Vatee's eyes blinked with a red spark. A needle-thin beam split the space between the two female competitors united against the Pirate Lord in half. By the time L'Ollonais' dulled reaction allowed him to twitch his chin and look down, the crimson spiritual chakra beam had already pierced him. Despite the successful connection, the beam appeared to make no contact with the Pirate Lord. Instead, it merely beamed through with no hint of disturbance, as if existing on a different plane entirely.
"Spirit Art: Gorgon!" Vatee hissed, releasing a telepathic pulse audible to just the three involved in this battle. With a perturbed look, L'Ollonais jerked his head back up. It was only because of the attempt to take haste he noticed the sluggishness in his movements. Once again, this time much slower and with stuttering behind the motion, the Pirate Lord glared down to see patches of stone extending in all directions from the point where Vatee's beam hit him dead-on. "Now you'll have a body as cold as your spirit," Vatee relayed telepathically.
"You should beware cornering Pirate Lord Green, Hideo l'Ollonais!" L'Ollonais smiled with a cruel twist to his slick and curved black mustache that curved upward from the intense aura leaking from his whole body that made his greasy black hair stand up and float as if the man was underwater. "Because a cornered man gives no quarter! Delabara Chopper!"
"Go right ahead!" Vatee cursed the man with a thought. "My body is segmented. I can split and reconnect it at will!"
L'Ollonais chuckled to himself with a deep and subtle chortle before turning fully to stone. Jinko scratched her head as to why a man that was swiftly being petrified would find this entire situation so funny. It wasn't that Jinko was a good judge of character or someone who sniffed liars out easily, but her most genuine impression was that L'Ollonais truly believed himself to hold all the high cards in this situation.
"What are you waiting for!?" Vatee let out a hissing signal that caused telepathic tremors in Jinko's mind. "Go, finish him off!"
"R-Right…" Jinko nodded, going through a myriad of hand seals and breathing in while placing her hands out with her fingers forming a heart shape. Jinko's chest inflated almost ten times before she finally exhaled a mass of flames from her mouth that, passing through the formation of her hands, formed a solid, heart-shaped fireball. "Fire Style: Burning Heart!" Jinko chanted out.
A deafening pop rendered all nearby combatants dull-eyed and tuned them out from the immediate present. The fireball continued to hurl toward the stone statue of L'Ollonais, but, miraculously, it kept on careening forward, completely out of control, with the petrified Pirate Lord no longer being where the two female competitors had last seen him. A hole as wide as a human fist jarred right in the center of the fireball where it spewed cinders and sizzled, but the integrity of the fireball prevailed over the structural damage and it hurled on.
Rinden, the brave swarm-baller, surrounded by his swarm of shuttlecocks, scrambled in terror after seeing a heart-shaped fireball thrice his size approaching from afar. The fireball passed through the shuttlecock swarm, leaving a depressing downpour of burning shuttlecocks that burnt up before touching the ground but the swarm-baller himself hid away somewhere within the swarm, swinging his net from the side and scooping the fireball up only to fling it into the sky where it could detonate hurting no one while causing a spectacular light show for the audience too.
"It missed… How could it miss!?" Vatee hissed out, desperately searching for wherever L'Ollonais might have gone. It seemed impossible that a stone statue could have moved out of the way of incoming obliteration unless one of the remaining pirate captains was loyal to the Pirate Lord and moved it at the last possible second.
Fearful gasps and whimpers made Vatee turn to her temporary ally, stunning the segmented tomoe decorative stone snake. Jinko stood still, twitching her hands, and flinched up in pain as the same hole that pierced through the fireball just now also gapped in the middle of her chest. A see-through, fist-sized gap that didn't bleed at all, betraying that whatever had ripped clean through the Genjutsu Tree Village kunoichi was pretty damn hot. Hot enough to cauterize a wound caused by ripping through the heart.
