Just as Senju Kochi was strutting around the arena, surveying the situation, and looking out for his next opponent, the surrounding colors became defined not by the light that reflected off them but by complete darkness. In a blink, the values of light and dark became switched, effectively inverting how the young Konohagakure ninja perceived the world around him.
A fleshy thud snuffed the darkness out again, resetting the world back to its normal order except for a minor addition of Senju Kochi's body suspended and impaled on a massive stack of man-sized nails all hammered down diagonally down into his body. Kochi's eyes wandered back, meeting a tall, tanned woman with a thick body and a brown scarf wrapped around her head. The magician woman, Vospyka, concealed her well-toned musculature underneath a dress made from animal furs with a night-blue outer robe which gave her an even thicker perceived body build than she truly had. Then Kochi's eyes, his skin, his clothes, and his entire body became just a stack of dry wood. Almost like a wooden sculpture, drained of life.
"That was an interesting jutsu. I can only begin to wonder how you pulled it off. Feels a lot like a technique I use, but it doesn't just affect me, does it?" Kochi wondered from what he considered to be a safer distance further away from the woman who just dispatched of his wood clone.
"Like I thought," the magician Vospyka closed her eyes and shut herself off from any sympathy for the young man she attacked from behind. "You keep plaguing yourself with having to understand and explain everything. It's why I found you and decided to eliminate you."
"Isn't that the entire gimmick of you self-proclaimed magicians?" Kochi smirked. While Vospyka registered as a considerable threat to him and even someone as arrogant as Kochi felt compelled to respect her, the magician stroked his ego by singling him out like that.
"The beginners, perhaps," Vospyka raised her hand, pulling out a nail easily her own size from behind her furred cape. It was yet another oddity since there could have been no way that anything half the size of that nail should have fit under that cloak. Then again, the existence of storage seals was something that Kochi was very well aware of. "But I have only truly lived up to my potential once I embraced the chaos of nature. Once I stopped trying to control it and let its capricious tides wash me where they wanted me."
"Sounds awfully humbling and boring," Kochi shook his head with a cocky expression stuck on his face, preparing to deal with the magician lady with a personal grudge toward his method of fighting and attitude toward life. "It seems to me like you're not fighting me by singling me out for my drive to understand the world around me, but some inner demons of yours. Normally I'd be offended by being treated as a scapegoat for someone else's conflicts, but I'll take you out if you're so insisting on it. Maybe after being knocked out, you'll finally begin learning something and seeing how fun understanding things can be."
Everything blacked out again. Defying the natural passage of time, Vospyka dashed forward with her hand fixed firmly on the other side of the nail, which she thrust like a lance at her opponent. Unexpectedly to her, the resistance of Kochi's chest was far tougher than most ribcages she penetrated with her nails. It was only when everything returned to normal that Vospyka witnessed Kochi's body unravel into another wooden statue, however, this one wasn't just a wood clone. It was a construct of wood growing out from a wooden heater shield around Kochi's forearms.
"Well, isn't your heart just pounding with excitement to wrap your head around how I pulled this switcheroo off?" Kochi wondered with a painful wince to his left eye as a trickle of blood from his punctured arm trickled onto the tiles by his boots. Truth be told, Kochi's awe at his own abilities over how suddenly he needed to produce the Wood Release: Tough Nut jutsu by causing wooden roots to burrow out from underground and creep their way up his trousers, underneath his clothes and coat his arms, then to produce another wooden construct by bursting out from under his sleeves while Kochi used an elementary genjutsu technique to conceal the real him and his wooden shield, leaving only the wooden construct behind, made Kochi itchier to tell his opponent all about it than Vospyka looked hyped to find it out.
"It does not matter. I failed to take you out with that attack. That is all that matters," Vospyka replied, humbly shifting her expression to a suitable one to admit her failure.
The little puddle of Kochi's blood by his boots was nowhere near enough for him to use it as a medium for the Devil's Swing. A thought didn't vacate Kochi's mind that his opponent may have restricted the number of nails she used on purpose, not to cause an undue blood bath and make it much easier for Kochi to catch her with that technique. The prodigious Senju descendant knew that if he connected with that, the bout was as good as his. Just like it always was when a tough opponent pushed him to that point.
This didn't change the fact that his opponent was just as dangerous. As this past exchange revealed, Kochi didn't really have the option of just standing there and striving to learn about his opponent's fighting style. Even if she thrust a single nail his way, it could break through his toughest defensive techniques and cause harm. Getting hurt wasn't something that Kochi was used to in a fight, and it could only have made the following tournament fights even tougher. Kochi needed to attack and make his opponent too busy defending herself to attack him.
Kochi's hands weaved together to work on hand seals. A pulsating, chaotic heartbeat inverted the world's colors and painted everything black again.
