A tall and slim woman of dull grey skin swayed her hips in a confident strut. This competitor was a lady of many paradoxes. Despite her scant attire, composed only of a golden belt holding up a red loincloth, a cherry-red top covering just her chest and shoulders, and a long black shroud that wrapped around most of her face held firmly by a thin golden tiara, suggesting the woman was used to the scorch of the desert, the skin of this female mercenary was dull and grey. Despite her tall and slender build around the waist, her thighs and arms had seen physical strain, seeing how they had a moderate amount of bulk, contrasting the mercenary's feminine forms.
The female mercenary from under Fennec's employ was engaged in a perpetual dance, holding two short hook swords and waving her head to the sides while gently swaying her hips and shoulders. Mostly, she answered any attacks that came her way but didn't partake in any active engagements, always finding an opportunity to slip away or stay on the defensive until another foe found her assailant. Depending on the biased beholder, this was either a clever or a cowardly tactic, but a handful of Fennec's mercenaries put it to work.
A tall, broad-shouldered, and obese man with a malformed face swollen with bile-filled growths over his face and wearing just white baggy linen trousers and a leathery apron, equipped with a massive hammer that was essentially just a wooden rod screwed into a vaguely rectangular-shaped cinderblock approached the female mercenary from her rear.
"Need help?" he spoke with jumbled and slurry speech, both spraying and drooling spit because of the questionable rotten and misshapen teeth situation and a constantly hanging lower lip. Based on the calmness with which the female mercenary reacted to the appearance of this unfortunate giant, one could've surmised that he was another one of Fennec's mercenaries fighting for a land to call their own, as opposed to constantly betting their lives on the line for a handful of ryo.
"If you would please be such a darling…" the female mercenary with a shrouded face leaned over her comrade, nuzzling a soft touch of her hand against his exposed shoulder and sending shivers down the spine of the giant hammerer. Letting out unintelligible wails, the hammerman swung his primitive cinderblock on a stick around to scare off the more daring competitors from approaching any closer, giving his female colleague some time to take a breather and put someone in between her and the rest of the brewing chaos of the arena.
"Whoa… That's weird…" a goofy chuckle made the shrouded female mercenary turn her attention to her left, where an identical copy of her gentlemanly giant stood and pointed at a doppelgänger of his. Before Fennec's seductress employee could react and figure out the ploy, the first hammerman swung his cinderblock and smashed it straight into the second's face so hard that it shattered.
The female mercenary flung her sword at the fake giant, but she only scratched his face, or rather, scratched someone's face. A rippling, psychedelic jitter washed down the body of the fake giant mercenary as features of a whole different face stared at one's face from underneath a cut facial mask. Because of the damage, the perfectly sculpted face of the misshapen mercenary now hung baggy and loose and the inner side of the mask had a charcoal-black lining to show underneath full of pitch-black hexagons. The faker ripped the mask off with his right hand, revealing himself to be an average-sized, middle-aged man with spiky brown hair, bony cheeks, and a chiseled jaw.
Screaming like a banshee, the female mercenary slashed at him with her one remaining hook sword and cut into something rubbery. What she thought would be a certain opening of the faker's waist and the spillage of his guts onto the tile set revealed itself to be just a rubbery tear as she cut through a cumbersome skinsuit designed to perfectly emulate the body build and appearance of her comrade. The master of disguise skillfully weaved his tattered bodysuit around his opponent's left arm until the shrouded woman ended up entrapped in it.
"Don't worry, the view's lovely from up there," the spy smirked and gave his entrapped and seething opponent a playful middle and index finger salute before spinning the hefty bodysuit around and releasing it alongside his opponent to hurl high up and flop right into the water pool outside of bounds.
