode load his way.
A feeling of weightlessness caught the Salvari warrior unaware. Oh, cruel fortune, he was slipping! While the flop on his back didn't hurt the body nearly as bad as the botch hurt his pride, the Salvari breathed out in pleasant surprise at this twist only for a buzzing, magical, diamond-encrusted claymore to whizz in and plunge straight into the eye of the fallen Salvari, showering the right side of his face in azure-colored, glittering goop.
All these accidents were just setup for the magical sword to do the work, and that pesky little rascal even foreshadowed it earlier with the Cursed Warrior and the brief talk with the magician.
"Drats! Sorry 'bout that, man! Shit…" the shaggy-haired magician juggernaut descended and flicked his tome to flip through hundreds of pages looking for just the right spell to heal the skewered Salvari but the cruel twist of fate struck again with the Cursed Warrior flapping its condor wings and causing a tornado that blew the magician and his book away and scattered both the magician, the injured Salvari and both of the magician's artifacts as far away from each other as possible.
With air caressing his wet cheeks, the stunned Salvari plunged his finger into his own impaled eye and picked a touch of his blood before extending his hands and revealing glowing circuits with sealing glyphs drawn within on the palms of his hand. "I call forth thee–Sarurama!"
A humanoid monkey clad in ancient warrior armor appeared from the smoke after a loud pop, grabbing hold of his summoner, who was headed for elimination and swinging him around, then releasing him on a trajectory headed toward the arena. With a loud crack, the Salvari's bare feet slammed against the outermost edge of the arena's bounds, saving him from a freak elimination.
Ungoverned by the rules that bound his summoner, Sarurama, the warrior mandrill, pounced from the spectator stands where the audience parted to let it land and vaulted all the way to the arena to join his summoner. While this would have been business as usual to the warrior animal, this time he stared at his partner with a smidge of bewilderment as glittery goop blotched on the ground from the impaled eye that remained closed yet leaked this unusual goop instead of bleeding.
"You got yourself messed up this time, Anjaman. Do you want me to start gathering sage chakra?" Sarurama turned to his companion, who just cracked his neck to the sides and rolled his knuckles before picking the mace back in his hands.
"And accomplish what, exactly? No. I now face an opponent that cannot be conquered with raw power. No. No matter how powerful someone is, not even the God of the Arena can overcome death. That is what my enemy represents. The ultimate end that comes for all things. I wrestle not against one of flesh and bones, but against death itself. Against an opponent like that, power is meaningless," Anjaman the Salvari sighed.
"So, what are you going to do?" Sarurama turned to his summoner. "Do you need me around?"
"Sorry, but I think I'll face my opponent the way any man can face death. On my own, humbled and powerless," Anjaman cackled with a full-teeth smile, closing his functional dharma-seeing eye and reaching for his shoulder. A hefty clang shook the ground underneath their feet. This was Anjaman's golden mace hitting the floor. One by one, the Salvari warrior removed his jewelry, his crown, and every single bit of his piece of gear of war, looking up with closed eyes and slowly walking toward the center of the arena to meet death and dance the devil's swing with it.
"What are you doing?" Anjaman turned with pleasant surprise, hearing light taps of the mandrill's arms and feet beside him.
"You may be eager to throw your life away, but I don't plan on letting a sage die on my watch. Sages are a diamond in a coal mine. Some species have never met the right people to garner that kind of bond," Sarurama replied. "If you open that left eye now and see me prancing like a dog by your side, I swear I'll rip it out myself and finish the job of blinding you."
"That's okay. To face death, one doesn't need sight. You wouldn't be able to see it even if you wanted to," Anjaman laughed out.
A rotating tree burst forth from underground, shooting off to the skies and racing toward a samurai fending off a Senju clansman from Konoha. The samurai's flash-swift cuts reduced the incoming tree projectile to a shower of wooden stakes and sawdust. In a miraculous mishap, a whirlwind raised by the wing flap of a Cursed Warrior sucked the wooden stakes and sawdust in, spewing it out as a blinding cloud that made Sarurama and a handful of warriors near the semi-blinded Salvari warrior cough and cover their eyes.
