A man wearing iron boots with golden sunflower knee decorations and a thick iron plate of armor covering only the warrior's chest with a leather strap loincloth and a long, flowing red cape strut across the arena as if he owned it. Despite the cumbersome-looking battlefield equipment he bothered lugging around, the most impressive feature was the head-sized golden crown that appeared to be modeled after some sort of village resting atop the conqueror's head.
Most curious of all, the conqueror strutting across the battlefield wasn't armed. He only held a wooden stick with a golden lotus decoration at the outer end where the point of a spear should've been. Still, despite the lack of visible weapons, his bulky arms and strict face were enough of an indication that he wasn't lost on his way to a parade. The man's stern brown eyes had the sharpness and focus of a warrior and his long and sophisticated facial hair game that extended all the way to the middle of his waist. It even distracted from the thick golden donuts that hung loosely from the man's earlobes.
"Hmm?" a wrinkled buccaneer twice the width and height of an ordinary man with a stunning red military coat wrapped all over with crossed belt straps equipped with different weapons ranging from sabers to hand cannons turned his amber-colored eyes back to the disillusioned fool who had a king's walk and confidence to him and therefore irritated the pirate. "And who might you be, walking arrround like you own the battlegrrrounds?"
"Oh, but I do. I am Serius, King of the Continent and Seas of the World, the One and Only of His Kind. I own all that is," Serius bowed by buckling his knees slightly and nodding his head in acknowledgment of being acknowledged, tipping his cumbersome golden crown slightly but maintaining it evenly atop his head.
"You wanna rrrun that by me one morrre time? No one owns the seas but me, landlubberrr!" the burly pirate turned around and spread his arms out in a t-shaped pose. Despite finding outrage in the words of Serius, the pirate smirked with a wicked grin. His teeth were natural, wooden, golden, platinum, or jewel, shuffled together in some chaotic algorithm of a purely random chance of each tooth being made of either of those things. The terrifying black beard of the amber-eyed giant was the most noticeable feature for it seemed to have a mind of its own–rustling, reaching, flapping, and hissing on its own and waving like living tentacles of a shadowy kraken from the briniest of deeps.
Almost like it was perfectly staged, just as the black-bearded pirate extended his arms and dangled his arm-thick fingers over his many hand cannons and sabers, the upper back, shoulders, and the back of his head lit ablaze, extending and running down all the way to the ends of his demonic beard that sizzled with candle-like licks of flame too. The black-bearded buccaneer drew a hand cannon and opened fire, blasting a cannonball at the pretentious conqueror but, much to his shock, his opponent perfectly mirrored his actions, firing a hand cannon held in his own hand and hitting the cannonball down in the middle, blowing both projectiles up and sinking both of them in smoke.
"Blimey fuckerrr… That was my hand cannon ye've coughed up!" with bulged and bloodshot eyes, the black-bearded buccaneer looked down at his complex cross-shaped system of belts and pouches only to see a pair of them empty.
"But of course…" Serius stepped out from the smoke with a methodical and pretentious step, taking one kick at a time with both arms extended to both sides as he turned to both sides and bowed his head like a king on a morning walk greeting the bustling rice farmers building the prosperity of his kingdom. "That is how you fight, isn't it? Even if your appearance is repulsive and you reek of squid vomit, you are a beloved subject of mine, and I seek to learn your culture and rule you in ways you know and accept."
"Magnet Ninja Art: New World Order!" Jishi Hitokawa, a young new member of Yushijin's Team Fir, floated over the two bruisers locked at an impasse against one another. Useless scrap in discarded knives, razor blades, shuriken, kunai, and other junk gathered together in mid-air, forming something resembling abstract shapes before slamming right down with brutal force.
The Konohagakure ninja found himself stunned as Serius, the King of the Continent and the Seas of the World, was nowhere to be found underneath his downfall of crushing scrap. Whereas the burning, black-bearded pirate fended off the incoming lumps of junk by blowing them out of the air or cutting them up with his saber, Serius had utterly vanished, becoming only a log surrounded by smoke. Mere logs didn't do too well against the odds of crushing junk.
