A whizzing comparable to the fluttering of the wasp's wings caught the ear of a short young man with shoulder-length hair and a large net that required him both hands to handle. Inside the net, there was a metallic spherical device with electrified octagonal pads surrounded by flashing electric patterns that kept the ball active and zapping. Perked up, the young man turned around and raised his net horizontally over his head with both hands. This came just in time as a black-haired, armed, and armored female mercenary with two cleaving swords came swinging from his rear in the air.
"That's a neat gadget you've got there! Not just any rod could withstand a swing of a chakra-coated sword!" with a ferocious and bloodthirsty look on her face, Kanoka, one of Fennec's mercenaries, growled at the terrified boy.
"What do you want with me, lady? I'm just promoting my sport, hoping to win a chance to play it here, in the world's largest arena as a part of the newly founded World Sports Games. I don't know you, nor do I want to harm you," the boy swung his net's rubbery side, slamming it into the woman's shoulder and knocking her into a stumble to his side.
"Yeah, that's exactly why you'll die quickly and easily!" Kanoka taunted the fearful young man into a backward stumble. "My group is in need of outlasting this ridiculous gauntlet, which means we need to abandon caution and score dozens of quick eliminations. You athletes strike me as the easiest targets, so I'll cut right through the lot of you and jump us ahead by a good five or so spots closer to the Top 16."
The Taser Baller closed his eyes in fear while his opponent lunged at him with crossed swords that Kanoka meant to clip the boy's head off with like a pair of scissors. While his choice for a defensive strategy was questionable at best, it was the electric ball that slipped from the holster in his insulating net that acted first. Triggering and shooting off the hexagonal pads to the sides and lighting up with an entire field of shocks and jolts, the ball hurled itself toward the mercenary woman, slamming straight into her chest and expelling all of its pent-up voltage at point-blank range to the woman's heart.
The sudden painful impact and the severe shock testing her heart muscle made Kanoka's eyes bulge out with a dulled-out stare and her jaw to drop. With busted ribs and an aching heart, the female mercenary flew back exclaiming in pain, and hit the ground on her back. A less experienced combatant looking at her would've surmised that she was done and down for the count with her eyes rolled back and her mouth ajar. But Kanoka sprung to a lunging thrust out of nowhere, only to be whacked aside by the Taser Ball smashing into her jaw from the left side. This time, the mercenary didn't even try to fake it. Grumbling, she pulled herself off the ground and raised her cleaving swords for defense.
"Just what the heck is that thing?" she cursed, eyeing the active Taser Ball rolling around in a circle.
"I feel like if I explain it to you, you'll adapt to it and try to kill me," the unimpressive-looking athlete pressed one of his hands to his waist while using his right hand to hold his insulating net for support. "Then again, you look like you're vicious enough to kill yourself trying to kill me if I don't explain it too…"
"It reacts to neural activity," Kanoka instantly surmised, watching the ball rolling around and hopping toward the nearest duking combatants only to freeze in mid-air when the combatants ceased their fisticuffs and stared at the incoming tasing device, ready to defend themselves. "Both times it attacked me when I attacked you in its vicinity. I thought it was trying to protect you or something, but right now I'm the only threat in front of you, yet the ball's going crazy anyway. That means it wasn't the threat to your life it was reacting to–it was the electric impulses in my nervous system."
"Damn, here I thought you mercenaries were just numb-skulled brawlers…" the young man freaked out, leaning back and nearly dropping his hefty insulating net.
"In our line of work, if you don't think and figure things out fast, you die. Just because your compliment made me feel warm and fuzzy, I'll give you another thing I figured out–the voltage it delivers is proportional to the signal it senses. There's no way that a sport for wussies like you would let a ball roll wild packing voltage like the one it hit me with, it's adapting to the strength of the impulse in my nerve system," Kanoka pointed her cleaver sword at the terrified Taser Baller.
"The shock of a Taser Ball is meant to punish athletes for bad plays. If an athlete is a skilled warrior, they wouldn't feel even the slightest sting from anything less than a cosmic jet, meanwhile, it takes a shock fourteen figures weaker to kill any ordinary athlete. It's the only way the sport can function," the Taser Baller admitted with an agitated look on his face.
