A massive humanoid statue of obsidian, covered by rigid lemon mosaic patterns, whipped its tail that was shaped like a mace forward, sending a mighty gust of wind forward. Because of how demolished the arena was by the second half of the battle royale, the concussive storm picked up pebbles and lodged entire boulders sticking out from the ruined arena, hurling them forward.
"Roku-Men-Tsuki!" Mentare Kotedo, the stalwart female kendo practitioner who, despite wielding a wooden sword and fighting similarly to samurai from the Land of Iron, took part in the battle royale as a member of the martial artist faction, thrust her kenki-imbued shinai, producing popping aerial bursts that shattered stone even though the turbulent gust put her on the back foot. "Monster, stay away…!" she grumbled while struggling against the ripping typhoon of a lone swing of the Cursed Warrior's tail.
Instead of hearing out the martial artist's plea, the humanoid Cursed Warrior with a strongly shaped dome and a vertically oval chin scooped the kendo practitioner off the ground with a swipe of its colossal hand. The raging typhoon that threatened to pick up and fling entire sections of even the spectator part of the arena kept Mentare grounded and unable to defend herself effectively. Having ended up in the hands of the Cursed Warrior, the female kendoka found herself helpless as its hands squeezed her from both sides. She bolstered her body and uniform with kenki, but this merely prevented her bones from becoming dust and her innards from squeezing out of every orifice she had.
Quickly becoming bored with its latest attraction, the Cursed Warrior flung Mentare Kotedo to smash straight into the sandstone staircase in the spectator section with a deafening crack and a dusty collapse of the stairway one could have used to move up and down to different spectator floors. With its yellow patterns glowing intensely, the Cursed Warrior bellowed out an apish battle cry that seemed deafened somehow. Almost as if it came from thousands of miles underwater. Strongly audible, even to the point of vibrating the surrounding air and shaking the ground with fissures, but rich with uncanny alterations, nonetheless.
"The Kendo practitioner Mentare Kotedo has been eliminated!" the announcer made the call the moment he got himself together from the calamitous blast of one of the competitors smashing through the fortifications of the arena and threatening the safety of the daring spectators. It was only a quarter of a kilometer away from the announcer's stand that this crash happened, and yet the shaggy-haired, bespectacled man kept his professionalism. "It appears that her rigid martial arts style is powerful against ordinary men and swordsmen, but not very effective against giant cursed monolith monsters that don't need to close their distance and don't interact with a kendoka's sword in any way whatsoever! The martial artist faction is facing the greatest threat of elimination with only two remaining members: Jet the Messiah of Martial Arts and the man who eliminated Uminawa Derk, Jonisucho! And what makes matters even worse–neither of the pair is fresh and in a good state. Jet is still being hunted by the vengeful Salvari and worn out to his limit while Jonisucho isn't unscathed after his duel with the notorious Land of Water serial killer either!"
A shirtless Sky Warrior with a nest-like haircut and bright brown eyes sat perched atop a hefty chunk of debris, observing the fight of a young man with sand-colored hair that spiked around the edges of his head like a crown, but the excess extended downward and a bit past his shoulders. The young man wore a simple robe with a priest's garment that was tied up by a belt rather than securely buttoned down and hung loosely over the boy's shoulders, more akin to a cape.
The young man fended off various challengers by heaving a massive segmented two-handed sword with horn-like spikes for a guard and sticking out in the middle of the blade as well. The sword should have, for all intents and purposes, have been too large for the young man to wield, yet he heaved it around and did just enough to prove to his opponents that he was not worth the trouble of dealing with such a tremendous sword or survive long enough for another battle to distract his opponent instead. Because of a noticeable lack of skills beyond just capable swordsmanship, the young man wasn't memorable enough for either of his accidental encounters to remember him past successive encounters, so the young man in a priest's robe simply drifted between encounters.
Without warning, the Sky Warrior with trousers decorated with layers upon layers of flashy fuzz and feathers flickered away from sight. Spinning his legs vertically, he homed in on the location of the young man to deliver a vertical roundhouse that would have smashed the boy's head into the ground and left him crippled and ready for a slide out of the arena. Thick rubber bands segmented the legs of the Sky Warrior Ozigi, making them appear much longer than they proportionately should have been, though if it was because of an ocular trick or body modification was impossible to tell.
In reality, it was a bit of both.
The young swordsman heaved his lump of steel up and over his head and rested it on his shoulders. Ozigi's brown eyes widened upon the realization that the youth put his massive weapon in the way of his attack without being aware of it coming. With a renewed sense of wrath, Ozigi pushed forward, forming flaming halos around his thighs, calves, and feet before driving his kick into the back of the head of the young swordsman just before he turned his blade to block the strike with the blunt surface of the sword.
