A mechanical thump alerted a perched Sky Warrior with a beak-shaped stone mask attached to a long, red, hooded cloak. The thumping continued until the chained barrage drowned each separate thump out. Then, a blazing, bubble-shaped blast decimated the area where a bullet-shaped projectile launched after the first thump blew up, which made any sort of thumping irrelevant in its commotion.
With the hooded cloak decorated with colorful feathers spread out wide, the gliding Sky Warrior adopted the look of an upside crescent-shaped glider in the air. Unexpectedly to it, a man clad in clunky brass and bronze armor, with a gear possibly twice his own size attached to the back, which had rubbery bullet points sticking out from each segment of the gear, closed in on the airborne Sky Warrior from behind.
"Your name was Papagei, wasn't it? I'm Gadget Man and I'm not much of a fan of how dismissive you were of Guard Woman. She's one of the original superheroes, you know…" The man spoke from a Corinthian-style bronze helmet through a voice box that disguised his voice. There seemed to be a strange absence of a real man's head inside of that helmet as the gap was fully sunken in shade through which only the sole glass lens peeked through.
The self-proclaimed Gadget Man threw a right hook from a dominant position directly above his target, putting Papagei on the defensive and prompting it to swiftly swerve to the right and reduce the span of its chakra-conductive feathered flaps so that it was easier to plunge down and contend the reach of his opponent and the angle of their strike.
Gadget Man may have looked like a hi-tech garbage bin with metal rods and disproportionate steampunk forearms and calves attached to them, making it difficult to imagine how a man could have fit and moved inside this particular suit of armor, but his size didn't let Papagei employ any of his usual snark and vanity toward the attacking superhero. Just the cylindrical chest of the floating steampunk monstrosity was man-sized in its entirety with each shoulder and thigh carrying gears with fuming barrels for teeth. The entire brass and bronze formation was spewing blue chakra flames from azure-glowing elements concealed underneath an armored plating.
Immediately as Papagei gained some distance on his opponent, Gadget Man clenched his arms and legs to his sides, directing all of his thigh and shoulder guns at the elusive Sky Warrior. In a blink, each of the barrels began spewing a barrage of kunai and shuriken buzzing through Papagei with unimpressive accuracy but lethal speed and even deadlier numbers. Catching a wind current, Papagei pulled the sharpest swerve in mid-air that allowed him to elude the all-out offensive barrage while positioning him above and behind Gadget Man.
"Gadget Man? I must say, I find this name misleading. You don't seem to pack all that many gadgets. What I see is purely a one-trick pony," Papagei mocked his opponent while battling him for a more favorable position in this unexpected human dogfight these two ended up dueling in. "You're packing so many gears, how about Gear Man?" Papagei mocked his opponent, throwing a hefty thrust of his massive pincer forward and forcing a collision with Gadget Man as he rolled over and blocked the punch threatening the oversized gear on his back.
"You've tried Gear Man, didn't you?" Papagei was regretful that his opponent couldn't see his sheepish grin underneath the beak-shaped stone mask, but he must have realized the mocking intent purely from Papagei's scathing tone.
"Apparently there is a professional wrestler in Kumogakure calling himself that. People kept on confusing me for that man and pestering me for autographs on professional wrestler magazines…" Gadget Man replied, snuffing out the blazing chakra jets that kept him suspended in mid-air so that he could reposition himself into a soaring uppercut pose and then re-engage his chakra boosters to throw him upward on a collision course with his opponent.
Just as Papagei began thinking of a clever comeback to accompany a simple evasive motion necessary to deal with such a straightforward aerial maneuver, he realized that the blazes leaking off from Gadget Man's chakra jets were connecting to something. A small platoon of fun-sized Gadget Men with different colored suits of iron were homing in on Papagei's location from all around their platoon leader. Had they all been sidekicks of some sort, there would have been far more superheroes signed up than Papagei recalled being, which could only mean that these were drones of some sort.
Finding himself in quite a predicament as the number of the drones and their homing, missile-like rushing approach made it nigh impossible to maneuver out of their way without getting blown out of the sky, Papagei flapped his feather-clad hood flaps back while clapping his hands together and igniting an ethereal blue flame around them.