"What about this!?" Kanoka growled. The ruthless mercenary flung her sword, making minimal movement to do so while flinging a cleaving projectile in the athlete's direction. A loud clang followed a low-pitched zap as the rolling Taser Ball homed in on the aerial projectile and increased its mass, dropping both of them down on the ground. As the Taser Ball began shooting wild jolts in all directions, the alarmed boy slammed his insulating net over it to prevent getting caught by a stray bolt that was adapting to his opponent's nervous system.
In a flash, Kanoka came in with an elbow strike that met her opponent's net with a resounding clang. Feeling an overwhelming nervous signal, the Taser Ball shot up and began dragging the poor boy with the insulating net around with it. In a drastic hurry, the boy with an effeminate haircut, dragged his thumb across the rod of his net, flicking a trigger that detached the insulating net with a muzzled clang. The disconnected net offered far lesser security compared to the connected one, making the Taser Ball rip clean through it as it exploded in an electromagnetic field and overwhelmed the mercenary, whiting her out and spiking her short black hair up.
The Taser Ball appeared to short circuit from a clear overload, as it sent a supersonic electromagnetic discharge in all directions and expelled the female mercenary under Fennec's employ out of bounds, smoldering with black smoke and covered in patches of electric burns from head to toe. A trail of black smoke even rose from the woman's jarring mouth. Meanwhile, the Taser Baller had thrust the rod of his net into the ground and stood on top of it, absorbing all the shock.
With a cocky hop down and a scoop of the discarded net part, the boy connected his insulation rod back with the net and scooped the temporarily inactive Taser Ball back up with it.
"The extremely likable underdog, Kaefer Farfaello, tricked his opponent, the mercenary Kanoka, into an early ring-out by short-circuiting the ball with an uninsulated overload! For a professional athlete, young Kaefer displays the mind of an engineer!" the announcer tolled the elimination for a wave of applause from the audience that very much enjoyed the bright and flashy electrical discharge light show. "We've got 90 contestants left! The plan of the Fennec's mercenary band to score quick eliminations succeeded, though, perhaps not in the way they intended it to!"
A terrible uproar sent young Kaefer down on the ground, dropping his net and the inactive Taser Ball and clutching his ears that splattered a trickle of blood from each side sifting through his fingers. An obese and absolutely gigantic colossus of flesh wielding a saber that should have been cleaving buildings rather than people clamored, flexing his muscles. The 12 meters tall chubby stared straight at Kaefer with disproportionately tiny eyes that could have only belonged to an ordinary human from behind a decorated bronze mask.
The fact that the gargantuan mercenary could leap at all, given his size and weight, was impressive enough. Proportionately, he didn't hop that high, barely higher than his knees' worth. However, given that his vast weight and the tremendous length of his saber only added to the danger of a two-arm jumping slash, even such a ridiculous-looking attack posed a deadly threat to mush the poor boy into mulch rather than cut him into two. The surrounding arena sank in dust and spewing sandstone rubble while the behemoth threatened to sever the whole Sun Disc arena into two or, at the very least, make it collapse from the calamitous earthquake of its jump.
"Ey, therrre, what do ya think yerrr doin'?" a grumbling voice of a lone pirate blocking the sword from touching the ground with one arm spread from underneath the massive saber. "Yerrr gonna rrruin the whole stage, larrrd-arrrse!"
An inhuman, rumbling comparable to churning gears and turning millstones came from the mouth of the freakishly strong and humongous mercenary. He pulled his sword away from the impenetrable barrier that was the pirate captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond. From behind the pirate captain with a bad reputation cowered the pale and whimpering Kaefer. Had it not been for the intervention of the terrifying buccaneer who feared for the integrity of his fighting stage, the boy surely would have been mincemeat.