"What!?" Ozigi barked out, wondering just what kind of sword resting strategy relied on placing the blade on the back of his shoulders. If Ozigi were to kick as he originally intended, he'd have cleaved the lad's head off his shoulders with his own sword. A deafening clang followed by a field of malicious red lightning sparks signaled the collision between the two warriors as Ozigi vaulted back and then backflipped a few more times to gain some space.
"What was that? You've absorbed the entire shock of my strike with that unnatural sword position. Who rests their weapon over their shoulders, let alone with the blade rubbing against their own body?" Ozigi growled in outrage at the young man while he just turned around with a cheerful grin on his face.
"Seems stupid, right? I thought so too, but I've got a sixth sense of sorts and it just told me to do it. As if in, if I didn't do it, I'd end up in a world of hurting, you know?" the young man snickered.
"A sixth sense?" Ozigi focused his glare. An ability like that would have been incredibly troublesome to deal with. If the rest of the lad's opponents sensed it in him, they'd have backed down from him and would have been wise to do so. Then again, Ozigi should have picked up on it. "Seems to me more like beginner's luck."
"I wouldn't say I'm being lucky. The images that I see get really intense… Imagine walking down the street and then BLAM! You see yourself getting splattered into a bloody stain on the pavement, just when the pain of dying seems too bad to bear, you snap out of it and it's all alright, then you realize that you're about to walk into trouble and you stop it. The idea of how to do it seems like it's just ingrained into your head, you know?" the strange young man tapped his temple without dropping the goofy grin off his face for one second.
"You came to this competition in the magician faction. Yet, unlike the other magicians, you didn't seem like a freak to me. All that you're doing is heaving that ungodly sword around…" Ozigi blabbed out.
Without warning, in a flash, the young man closed in face-to-face and drove the blunt and flat side of his two-hander into Ozigi's face, sending him flying and crashing through multiple rocky pillars with a face red from the incredible impact that felt like it nearly got flattened and ironed out in one slam. Had Ozigi not thrust his feet into the ground and stopped himself with a skid that left flaming skid marks on the tiles, he'd have flown to another country despite bolstering his body just before the impact. He made an awful mistake. This young man was terrifying!
"Don't speak God's name in vain!" with a childish pout, the young man pointed at his opponent whom he nearly eliminated with a surprise mock charge, placing his horned two-hander sword over his shoulders with one hand while taunting his opponent with the other. "For your information, this very sword you called ungodly is in fact hallowed and does away with all manners of eldritch abominations that the human dimension can't comprehend!"
"Tsk…" Ozigi grumbled and wheezed after breathing in and busting through the block of fear that had gripped his lungs and shriveled them into an inconsequential sponge. "There it is, that weird babbling the rest of the magicians speak of… Magical councils, different dimensions, rules of nature…"
"You could use being more open-minded," the sword-swinging youth flipped his massive, horned lump of steel over his shoulders as he awaited a follow-up attack. "I am a man of God, but only once I truly opened my eyes to the countless marvels of existence and the Further Beyond that I began truly appreciate God's work and might."
"I have no use for God," Ozigi stated, pulling all the hefty stone chunks out of his way and wiping the traces of blood off his nose and lip as he stepped out into the clear to face the visually unimpressive opponent who packed an unbelievably tough punch while hardly even trying. "The Sky Warriors live a simple life. They live, they observe, they train, they fight, they die. I have learned all of my skills from the great emu. Studying its abilities has helped me hone my legs to be strong enough to push me beyond the Earth's atmosphere. Just like the emu can kill most creatures out in the wild with one kick, I can do the same to any opponent I face."
"But what if there are many more incredible birds beyond the scope of what you know? You live high in the sky, in a flying country, which is cool, but you only look down. Look up into the skies and beyond. Use those legs of yours to see the universe, then kick into the multiverse, hop across multiverses into the Further Beyond and see the most amazing bird that exists! It's absent-mindedness like yours that made me forsake my God," the young man argued passionately before stretching his face out with a face that was as sorrowful as it was depressed.
"You've… Forsaken your God?" Ozigi wondered. Any time that a man fought so reservedly and broke through their façade of weakness upon a mention of any single thing, they treasured that thing more than anything else in the world. Naturally, whenever they forsake this most precious thing, there is a grand story behind it.
"Yeah, I was once absent-minded. Just like you. So, one day, I've mistaken my holy book for the Necronomicon and ended up reading from it during a sermon. Now my body's a living portal for the entire legion of foul demons from the Further Beyond. God's love is infinite, but even infinity knows something grander than it. Not even an all-loving God can love one such as me," the young swordsman sighed, smacking his forehead in embarrassment with his own story.
"Demons? The Further Beyond? Are those from your holy book?" Ozigi wondered, struggling to believe the outlandish story of the silly youth wielding a massive sword.
