A walking titan of rusted metal covered in moss, a genuine walking garden thrashed in a mindless riot of fists and punts alongside a mechanical golem with a bird-like iron mask and two glowing red scope eyes. This rampant and undisputed duo freely picked their enemies from amongst even the most powerhouse of factions, like Cursed Warriors, ninja, and samurai alike.
The iron-beaked golem stiffened with an arched back before collapsing to one knee. Darkened, cherry-colored blood squirted from the back of the golem's knee. The source was a long and deep cut in the exposed area of its flesh. Further away, hanging onto the peak of some rocky rubble, a feminine shape dressed in a beige exterminator bodysuit tightened the vision in her many different scoped goggles capable of zooming or pulling out for an ideal range of vision, seeing in ultraviolet and infrared, any other specter that humanity had discovered and a few that ranged on the fringe area of science of the ninja world even.
Mechanical legs that made the hanging exterminatrix look like an arachnid cluttered with light twitches. The top and bottom pair that extended diagonally was by far the thickest pairs, wielding rubber hoses and steel frames, while the rest of the mechanical appendages appeared like subtle, almost surgical precision tools. The suspended hunter of the monstrous element extended her right mechanical leg while bending another pair of her upper legs to form an assisted and enhanced mechanical scope on top of the many goggles sticking out from her wholly leathery mask. The lower pair of legs wrapped around the exterminatrix's body to hunker her down and prevent twitchy movements that would have ruined the complex trick shot.
The extended thick mechanical leg squirted a bolt of water fired at such high density and speed that it surpassed what even the sharpest blades would've been capable of. Even if her magnum squirt could have punched through even the bulkiest of armors or sliced any metal alloy found in the observable universe like a heated knife through butter, the ruthless exterminatrix still aimed for the few soft and fleshy bits exposed by the golem's bulky armor frame that was necessary to allow it any articulation and freedom of movement.
With a punchy thud, the squirt of water slammed against the back of a butterfly-like wing flap. With a backhand smack, the wing deflected the watery bullet into the upper layers of the atmosphere, though still, it didn't lose a fraction of its pressure. The aquatic projectile only lost its density when the water comprising it froze up into a frigid icicle.
"I'm afraid I cannot allow you to eliminate either of these two. They are the battering rams of our faction, our powerhouses, so to speak," Vizeriman muttered while looking up in the approximate direction of the sharpshooter exterminatrix. Glancing at the armored female mercenary closing in on his right side and drawing her cleaver-style swords, Vizeriman extended his long robe flaps to obstruct her path. "Stand down, Kanoka. Against a long-range opponent with such a deadly aim and an even deadlier bullet, you're a bit out of your element. Stick with our formation. I'll deal with our freaky sniper."
"Be careful," Kanoka warned Vizeriman with a respectful tone that had a slight taste of worry for her superior. "If one of her scopes can see your Heart of the Desert and if she can hit it… Even you might die this time. Don't get yourself killed."
"I am well aware of the risks. I did not come to this tournament expecting to remain safe behind my veil of immortality. Someone was bound to threaten it eventually, though perhaps it is sooner than I expected that this would happen," Vizeriman pondered, wrapping the lower flaps of his butterfly-like wings around his painted body while the upper ones sent him into a swooping glide into the air.
It was dangerous for one of the Fennec's mercenaries to separate from the formation as the faction had many enemies seeking to prevent the warlord Fennec from gaining more leeway in the deeper parts of the Land of Wind desert with a prime corridor to march straight to Sunagakure if needed. With an impressive display of his control over his unique fighting style, Vizeriman opened his robe again, forming four-sided elongated butterfly wings out of chakra-coated cloth. Flapping his four separate wings, Vizeriman sent slashing projectiles of compressed air that sliced up the surrounding rocky wreckage into smaller rocky pieces.
Twirling around his axis while carefully guiding his wings, Vizeriman created a whirlwind around him full of dust and debris that fended off a few stray sniping shots that his perched opponent fired at him to send him crashing down and prevent him from interfering with her extermination job any further. Controlled and masterful air currents picked up the collapsed rocky debris of Vizeriman's making and swept them up along for the ride. This way, the flying storm rider mercenary surrounded himself with a vast network of chunky rocks, and by merging his air current streams, Vizeriman sent all the rocks hurling toward the last known location of his sniper.
Etching her mechanical legs into the stone peak, the leathery exterminatrix swung herself aside and tried to dodge all the incoming junk, but it was too widespread and too intense. It wasn't exactly a direct hit from one of the incoming boulders that took her down, but the collapse of the rocky mound she clung to when dozens of large rocky chunks broke it down into crumbled debris. With a vocal, modulated grunt, the exterminatrix ended up buried underneath the collapsing lump of rock for her troubles.
A whirling jet of blaze burst forth from the fallen mound of debris, surprising Vizeriman and igniting many of the still dissolving wind currents around him. While Vizeriman struggled against the challenge of the racing flames, the scorching halo of fire blew a vast layer of rock off of the fallen exterminatrix, revealing her up on her feet with her mechanical arms perked up and aiming into the air, spewing flames. When a few of the flame streams connected, the sheer pressure and density of the blaze caused a violent firestorm like the one that sent the flaming rocks flying in all directions and disassembled the stony mausoleum crumbled on top of the exterminatrix.