"H… He… Used it… On himself…" Jinko grumbled before vomiting an excessive mouthful of blood upon herself and collapsing on her back. By the time Vatee turned back to intercept another potential attack from L'Ollonais, the Pirate Lord's scattered stone body parts shuffled around in the air. Their petrified texture allowed for the bloated parts to keep enough mass to freely levitate around according to the buccaneer's will. His right hand held L'Ollonais' hand cannon, suggesting that a guts-coated cannonball through the heart was the likely culprit of Jinko's injury.
"Campeche Ruse!" Hideo l'Ollonais' voice spread through a petrified open mouth, turning the stone-turned man into an assortment of slushy goops of syrup that splattered about on the ground and converged into one again. "To syrup we turn, from syrup we are reborn!" Hideo l'Ollonais posed with wide open hands as he restored his bulked-up and perfectly intact human form with the slushy syrup shape washing off like a sticky upper layer off of the Bane of the Rain.
L'Ollonais reached for his spiky mustache, pulling one hair out while playing with it in between his fingers, causing the stiff and straight needle-tense hair to turn curly and then become straightened again. Blowing gently against the tips of his fingers, L'Ollonais sent his lone hair floating toward the serpentine Statuman in Vatee. "Tortuga Torch!" L'Ollonais snapped his finger. Vatee had lost track of the revolting lone segment of the man's facial hair, though its location became revealed to her when a horrid pillar of flame torched from the lone hair and engulfed Vatee whole.
In her stone prison, nobody could hear the woman scream as she writhed and wailed, thrashed with arms that she could still have a phantom feeling for but no longer had. The intensity of the pyre was such that all Vatee's artistic splendor became just washed out black ink blotch in an orange and red blaze. The shadowy avatar of the Statuman thrashed about in the blaze before collapsing on her side and the immolation pillar snuffing out as suddenly as it burst into being.
"You think a stone beast and some teen wench can do me in? Good luck accomplishing what growing up as a slave and living through three separate massacres didn't. I've lost my home village, the island that chained me alongside thousands of other people, and the navy unit I served on after becoming a free man. Though I must admit, all of you pushed me into a corner with my heels dangling over the edge of the deck. My aspiration for more land may as well be ruined. In my current state of weary, I don't believe I could outlast a hundred more men without a miracle. And it's all… Because… Of you two…" Hideo l'Ollonais walked toward the two of his opponents with Vatee flopped on the side and Jinko stretched on her back and sprawled out, mouth wide open and pointing at the desert sky. The hair of the young lady obstructed her eyes as she laid without signs of life. "I told you all what would happen to those that would attempt to push me further, didn't I? Though I am in a conundrum, I don't believe a stone snake like you even has a heart to rip while I've already blown that one's…"
L'Ollonais turned to Jinko to point his hand at the gap in her chest, only to find none. Just a hole in her clothes and a tiny glimpse of the young woman's bosom flashing from inside the containment of her torn top. Before L'Ollonais could comprehend that he was staring at a perfectly healthy cleavage or even blink, Jinko sprung to life, crashing into the Pirate Lord with the entire weight of her body and the limitless Herculean Strength of a medical ninja.
"Where are you looking, you creep!?" she growled, but a thunderous crack drowned out her triumphant exclamation soon enough. Countless quintillions of megatons of force banged around L'Ollonais' body like a crazy chimp inside of a container. A condensed airwave ripped through L'Ollonais' body as Jinko's blow punched atoms out of the stunned and exhausted Pirate Lord and shot him off riding the airwave that ripped through the arena walls and corridors without compromise like a javelin tearing through a cake and escaped out somewhere into the atmosphere that shut the airwave down by scattering it out hard.
Pirate Lord Green Hideo l'Ollonais wasn't riding that airwave, employing another Delabara Chopper onto himself to scatter into separate body parts and slip off of the tunneling javelin of compressed air that threatened to knock him to the other side of however far the human mind could comprehend distance and scatter around wherever the laws of physics demanded them to land. A left-arm landing somewhere in the rocky mountainside of Land of Lightning, a right arm splashing somewhere into the sea between the Land of Waves and Land of Water, head, and legs landing around random islands in different parts of the world with the Pirate Lord's torso satelliting the Earth like space junk, far away to be unable to return home on its own.
