Captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond was digging into grapefruits by slamming his face into a handful and then rubbing them into it. That way, Captain Drummond's face ground the juicy fruit into mush while his crooked and grimy teeth rubbed it in and helped him hook the plunging chunks of fruit down into his mouth by haphazardly directing the mess to the captain's mouth. The mighty captain sat atop the ruins of one of his summoned ships that laid pointing the busted figurehead up into the sky.
"You're the man they call Tarbeard?" a high-pitched yet highly guttural and snorty voice distracted the heavyweight pirate from his scurvy prevention routine. The fact that someone was present in his vertically crashed ship was surprising enough for a chunk of grapefruit to get stuck in Captain Drummond's throat. The sour juice of the fruit caused a mild irritation that made the hardened pirate tear up and smack his chest in rapid succession to get it out.
"How the fuck did ya get on my ship?" Captain Drummond threw his entire body off the sideways cabin and flopped onto the boards, grabbing hold, and pulling himself up to maintain a hazardous grip on the unstable vertical surface of the totaled ship. Still coughing, Tarbeard gazed at a man as large as him of tomato-red skin and a round belly. More plump than muscular. He had two ears that were as massive as the rest of his head and a mustache tied into braids and then bound around one another and decorated with golden rings and jewels. One of the Salvari, without a doubt.
"Where some men see a wreckage, I see a funny staircase," the red-skinned Salvari postulated with an index finger waggle as if he had stumbled on a nugget of gold with this nonsensical piece of wisdom. "I've heard of a terrifying pirate with a reputation that makes him so feared that it drives people mad and makes it impossible for them to concentrate. A man they call Tarbeard. I've come to remove this Tarbeard from the battle royale."
"That's hilarious, nose-brrraid, I don't rrrecall everrr meeting you orrr gutting anyone shoved so farrr up the continent's asshole. Seeing people lining up to get a shot at me makes me a little mad, I won't lie. The whole point of having a terrrifying rrreputation is to avoid people getting in yourrr way," Tarbeard let go of the wooden railing and stood horizontally on an almost completely vertical front of the ship wreckage. Incredibly enough, there was not an ounce of chakra leaking out from Tarbeard's body, this feat of inhuman balance was all natural. A seaman's instinct acquired over decades of sailing the most apocalyptic storms raging in the far-off uncharted regions of the northeast oceans.
"My name is Hathmonpachi. Amongst the Salvari, I am known as the entertaining and artistic warrior. I can make the glorious violence in the arena seem like a happy, go-lucky time for the entire family to see. It is a unique talent that not even the Supreme One shares," the tomato-skinned Salvari postulated further. "A man who does everything to be feared and reviled is someone I find in direct opposition to my philosophy. How will people laugh and cheer at my excellent performance if they are too disturbed by your bad mojo, my friend? Not to mention…"
Before Hathmonpachi could complete his thought, a deafening slap rang across the arena. With a fully wound backhand, Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond slapped his opponent with an open, front-hand slam that felt like it could flatten the entire horizon into a disc shape but truly was more ruckus and means for humiliation than an attempt to mangle his opponent.
"I can see wherrre yerrr gettin' at!" Tarbeard cheered for himself with a big, wide smile. "This slapstick schtick's hilarrrious!"
"Oh! Look there, the boldest of spectators!" the deafening clamor of the sonic boom caused by Tarbeard's slap attracted the attention of the announcer and the entire audience. "The man seeking to gather an ocean of infamy and become the next Pirate Lord, Captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond, has just challenged Hathmonpachi, the Artist of the Salvari, to a one-on-one battle!"
Manshuri and Shakali of the Salvari looked up at the wreckage of the grand pirate ship, where the two chubby giants sought to do battle, looming like a tower in the north-western wing of the Sun Disc arena. From hundreds of meters apart, surrounded by rowdy bouts from all sides, the two Salvari amazons shared a look with one another, wondering if they were to interfere and assist a fellow Salvari.
"That flappy-eared bitch!" Shakali growled, cracking the edges of her sickle swords against one another and rearing bestial, razor-sharp teeth behind her black lips. "Just had to get himself into trouble!"
"Calm down and leave Hathmonpachi to it, Shakali," Manshuri soothed her fellow Salvari warrior from afar. "Your blend of bloody violence simply doesn't mesh well with Hathmonpachi's happy, go-lucky style of fighting. You will spoil his art."