"Th-Thank you!" Kaefer mewled out with shaking and blue lips. Tarbeard didn't acknowledge the boy's existence, instead, he stood staunch like a lighthouse against an opponent four times his own size and dozens of times his superior in girth. Regardless of the visible difference in size and stature, Tarbeard intended to pummel and punish the mercenary who proved himself to be willing to damage the very arena that hosted all the competitors and cause countless perilous eliminations.
Tarbeard slid the sleeve of his coat off and flexed his thick arm before his massive opponent. Kaefer could sense the bad news emanating from the pirate captain in the form of wicked miasma trailing around him as his aura that even an ordinary young man could see. Everything about Tarbeard sent alarming signals of bad vibes. Even with the pirate captain looking away and completely ignoring Kaefer, the boy felt so terrified of the burly pirate that he scrambled and ran for his own life instead of helping him stand his own against the gargantuan mercenary. Something deep down suggested to Kaefer that the captain preferred it this way.
The two larger-than-life figures stood in front of one another for a little while, absorbed in the scene's weight, while standing in complete silence. Then, the goliath struck without warning, swinging his thick leg bloated with flabby flesh straps forward. An emanating shockwave dispelled the bad vibes permeating around Tarbeard as, flaring up from his head down to the shoulders, the ambitious captain thrust a jab of his own as an answer to the punt that should have absolutely sent him soaring into the atmosphere.
The kick and the jab collided down in the middle with neither side folding. An expansive concussive ripple compressed and electrified the surrounding area. The two forces kept imposing their way until the foot of the gargantuan mercenary under Fennec's employ kicked Tarbeard over. Rumbling, growling, and thrashing about with its arms, the flabby-skinned giant raised its wooden clogs and prepared to squish the fallen pirate, but Tarbeard's raised hand stopped the stomp halfway.
Winding his right forearm back and flaring up with wild flames covering his back and shoulders, Tarbeard delivered a devastating blow to the sole of the wooden clog which smashed the piece of footwear to shreds and incinerated the tiny parts of the shredded shoe whole. The flames covering the back of Tarbeard's body, upon severe compression comparable to that of a full-power punch, detonated with a ripping burst that sufficed in even sending the heavyweight goliath stumbling back.
"Ye ain't any norrrmal fellerrr, arrre ya?" Captain Drummond said after pulling a hand cannon out and taking aim with it over his horizontally bent right arm for support. "My bad vibes don't seem to affect ya much. But maybe that's just cause yerrr as simple as yerrr larrrge?"
With a deafening clamor, Tarbeard's hand cannon let it rip and sank him in a cloud of gunpowder, smoke, and dust. With widened eyes, the colossal giant let out an inhuman, muzzled scream as one of his tiny eyes closed into a black pulp. Something that Tarbeard found curious was how the scream sounded as if someone was screaming from inside the abominable mouth of the big guy as opposed to it being the giant himself. Captain Drummond heard his own fair share of screaming and begging and death rattles in his time, this sounded like nothing he had ever heard, save for a giant squid crying as it fled to the briny depths after Drummond blew a barrel underwater straight by its eye.
"How's that forrr a spit yerrr eye?" Drummond spat to the side and wiped the remnants of his slobber off his messy and curly beard with the sleeve of his coat. "That'll show ye ferrr trrryin' to wrrreck the stage ferrr all of us!"
With the scorned giant beginning a wild barrage of punts and swings of its saber in all directions that was bound to catch the attention of any contestants brawling it out amongst themselves, Drummond rushed to stop his foe before he attracted unnecessary attention that may have been difficult to get rid of. L'Ollonais had already shown how attracting attention and adopting the position of an arena leader could have been detrimental to continuing one's participation in the battle royale. Drummond got to where he was in the pirate pecking order by being ambitious, but also from learning from the mistakes of other people, rather than waiting until circumstances forced him to learn from his own.
Tarbeard bent his feet and took off, effortlessly soaring all the way to the giant's chest and extending his hand. A cloud of smoke followed up a heavy pop. The smoke was quick to disperse, revealing Captain Drummond to have unsealed a gunpowder barrel that he pressed to the center of his opponent's chest. With flames still coating Tarbeard's back, shoulders, hair, mustache, and beard, Drummond plunged his firm fist into the barrel's depths, detonating the keg in an instant point-blank to his opponent's chest. With his flabby arms waving and wandering backward with spacious steps, Tarbeard's oversized opponent threatened to fall down and crush someone.