"Sneaking up from behind for a shockingly swift elimination! This is just the type of operation the spy faction revels in! The master of disguise Katai Tsuiseki eliminated the mercenary Fatina in a blink and left her comrade Shakshu groggy and laying flat on his back! This leaves 104 competitors still left in the battle royale!" the announcer yelled out to the confused audience that noticed nothing of note before hearing the splash of the pool outside of bounds. Given how the sneaky operations of the spy faction constantly left them scratching their heads and the spies didn't quite translate their skills into being effective arena entertainers, it didn't seem like they were connecting with the audience as much as the other factions were.
"Well… This place is getting crowded…" Katai gulped after seeing a towering armored humanoid with a thick layer of armored skin modeled after the human skeleton and the muscle and nervous systems and a handful of other mercenaries under Fennec's employ approaching to corner him and punish him for messing with Fennec's business. The slick, armored giant leaned his whole body forward, taking off into a daring charge, and threw a cross straight to where the spy stood just now, but only the shrill noise of shattering glass surprised the lined-up mercenaries.
Confused, the walking humanoid shell of armor with a flat iron-masked face stared with round yellow lights for eyes at his fist. Instead of a smushed spy, there was only a shattered mirror wall and heaps of glass lying around. Just to confirm that his lamp eyes weren't deceiving him, the armored giant leaned to inspect the wreckage with a closer look.
"Just another diversion. These spies proved to be troublesome to get our hands on," Vizeriman shook his head in disappointment. "Still, ninja are spies are rivals by their profession, seeing how the spies seek to replace the ninja. They are bound to end up at each other's throats eventually, we shouldn't take this attack against us as a targeted attempt to eliminate us. Don't scatter and wander too far away from each other. Remember what we all are working for. Stay focused."
The rest of the remaining Fennec's mercenaries, both humanoid and monstrous alike, all either nodded in agreement with the immortal wearer of the Heart of the Desert or stood still and took his orders like sage advice. Turning around, the Fennec's crew leaped into the fray but never completely lost the track of one another. They lost some crucial players already, which was why it was more imperative now than ever before to stick together and cover for one another.
Vatee went from resting with her whole body stretched flat on the ground to coiling and rearing herself to lash out at an opponent. She lay stretched and covering more ground in order to sense the nearest tremors on the tile set, figuring out if they were getting closer and if the rate at which they were closing in was constant and methodical, relaying the fact that someone was approaching the crumbled Mana's statue with intent to eliminate her.
The person who approached the ruined Five-Tails statue now was a young woman with wooden sandals and thigh-high, black-lined, salad-green stockings, a short green skirt, and a sleeveless top that matched her socks in color, texture, and style, save for the two buttoned lines at the collar and the bottom of the waist-reaching top. The woman had lively pink hair with pepper-black tips, modeled into long and thick twin braids falling over her shoulders out front, and blue eyes and wore a blank forehead protector tied over her hair.
"Get away from here if you know what's good for you!" Vatee hissed. Normally, warning people before attacking them was not her style, but, given the exhausting ordeal that she and the rest of the Chaos Factor ended up in, she had to avoid unnecessary fights where she could. Securing Mana's recovery was the only way to ensure the Chaos Factor's survival and her own.
"I cannot!" the kunoichi swiped her right hand in dismissal. "I come from the Genjutsu Tree Village. We aren't a powerful or large ninja village, we don't have our own solid roster of ninja nor are we acknowledged as an official ninja village by the other countries, but it is only because of the Five-Tails and the mystical mist that it shrouded the forest around our village in that we live and thrive."
"That's a poor reason to come to the Five-Tails statue looking for trouble…" Vatee replied.
"I am not looking for trouble, serpent. I saw that statue sparkle and fend off multiple combatants before protecting a young man from harm. It has a certain ferocity when fighting to protect, just like the Five-Tails. I've come to speak to the statue and pay my respects to it if it truly has a semblance of the real Five-Tails resting within it," the kunoichi from the Genjutsu Tree Village didn't as much as drag her feet back one inch. "And if you would wish this statue and the spirit resting inside it harm, I am here to punish you as well!"