Jinko blew at the bruised knuckles of her steaming right fist and scanned the distance she shot the Pirate Lord flying to. "Unbelievable! We have a new unexpected powerhouse changing the scales of balance, ladies, and gents of the audience! This was bound to happen as the early leaders wore themselves out and fell to the new guys, but who could've expected THAT!? With her cutesy idol-like appearance and incredible skill at medical ninjutsu, Jinko Shinza is bound to become a crowd favorite, and she started climbing the ladder by eliminating Pirate Lord Green, Hideo l'Ollonais himself! That leaves it at 103 right now!"
Jinko exhaled, deflating her bloated cheeks with one whiff before turning to the collapsed Vatee. The pink-haired young lady rushed up to the slumped Statuman and knelt by her side, then rubbed the side of her neck, beginning to go paler visibly. The pulsating heat from the dry Land of Wind climate didn't help the complete unknown and the way it made sweat pour down Jinko's forehead.
"Yeesh… I'm completely out of my depth. I can heal my heart but this… Do you even have a heart?" Jinko began mumbling to herself frantically, trying to switch the focus between different body parts and tomoe segments to determine a potential vital but Vatee just sprung back to life. Coiling into a spring-like shape before relaxing and unraveling with a dull chatter of limestone.
"Forget it. It takes complete destruction of the body or breaking of one's spirit to kill a Statuman," Vatee relayed. "Nice shot. I owe you this one, it seems."
"I would like to see the Five-Tails statue now if that's okay," Jinko looked at the strange living art piece coiling and rattling right in front of her with a hopeful tilt of her eyebrows.
"I don't think you'd have gone through all that trouble to protect it from someone seeking to bust it so… In any case, you do know that this isn't the real Five-Tails, right? It's just a statue with a whole different girl's spirit stuffed inside of it," Vatee signaled to the persistent medical kunoichi from the Genjutsu Tree Village.
"That's true but… Even if it is just a statue, I'd still like to see the mythical protector of my village and our woods," Jinko nodded, pressing her hands to her chest to relay the honesty of her request while beaming an ecstatic smile. Alongside Vatee who slithered to the collapsed statue and over it as if to claim it as its own, Jinko approached the slumbering wreckage of stone body parts and ran her hand across the thigh that laid detached from the rest of the body until she brushed against an arrow still embedded into the stone body. "You poor thing…" she muttered.
"This statue might not mean the same to you as it does to me, but Mana, the spirit that's resting inside this hunk of stone, might just be my only hope to see my son again. Drasko, the other remaining member of our faction is a monster whose manic aspirations will only get him and everyone following him killed," Vatee slithered lower and extended a couple of segments of her body to hang over the side of the stone statue to get a straight look at it. "Maybe Mana's crazy too, she challenged everyone just like Drasko, she dared stand out from the crowd and stand her ground against the whole roster…"
"But she did it to protect that boy, didn't she? Just like the real Five-Tails. Maybe whoever put her mind into this specific statue did it for a reason?" Jinko looked up to gaze straight into the decorative and very painted-on eyes of her temporary ally.
"You shouldn't confuse the man that trapped us in these bodies for someone caring and benevolent. Why should I have been placed in a serpent's body then? All I ever wanted to do was protect my boy and come back to my family. Is that such a deceptive and malicious reason to live and fight for one's life?" Vatee coiled around Jinko's body, coming an elbow's reach away from wrapping around the young woman and putting a squeeze on her for insinuating something like there being a cosmic reason to their predicaments.
"Snakes don't always represent deception and malice. In some cultures, they represent rebirth, and in the east, they represent fertility. If your reason for fighting is defined by your motherhood, maybe there too is a reason for the body that was chosen for you?" Jinko crossed her arms with a curious scan of Vatee's body with her eyes.
