The audience cheered for Bishiyari, the strongest Salvari warrior. A significant portion of them didn't pull their eyes away from the Supreme Being of Ultimate Goodness ever since he ceased his brief rest and resumed the fighting. Even though it was debatable, it was highly unlikely that many on the spectator stands would've rooted for someone like Bishiyari's current opponent to be honest. Her unusual build of the swollen lower body and rather frail upper body, her strange bird suit that only covered the lower half and therefore made it even wider. None of those things made this Sky Warrior particularly appealing.
"Hmm, I sense little to no bad karma in you," Bishiyari stated out of the blue, before swinging his arms around and connecting his palms together as if in prayer. "It doesn't make much sense for us to fight, so if you wish to retreat, I shall close my eyes and…"
A brass-armored boot with three hooked claws slammed straight into Bishiyari's closed face. The Sky Warrior fashioning herself after a cassowary rolled through the air before landing behind the Supreme One and dashed back at him. After a minor stumble, Bishiyari caught the Sky Warrior's elbow and bent his right leg to absorb her kick with his shin. While the sharp brass claws tore through the Salvari's trousers, they didn't leave a scratch on his cerulean skin.
"Why do guys always try to run away from me? Don't they see how thick my legs are, goddamn it!?" the Sky Warrior fashioning herself after a cassowary shot a kick high enough to slam into Bishiyari's chin and shoot him upward with a sonic boom clamoring under his chin. Spreading her legs wide, the she-cassowary whirled through the skies with a spinning kick flurry, but both of Bishiyari's hands wrapped around her heels, catching the blitzing feet and stopping his opponent's attack.
"You may not be inherently evil, but in attacking one striving for Ultimate Goodness, you've shown your recklessness," Bishiyari replied and released his opponent's heels, leading to the two fighters hovering in mid-air and carefully positioning themselves while falling. Clouds of blue smoke spread around the Salvari warrior whose entire body was decorated by lifeless, different faces, and electric sparks cracked and sizzled around them.
"Reincarnation!" one of Bishiyari's twenty arms slipped into a golden ring with a protruding blade and thrust a jab, creating a golden beam and a surrounding airwave that engulfed the Sky Warrior and sent her flying far away from the bounds of the arena and crashing with an earth-splitting thud and a shockwave to catastrophic that the sand thrown by it reached the sky. With a light tap of his feet, Bishiyari touched the arena's bounds and connected a few pairs of his hands in prayer.
"Who could've expected that!? This fight didn't last any time at all! The Supreme Salvari eliminated Bikdotla, the Sky Warrior, in an instant! This puts the Sky Warriors into quite the predicament as half of their participants have already been thrown out!" the announcer's official confirmation of Bishiyari's flawless victory sent the audience into a mad howl. Despite having seen their favorite win a hundred and eight times before, the audience bawled about his performance as if it was the first time they'd seen it.
Kenbuta Takao, the Kirigakure ninja, was brawling it out amongst a mass of enemies that sought to eliminate him after a brief exchange with the fearsome lich of the Tonika Village, Kotsuzu Yabure, left him flat on the ground, bleeding and scraped. Fortunately for him, the uncanny ability to employ Steel Release to reshape his weapons into something more favorable for the range of his current predicament favored him and he fended off the countless physical or armed assaults all around him.
That was until he met his cleaver-shaped swords with a steel-cowled and armored superhero steel wings attached to his arms that either served as cumbersome cleaving blades in their own right or connected to an immovable shield when put together. The two rammed each other like oxen trying to out-wrestle each other before Takao's cleavers vanished by dissolving into a cloud of coal-black dust that brushed against the hero's exposed eyes and made him stumble forward while the Kirigakure ninja stepped from the side and kicked his opponent in the back while his blades reformed into simple twin katana.
After an evasive roll, War Man took the fight away by taking off with a bountiful leap and sticking his feet to the wall, then shooting off with a wall run, crossing in between different rocky ridges of debris. Surrounded by a flaring base chakra aura, Takao appeared directly above his opponent with his sword handles held close together and the steel comprising his blades merged and shaped like a gigantic mallet.