"Spirit Art: Chatter Wall!" Papagei chanted out, disconnecting both of his pincers and locking each of the separate pincer halves into a single half, before forming a double-sized pincer from each separate arm of interconnected pincer halves. The super-sized pincer pinched with a calamitous thunderclap, sending a wave of electrified air that not only matched the all-out headlong rush but also ended up scattering their formation by obliterating the squad of child-sized Gadget Men while blasting Gadget Man himself away for a ride.
Tightening his winged flaps together, Papagei dived headlong like a human bullet. Shooting forward with nigh hypersonic speed, Papagei extended his hood flaps and tightened them like iron sheets with the application of chakra coating across the colorful feathers decorating them. He turned around and plunged the hooked brass claws attached to his feet into the massive gear attached to the back of Gadget Man.
"This massive gear must be the place you stored all those explosive rubber missiles you've used earlier. Given how the entire purpose of a dogfight is getting behind your opponent's back, isn't it a bit of an obvious weakness to your whole fighting style to have it luring your opponent to hit it?" Papagei snickered with sheepish cackling as Gadget Man tried turning around and correcting his position, but it was impossible to contend against a dogfighter that was attached to one's back and going nowhere. No matter how sharp or drastic Gadget Man's turns, loops, or rolls were, Papagei was still right there behind him.
"Damn it, got to ditch it!" Gadget Man grumbled out, emitting a halo of chakra flames from the hollowed-out teeth of the massive gear on his back only for the heavyweight gear to rumble and slip down carried by its own weight while Gadget Man blasted chakra jets from the soles of his feet and the front sides of his forearms when he needed to correct his position. While the aerial combatant was clearly faster using this method of transportation, he was less skilled using it and it relied on the chakra batteries inserted into his gear as opposed to the massive supply stored inside that hefty gear on his back.
"Thanks, but the warriors of Sky Country see no use in material goods so I cannot accept your gift…" Papagei shrieked with a mocking chortle, heaving the plummeting gear he was still clinging to with his brass claws over his head before releasing the claws. "Spirit Art: Macaw Crash!" Papagei yelled out, spreading his arms out wide and pinching his gauntlets to form tunneling airwaves of compressed air and sound. Then, the Sky Warrior slammed his arms and recently re-separated pincer gauntlets together to force the separate tunnels of air and sound waves to collide and create a tunneling wave of bright white sonic boom that crashed its brunt straight into the center of the heaved back-gear.
Just as Papagei had thought, the back-gear packed to the brim with explosive missiles wasn't built to take a direct blow of such volume. The resulting explosion first turned even the most hectic cacophony of the chaotic battle royale down below and all around the aerial combatants into full-on grave silence before a bright white flash and all-encompassing flare made all beholders realize it wasn't that everything had gone silent. It was just that the resulting volume was so overwhelming and vocal that they were robbed of hearing it for most of its climax. Then the bleeding and pain, the internal shrieking that demanded one to cover their ears and try to get as far away from this ear-perforating ruckus as possible started.
Unfortunately enough, most bystanders didn't really have a place to hide. They had nowhere to get away to, so they just collapsed on their sides, trying to phase through the sandstone stands. It was only when their hearing returned to them washing like the roar of a raging waterfall that they could pick out the shrieks and inhuman yelling of their peers and realized that they were screaming their vocal cords out from the noise as well.
Somehow, social anxiety and shame of being shown as weak and human to people who actually never questioned their humanity was what won out in the end as each embarrassed audience member and disgruntled battle royale combatant succumbing to the calamity of the resulting explosion stood or sat up and tried playing the torturous experience off as something mildly amusing with slow clapping or half-hearted pumping of one's fist in the air.
"What a marvelous aerial bout! Yes… From what I can see, competitor Gadget Man has been eliminated!" the announcer raised his shades up to unroll and press a spyglass to his right eye and survey the vast landscape of the Agbarah Sheikhate to the south-west of the arena grounds where Gadget Man had fallen off to. Riding on top of elephants and steeds with fuming mouths and flaring red eyes, the healers took off to pick up and drag the defeated superhero back to the infirmary complex. "That means that the Sky Warrior Papagei has won this dogfight, it also means that we've got 96 competitors remaining in the battle royale!" the announcer said while stuffing his spyglass back in and flicking his shades back on the tip of his nose.