"Substitution Jutsu, they call it, isn't it magnificent? I love learning the ways of all my subjects…" Serius noted, seemingly to himself.
"Huh? Are you talking to me?" a middle-aged woman in a messy silver ponytail and a messy waitress uniform, covered with her own blazer and neatly laying on top of a stone ridge with a bra slipped over her eyes raised her lazy head and turned her undergarment over the top of her head to get a look at the noisy fellow interrupting her slumber.
"What in the devil?" Serius the conqueror scratched his head. Suddenly he froze, his complex and hefty golden crown slipped from the top of his head and clanged down onto the rocks, bouncing off one ridge after another before rolling off into the shifting hell of elegant footwork and raising hell amongst the competitors. "My crown. It slipped… It's never slipped, no matter how or where I've turned my head. Just who are you, ma'am?"
"Me? I'm just a middle-aged spinster. Go away, someone will see your fancy getup and beard-work and bring a fight here…" A tad vexed, the woman with short silver-colored bed hair tried to shoo the extravagant conqueror away. "You'll find nothing but comic relief here. I'm sure that you want to be taken seriously, being a conqueror, king of the world type, or whatever…"
"Excuse me, commoner, that's King of the Continent and the Seas of the World. Wait… What's going on? What am I so outraged about?" Serius stroked a strap of his beard that was as long and thick as a python as he tried wrapping his head around the source of his own frustration.
"See? You already see the pages, you know when I don't capitalize your ridiculous titles. If you'll spend more time around me, you'll let my corrupting influence turn you into a comic relief character, and once the slapstick starts… Well… Then your reputation as a credible warrior will be ruined. There's no way you'll make it to the Top 16 as a comic relief. This isn't that type of story. Face it, people want their warriors cool and edgy, grumpy and brooding," the waitress took her improvised eye cover off and slipped it underneath her black skirt with one still tense and attached strap and pulled the second strap up to appear more presentable.
"That thing on the rocks, it's a sword. A wooden sword… It's styled like those blades of the samurai from the Land of Iron, but… Curious, you don't look like a samurai. Why is it wooden, are you a beginner swordsman? No, my Iron Minister wouldn't permit half-baked swordsmen to represent his department…" Serius leaned to pick up a bokken laying on the rocks and examined it from both sides.
"Iron Minister? You call the Iron Shogun that? Don't let him or any of his loyalists hear that or your head will rule from the bottom of a bucket," the bed-haired samurai yawned with half-shut eyes and still looking groggy. "Are there any other stuff of mine you wanna get your sweaty hands all over? I've got my underwear right here, how about you fondle all that and get your smell all over it, that'll make falling asleep again much easier for me, I'm sure."
"Falling asleep? Ma'am, you mean to tell me you were… Sleeping!?" Serius leaned back in disbelief, nearly stumbling off the cliff and wrecking himself in the process.
"Careful, you're being converted into comic relief as we speak. You'd think you'd take my warnings more seriously but no…" The middle-aged spinster dressed as a waitress with a messy and untied black bowtie hanging around her unbuttoned collar rubbed her swollen eyes and snatched the bokken away from Serius with a single, fluid motion. "That's right, I need my beauty sleep, or else I'll never find myself a husband. I'm already way past my shelf life. At this rate, I'll never get rid of my Curse Seal."
"B-But this is the middle of a battlefield, it's so awfully noisy out here!" Serius freaked out, making an incredibly undignified and long face as his thick and strapping warrior's arms turned noodly and malleable on the spot just to accommodate his awkward posture and the watery drool slipping from his nose and sticking to his sophisticated beard.