"One day I'll sew a wall carpet out of his fucking entrails. That'll be art. I'll hang his braid stache loose like a cherry on top," Shakali growled before turning her back on the towering cruiser wreckage. "Whatever, I've got that wussy martial artist to butcher, anyway. See if I have fuck-all to give about what chicanery he's up to!"
Manshuri chuckled to herself, reflecting on how often Shakali's attitude clashed against Hathmonpachi's belief that comedy could have provided a delectable spice to even the field of battle that, once licked, one could never go back on. Perhaps what Shakali hated the most was the fact that, despite his quirks, Hathmonpachi was an incredibly popular Salvari warrior and a formidable presence in the arena as well.
Hathmonpachi crept his head back into a position of looking forward and straight at his opponent. The entire audience and even Captain Drummond himself all waited in exhilaration as to what the response of the Salvari would be. As with his Salvari peers, Hathmonpachi's eyes gleamed with jade-colored dharma. It was difficult to say exactly what Hathmonpachi's eyes were saying, for sticky grapefruit muck was dripping all over the humiliated Salvari. What the audience and Tarbeard anticipated the least was for the artistic Salvari's look to shift drastically to joy.
"A mean slap, Tarbeard!" Hathmonpachi bawled out, opening himself up with both flabby hands as he whooped to himself. "Allow me to return one of my own! Merely as a greeting, like warriors would!"
Tarbeard was almost curious. With a sullen stare, he cast his death-inducing stare, calling forth every ounce of heart-stopping influence he could scrape off the bottom of the barrel of guts, eyeballs, brains, and gunpowder. If ever a fat merchant saw him as an Eldritch abomination, an icon of unthinkable horror sprawled out before him in all its glory, what this chubby redskin would see should have made him wet his baggy linen trousers on the spot.
And yet… Something was wrong. Tarbeard wasn't going to just stand and take a free slap from his opponent, but he couldn't help but wince with his left eye and cover his face. This was ridiculous! There was no reason for it! That oaf was just standing and raising his arm up for a slap at a sluggish pace! Tarbeard felt like he had centuries to dodge that casual swing and yet he found himself in awe of a divine figure of rubies and glamor. A center of the universe shooting off light and attracting worlds and galaxies themselves to dance around him, and all those stars dancing to Hathmonpachi's rhythm cast a blinding light. Was this what his foes saw whenever they were overcome by fear?
A thunderous smack made Captain Drummond's eyes roll back and his mouth drop wide. He stumbled and stiffened up. It took Tarbeard a solid eleven seconds to realize that the smack didn't hurt one bit. Was the slap all in his mind like the cosmic feat of exaltation and ruby transcendence glistening with galactic light just now? No. Hathmonpachi's hand was firmly placed on his thigh–the imbecile slapped his own thigh with all his strength to cause all that ruckus! That dumbass was just messing with Tarbeard!
That awful sound of hilarious shriek rocked Tarbeard like a torrential wave during a raging thunderstorm. With a pitiful look, the pirate captain looked around and saw the audience joining the Salvari in laughter. Hathmonpachi undid decades of terror in the open seas with just one mock swing. All the bloodshed and burning oil in the seas washed down the drain in the face of childish mock humor.
"You sandy fuckerrr!" Captain Drummond bellowed, throwing a devastating hook, but his left leg that he used for support cracked through the hull of his ship. What followed was unthinkable–Tarbeard lost his balance and flopped face-first onto the deck of his own wrecked vessel. With a face flushed with red, Tarbeard looked up. His eyes lost all traces of humanity and, if he could have, Captain Drummond would have burrowed through Hathmonpachi's guts with his bare fingers and torn the fat redskin goofball apart, tossing his bowels all over the place to dry in the desert wind.
"Oh my, Tarbeard, did you trip? That's so embarrassing! You should try using your ears for comfort, then again, it appears that nature has gifted me more than it did you in that department!" Hathmonpachi took it to the air and rolled up into a cannonball as he rolled back onto a mast and spun around it with elegance unbefitting a chubby oaf like himself. Fooling around, the Salvari heavyweight flapped his tall and wide ears and bent the upper half of them with just the willful tension in his temples and facial muscles.
An explosive bang lifted the entire front section of the crashed ship, shredded it into wood chips, and incinerated the remains in a lone tongue of flames, catching on to each chip in mid-air. Captain Drummond emerged covered in oil and gunpowder with a face so full of anger and hate that just the mere sight of a man being this angry with a person would have made that person spill their own guts to avoid having such a man as their enemy.