"Curse Technique: Stack Attack!" a resounding voice echoed through the void of inverted colors and time that halted still. Kochi grunted in pain when everything returned to normal, and he realized that a dozen of gargantuan nails had been hammered all around his body. Even if the probability of his opponent interrupting his hand seals had popped into Kochi's mind, there wasn't exactly a single thing he could do about it other than try covering up with his Wood Release. Even if Kochi produced wooden boards to shield his body underneath his clothes while he worked on his hand seals, the opponent's nails busted through them, and while her nails hadn't left him helpless and impaled like they would have if he did nothing, Kochi quickly found himself overwhelmed and in a critical condition.
"Understanding can be a massive burden as well. Instead of surrendering yourself to chaos, you live every second that remains knowing every intricacy of your doomed fate, which is an ailment worse than many others. As you said, I believe that humbling you and making you reconsider your attitude and fighting style would be a far better outcome than killing you, so I think I will reverse the judgment you cast on me earlier," Vospyka pulled out a lance-sized nail from under her cape and prepared to seal the deal.
The ground underneath Vospyka's feet vanished, sending her into a plummet into what seemed like oblivion. Despite not being able to see it, Vospyka had a guttural feeling of a world-sized white face of a clock far away in this shadowy void she's been cast into. A chime nearly deafened her, proving her creepy feeling of a colossal clock face to be truthful. Massive wooden boards slammed together, building the frame of a pendulum clock that chimed once again and then began ticking erratically, racing through hours, days, and months with inconsistent pacing.
Vospyka grunted as her feet landed on an infinite pool of blood. Either the surface of the blood pool was incredibly shallow, or it turned increasingly thicker the deeper it went as Vospyka's feet barely submerged under it, even though the pool undulated and rippled from the force of the landing. The undulation of the pool felt like trembling ground. A glance back revealed the leaning pendulum clock towering behind Vospyka.
The pool of blood began boiling in a singular center while Kochi emerged from the boiling point. Despite appearing from a boiling pool of blood, his body and clothes were clean of even the traces of his own blood that he shed because of the many injuries Vospyka left him with. Kochi was about to say something before turning his attention to the face of the clock.
"What's going on? Why isn't it chiming anymore?" Kochi bellowed with the strain of his battlefield, injuries oozing from his voice.
"Your illusion takes four seconds to overwhelm my consciousness and render me comatose, doesn't it?" Vospyka asked, slowly regaining control over the tide of battle even when she was the one trapped in Kochi's illusion. "However, that time is calculated in real-time and you cannot control my time perception inside this illusion. Otherwise, you'd just execute its effects immediately by making me perceive four seconds as an instant. That clock behind me is merely a distraction. Its ticking is meant to convince me that time is going wild inside of this illusion when, in reality, it is fixed like clockwork."
"What's going on? You've just wasted your own time with this babbling! Why isn't the genjutsu resolving?" Kochi barked out in desperation, having truly lost control of the battle for the first time. He's been pushed to a corner before, sure, but it was all in service to being able to trap his opponent in this technique. Now it became painfully apparent that it was all for naught.
"This is the problem with needing to understand everything. The human mind is too weak and limited to wrap itself around the chaos of nature. I'm almost tempted to keep both of us here just to see how long it will take you to figure it out…" Vospyka smirked with the left side of her face. "We've got all the time I want."
"Time…" Kochi blanked out. His dulled stare signified lost focus that was necessary to maintain his illusion, even past the point where it glitched out and didn't properly resolve. With a howling swoop, the pair returned to reality, standing before one another while Vospyka clutched another large nail in her left hand.
"Curse Technique: Want for a Nail!" Vospyka chanted before stabbing her nail through Kochi's abdomen. Immediately after impalement, the nail became blurry, as if it was shifting in and out of existence. Out of nowhere, the nail split into a handful of nails connected in the middle while the pointed ends multiplied and widened Kochi's wound, spilling profuse amounts of blood as the weight of the nails and the force of Vospyka's thrust sent the young man out of bounds.
"Elimination!" the announcer shouted out. "The magician Vospyka has eliminated the Konohagakure ninja Kochi Senju! It appears that despite catching his opponent in his ace illusionary technique, the battle was decided before it began, because of competitor Vospyka's ability to manipulate time, when Kochi desperately needed the passage of four seconds in real time to resolve his technique! It appears that, in this case, knowing the reason for his defeat didn't help young Kochi avoid it at all! With his elimination, we're left with 80 competitors!"
In the area in the ring farther to the north, a Sky Warrior clad in thin metallic armor and a cape of white fuzzy feathers raced around thin metallic wires that tried enclosing him into a rectangular area and cage and contain him that way. The wires came from the unraveled arms of an Exterminator with a hollowed-out head shaped like a canary cage, given shape by the same metallic wires. It was almost as if the entire body of this Exterminator was made from these metallic strands that they could unravel and reshape freely at any point.