"I've survived so many hopeless rebellions and wars that I've learned to sleep during a battle. So what? You call that tomboyish? That's sexist. Women can sleep through wars too…" The groggy middle-aged waitress made her first war face for the entire encounter. With unmatched ease, she twirled and spun the bokken in her hand and tossed it up like a rifle, catching it by the handle with her right hand and extending it out to boop Serius' nose and send him fumbling off the rock. The disgraced conqueror slammed his head onto every single rocky ridge on his way down.
"Are those… Birds that I hear chirping?" Serius shook his head in disbelief as he peeled himself off the ground. Examining himself, he saw his cartoonish and out-of-whack proportions returning to normal. A clack of leathery uniform boots distracted him as his peeved opponent hopped down the rocky wreckage mount and tapped her shoulder with her bokken as if waiting for an attack to counter.
"Told you, the longer you stay in my view, the worse it'll get," the silver-haired waitress scratched her neck with a grumpy and a tad swollen from a sleepy grog face. With a crude gesture, she pulled the collar of her shirt down, exposing her neck and the upper parts of her shoulder and a down-pointing triangle made of two black and one white cube with contrasting hieroglyph colors and orange, drip like paint marks extending down her body and crawling much further down than her pulled shirt revealed. "It's this Curse Seal. A sky-fairy-baby gave it to me when I was a little girl and now everything I focus on becomes cartoons."
"Hmm… This is troubling news indeed," Serius nodded to himself, looking around and gasping with joy when he found his fallen crown to pick back up and place it on his head. "You see, I normally fight my challengers in their own ways, but, I'm afraid, I cannot make things turn into cartoons. Unless, of course, neither can you and it's all just crazy talk."
"Seriously?" the groggy samurai in a sloppy and wrinkled waitress uniform scratched her cheek with a squint in her eyes and a mocking downward slope in her stretched lips. "You waltz around pretending you own the entire world and I'm the crazy one? It's a good thing you'll be turning into a cartoon, because you have the beatdown coming your way from a mile away, and I'd genuinely feel like I'm putting down a mentally challenged person if you weren't a cartoon."
"Enough of this cartoon claptrap!" Serius the Conqueror pointed his lotus staff at the samurai waitress. "You wield a sword, so, for now, I shall challenge you in the ways of the samurai, using my staff as a wooden naginata. Since your sword is wooden, I wouldn't dare impose my cruelty on you by using a real blade, either."
"Wait a second, pal, I've actually come prepared for this occasion. You won't need to swing that staff around. Here's a replacement sword," the waitress swordswoman reached behind her messy dress and pulled out another sheathed bokken. With a quick motion, she flung it at her opponent, who caught it out of the air with a pleasantly surprised look.
"Ah, thank you, kind lady. It is so gracious of you to bring a weapon for me as well…" Serius nodded, drawing the sword to examine the craftsmanship. Halfway through the drawing, he realized that what he was drawing was many times more bloated and much longer than the sheath it was placed in. It made little sense, but what made even less sense was the fact that it was a cartoonish stick of dynamite. Truthfully said, Serius actually marveled at the lunacy of seeing a stick of dynamite that appeared to bend the very reality he was in by appearing like it was hand drawn and colored lazily with a brush of burgundy paint.
"Simply marvelous!" Serius examined the stick, looking completely unthreatened by the fact he was holding an oversized handful of cartoon explosives. A deafening blast resonated throughout the arena. The fire spread with bubbling bursts and flung wild blotches of ink in all directions, creating an overly artistic, woodblock calligraphy-style drawing of an explosion. When the smoke cleared, Serius stood with tattered clothes, all charred black with wild, spiky hair, and coughing up puffs of black smoke. Mere dusting let him remove the excessive charring as if it was just a layer of dust. Much to his shock, the conqueror stared at his hands and touched his intact face after taking a devastating blast head-on.
"See what I'm talking about? Don't worry though, this stuff's all very child-friendly," the messy swordswoman yawned, being the only person to see all this miracle-making with her own pair of eyes and be thoroughly unimpressed by any of it. "Honestly, it's probably what helped me keep my sanity living in the Iron Country and fighting for every inch of my happiness there. But, if I can win this tournament, the Shogun said that he will leave me and the people dear to me alone. He'll leave my café be and arrange a marriage for me. I hope now you understand why I must win."