"Well, you've seen the statue now. That man has tuned our minds to communicate with one another. Telepathic communication with someone else is tough. You may leave now, I won't spare any more words on warnings," Vatee tilted her segmented body to wrap it around the bent knee of the collapsed statue while raising the front of her body as if preparing to lunge at the medical kunoichi.
Smiling with a kind look to her closed eyes, Jinko turned around to face the brewing chaos of the arena. Vatee turned her head, almost as if to ask what the pink-haired kunoichi from the Genjutsu Tree Village was doing.
"I've decided to protect the Five-Tails with you. Even if the spirit inside this body isn't the real Five-Tails, she's just as kind and protective as the real deal. You seem to place a lot of hope in this statue too, betting your very reason for living on its revival. The protective and kind nature of this Mana that's inhabiting this statue, your reason for fighting, and the trust you place in Mana, all of those things have moved me and I'm going to fight for them alongside you," Jinko put up her right fist with a cheerful smile beaming in her face.
A disfigured samurai with a chopped-up and mangled face and a lawman's uniform walked forward with a sheathed sword, moving it like a walking cane until he heard reeling steel wire. Turning to the side, the samurai took a slash across his face, but he spewed little blood. Based on the sorry look of his visage, he took so many hits and cuts that he must've been all out of blood to shed.
All that Okurimi Mibu, the Man the Devil Disowned, had when he turned to track the zipping curiosity in an exterminator's uniform was wrath. Bloody capillaries surrounded the furious gaze of the manslayer, who straightened his back with a wobble, showing himself off in all of his tall and broad splendor. The zipping exterminator had a white radiator for a head with two exhaust pipes venting heating gas from them and assisting him with the zipping he employed the steel wires for.
In speedy blitz, the radiator-head shot past then switched up and shot right back through the other side, Okurimi Mibu, kicking him around and smashing the hefty radiator head straight into the stalwart zombie-like samurai but the walking juggernaut of reciprocal justice barely budged against the zipping kicks and headbutts. The immovable giant in a lawman's uniform merely grunted and continued to stare with wide bloodshot eyes bulging out of a slashed-up face.
"You're a regular monster. You may not have noticed it, what with you having served as a samurai and all. You must've dealt with ordinary human problems, civilian unrest, rabble-rousers, war the like. That's normal human stuff, but walking deathless samurai falls somewhere on our court. We're the Exterminators, you see. People hire us when they want a regular monster gone. We do your regular yokai, what we don't do, is assassinations of political leaders and disciplining rebellious farmers, just in case you're wondering why this whole thing is happening to you," with steel wires keeping the exterminator suspended, the radiator head wobbled in mid-air while pointing at Okurimi Mibu.
More and more the radiator head blitzed past or crashed straight into Okurimi Mibu, kicking, stomping, and head-butting him around, bringing him to one knee or causing him to stumble at various points. Still, despite how much the exterminator battered the undead lawman turned manslayer, the terrifying butcher from the Iron Country responded in kind, refusing to even as much as draw his sword.
"That's odd… Usually, the targets struggle a lot more. Run away and the sort. Could it be that you pity your loathful existence and want me to get it over with already?" the radiator head wobbled suspended on steel wires on the other side.
"Slay… Evil… Now…!" Okurimi Mibu howled like a rabid wolf calling out for the moon, except with a much more grave and grungier tone of voice.
"I see. You don't treat me as someone evil deserving of your punishment. I'm just an exterminator doing its job. That's some deep thinking for a monster, but it's not like I haven't slain intelligent monsters before. Tell you what, I'll see what I can do to alleviate your suffering and send you to hell with the next shot…" the radiator head pulled out a handle and extended it in front. With a quick flick, two long and thin blades shot out from each end alongside a third out on the front. The frontal blade split into two halves that extended to form a triangular, kite-like shape.
Without waiting for the final words of the Man the Devil Disowned, the exterminator rushed forward with a gliding swoop, aiming the blades of the triangular kite for the neck of the crazed and disfigured former lawman.