"Steel Release: Kemono Slam!" Takao howled out, swinging his mallet from an overhead position down and swatting the armorer superhero like a buzzing fly to crash into the ground below. War Man slammed his blade wing plates together, forming a heater-shaped shield in front of him and absorbing the shock of the blow only to cough and grunt from the shock of his back slamming against the ground and his brain scrambling inside of his skull from within.
Just as the staggering hero returned to his feet, the Kirigakure ninja was stuck on him like a vulture to a stinky carcass. "Steel Release: Kamakiri Mash!" Takao yelled out, transforming his swords into oversized scythes, Takao whirled them over his head like helicopter blades to home in on his fallen opponent. Once the distance was just right, the Kirigakure ninja slashed them down as a praying mantis struck at its prey, after the initial strike, he mashed his scythes with vicious rage and brute force as a substitute for finesse. War Man slammed his wings back into a shield shape, but a calculated double-scythe slash split them again, forcing the superhero to scramble and fend off the attacks by deflecting them with his wing-like blades.
"Steel Release: Seiryu Spin!" Takao chanted out, letting his scythes explode into a blinding swarm of iron dust and reform around the handles as jagged katana with spiky blade edges, reminding more of a saw than a civilized weapon. Intending to rend his opponent and saw him in half, Takao spun with an unstable angle in a whirligig manner before concluding his spin with a cross-shaped double blade slash. War Man reconnected his wings into a shield and absorbed the spinning attempt to saw him, but the brute force of the cross slash sent him rolling on his back and left him panting.
"I see… You don't really have to watch out for your weapons when you can just reshape them in any way you please and freely manipulate the alloy they're made of. You can make them as sharp or as blunt as you like," War Man stretched out his numbed muscles as fending off the unmatched raw power of his ninja opponent taxed him even when hiding behind an impenetrable shield.
"Your suit's seriously impressive!" Takao exclaimed, reshaping his weapons into daggers and pointing them at War Man with a shocked expression. "I can't see any chakra coating on that thing, but I can't seem to easily cut it either."
"That's because it's Audra Steel, kid. I've slain an outfit of gangsters mining and illegally forging it. It was a serious upgrade to my old threads and ordinary steel equipment," War Man patted the shield half attached to his right forearm, making the gear let out an oddly clamorous thud as if one was smacking a flat tin sheet and reflecting mystical violet glow off of its silver surface as if transforming ordinary sunlight upon reflection.
"Isn't the point of stopping an illegal operation to return the stolen goods to the original owner?" Takao's eyes squinted with suspicion. "I'm getting the feeling you're not much of a superhero, you know…"
"What would you know!?" War Man burst with wrathful outrage, dashing at Takao and throwing a right hook. With each simple attack of this particular hero, there was the caveat of the shield halves attached to his forearms that made each punch into a thrust of the Audra blade wings. Takao crossed his daggers, shoving them to the side of the blade to push it aside from his face, but that opened him up for a left hand that cracked his forehead open.
War Man spun around, knocking the opposing ninja away with gnashed teeth and a gash across his chest. With a roundhouse, the superhero chased after his opponent, slamming it into Takao's face and teeth and making him flip and roll backward while the superhero rolled his blade wing back just to secure a basic, good-old right hook to flatten Takao on the ground.
The armored hero unrolled his right wing and slammed the edges together, igniting a bright spark between the two tips while gently spinning the Audra wings around the spark which made the ignition drain out the Audra radiance from the armored wings and grow the ignition into a flaming violet nova. "War Shell!" War Man clamored out, thrusting his Audra wing to force the blazing shell to shoot forward at his opponent. Takao shook his dazed head before focusing his Steel Release dust around one handle to form a javelin.
In a drastic attempt to detonate the incoming blazing nova bullet, Takao flung the javelin in a straight line and forced a premature detonation. Despite not taking the brunt of the blast, the Kirigakure ninja caught plenty of the clamorous blast and flew off from its side, scraping and dragging across the arena grounds. Takao wheezed in pain, feeling the taste of blood in his mouth and the ironic chill of the warm desert winds brushing against his bleeding scrapes.