With the leathery sniper having successfully freed herself with just minor patches of dirt and scrapes on her black exterior and tears on her beige overalls, the exterminatrix devoted all four of her larger mechanical arms to spewing fire and lit up the skies with a cumulus of a solid firestorm. Vizeriman grunted in pain and wrapped himself up in his robe wings, having no way of maneuvering around something this massive and widespread. Covered in minuscule smolders, Vizeriman fell from the skies like a comet with a flaming tail and smacked back-first into the ground. One of the field commanders of the Fennec crew unraveled his wings that twitched as if the robe comprising them was utterly powerless. Like a stomped and dying butterfly, Vizeriman dragged his body back a few paces before whirling his wings and shaking the flames off like morning dew and levitating his body off the ground.
A clack of a plastic heel alerted Vizeriman to the location of his opponent, he turned his head up but he only saw a bright flash before a focused stream of flames hit him straight in the face, engulfing it whole. Had Vizeriman been mortal, a burst like this would've peeled flesh off his skin and left only a chattering, charred skull underneath. Now it only scattered billions of grains of sand away that soon whirled back into place, guided by the power of the Heart of the Desert artifact resting inside of Vizeriman's core.
This was not just a flex, seeing her opponent stumbling and momentarily overwhelmed, the sniper took aim at his heart, validating the worst of Vizeriman's fears–she actually could see the Heart of the Desert inside him. Acting in desperate self-defense, Vizeriman stuffed one of his wing flaps in the way of a sniping water bullet. The focused bolt of water punched a hole through the wing and left a crater in Vizeriman's chest, but it only exposed the Heart of Desert as opposed to destroying it as the exterminatrix intended.
"I'd have much rather hunted down your monster friends before. Now I see that you're something of a monster yourself. It baffles me how a man can throw away his own heart and discard their humanity in pursuit of becoming a monster…" the exterminatrix spoke with a modulated, robotic voice while shooting stray water bolts in a wide cone. By the time Vizeriman understood his opponent's plan, it was too late. With the methodical spraying of water jets that would've cut armor made of diamond fibers up like silk, the exterminatrix clipped Vizeriman's wings that he used for attacking and defending alike. "Such a miserable existence. I'm doing you a favor by putting you out of your misery."
Having closed the distance and retracted her countless scope goggles, the exterminatrix disarmed her opponent with wide hand-to-hand skills and tied Vizeriman's painted body up while opening him up for a finishing shot. A mechanical leg extended over the shoulder and fired a focused watery beam through Vizeriman's chest. The exterminatrix twitched like a startled hare in the forest. He dashed back just in time to avoid certain death as Vizeriman's malformed body, which became a compact mesh of sandstorm and human body parts, lunged at her. The mercenary's own ribs became lines of sharp teeth that took a hefty chomp that should have bitten off the whole upper half of the exterminatrix but only got her right forearm to munch on.
The disarmed exterminatrix thrust her mechanical arms into the ground while extending one of them to fire a grappling hook that attached to a nearby Cursed Warrior and carried her away, clutching her blood-splattering injury. It wasn't like the mechanical exterminators had any shortage of limbs. Reacting to the grievous injury, the black leather skin layer drew over the bloody stump with one of her smaller and thinner mechanical arms stapling the leather stump up.
"Desert's Heart!" Vizeriman chanted, using his own hands to draw a single grain of sand and form a tumultuous sandstorm inside of his hands before containing it inside of a cradle core of Wind Release chakra and sending it flying at the fleeing Cursed Warrior that had his enemy attached to them.
The exterminatrix fired a stray shot of flames aimed at the head area of the flying colossus which forced it to swerve and avoid the Desert's Heart while the exterminatrix detached herself from the stone beast's grip and dropped down into the hectic arena on the ground level. If the Cursed Beast noticed her, she'd have been in far more trouble than just dealing with Vizeriman and his pair of golem mercenaries.
Panting heavily with her modulated feminine tone, the exterminatrix straightened her back and scanned her environment with chakra-sensor goggles. Had it not been for her peerless sensory gear, she'd not have noticed Vizeriman shifting the location of his Heart of the Desert from his heart to his brain in time. This shift forced Vizeriman's body to go haywire, turning him into some sort of mesh between a man and a sandstorm. The jowls of the desert with ribs for teeth shot into the sky. Two separate whirlwinds of sand extended to the side of the central jowls' mass with detached human forearms. Vizeriman cradled his hands together and formed another Desert's Heart, sending it toward the crowd of competitors where he last saw the exterminatrix landing.
Using evasive rolls and flips with only one functional arm for support, the augmented exterminatrix moved out of the way just in time while firing potshots of super-heated bolts that turned sand masses into glass with watery bullets to shatter them into reflective shards and scatter them across the arena floor. Overwhelmed by this unique type of assault, Vizeriman stumbled back, losing more and more of his body mass as his constant switching of where he held his Heart of the Desert caused his body to become more desert than a man with each successive change.