When the healers rushed to the scene where Gadget Man crashed into the town, all they could find was the central cylinder, bent and busted open, with a man panting inside it. He had partly escaped from his confinement inside the cylindrical control panel when his injuries caught up to him and made him pass out.
"Foul lich!" a judgmental and authoritative voice resonated from a man with a pitch of skin that relayed he spent entire days out in intense sunlight and curly, black yet greying hair and a well-maintained Garibaldi-style beard. The man was shorter than an averagely built man and wore expensive and hand-forged, fitted military armor underneath a regal red cape he coated over most of his body. "I've come to execute you for your crimes!"
Pressing his slick and pale body against the area of a stone protrusion sunken in shade, Yabure Kotsuzu, the lich of Tonika Village, turned his head sideways. He'd have liked to have the faintest clue of who this man singling him out was, though only because he's been through several taxing fights already and preferred to choose his opponents more carefully from this point on. Especially when Signal Man smoked him out of his hole.
"Did I eat your child or something?" Yabure chattered with a head that turned long past the point a human head should have been able to turn.
"The fact that you eat children at all is enough to earn my scorn, lich!" the armored conqueror in a red cloak extended his hand in an authoritative display, letting his cloak flap behind his back while revealing the full splendor of his black and golden armor. "My name is Jyujin Gyozarro. I've spent my entire life sailing the wayward islands and roaming the archipelagos away from the free continents and bringing them culture and order. In my journeys, I've encountered plenty of perverted and abominable monsters like you, and I've expelled every single one of them!"
"Interesting, I wonder what fear drives that passion…" Yabure chattered, rearing lines of narrow and spiky fish-like teeth on the bottom of his faceless head that appeared as if it was molded by hand from clay that was then turned into flesh.
"Mind your own fears, wretch!" the judgmental conqueror of the world's islands drew a saber and rushed straight toward the shade where the pale lich pressed his body against the stone like a cornered animal. "Cordoba Thrust!" Jyujin chanted out, turning his sword-wielding arm into a blur as he thrust his chakra-coated sword thousands of times in a few blinks, like a one-man infantry charge.
The mountainous wreck that Yabure pressed against bubbled with a round spot of a black, inky bog. Like the vertical surface of a black lake's surface. What sprung forth from it was no fish. Cancerous tumors of interweaved, rotten flesh and bone with razor-sharp lines of teeth ready to chomp down flung forth. Jyujin ceased his righteous advance and swung his saber defensively while turning his right shoulder plate as an offering to the charging shapeless worms. Jyujin's efforts helped him cut up a handful of the charging living tendrils, another band slammed against the shoulder plates and bounced off them visibly stunned. One would have guessed them to be concussed, had they the brain to concuss.
Jyujin grunted in pain as a triplet of the springing tendrils of bone, teeth, and decay chomped down on a handful of soft spots around the joints and made meek drips of blood tick and pool on the ground underneath him while the injured conqueror collapsed to one knee. Despite the setback, the warrior stared bravely ahead into the bubbling dread brewing within the shadows and threatening to send far worse nightmares his way.
"And to think you call me wretch, twisted and abominable…" Yagure said in a muzzled, whispering voice. The nightmarish, faceless lich spoke from his little pocket of shade where he reigned supreme and could lash out from at his leisure. "Fear empowers my magical runes. Without that borrowed power, I wouldn't be able to produce servants of flesh and bone in scorching sunlight."
"Look into my eyes, monster. Look at them closely and tell me if it is fear that you see, or if it is they that make you feel terrified!" Jyujin barked out, rising on both feet and utterly refusing to dash outside of his opponent's range of influence outside the shadowy corners even though safety was just one good leap away.
Reaching under his cape, Jyujin removed a wrapped scroll and unsealed it with one firm motion of his hand, revealing its contents to his opponent. The sealing glyphs drawn therein immediately began glowing before the very eyes of the twisted and malformed humanoid lich with a head that had twisted upside down and now hung on its neck at an awkward angle. The ground underneath both their feet trembled and quaked, blocks of dirt and sandstone shifted and bounced. From the foundation of collapsing ground, a mossy cinderblock castle was erected in the northeastern section of the arena, covering nearly the entire quarter of the battlefield.