"You imbecile! I am a Sky Warrior who has modeled their equipment and fighting style after an owl! I am not an owl!" the airborne Sky Warrior with wide and powerful scoping goggles covering his eyes and sticking out like a pair of horns over his helm yelled back at the Exterminator, who seemed obsessed with entrapping him.
"Do you take me for some kind of idiot? I am well aware that you are not an owl! You are some kind of owl-like monstrosity. Until I can dissect and understand what you are, you're best grounded and captured!" the Exterminator said with a strange reverberation to his voice. Almost as if their vocal cords were made of these metallic wires and the Exterminator could only speak by vibrating these wires at the right frequency.
The owl-man did a daring loop in the sky, evading the enclosing of the wires that would have left him caged before swinging both his wings in mid-air and sending feather-shaped blades hurling toward the Exterminator. The flashing, chakra-imbued blades sliced the Exterminator's uniform open and severed more than a handful of the metallic wires their entire body had been made of. With the tearing of the Exterminator's uniform, more of their body was revealed, and it became apparent that the body of this Exterminator was just human vitals wrapped around by layers upon layers of this thick wire.
With the hail of feathery blades cutting a clearer path through the hectic field of intertwining steel wire strands, the Sky Warrior clenched his cape together and pointed his steel cowl downward for a nose-first dive. Careful aerial positioning allowed the Sky Warrior to avoid the Exterminator's attempts at correcting their tangled wires and entrapping their opponent. Even when the Exterminator tried weaving their wires like some straw basket into a thick and impassable cage, the owl-like Sky Warrior grabbed hold of two of their white feather knives and flashed them with a quick aerial turn, slashing the cage open and resuming their dive.
Instead of smashing right into his opponent head-first, the Sky Warrior pulled a pair of his feathery blades and slammed them right into the Exterminator's chest before vaulting backward with a loop and locking hooked steel claws attached to his feet into the noodle-like mess of the tangled steel wire. The Sky Warrior clenched the wires, pulled them, and tried stomping his opponent into the ground, but the highly unusual composition of his opponent's body proved indomitable. It became clear that fighting this Exterminator like any ordinary humanoid opponent was nearly impossible.
Grabbing as much of the wire comprising the Exterminator's body, the owl-like Sky Warrior imbued their cape flaps with as much chakra as they could and took it to the skies, vaulting over their back while flinging the entire mass of tangled wires over his head and headed toward a ring out. The wires untangled and became live in mid-air, creating a chaotic mass of intertwining metallic tendrils that no longer reminded of anything even remotely resembling a human.
In their new untangled form, the Exterminator once again put their opponent on the defensive, prompting them to take it to the skies and begin racing against the tangling and constricting metallic wire. Instead of forming a cage to entrap the Sky Warrior, this time the wire tried wrapping around his body, and, this way, it proved to be far more successful. Unlike before, when the owl-like Sky Warrior could imbue their feather-shaped knives with chakra and cut the tendrils apart, this time, the tendrils bent and moved alongside the knives and proved uncuttable.
It didn't take long for the wire to wrap around the Sky Warrior's wings, the claws on his feet, and his joints, thighs, and the rest of his body. Having bound his opponent wholly and left them with no hope of escape or fending off the relentless onslaught of wire, the Exterminator's unraveled form began dragging the captured Sky Warrior deeper into the core of their unchained form. Taking up from a creed of warriors that never lose their will to fight, the owl Sky Warrior was no different. Their hi-tech goggles locked onto the signature of the vital organs that were the last testament of this Exterminator, still having anything even remotely human left of them. Talon-like wrist blades burst open from the Sky Warrior's gauntlets, ripping the wires around his arms to shreds, which let the owl Sky Warrior cut just enough of his body free for one final plunge of the blade.
With the heart skewered, the rest of the wire collapsed on the ground, utterly lifeless and silent. If anyone were to tell someone that these wires were alive and acting on their own free will just now, they'd be labeled a fool. With a relaxed posture up in the air, the owl Sky Warrior shook and let the remnants of the wire slip off their body, taking it to the skies above where even the Cursed Warriors looked to get a breather after this disturbing bout.
"The Sky Warrior Neshtcha has overcome the sudden challenge of the Exterminator Model: Live Trap! The Exterminator must have taken the Sky Warrior after some sort of monster, because of how he fashions himself after an owl. Turning a person into an Exterminator, as you might expect, is grueling and not much of a person is left after such a procedure. Is it at all surprising how fickle the mind of such a living weapon serving only the purpose of exterminating monsters roaming the world is? Someone whose entire body is made of wire can take for some amalgam monstrosity even a man wearing animal-shaped armor! Still, it's a rare opportunity to see underneath an Exterminator's uniform and learn more about how these living weapons think and fight!" the announcer pointed out to the audience some more details about the Exterminators that someone living in the Land of Wind may not have been aware of.