A broad-shouldered man with stone-grey skin and matching patterns to the mosaics decorating the colossal bodies of the Cursed Warriors swiped his arm to the side. From the elbow up, his forearm seemed like he dipped it in gold, and it was because of this golden coating that he effortlessly deflected an incoming club strike. The eyes of the stone-skinned man gleamed with the same light emanating from the mystical patterns decorating his body and they were twisted with madness. His silver-colored hair floated in long and loose strands in all directions.
The swinging club was barely larger than the distance between a man's elbow to the wrist, round and golden. It swung with a miasma of stardust around it and a jolt of lightning struck the area where it landed the instant that the club smashed down, narrowly missing its intended target. The one swinging the club was one of the Salvari, a red-skinned goliath with wild and spiky black hair and a crown easily surpassing the size of the head it rested upon and concealing the pronounced widow's peak at the center of the Salvari's forehead. The man's arms and legs were as thick as those of an elephant, though meaty more than muscular. This made the size of his weapon of choice curious, to say the least. A man half that size could have easily swung a weapon a dozen times the weight and length.
"You appear human, yet you walk alongside these Cursed Beasts. You must be their ringleader, correct? Taking one of them down appears to have become quite the badge of honor, so I will be eternally honored after I take all of them down by smashing your head in," smiling with a curly and greased black mustache the burly Salvari warrior taunted his mad, stone-skinned opponent. Bellowing with a thirst for glorious violence, the burly, red-skinned Salvari wound up his tiny thunderer's mace for a swing while his opponent clamored with a deafening battle cry and shattered the ground underneath his feet.
The treacherous and sudden ground collapse left the Salvari suddenly without a point of balance and slipping. The stumbling Salvari warrior found himself stumbling with a chunky, gold-incrusted fist racing for a face-wrecking haymaker. Despite the incoming sense of foreboding and the imminent threat of elimination, the Salvari met the incoming golden doom with an excited smile splashed across his face.
"Wind Style: Plume Cyclone!" a voice called out from somewhere farther away from the battle. A spiraling gale tunnel engulfed the musclebound Cursed Warrior and sent him dragging away. The sinewy stone-skin had to cover himself up as chakra-coated feathery projectiles stabbed into his strapping arms and punctured his cursed skin, leaving visible cracks wherever they struck.
An ash-haired Konohagakure ninja dressed in a platinum-colored suit with black trimmings and wearing his Konohagakure forehead protector wrapped around his right arm approached the scene of his crime still holding a handful of stiff and sharp-looking feathers in hand while gently nuzzling the tip of his own nose with them. While taken aback by the unwelcome intrusion at first, the effortless swagger and elegance of the interloper appeared to dazzle the Salvari brawler enough to give him a chance to explain himself.
"You're a Salvari warrior, aren't you? It's hard to confuse that facial hair game for anything else once you see it," the formally dressed Konohagakure ninja chuckled to himself as if passively mocking the appearance of the one he just went out of his way to assist.
"I was enjoying myself in a good brawl. If you allowed yourself to intercept it, you better be ready to offer something just as satisfying in return!" the Salvari regained his balance and swung his tiny yet extravagant-looking club around, spreading sprinkles of stardust wherever it went. The air contacting the unidentified miasma emanating from the golden mace jolted with fields of static electricity yet lacked the intensity to produce anything as devastating as a full-on thunderbolt just yet.
"It's as if you read my mind," the ash-haired Konohagakure ninja smiled to himself, enjoying the silky smooth brush of the feathers in his hand against the tip of his lips before waving his hand to the side and embedding the feathers in a stray block of stone wreckage to his left. "I couldn't help but overhear your craving for fame and glory in battle. It just so happens that as a Senju, I too am destined for greatness and I intend on challenging and defeating the strongest opponents in my way to seize that greatness!"
"Senju? Is that name supposed to mean anything to me?" the strapping Salvari warrior pointed his finger at the ash-haired young man in front of him. "To answer your previous question and to make you wet yourself, I am no mere Salvari, I am Kalashandi, the King of Salvari. That means that amongst the Salvari, I am the unquestionable No. 1!"