"Hmm… I believe I was wrong earlier," Serius looked up. His body had begun fully imitating cartoonish art with outlandish limb proportions and simplistic facial structures, flash, and flare over detail. Even his ludicrously detailed crown had become just a bunch of cragged spikes colored with a yellow pencil. Serius the Great was now just a pencil-sketched sticker stuck onto the surface of the physical plane. "After I've fully immersed in your fantastical cursed power, I believe that I too can mold this world of cartoons. I only hope that I am right. I would hate to have to fight you in a style that's unbefitting of your culture and preference."
"Sorry, bud…" the silver-haired fussy waitress shook her head with a sassy press of her lips. "Not how this works. I make everything go cartoons."
"Or perhaps you simply never met a warrior willing to play along with them. I believe it to be impossible to break out from this world of whimsy, but the rules of this limited and colorful dimension are highly warped and the narrative of the script itself is bendable," Serius exclaimed, sheathing the sword. "I implore you, ma'am, please, use that explosive trick again!"
"Sorry, the whimsy's all gone when you redo the gags," the waitress shrugged. Confused, the self-proclaimed great conqueror of the continent and the seas drew none other than an oversized bouquet that would've required picking an entire field to gather. Slowly and with his royal step, the monarch of the world approached the bitter cartoonist lady and handed the flowers to her, causing a flush of red in her cheeks and a gentle, lustful gasp in her mouth that she was forced to snuff by biting her lower lip.
"Why don't you smell the flowers and be my queen, m'lady?" Serius bowed, extending his hand as an invitation to follow his suggestion and reach out for his hand afterward.
Entranced by Serius' charm and hopelessly in love, the toon-force samurai pulled the oversized bouquet closer for a whiff only for a mean and edgy-looking cartoon shark to slice the flowers with its fin and eat itself right out from their midst before chomping down on the mistress of toons herself, digging its banana-sized teeth into her and gobbling her down up to the waist. After biting the upper half of the woman off, the shark straightened its back and lost all of its savage ferociousness, dusting off its frontal fins and putting a hat on its head and a monocle on its right nostril.
"Now that we are done here, I believe the time is right for me to pursue my dream of becoming a professional political commentator. Good day to you, sir…" The shark tipped its top hat to Serius and bunny-hopped out of view and out of mind.
"That was a neat trick," a more engaged tone of the woman's voice made Serius the Great turn back and exclaim in wonder when the woman he just saw bitten in half with distinctive shark tooth marks was now back together like nothing had happened. "I actually forgot I stuffed a toon shark in there. You handed my trap back to me and I fell for it like a hopeless, love-struck sucker."
"What happened to that chap? Is he going to realize his dream?" Serius wondered.
"No," the silver-haired toon-force swordswoman shook her head. "Things only turn into toons when I focus on them. When I'm aware of them or if they're near me for long enough. That's why it's for the better that I shut myself off and nap as much as I can. There is such a thing as jumping the literal shark for the reality we all live in. Trust me, there can be too much cartoons for a person to handle."
"I'm realizing that I'm asking for you to sabotage your own chances for victory, but… I would love to hear more about what made you this way and to understand your ability better. As the King of the Continent and Seas of the World, the One and Only of His Kind, it is my duty to help my subjects overcome their curses and ills and I'd like to see if there's anything I can do to help you overcome this curse of cartoon-making," Serius inquired.
"Hmm… You don't seem to have villainous curves to your mustache and usually, people erupt into a four-minute musical number that's usually the standout number when they're plotting to kill me so… I guess you're trustworthy enough, even though you've just sicced my toon shark on me," the silver-haired waitress sighed, deflating and causing random strands in her hectic bed hair to shoot up.
"That was an experiment of how this world of miracles worked more than a genuine attempt at taking your life," Serius calmed the woman down.