"This clearrred it up forrr me, scallywag!" Captain Drummond barked at his opponent, who seemed to be surrounded by an ethereal glow and levitated around the flag pole missing the flag. Hathmonpachi hovered up and down with only the pillow of his right toe touching the very top of the flagpole once in a long while. "I've spent a dozen yearrrs aboarrrd my flagship without a single trrrip durrring some of the most fierrry marine battles and some of the rrroughest oceans out in the yonderrr. Therrre ain't no chance in hell that captain Buck "Tarrrbearrrd" Drrrummond trrripped!"
"You know, if you remain soaked in your own arrogance, and seek only the vanity of recognition and lordship over thieves and marauders, you'll never make progress toward true enlightenment," Hathmonpachi postulated once more with a voice and kind tone more befitting a thick-bellied grandma than one of the deities of the Sun Disc arena. "You'll continue to trip lower and lower. Only by turning to the path of honesty, cheer, and love for your fellow man can you guarantee a life of good fortune, bright skies, and momentous memories."
"That's it, isn't it, ye scabby sea bass? Ye've done and currrsed me, rrrobbed me of my seaman's mojo with yerrr rrrapscallion ways," Captain Drummond boiled, aiming his hand cannon at the cheerful Salvari warrior before him.
The looks of Hathmonpachi and Tarbeard connected with the former, doing his best to share infinite wisdom with his opponent and convincing him to take up the path of honesty and righteousness and stop, causing terror and relying on fear to intimidate the world. Tarbeard's eyes meanwhile knew only hate. It was Hathmonpachi's eyes that wavered first when they realized that Captain Drummond knew all too well of the fact he was covered in oil and gunpowder from the crashed remains of his own trusted battleship and yet he simply hated his opponent far more than he cared for his own well-being.
BANG!
A cannonball rode at the vanguard of a genuine firestorm erupting from the end of Tarbeard's cannon. One that quickly caught wind of the buccaneer's own condition and lit him ablaze. At the same time, it began popping each lone speck of gunpowder like a little compact bullet, causing the most raucous of popping tirades. The cannonball hurling toward Hathmonpachi became lost in the ethereal, lustrous aura of infinite luck and wisdom and spun around the levitating Salvari warrior like a little satellite whereas the flames of hatred engulfed Tarbeard whole and singed his military coat and captain's hat alike.
The terrifying inferno caught wind of the crashed pirate battleship tower and began taking its due from the devastated Warden. It took the flames no time at all to find the gunpowder stash and the machine oil and tar and take what it pleased. Exactly like a true pirate would. Rowdy blasts tore the ship asunder from all directions, making the blazes of the Warden the worst place to be in when facing an opponent that could use their spiritual chakra to influence the very tide of battle. Luck itself.
Emerging from the flames, clasping a burning keg of gunpowder, Captain Drummond took off in a mad leap toward his exalted opponent. Like an athlete slamming a ball into the net, he attempted to slap Hathmonpachi with the gunpowder barrel, yet it detonated prematurely in the pirate's hands. Unbothered by his poor luck, Drummond grabbed Hathmonpachi by his face by shoving his burning and unpeeled hand through the infernal combustion.
"Ye've forrrgot something about bad luck, ye lily-liverrred son of a biscuit eaterrr!" Drummond grimaced, covered in flames which were his true element. By getting a lick of Tarbeard's own physical energy pirates referred to as "guts" the natural flames that Tarbeard ended up covered by gained a supernaturally powerful blaze as if they were a technique used by the pirate himself. "It drrrags ye to the brrriney deep of the Kraken's lockerrr and it takes trrrue guts to handle it. Ain't nobody dancing a lily-liverrred jig getting thrrrough the gutterrr and sucking frrrom the bilge like a trrrue swashbucklerrr!"
Hathmonpachi's braided mustache came to life, thrusting forward while shimmering with a fiery dharma of war as opposed to the aura of jade dharma symbolizing good fortune that the Salvari remained coated in himself. The firestorm around Tarbeard which the injured buccaneer adopted as his own became like a matador's muleta, allowing Tarbeard to slip the spear-hard thrust of the Salvari's facial hair and deliver a wholehearted, utterly unskilled yet genuine in bad intentions and gloriously violent beatdown. Tarbeard thrashed with his arms and legs like a degenerate drunkard but possessed vicious physical power and mad brutality to deal some damage.