In that way, Tarbeard had turned the goliath's tremendous size into a disadvantage, as his opponent lacked the discretion of being able to fall inside the arena's bounds. If the lug flopped on his back now, he'd mess up and ring himself out. Even if it would have been by just one arm or his head touching the area outside of bounds. Nasty black patches of burns stretched out across the region where Tarbeard plunged his blazing fist into the barrel and caused a vicious blast on the giant's chest.
Taking aim with his hand cannon, Captain Drummond blasted another eye of the gargantuan mercenary out, leaving a lone black trail to smolder from a charred black wound partly covered up by the brass mask that the mercenary wore. Even the giant's flesh didn't seem to behave like that of any ordinary man whom Tarbeard has burned throughout his voyages. The mercenary's flabs burnt with the stench of noxious rubber and stung at the nostrils like burnt tires rather than the stimulating smell of a roasting man.
Landing on the ground, with his hand cannon placed over his shoulders, Drummond dug his dulled chompers into his thumb until he splashed blood all around the place. The savage display of self-mauling disgusted the audience, even though the unnatural sight of Captain Drummond, who was usually the biggest dog in any yard facing off against an unnaturally tall humanoid mountain of lard, kept them staring regardless. Once more Drummond leaped into the air, swinging his chewed thumb to splash blood out in front of him.
"Come to me, Warrrden!" Tarbeard growled, drowning the skies in a cloud of black smoke with the bonus of a ripping thunderclap to confuse his summoning technique for a live thunderstorm. From the black clouds, a large military vessel flopped onto the shoulders and arms of the blind giant, who quickly let go of his massive saber and put up both of his arms to try to keep the ship above his head.
"Abandon ship, mateys!" Tarbeard howled, causing a wave of pirate crewmen to vault themselves overboard into an unbelievable fall of over fifteen meters, only to splash into the area outside of bounds. The pirates appeared more likely to take their chances with such a daredevil drop, rather than disobey the orders of their captain and receive their penance at their own peril. With the sealing glyph that reloaded Drummond's hand cannon with a live cannonball working its magic, Drummond took aim at his own ship held high over the giant's head.
The ship's weight appeared to stun the colossal tub of lard in place, while Drummond took aim and let it rip. A cannonball punched through the wood side of the hull in an uneven exchange. It wasn't entirely clear what sort of vessel this "Warden" was, not until a chain reaction of fiery bubbles drowned out and swallowed the top half of the giant whole. Fennec's goliath fell from a cumulus of black smoke and rampant gunpowder firestorms unconscious and smoldering with trails of black smoke, the volume of which reminded Drummond of an aftermath of a naval skirmish. The terrified spectators fled in an absolute panic shortly before a black shadow loomed over them. They had little to no hopes of escaping in time, knowing the volume of the monstrous mountain of a man that would give them their crushing demise.
It was an absolute miracle that the giant seemed to evaporate into thin air, leaving just an airborne web-shaped network of black sealing glyphs and a wall of dust spreading evenly in four directions around the giant's vast dimensions. Whoever or whatever that mercenary was got called back to wherever it came from. Likely realizing this, the announcer fixed his bandana and glasses and slammed his hands down.
"The pirate captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond scored another elimination against the Fennec's crew of mercenaries! True to his ruthless pirate nature and terrifying reputation, Drummond nearly sent his gargantuan foe slamming down on the unsuspecting members of the audience, only for the mercenary to get recalled! Where it went and just what that behemoth of a man was remains a mystery, however, it's not a question for us to answer, since with the 89 remaining competitors still duking it out in the arena, we've still got a majestic fighting event to resolve!" the announcer cast his voice to the spectators, hyping them up for the continuing blood fest that now had vastly more space to take place in after the elimination of one of its most spacious competitors.