That was when the downpour of wooden stakes came washing down. Anjaman breathed in and blew his pecks, abs, and biceps out, becoming so hard that the calamitous wooden debris flung at the speed of a bullet from a whirling tornado bounced off of his skin and busted to harmless shreds. A vicious rip resonated through the ground, forcing everyone sharing the arena to fall on their knees at once while the spectators screamed out, startled by the cruel whim of mother nature.
"Unbelievable! To think that amongst all these incredible battles, an 11,2 earthquake has just hit Agbarah! Don't worry, spectators, this arena, and the halls you're seated in are built to withstand far worse than the worst nature has to offer!" the announcer scrambled, pulling himself back to his stand after being flung over the rails and thrown off to a random seat in the spectator area face-first.
"Unbelievable? Try impossible… " Anjaman, betrayed by the ground he stood on, began wrestling against the rocky debris of fallen wreckage and tiles that popped out from the arena and buried the unlucky competitors, forcing them to burrow out. Before the Salvari could stand back up on his feet, a turbulent turquoise shockwave that slammed from the very atmosphere rocked him and sucked him up while locking him completely in place.
"What's this!? How unlucky can one person get!? It seems like this impossibly powerful earthquake has caused a catastrophic calamity of the Earth's magnetic field, creating a tunneling distortion entirely localized around competitor Anjaman!" the announcer made the spectators fear he would lose his voice while the world's most vibrant and vocal with its terrifying hum aurora borealis sucked Anjaman into the clouds. "Those of you who are extremely sensitive, first, what are you doing here at this point still, second–close your eyes or leave! It appears that the magnetic calamity that sucked Anjaman in is collecting every tiniest bit of iron in the area and building an improvised mausoleum out of it!"
Sarurama pounced into the sky, seeking to enter the schism in the Earth's magnetic field, but the swirling and glittering waves deflected him as a fly swatted away by a stiff hand. "So, this specific type of magnetism repels the iron in my blood? What are the odds?" Sarurama wiped the trail of blood on his lip while grumbling and shaking his fist at the cruel whims of death itself.
The other competitors began clutching and digging themselves into the debris, shocking the mandrill who thought that this magnetic calamity was merely out of this world in terms of being unbelievable when, in fact, it was from a whole different plane of ludicrous. "Everyone's blood is being pushed back!? Anjaman is the only one sucked in!?" Sarurama shrieked out in disbelief, clawing at his eyelids at the preposterous implications of this scourge painstakingly designed to eliminate just one man.
"I see…" Anjaman cracked a grin, at last opening his lone eye and facing his impending and inevitable end. "So this is the type of overwhelming odds a man faces when confronting his own mortality. We Salvari have been foolish to label ourselves Gods, haven't we?"
Blood compressed to crimson needles forced its way from Anjaman's body, one drop forced through one pore at a time, before every particle comprising the Salvari's body simply scattered away. The severity of Anjaman's demise looked like no death that anyone had ever seen. It was more like a cosmic event, a chemical reaction and a grisly behavior of fundamental particles that just comprised a grown human man with unmatched power. A power that was meaningless in the face of what he perceived as death itself.
Death didn't return a single ounce of the man it has taken into the skies. It was as if the Salvari man foolishly challenging death had become something more than he was in life. More than just a man of cosmic hubris, but mere stardust crushed by the most intense magnetic phenomenon in recorded history. One so ludicrously unlikely to happen that it will never occur again for billions of years, simply being too unlikely to occur for the entire age of the universe to pass before it does again.
"Ehm… I'm not sure what happened, but… One thing we can be sure of is that Anjaman the Salvari is eliminated… And deceased. This leaves 122 competitors left fighting in the arena and… Oh thank god all those horrible accidents seemed to have stopped for some reason," the announcer pulled out a silken hanky and began wiping the sweat and dust off of his face while his shades hung loosely on one ear and his bandanna laid slipped off to the right side and barely hung on one ear.