The burning Warden popped and let the pair of fighters collapse inward into the belly of the burning wooden leviathan. Thunderous pops and blasts of explosive cannonballs and infernal tongues looking for any spot for a potential escape as well as bursts of jade spiritual energy came and gone from all levels of elevation and every side, relaying the message that an intense round of fisticuffs was going down in the bowels of the dying pirate battleship between a man who could make his opponent suffer seven years of the worst luck and a very disturbed individual that just didn't give a damn about bad luck and was fully content with sharing his bad omens with the world.
When the blazing captain's deck blew up and Hathmonpachi's limp body flew out from the inferno, dragging across the tiles, the audience howled. Men began shooting their fists into the sky and demanding the head of one Captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond while the woman gasped and fainted. This was simply not a typical bout for their beloved artist of good fortune. In a usual fight, Hathmonpachi would curse his opponent with blasted luck while enhancing his own and preserving the balance, but Tarbeard reveled in misery, embraced it, and became so sullen by it that each stroke of bad luck made the agent of terror wish to sink the world to the Kraken's locker as deep as the trench his heart sank to.
Having chosen to salvage only a bottle of good rum from the collapsing remains of the Warden, Captain Drummond took a sip off the top, slurping in a good quarter and soaking himself in another quarter before tossing the entire bottle away and rolling through the air like a living cannonball himself. Flipping the bird at his thousand years of bad luck, Drummond stomped his foot down at the tile set where Hathmonpachi laid and caused a thunderous collapse of stone and tiles in all directions. A concussive rip dug through the arena, threatening to ring captain Drummond out, except his opponent was underneath Drummond's foot so he'd end up ringed out first.
Drummond pulled out his hand cannon and blasted Hathmonpachi's limp body being washed around by conflicting air pockets and a messy jig of the rowdy debris with a point-blank blast, sending the Salvari flying off, rolling and bouncing around while the mad pirate captain was having a blast bawling it up for himself, just like Hathmonpachi intended for his bouts to be enjoyed, but perhaps not quite how he intended to make this result come to life.
"How did I hit ye strrraight in the eye with my bad luck, ye'll ask?" Captain Drummond laughed it up. "Why it's just that I'm thrrree sheets to the wind so my aim's naturally bad enough to compensate!"
"I may have been wrong," Hathmonpachi rose from the ground with a visibly broken and misshapen jaw. One-half of his teeth were missing entirely on the right side. "You may be a hateful and arrogant man, but you overcome the obstacles put in your path and you, therefore, deserve your empty title of lord of pirates. That being said, a man such as yourself is an obstacle in the way of happiness. In battle, you sow only terror, so, even with your empty title, you do not belong in this arena."
"Just trrry and rrremove me from it then!" Captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond spread his arms out to the sides and made a mean grimace, missing more than a few teeth himself as his supernatural flames of hatred chewed at his own tar-soaked skin, leaving it covered in red patches.
"At any point in time, there is a certain chance of a man having a heart attack. That chance depends on that man's age and physical condition, the food they eat, and how often they exercise. I say the chance of you suffering a heart attack at this very moment is around 100%. Hardly a surprise, given how hard you've worked for your terrible title, is it?" Hathmonpachi struck an elegant pose, standing up on his right toe as he bent his left leg in front of himself and put up his right arm in front of him in prayer while he raised the left one high over his head.
Once again, Captain Buck Drummond saw before him that exalted figure gleaming of rubies and glowing with the jade dharma of excellent fortune. Then Tarbeard realized that he couldn't quite see his opponent nearly as well as he saw him just a blink earlier. Vision became blurry as a sharp pain made Tarbeard grab his chest and pant heavily. No matter how much he craved to bash the Salvari's bloodied head in and scoop his eyes out with Hathmonpachi's own teeth, Tarbeard collapsed to one knee and fell his own eyelids turning to lead. With a hefty slam matching the volume of the collapse of his own ship, Captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond who staked his case here in the Sun Disc arena to become the next Pirate Lord–Pirate Lord Black, collapsed into the hole of his own stomping face-first.
"Oh my! Captain Buck "Tarbeard" Drummond has suffered a terrible heart attack just now! How unfortunate for it to happen here and now of all times and places! It certainly sends a clear message of how important getting regular check-ups with your healer is!" the announcer ruled the bout between the Salvari and the collapsed new Pirate Lord complete in the former's favor. "It's a rare occasion that our healers have to intrude into the hallowed boundaries of the arena to retrieve a competitor who's ringed out in the middle of the arena, but sometimes dem's the breaks! Tough it out and get back well, fellows! Things are bound to heat up as we've got 81 contestants left in the scuffle!"