Using evasive rolls, vaults, grappling hook zips, and the natural agility of her enhanced body, the exterminatrix avoided the stray and cumbersome Desert's Heart bombs while her mechanical arms didn't need to worry themselves about assisting their owner with dealing with defensive measures and evasion, moving as if with a mind of their own and firing controlled bursts of compact bolts so hot that they glowed with white light and melted the sandstorm just by coming close to it. In just a few blinks of this hectic and desperate exchange, Vizeriman became a motionless prism-man, sparkling with reflective sunlight.
Grunting in pain and weary, the exterminatrix fired a grappling hook shot and swung through mid-air to plant both of her feet into the motionless prismatic statue and kick it over to shatter into pieces as it hit the ground. Clutching her pain-ridden sides with her one and only functional arm, the goggled exterminatrix stared at the shattered remains. A gust of wind picked up in the center of the waltz of rainbows where Vizeriman's glass body collapsed. A shining pearl-like sphere rose from the pile of glass shards, rotating around its axis and attracting more and more shards to reassemble the immortal warrior of the desert back around it.
This was as clear of a shot as the exterminatrix would get. She connected two of her arms and zoomed her vision to ensure she would not miss this shot. Two of her hind mechanical legs perched her up for support to keep her standing after the decimating and focused shot that she was preparing for. Suddenly, she abandoned everything and fired a grappling hook to reel her away. As if she had predicted this, the Cursed Warrior she used as a pawn to flee certain death before, passed by the mountainous ridge of debris she chose as her perch point with a mouthful of devastating violet flames that reduced the debris to molten mash.
She missed her chance! The same damned thing that had just served as her salvation now came back for its toll and it felt like the cost was a pound of flesh.
Shrill chinks followed the prompt reassembly of an airborne prismatic figure of glass with a face-paint-decorated, hairless human head at the top. Like a legless mountain of crystal rotating wildly as he marveled at his own transformation, Vizeriman positioned himself atop the arena, in between the wild aerial battles in the skies and the rumble on the ground level. The desert's champion extended his crystalline blocks for hands wide over the arena as if he claimed governance over it.
"Interesting, I've never even thought to be capable of a transformation like this. I guess I've just never pushed the Heart of the Desert like this…" he spoke with an entire choir of duplicated voices that echoed from within the blocky crystalline formations he turned into hovering in the air. "Let's see exactly what this new form is capable of…" he muttered, extending his right hand of the three-part crystalline configuration of the body shard and the three-part arms to each side.
As if he was a porcupine, Vizeriman sent a hail of crystalline glass shards hurling toward the worn-out exterminatrix who tried bolting away but ended up receiving a handful of mean scrapes that slowed her down even further than the tiring battle she's been engaged in against what felt like the heart of the Land of Wind itself. The exterminatrix collapsed to one knee with a glass shard sticking out from her thigh, pulsing with unclear bio-mass that pumped within the mechanical tools of exterminations that were the Exterminator group.
Vizeriman guided his hands, pelting the grounded opponent of his with more and more washing hailstorms of glass that felt as tough as titanium and ripped cloth, leather, skin and flesh open as easily as it hurled through the air. With her goggles flickering on and off, the floored exterminatrix dragged her tattered and bloody body across the stone rubble, leaving filthy and thick smears of something resembling murky green machine oil on the ground.
The carrier of the desert's most hallowed artifact turned around on his axis, crossing his arms together before spreading them apart. He burst an entire forest of sharp, sky-high glass shards from the grounds, impaling the fallen exterminatrix on them and leaving her to hang limp and bleed whatever pumped through her highly modified system.
"It's over! None of us could have expected this, but the Heart of the Desert adapted to the intense heat of this intense battle and turned the mercenary Vizeriman into a being of adamantine glass shrapnel! The new and reborn Vizeriman eliminated Exterminator Model: Infrared Sensor with razor-sharp ruthlessness, leaving 97 remaining competitors!" the announcer relayed the developments to those members of the audience that missed out on the battle because of engagement in many other momentous meetings and brawls transpiring in the arena.
The hovering mass of glass descended closer to the impaled and lifeless exterminatrix, grabbing her leathery head and tilting it to check the snuffed-out lights on her goggles. With a curious squint to his hairless bony ridges above his eyes, Vizeriman dragged his crystalline blades where his fingers once were across the deceased exterminatrix' face, slicing through the leather and revealing lightly rotten flesh of dulled-out color with plastic rubes replacing major blood-vessels in the husk of dead flesh underneath.
"Interesting, so the leather isn't just a bodysuit or a mask, your skin was molten into it until the leather became the new, thicker layer of skin," Vizeriman muttered to himself, throwing the limp head of the dead exterminatrix aside to leave her hanging on his jagged forest of glass shards. "Your group has some gall to label me a monster when you're more tools, gadgets, and tubes than a woman. Then again, perhaps it takes a monster to truly know one?"
Vizeriman hovered away to regroup with the other Fennec's mercenaries. None of the combatants that saw the conclusion of this battle or nearly ended up impaled themselves on Vizeriman's catastrophic attack challenged him, respecting the power of the Heart of the Desert and the mystery of Vizeriman's new form. For now, at least.