"Nope, they're real and I live my life in atonement for my mistake, so I've come to know my enemy. The world you live in is just a lone planet. A pebble in a large asphalt square that is the galaxy. This universe inhabits countless galaxies that are a bundled cluster of systems bundled with planets just like this one. A universe is a part of the multiverse, a collection of universes bound to a single history and plain of existence. An omniverse is a package of all the multiverses there are, bound to different mediums of reality and having different laws of nature and rules, different authors, and inhabiting different heroes. If you were to imagine the Further Beyond, an omniverse is just a bubble of air that hosts oxygen–a bundle of life that floats in an ocean of countless sea miles of inhospitable depths where nothing can survive. The demons that use my body as a door to the omniverse are like amoebae and bacteria that live in that ocean and seek favorable conditions to become something greater than what they are. If I were to explain the most terrifying demon I have encountered, in my analogy, he'd be like a megalodon," the young man kept bending finger upon finger as he counted while keeping one hand on the handle of his sword as if it weighed nothing.
"That is a fancy story, whelp. But I've seen you fight and I can peg down your stories of demons and universes and sharks to make-believe," Ozigi grumbled, raising his foot and bending a knee to prepare for a kicking outbreak. "I won't make up ludicrous tales of my would-be strength. I've trained my body to deliver the mightiest kick in the world, one that would not dishonor the mighty emu bird, and that is the only thing I can promise you."
"Yeah, right, man…" The young man flipped his sword off his shoulder and slammed its tip beside him with a thunderous crack that raised a draft of pebbles and cracked the floor. "It's easy for you to brag when you can fight at your full strength without the threat of demons taking over and invading your realm through your body. I'd like to see you talk smack when a demon's trying to crawl out of your asshole."
With a bold battle cry, accepting the youth's strength which he displayed previously, Ozigi charged forward with a devastating push kick that put his opponent on the defensive, forcing him to raise the hilt of his sword and drag the sword in front of him to absorb the charging push kick. The ground beneath the feet of the young warrior collapsed, creating a ring of pressurized destruction that threatened to crumble their section of the arena wholly.
Ozigi's feet became a blur, overwhelming his opponent with a barrage of kicks that flashed faster than the demon-hunting priest boy could defend himself. A lone kick slipped past the youth's defenses and marked his cheek with a bruise, flinching the swordsman and staggering him. Ozigi rolled through the air with an overhead stomp that should have flattened any warrior and crumbled their spine into bone dust. With an awkwardly bent head, the young man became stuck in place before the full brunt of the impact transferred through his body and left him flattened face-first on the ground.
Planting his feet on the ground, Ozigi slipped his foot under the boy's face and elevated him off the ground. The young swordsman priest had a dizzy look in his eyes and a bruised face with whimpering lips. Ozigi prepared for a motherlode of all roundhouses that would send his opponent flying out of bounds before a spine-chilling snap made him flinch in place. Staggering back, overcome with existential dread, Ozigi covered his face with his arms. A fleshy tear and a painful resonance spread through his entire body followed only by a splash of his own crimson to blind Ozigi just before he tumbled on his rear and rolled away to put some distance between him and the cursed priest.
There was an arm sticking out from the dislocated and wide-open jaw of the young man. His eyes quivered in terror at first, before becoming more annoyed than anything that once again his body was being hijacked by demons seeking to enter the little air bubble of the omniverse through his body and absorb the nutrients inside of it to grow larger and evolve, potentially abandoning their amoeba-like state and becoming a mighty megalodon like the strongest demon itself.
To describe the arm sticking out from the young man's jaw as black would be to do it a disservice. It was void, non-existence itself. Almost immediately upon seeing it, it became but a blur. As if Ozigi's eyes tried to reason it into an acceptable shape that they thought made sense to someone bound by existence and how things that existed were to look. The hand became that of a sinewy man, an over-the-top mound of muscle and veins.
The hair of the demon-hunting youth turned a vivid red and spiked wholly upward in a stormy mess. The youth's eyes bulged out and tore their blood vessels before an ethereal demonic light from within made them glow like searchlights, except with a blood-red luminescence. The boy's body bulked up like the demonic appendage sticking out from his mouth, while his teeth became so sharp and bestial that they dug into the flesh of the demon limb and began devouring it with a bloody spray of tendons and gore. The bulky body of the swordsman ripped through the priest's uniform and displayed a pair of bat-like wings.
"I am Abaddon the Destroyer!" the possessed priest snarled in his own voice which was also that of someone else entirely. A greater entity from an inconceivable realm, one might have called any name imaginable, speaking through the cleric. "King of the Locust horde, I make my foes perish and destroy the realms I step my foot on whole!"
"This is madness!" Ozigi gasped in disbelief before letting his outrage simmer down and the source of reason to break through the rocks of awe. "That must be it, the young priest must have given way to his madness and bought into his own stories, allowing his body to undergo this ridiculous transformation by letting his misguided spirit energy taint his physical body to this berserker state. Whether I am in the face of a demon or not, I have only one option–to kick like the mighty emu until my foe no longer moves or I am killed!"