"That's not what your fan club would make one believe," the Senju clansman scratched his head with a clearly acted-out look of bewilderment on his face. "I thought that the one going on about "Supreme this" and "Supreme that" would be the undisputed No. 1."
"Bishiyari is indeed considered the Supreme Being, the God of Arena. That being said, I am the strongest warrior amongst the Salvari and the undisputed King. In other words, I am No. 1, Bishiyari is beyond any ranking, he is beyond competition. Bishiyari is No. 0," the red-skinned Salvari explained while stroking and angling his mustache with his left hand while pointing out the numbers with his right hand to make his explanation clearer to the confused Konohagakure shinobi.
"Sounds an awful lot to me like loser-talk. I've no time for self-deluded fools who make up excuses to cover up for their weakness. Being weak is one thing but being this wrapped up in your own inferiority complex, man… You need someone to talk to, not a challenger," Kochi Senju, the member of Kusagoro's squad on this mission, shook his head with faked façade of pity meant for his opponent's pettiness.
"Very well, insolent whelp, you've earned yourself a smashing. Let's not dally around, maybe I can still find and crush that puppeteer of the Cursed Warriors yet?" bringing his mace up in front of him, the bulky Salvari smashed it into his own forehead, thundering down upon his own self, however, instead of getting electrocuted or reduced to ash by the roaring heavenly thunderbolt, the lightning pillar encased the red-skinned Salvari and turned him into a super-sized lightning avatar of himself. "Shibi Mode!" he thundered with the full volume of a raging cosmic storm.
Wooden roots emerged from underground, wrapping around the feet and calves of the Konoha ninja with noticeable openings for pipe-shaped vents lined up from the knees to the heel. "Wood Release: Trail Blazer!" Kochi chanted after clapping his hands. Just as the bloated like a balloon lightning giant floated over his head with an open palm ready to smash him to bits while obliterating him with the force of a cosmic thunderclap, flames spat from the vent openings in the makeshift wooden greaves, propelling Kochi forward just fast enough to outpace greased lightning.
Employing a shocking skill in rollerblading, Kochi dragged his right foot with a kick, skidding a considerable distance across before letting matching wooden platforms wrap around his forearms and then his whole body as well, covering Kochi head-to-toe in his makeshift wooden armor. This time he had thrice the number of venting tubes spitting Fire Release chakra bursts and propelling him in a crazed dash forward, utterly fearless, the Senju prodigy crashed straight into the exposed back of the Salvari warrior, absorbing the ludicrous voltage coating him into the armor and causing it to snap and shatter with a peeling burst and a pop.
Seeing the Salvari flung out from his full-body lightning armor that all sizzled out, Kochi seized the moment, clapping his hands together and prompting his body to adopt a wooden texture and split into two identical doppelgangers that went through a pair of hand seals and bloated their chests while inflating a troubling bunch of air.
"Fire Style: Burst Ready!" Kochi's Wood Clones chanted out in unison while breathing out jets of flames from their mouths that centered in blazing bombs contained entirely within the raised hands of the original Kochi. With both red-hot fireballs ready to go, Kochi flung them both one after another at his opponent, scoring a direct hit. Each of the twin Fire Release bombs burst into a full-on raging firestorm upon impact, raising a sky-reaching firewall upon their combined climatic collision with the target.
"Incredible!" the announcer finally took notice of this momentous match-up. "Senju Kochi from Konohagakure showed the ability to use Wind and Fire Releases, despite being from the Senju Clan! For those spectators amongst us that aren't used to narrating ninja fights and unfamiliar with the Senju Clan from Konohagakure, the Senju are famous for their Wood Release Advanced Bloodline, comprising Water and Earth Releases! This means that most Senju should only be able to use Water and Earth Releases for their ninjutsu techniques!"