"The best use for that Audra steel was put to work in my hands and used on my war against the countless criminals, mercenaries, and thugs that plague the innocent settlers every day. All the while you ninja just stand around until the robbed and plundered throw you enough coins for you to move one finger and flick a threat you could eliminate in your sleep away. Don't you dare lecture me on what's right and heroic!" War Man barked out at the fallen and writhing ninja.
"A war?" Takao grumbled, rising off the ground while scratching his busted open head to ease the pain. "Jeez, you're really taking this whole war gimmick you've got all the way, huh?"
"It is a war. Not a war we started, but a war that must be fought to completion. If you will only fight when you're being paid or only be interested in helping those that were already hurt by it, you may as well get out of our way like the rest of the posers!" War Man grumbled, spreading his winged blades apart and forming a T-shape while taking off in a horizontal spinning slash flurry, hurling like a tornado of slashing fury that caught Takao with the brunt of it and left him with few options for responding. Whited out, the Kirigakure ninja flew with shredded clothes and flopped into the water out of the arena's bounds.
"Heroes score a win against the ninja!" the announcer shouted. "War Man managed to eliminate Kenbuta Takao with a perfect mixture of blitz offense and stalwart defense! War Man's clever use of Audra equipment made him too much for Takao's all-out offensive fighting style. Kenbuta Takao prided himself on fighting without fear, therefore, without the need for any defensive measures. While a daring, flashy, and entertaining style, it was a poor match for War Man's balanced approach and a bad choice during a marathon of a battle royale! This leaves it at 114 left, ladies and gents!"
A black humanoid dragon decorated with ruby rings and man-length claws and a complex network of glowing mosaic lines over its obsidian body with moose-like structure of impressive horns and building complex-wide wings thrust a punch engulfed in ruby-colored flames which emitted a dragon-head-shaped pulse of ruby flames. The projectile wave slammed at a bundled cocoon of slick black hair wrapped around an armored giant mercenary of Fennec's crew.
The walking giant suit of armor emerged unscathed, tearing through the outer wrapping of a cocoon of his own black hair. It seemed as if two immovable goliaths had found each other's match, as the enigmatic Cursed Warrior faced off against the shapeless black miasma clad in a living suit of black armor with an infinite mass of black hair responding to each command of the armor-possessing malice.
The Cursed Warrior flapped its wings, sending an intense airwave and pulse of black smoke that dusted off of the surface of the dragon-shaped warrior. The dust cloud rattled the hidden ace of the Fennec crew while the shroud seemed inward and jammed the armor movement, producing sparks and grunts each time that the armored shapeless merc tried to move. Like specks of gunpowder, intense pressure made each grain of dust pop with a contained blast with an entire chain of explosions resonating from underneath the armor of the hairy possessed suit of armor under Fennec's employ.
Fennec's most enigmatic warrior sent a wave of hair strands, pushing through the chained explosions with inhuman toughness. The tendrils wrapped around each claw, each jagged edge of the dragon's wings, its arms and legs, and its horns, and wrestled the Cursed Warrior to the ground. More and more hair strands seemed to pop up, lash and wrap around the grounded Cursed Warrior, threatening to fully submerge him underneath a mound of greasy black tendrils.
With a ferocious flap of its wings, the Cursed Warrior pulled the attached hair strands apart, rooting them out from the armor and malforming the possessed suit of armor by forcing the noodles of the black miasma inhabiting it to ooze out from underneath each piece, pulled apart by each of its separate hair weaves. With the first instance of relinquished control, the Cursed Warrior spat out a powerful beam of ruby-colored flame from its faceless jaws, spewing the jet into the sky before slicing the heavens and burning away the ozone layer while dragging the concentrated beam of condensed cursed flame to stream directly at the disassembled black miasma.
Whatever the hairy evil possessing that massive suit of armor was, it sizzled, hissed with a husky wail, and dissolved in the cursed flame. The ruby flame wave dissolved in a cloud-scraping wall of roaring flames before thinning out and vanishing as if it had nothing to go about and sustain itself. Roaring with a resounding clamor, the dragon-like Cursed Warrior flew off to cause havoc elsewhere, looking for other targets to eliminate while wise contestants cowered behind and underneath the wreckage so that the hovering drake didn't target its ruby flames at them.