"You imbecile!" Vatee hissed with an overwhelming telepathic pulse. "Don't you realize by now that I am here to protect this statue and the spirit resting inside it?"
"Oh…" the pink-haired kunoichi gasped, covering up her mouth before pressing her hands to her hips and bowing. "My apologies, serpent. Can I please approach the statue and see it up closer?"
"Well…" Vatee contemplated the request of this young woman. From the first glimpse, she seemed to be a kind and polite person. Her facial features implied an inclination to act kindly toward everyone, and the structure of her chubby cheeks suggested that this pink-haired girl smiled often. The look in her eyes seemed to disarm with kindness and good intentions. Still, the Five-Tails statue and Mana's spirit resting inside it meant everything to Vatee. The survival of this statue and the spirit contained therein indicated a chance for Vatee to return to her human body, to see her son again…
"Excuse me, young lady, I'll ask that you step aside," an authoritative and low-pitched, grave tone made the pink-haired kunoichi hop up wonder and turn around to face the approaching gentleman who had lost his black and golden coat and now wondered in a tattered shirt and wild black hair spreading in all directions and flowing in an ocean of black miasma as if the man was walking the bottom of the ocean and was underwater. "I have a business to settle with that infernal statue."
"L'Ollonais!" Vatee reared her fangs and wrapped around the crumbled and cracked façade of Mana's stone prison like a mother hen.
"Those incessant pests coming after my head really got under my skin. They flayed the skin of a gentleman I've carefully grown all these years and exposed the twitching nerves of a true monster underneath. The man that held captive and slain entire islands and the pirate that people prefer dying to as opposed to living with the trauma of having encountered. That bane shan't forgive the humbling and the beating that I took by this stone beast's hooves and horns," the Pirate Lord drew a cutlass he had looted off of somewhere as it was clearly not his own saber and pointed it at the vague area where the Five-Tails' horns would have connected if the right horn of Mana's stone prison still stayed intact.
"If ever there was a time for your slumbering, heavyweight rear to wake up, it would be now, you silly girl…" Vatee glanced down at the hardly recognizable wreckage she still sought to protect with the last remnants of her spirit that the Conductor had trapped in this serpentine body of segmented stone tomoe fragments attached to a decorative dragon head.
A relaxed hand swung through the air, cracking with a resounding smack across the Pirate Lord's face with a savagery that blanked out L'Ollonais' stare for a moment and rocked his head to the side. The pink-haired young lady standing beside him looked at him with righteous outrage and, given how her hand was still static in the post-slap position, she acted upon it with clamorous smacking fury.
"The illusory mist that the Five-Tails gifted us protected my village for over a hundred and fifty years!" the perky young woman said. "I won't allow a lowly fiend to desecrate the memory of that majestic animal, even if it isn't the Five-Tails' true spirit that's resting inside that statue."
"You should not have ever left that sweet spot of a village then, girl," L'Ollonais turned his head back and stared straight at the pink-haired kunoichi who neither flinched nor backed down from the intimidating stare of the Pirate Lord. "Now, even if you return there, somehow surviving this arena, not even the illusory mist of the Five-Tails will protect you from my vengeance. I've already instilled fear into that crumbled stone colossus, so much so that it stays asleep out of fear of ever meeting me again. Now, it seems, I'll have to show that same fear I inspire in you too."
L'Ollonais swung his sword about, cutting through thin air in an instant. The Genjutsu Tree Village kunoichi flinched, half of it was because of confusion why someone would swing around with so much force despite being so far away from her that their sword couldn't possibly reach her. Then, a loud and fleshy pop made her exclaim in fear as her right arm detached from her torso, yet it didn't shed a single drop of blood.