"That's all wrong, of course," Kochi spun his hand around while waiting for his opponent to get back to him, as opposed to him having to plow through waves and waves of other combatants pursuing Kalashandi. After getting his hands on the self-proclaimed King of the Arena, Kochi felt like Kalashandi had to pursue him and demand a piece of his time as opposed to the other way around. "I've been born with the Wood Release bloodline of my clan, but my natural affinities are Wind and Fire Releases."
"You just like to hear yourself talk, don't you?" Kalashandi kicked off the ground of bustling mass-brawls and hurled across the area he landed in and the sweet spot directly in front of Kochi, stunning the young Senju with an outlandish appearance of a quadruped human torso having grown from the bottom half of the red-skinned Salvari warrior with Kalashandi's entire body growing out from the head of the lower half.
"I was about to say that I am the most interesting man in most rooms, but… I must admit, this kind of stole the show…" sweat began dripping from Kochi's forehead as the young Senju seemed distraught about being upstaged by such an outlandish technique. It didn't seem very practical to grow a headless giant body instead of one's own lower half and become some sort of human-centipede-centaur abomination but even Kochi had to hand it to the Salvari warrior that it was the flashiest and the most outlandish thing he had ever seen.
"Body Art: Unichavras!" Kalashandi chanted out with his arm raised in front of him and his palm wide open.
"Body Art? What kind of bloodline is that?" Kochi grumbled with a frustrated look on his face. One thing that the elegant Senju prodigy hated more than anything was being upstaged.
"The energy that you ninja call chakra, and we know as dharma, is comprised of two sides that are balanced perfectly between one another. One is the physical dharma, the other is spiritual. The physical dharma commands mastery of one's body, while the spiritual dharma commands the ethereal, the ephemeral aspects of one's own mind and its connection with the universe. Mastery of the physical dharma allows me to mold and shape my body as I please. I can grow new body parts or become larger or smaller with a mere thought!" Kalashandi claimed, crossing his chunky arms in front of him and sprouting another pair of arms that burst from his shoulder blades with the two arms connecting by the hands and greeting one another with a shake.
"Okay, I was not quite ready for that…" Kochi closed his eyes with an uncomfortable admission. "However, even if your exotic fighting style is… Well… Exotic… It still bows to the same principles that we all know and swear by. You must keep straining yourself with the chakra, or dharma, cost of morphing your body. It's no different from a continuous ninjutsu technique, essentially."
"Does this desperate quest for explanation and rationalization comfort you?" Kalashandi wondered. "Are you so insecure that you must seek understanding and belittle your opponent despite still being hopelessly outmatched? Vajra Strike!"
Using the one arm that wielded his golden mace, Kalashandi swung it five times in a straight line, creating five rows of sprinkling stardust hovering in front of him and sparkling with static electricity that seemed to be drawn to these white areas like flies to honey. With his five unarmed hands, two hands of his quadruped, headless lower half body included, Kalashandi grabbed the white lines of stardust that sprinkled with static electricity and ignited them like thunderbolt javelins in his hands. Like javelins was the exact way that Kalashandi used his thunderbolts, flinging them one by one at Kochi.
"Wood Style: Tough Nut!" Kochi clapped his hands halfway past Kalashandi's thunderbolt-slinging routine, weaving wood from underground that burst and wrapped around his hands and formed two halves of a wooden heater shield he connected by slamming his forearms together in front of him and having the wooden heater shield merge from between the two separate halves and sprout roots that plunged underground to secure Kochi's staunch stand against his opponent's attack.
The first thunderbolt javelin slammed into the center of the heater shield, scorching the center, but then the electricity dissolved and sizzled out while the stray network of roots grounded the dissolving jolts. The other successive ones tested the mettle of Kochi's Wood Style heater's different sides and corners, but while collectively they cracked the shield in multiple spots, all the thunderbolt javelins dissolved and grounded with Kochi's shield wilting away in mere seconds after Kalashandi threw the final javelin.
"Am I hopelessly outmatched?" Kochi smirked, oozing confidence from the left side of his smug face. "Or am I just waiting for the right time to seize the glory I'm destined for?"