"This is just unfortunate. Sharsher was one of our strongest hitters," Khinzira, another one of Fennec's mercenaries, lamented.
"That's true, I didn't think Sharsher to be capable of being destroyed, to be honest. We must avoid these Cursed Warriors at all costs, it seems," Vizeriman, the carrier of the Heart of the Desert artifact, nodded alongside his most trusted ally. "Even if that means having to face them in the later stages of the competition. For now, let's see if the rest of the factions have heavy weaponry capable of eliminating these Cursed Warriors. It's become abundantly clear that we are not the top dogs here, so we'll need to be smart if we are to give Fennec Agbarah."
"You heard it!" Khinzira yelled at the rest of the rampant mercenaries under Fennec's employ. "If you meet one of those Cursed Warriors, flee at once!"
"Another mercenary under the employ of the notorious desert scourge Fennec fell! That leaves 113 competitors. Fennec's crew has also lost half their members, and some of them appeared to have been some of their most capable fighters! Let's see if they can turn this around, though, for the sake of the entire Wind Country, it's probably for the best that they don't!" the announcer wiped his sweaty forehead. "Come on, Salvari, what are you waiting for? Wipe out those Fennec goons! Wait… I'm the announcer, I'm not supposed to have favorites…"
War Man strutted across the battlefield. He didn't seem too bothered by where he was going, as opposed to who had clear sight of him and who the armored superhero could see. Even if he hated it, the many rough brawls he went through made the superhero wary of picking tough fights until he could recover. Even his last fight against a Kirigakure ninja nearly cost War Man most of his ribs, his skull, and his hips. Everything burnt underneath that suit but, being ever the warrior, War Man pushed on.
Right into a feeling of weightlessness as the ground underneath his feet gave way and War Man crumbled into a pit. War Man hit something soft and rubbery, something that flexed but didn't quite tear. This was some impressive trap hole since the trapped superhero couldn't see much below him but could tell that the hole spanned quite some distance down.
A young woman landed by the edge of the pit and looked down, placing her hand over her brow to peer deeper at the captured hero. She had shoulder-length bob-cut brown hair, a standard Konohagakure chuunin's uniform, but she wore a poncho-style cape covered with sandstone-colored rags that matched the color of sandstone tiles and the dirt wreckage that lay everywhere in the arena.
"Hey there, I just wanted to let you know that you're full of shit about everything you believe in," Erumo waved her hand at the superhero from the top of the pit.
"What was that?" War Man seethed but grabbed his acting-up ribs. While falling into the trap pit, he became tangled in an invisible steel wire that tethered him. Bit by bit, the hero worked on identifying each string and cutting it without letting it ruin his suit or cut into his body and cause even more hurt.
"Yeah, I heard what you told that Kirigakure ninja before you eliminated him. Sounded to me like you're just using crime as an excuse to be a violent dickwad. Most of the criminals you kill without care are just struggling to get ahead or survive or people victimized by the world around them, which is why you can't just go around killing people. You need structure in the missions that our village issues us, and you need to know who your friends and foes are. Even then, we don't act like what we're doing is some objective cosmic justice or whatever. We're just making a living trying to do the best we can and make our world a bit better using our skills, anyway, bye now…" Erumo saluted the fallen hero with a polite smile before pulling on a piece of rope.
A catapult mechanism hurled War Man through the steel wire entrapment and straight out of the hole, flinging him out of bounds with a flat smack face-first into the plain grassland. The crippled hero writhed on the ground, wheezing in pain as he rolled about, reflecting on getting tricked and thrown out by that Konoha ninja.
"Erumo Budoki, a kunoichi from Konohagakure, eliminated War Man by catching him in the classic trap hole with a catapult arm trick! A series of quick eliminations!" the announcer pumped his fist over his head. "Superheroes are left with only four members now so they better stop their little civil wars and get their act together, or else their dream of a Hero Village will stay just that - a daydream!"