"Delabara Chopper!" Hideo l'Ollonais chanted out, swinging his sword again and again, slashing through thin air with ethereal white crescent swings that sliced his opponent up from afar and chopped her up into pieces, though not in the usual manner that a sword or an ax chopped one up, but separate one into chunks that floated like balloons in the air. Mere separate body parts, drifting further and further away from each other and rendering the victim utterly helpless in the face of such an unbeatable technique.
"Hmph…" the separated head of the young woman pouted her lips and blew her cheeks out. L'Ollonais' eyes quickly raced to her faraway torso that bloated like an actual balloon, as opposed to merely floating weightless like one. Realizing the trouble of keeping up with a dozen different body parts that drifted away from one another while acting just like instructed by their owner as if they weren't separated, to begin with, L'Ollonais realized why the Delabarans intended this technique to be a means for escape and self-defense, rather than an offensive technique.
"Fire Style: Burning Heart Beat!" the pink-haired kunoichi's head chanted, while her separate arms weaved together and formed a handful of hand seals, then her body inflated and drew heaps of air into her lungs, then her drifting head breathed out a heart-shaped halo that expanded outward on its raging path toward the Pirate Lord. L'Ollonais grunted and covered up, bracing for the inevitable impact, as keeping up with so many body parts scattered all around him was too troublesome for his weary body at this point.
The pulsing heart-shaped halo of flames might have looked like a fiery donut with a hole in the middle, but, as Hideo l'Ollonais found out when the heart-shaped fire blast slammed from above into the ground, instead of just empty air, it contained a concussive heatwave that scorched and smashed all at the same time. With whited-out eyes and jerked body, the heart-shaped shockwave hammered L'Ollonais into the dirt, shooting chipped tiles in all directions and leaving a heart-shaped crater in the ground.
"Oh no! The Pirate Lord Hideo l'Ollonais took a mean hit from Jinko Shinza, a kunoichi from the Genjutsu Tree Village! With how many grueling battles the Pirate Lord went through, can his bruised body truly take much more!?" the announcer turned the audience's attention to another battle brewing near the center of the Sun Disc arena.
L'Ollonais coughed out blood and rubbed his ribs. The heatwave pulsing within the heart-shaped fire halo singed more of his shirt to where now mere strands of it stayed connected to his slim chest. The Pirate Lord pushed himself off the ground, caressing his scrapes and bruises, and began crawling out of the crater. The sight that met him was a nova of emerald light engulfing Jinko's entire body. When the light show subsided, the perky pink-haired kunoichi's sandals tapped against the tiles and she stretched her back, having connected back together again.
"H-How!?" L'Ollonais wheezed. "You're not supposed to be able to just connect yourself back together!"
"Ever since childhood, I've admired the noble and protective role of the Five-Tails. You see, I had a gentle and loving soul and I wanted to help everyone I've ever met, and it felt like I loved everyone I met and everyone was my best friend. The Five-Tails was my idol on my path as a ninja, and even though I didn't have the chakra or the power to protect entire villages, I did everything I could to at the very least protect my own comrades as a medical ninja!" Jinko stated pointing at L'Ollonais with an accusatory index finger.
"Hmm… Delabara Chopper manipulates one's body itself, perhaps a technique focused on similar bodily manipulation could undo its effects even without the user canceling the technique," the Pirate Lord put it together. In that case, Delabara Chopper would've been utterly ineffective against not only Jinko or her allies, but most medical ninja with sufficiently advanced medical ninjutsu.
"Snake! Let's protect the Five-Tails' statue from this awful man together, like best friends!" Jinko turned to Vatee with an ecstatic smile on her face and extended her hand out to the terrified Statuman, who laid pressed to the ground like a cornered animal. Seeking to exploit the opportunity while his opponent wasn't looking, L'Ollonais drew his hand cannon and fired a cannonball aiming straight at the turned side of Jinko's face but a whistling stone tomoe fragment detonated the cannonball prematurely, causing Jinko to turn her attention back to L'Ollonais while Vatee slithered by the side of the perky kunoichi after reattaching the segment of her body she used to protect her.