"Destined? What exactly are you destined for, whelp?!" Kalashandi bellowed while turning his entire abominable bodily configuration around and clapping his hands, flaming with a skyward pillar of spiritual chakra leaking from all around him. "Body Art: Airavata!"
The lower half that Kalashandi's torso was connected to morphed further, growing even larger and thicker with yet another hand that was as hefty as Kalashandi's upper body sprouting from the front of the headless lower mount body. With the newly sprouted hand pointing outward with an open palm, Kalashandi's complex bodily structure charged forward in a palm strike tackle aimed to uproot and blast Kochi off the ground and out-of-bounds if needed.
Kochi flipped backward and then hopped to the side, employing evasive taijutsu to avoid facing the overwhelming strength of Kalashandi directly. While he danced around the potent palm strikes, fist stomps, and hammer strikes coming his way from all of Kalashandi's spare limbs, Kochi kept it in mind that wherever his golden mace swung — devastating lightning bolts were soon to follow. With a slip of his hand, the Senju ninja revealed a steel ring with a blade attached to one of its edges. The weapon was identical to a windmill shuriken that most ninja used in sparse quantities in their kits, but Kochi's was different. Instead of four cross-shaped blades, Kochi's had only a pair spread to the sides.
"I am Kalashandi, the King of the Arena, the winner of the most Beef Matches in Sun Disc's history! If you think I am merely a footnote in your history, you're in for a rude awakening, snot!" the many-limbed giant thrashed around while Kochi was busy slashing and cutting his many limbs off with his horizontal twin blade ring.
"What in the devil is a Beef Match?" Kochi wondered, taunting his opponent while patiently cutting off limbs and avoiding getting smashed or stomped or thrown about. "It feels like I have to know, because, as someone who'll be beating you soon enough, it won't mean much when I brag about beating the King of Beef Matches unless I know what it is."
"It is a remarkable play on words! A Beef Match can only be hosted amongst heated rivals and alleged equals in skill, with the winner getting the glory of winning a Beef Match and an actual cow!" Kalashandi fell on his front with his creepy lower headless mount body having been thoroughly quartered. It didn't take long for the crimson-skinned giant to cancel his headless body mount technique and sprout an ordinary pair of welcomely human legs. "Do you even know how special that is? Wind Country doesn't even have cows, because they eat grass which barely grows here! The Sheikh imports every single cow for each of my Beef Matches and I've won all of them! I own all the cows in Wind Country!"
"Now I kind of regret asking. I was really hoping it wasn't anything literal…" Kochi deflated with a distressed look on his face. "I won't be able to stop thinking about all those poor cows. Fire Style: Blazing Pillar!" Kochi chanted after weaving four hand seals in the soft spot while Kalashandi was returning to stand on his own pair of feet.
Flames burst outward from Kochi's body in a rapid discharge, blinding all nearby witnesses as the blaze hurled upward in a tower-like pillar form and cast its light and warmth all the way to the uppermost stands of the Sun Disc arena. The light was fully able to disorient even the vision of the spectators in the furthest rows and stun even the shade-donning announcer. Kalashandi groaned and stumbled back with his right arm covering his blinded face.
"Don't worry, this is just a Fire Release genjutsu technique. While the light from the fiery flare was all too real, the blindness and the visions you're experiencing are all temporary. I just wanted you blinded. This blindness should last for around eleven seconds. I wanted to give myself a timer for defeating you to make it more challenging and entertaining," Kochi went on to waste more and more of the time he had scored himself on his pointless, cocky yammering.
"You daring to presume that I, Kalashandi, the Savior of Cows and the benevolent King of the Arena who put milk in cups of Wind Country people by graciously sharing his thousands of cows, would keep my cows unattended and let them die is the final straw, whelp!" Kalashandi grumbled out through tears bursting from his blinded eyes and making it impossible to open them or to move his hand away from them, let alone see anything at all. "For your information, my cows all graze the finest oases of the land and eat its sublime grass and drink its crystal-clear water! The milk I so graciously provided to the audience that spectates my matches is the sweetest milk in the universe because of that!"