"Behold, the Castle of Orochi! A portable fortification capable of containing the enemy forces as well as providing sanctuary to my own! Even the wildest and darkest islands can be granted order and built from the ground up from this fort as the nexus of the new world order!" Jyujin spoke with thunderous authority from atop a castle wall. The castle had eight separate stone towers interconnected by a wall at least eighty meters tall and four meters thick. Each of the eight towers and various intermediary battle stations atop of the castle walls had various defenses used to fend off a siege.
The towering structure aimed its armaments straight, engaging them only on the side where the lich of Tonika Village was hiding out with the intent of smoking him out from the shade. Despite this noble and well-equipped attempt, Jyujin's armed assault had one major oversight. The colossal castle cast the motherlode of all shadows. Before it could unleash hellfire, the castle quaked and shifted to the right side, beginning to disappear partly underground in the bubbling bog of black, bad broth.
Before long, a voracious and sickly mouth of decayed flesh and arm-long teeth burst forth, a living fog stuck in between gooey biomass and gas absorbed the risen castle within its all-devouring mouth entirely before taking off from underground and hanging above the ground like a haunting, cancerous zeppelin. A resounding blast opened a hole in the side of the terrifying visage of looming death. Before the hanging cloud could do its worst, Jyujin the conqueror employed the castle's cannons and blasted his way out through the side of its head, hurling out with a singed cape and armor that was melting over his skin.
A shadowy entity that has expanded so far and wide into the reinvigorating sunlight could only survive for mere moments, however, as the dying fog dissolved with chilling moans and turned to dripping grime, the castle that it has devoured fumed out from an opening in its mouth in the gaseous form of fully dissolved matter. The scorching desert's sun burnt up the death smoke to cinders while Jyujin panted on his knees before his foe. He'd have liked to submit no quarter to the lich, and yet, despite being cornered, the nightmare of Tonika Village showed more fight than anyone could have expected from him.
"See? Even if you corner fear, beat it down and threaten to snuff it out. As long as the man with the lantern is afraid, fear will carry on. Deep-seated inside the heart of the man with the torch," Yabure chattered, rebounding from the stony plateaus, and reaching out with a voracious appetite with fingers long as spider legs.
Jyujin collapsed on his hands, coughing up a mouthful of blood before chipping off a remnant of his jagged, semi-molten armor and dragging it across his hand to send a splash of blood down before him for a proper pool. This appeared to truly confuse the lich to where his head completed its full counter-clockwise turn around his neck and cracked back into place. With his eyes closed, Jyujin drew with his fingers from the pool of blood before him and formed bloody glyphs in front of him on dry stone tiles. The sky over Yabure's head let out a poof as an entire summoned wooden house frame came crashing down on top of the gaunt lich.
Stumbling back to both feet, bleeding and bruised, the conqueror strut proudly into the domain of shadow to which Yabure confined himself. With a swipe of his saber, he ignited a liquid that had spilled from within the foundations of the collapsed house, causing the entire area to light up like a pyre, making the trapped lich hiss and jerk with violent attempts to escape the incoming demise.
"The only thing I fear is death before law and order are brought to the entire world. Every single faraway island brimming with savages and debauchery! The fact that you come not from outside the main continent, but from within its very heart is an insult to my entire life's work. You are a crime against civilization and therefore against man itself," with a lone silvery flash, Jyujin's saber beheaded Yabure while the flames persisting in the chemicals the blade was soaked in caught on the cancerous growth and malformed tissue wrapped around the gaunt body of the lich. The voracious flame devoured the twitching lich in seconds, reducing him to ash. "The punishment for your crime against mankind is death. Executed immediately," Jyujin swung his sword to the side, splashing both the unidentifiable ink-like bodily fluid that came from Yabure's body as it was being beheaded and the flammable kerosene to the side, sprinkling some more flames onto the surrounding pyre while the conqueror stumbled away from the burning frame of a broken home.
"The conqueror Jyujin Gyozarro eliminated the lich of Tonika Village, Yabure Kotsuzu!" the announcer sealed the deal of this bout with a proclamation. "95 now remain!"
P. S. Sorry 'bout the sudden absence. I got sick last Sunday and I really didn't feel like writing anything. I've mostly recovered now so I shouldn't miss any more updates