"Oh, really? If that's the case, I'll have to try some after winning this whole thing," Kochi snapped his fingers in excitement.
"Sorry, you won't have the chance to taste the milk of my cows, because while your illusions have shrouded my eyes with darkness, the darkness I'm about to plunge you into is very real and deadly. Prepare to die to an infinite voltage of energy, a network of thunderbolts so vast and incomprehensible that just witnessing it will make your mind go blank long before your body dissolves in its thunderous infinitude! "Body Art: Indra's Net!"
Kalashandi's body began to morph again. This time it was because of a thousand of eyes opening up all over the goliath thunderer's body. While his two original eyes may have been blinded by Kochi's illusion, Kalashandi's impeccable control over his body made his whole self light up with eyes like stars in the skies. Kochi closed his eyes and extended his hand, slashing it with his twin-blade shuriken weapon and causing a sizeable glob of blood to splash on the floor in front of him.
"Not sure what that whole "Indra's Net" deal is about, it sounds scary so I'd rather not deal with it, however, your time is up so I lucked out. You nincompoop, I blinded you BECAUSE I wanted you to sprout more eyes… That way my ace illusion can't miss," Kochi explained with his usual cocky attitude oozing from his body language. The reflection from the spray of blood that pooled by Kochi's feet reflected off of the surface of Kalashandi's thousand eyes, front and back, forming an infinite loop as the thousand-eyed goliath stood dazed with a thousand dull eyes. The crackling lightning that was about to form his Indra's Net snuffed out before it could get going with the brawler feeling weightless.
The ground underneath Kalashandi's feet vanished, and the giant began falling for what felt like forever. The white face of a clock appeared off in the distance, chiming once while Kalashandi plunged into the infinite emptiness.
"This is just another illusion! Dispel!" Kalashandi clapped his hands, booming with an azure energy bubble, but gigantic wooden platforms swept about the infinite vastness of the illusionary dimension that the King of the Arena found himself in. The wooden platforms slammed together, forming the frame of a square pendulum clock tower that chimed again and began ticking and turning erratically, racing through hours, days, and months in no time at all.
Kalashandi crashed into a pool of blood. The pool must have been shallow as the Salvari scrambled back on his feet and looked around with the pool not even reaching the top of his toes. There was nothing but an infinite horizontal plane of blood and the gigantic pendulum clock tower behind Kalashandi. The white clock face was as large and bright as the moon and loomed around as imposing over the illusionary dimension of bloody emptiness.
"You've clocked in at two out of four seconds, buddy. Dispelling my Genjutsu: Devil Swing through ordinary means is kind of impossible. You see, the reflection of your own eyes in my blood is the key and not only are you dazed enough to wobble staring at it pooling under my feet, staring back at your own eyes, but you've also got thousands of them, so you've got no chance at dispelling this illusion. And the worst part is, I've dilly-dallied you through the remaining two of your seconds…" Kochi sighed and pointed at the clock that chimed for the fourth time in total. Kalashandi's eyes shot open as wide and terrified as they've ever been. The blaze-colored light shooting from his eyes as a shimmer of pure dharma popped and spilled with showers of blood as Kalashandi began pouring blood from every one of his orifices until his very own body began bubbling and bursting into sprouts of crimson.
There was no fifth chime as Kalashandi's body dissolved into a mass of blood that became part of the shallow pool he fell into. Outside of the realm of illusion, Kochi turned his hand sideways and shot out a wooden fork of tree branches that slammed into Kalashandi's unconscious belly fat and flung the bruiser out of bounds while Kochi's wooden arm retreated into place. The Konohagakure chuunin couldn't have felt more proud of his own self while the announcer listed off his victory.
Because of the deafening boos and a wave of outrage in the audience that clearly had its favorites, no one heard the announcer when he relayed that 101 contestants were left in the battle royale.