An armored Konohagakure ninja smashed through the ranks of multiple combatants, lobbing around clusters of discarded armor chunks, weapons, tools, and all-around scrap. A pair of Fennec's mercenaries, a smaller and uglier one wielding a spiked chain and a much taller and heavier one swinging a cinderblock on a wooden handle tried getting the drop on the reckless Konoha chuunin who was massively over-extending himself but ended up slamming into makeshift scrap scarecrows build out of aluminum plates with shuriken for eyes and senbon for hair.
Once the pair smashed the figures for distraction to bits, Hitokawa Jishi was already gone. Having just lost track of their target, it was the pair of Fennec's mercenaries who ended up over-extending and moving too far from the remains of their faction, which prompted them to retreat quickly. Meanwhile, the helmed Konoha ninja pushed on.
"Magnet Ninja Art: Plow Rush!" Hitokawa Jishi extended his left hand while clutching his wrist with the right. His face relayed the intense focus he had to achieve to pull off the technique of his unique fighting style as the sealing glyph on his hand lit up and began attracting clusters of kunai, ordinary knives, swords, shields, armor, and discarded scrap of all sorts until he had assembled a dreadnought express that pushed through all competition at the threat of violent expulsion from the arena.
"We're seeing an awful amount of effort being put in by Hitokawa Jishi, a Konoha ninja. Not a strategy usually employed by shinobi, but, given that this noisy youth came alongside his master who was looking like he's having the time of his life trading blows with the invincible Cursed Warriors and was tearing through both the sky and the ground, this attitude must be coming with the team!" the announcer did his job, directing the audience's attention toward more interesting centers of the chaotic battle royale that was erupting and dying down at ludicrous speeds that no audience members could perceive.
While this invited the thought of the audience's time watching this highly dangerous show of force, risking their own peril, for naught, the sheer entertainment factor of developing characters, storylines, and bombastic collisions and explosions that struck like the thunderbolt and vanished without a trace proved to be worthy entertainment.
"Magnetic Ninja Art: Scheduled Launch!" Jishi chanted, aiming his gauntlet that carried the sealing glyph at an Exterminator standing directly in his path. The uniformed Exterminator stretched their hands out and stiffened up. It was impossible to tell if it was intimidated or not since their head was just one white plastic gadget with bars and a red lamp at the bottom center. The protrusion around the glowing red lamp was like a more sophisticated megaphone, to an extent.
"What's this!? Jishi Hitokawa has attacked an Exterminator! A highly questionable strategy since Exterminators usually overlook humanoid contestants and target more monstrous or unusual-looking warriors!" the announcer bawled out, leaning over the railing before grabbing the turban that was loosely hanging over more akin to a bandana style over his shoulder-long bright hair.
"Wh-What are you doing!?" the overwhelmed Exterminator, sprawled out and twitching erratically, bellowed out with an unnatural voice that sounded as if it came from a low-definition speaker behind the plastic bars that proved to be a poor speaker system. "It is the mission of the Exterminators to eliminate monsters!"
"Sorry about that," Jishi smirked while keeping a pulse of base chakra pumping from the sealing glyph in his hand. "But with Erumo, Kochi, and Yushijin all getting eliminated already, I need to move this along and eliminate as many people as I can to end up in the Top 16! You Exterminators are living weapons, meaning that my Magnet Ninja Art allows me to magnetize anything I or my chakra touches, so targeting your guys will score me some quick eliminations."
"I see… So that's it…" The Exterminator's voice suddenly shifted to a lower pitch as the Exterminator turned its plastic rectangular head, aiming it right at the Konoha ninja, pulsating with magnetic chakra waves and threatening him with elimination. A shrill, tunneling sonic wave dug through the area, blasting Jishi Hitokawa aside and hitting him with enough wallop to tear the cape and hood he wore as well as the clothes he used to conceal his armor underneath to shreds and blank him out for a bit.
"Usually, we don't pick fights with ninja, mercenaries, or bandits. That is not our mission. However, we may engage humanoid targets if they stand in the way of our prime directive–to eliminate monsters!" the Exterminator flopped on their feet and brought their head to the forefront, like a live weapon. Because those destructive sonic waves came directly from the pad of the red lamp in the lower central area of the gadget head of the Exterminator, it was a direct threat to his opponent.
"Tsk!" Jishi grumbled, picking himself off the ground and tearing the baggy cloth that covered his shoulder pads, gauntlets, and chest plate. Seeing the pitiful state his hood and cape were in, Jishi discarded them to flutter away and get carried off by the wind. "This is strange, I thought all of you were living metal. Just plates and tubes to throw around. I didn't expect my Magnetic Ninja Art to fail."
"Shukaku, the One-Tailed Beast, utilizes Magnet Release, a more advanced version of your Magnetic Ninja Art. While we aren't quite in the same league alone as the Tailed Beasts are, most Exterminators are outfitted to resist the abilities of some of the best-known monsters out roaming the world," the sonic Exterminator declared, preparing to repeat the drilling sonic shockwave if the Konoha ninja kept pushing his luck.
Jishi shot off into the air with his arms spread wide, displaying the sealing glyphs decorating his armor now that he had removed his clothes that obscured it. Jishi gently undulated his arms in front of him, the potent magnetic resonance from Jishi's chakra that was emitted by the active sealing glyphs made his hand movements blurry and impossible to see clearly. With a robust magnetic shockwave behind him, Jishi propelled his armor that was still equipped to his body to shoot himself toward the Exterminator with a flying kick.
As an answer to the challenge of the young Konoha ninja, the Exterminator unleashed another ultrasonic shockwave, invisible to the eye but devastating to anyone in its path. Instead of facing the brunt of the immovable ultrasonic wave, Jishi pointed his arms down and shot himself straight into the air like a living bullet. This way, he navigated over the conical ultrasonic death wave and swerved right down with a kick, surrounded by faintly visible aerial vibrations that attracted many metallic armor chunks, weapons, and tools to create a massive, foot-shaped construct that was meant to punt the Exterminator aside.
A blast of a sound wave so intense that it was actually visible with the naked eye as a thunderous white howl hit Jishi's magnetized leg and made it vibrate before causing all the compacted scrap to shatter and fly off to the sides as if the sound wave washed away the scrap without interacting with the magnetic waves at all. Immediately feeling his kicking leg much lighter, Jishi stumbled in mid-air, focusing on maintaining his levitation so that he could navigate around the devastating sound waves and end up on his opponent's blind sides if needed.
"Surprised? Intense sonic waves are in no way influenced by magnetism, meaning that I can break your magnetic field by blasting away the debris you use to amp yourself up! Moreover…" the Exterminator grabbed hold of their plastic rectangular gadget head and turned it with some kick to the turning force, making the head twist sideways with an audible snap. Punching the red lamp with a hammer fist, the Exterminator made something intriguing happen.
"What the… What's going on!?" Jishi gasped, realizing that he was surrounded by shifting masses of pink waves, moving with crests and troughs, like calm ripples of an ocean's surface in specific directions all over the place.
"Ultrasound can detect magnetic waves, meaning that you have no chance of surprising me with your Magnet Ninja Art, because I'll know where you're coming from at all times!" the Exterminator reported with a strange enthusiasm to his tone that should have been uncommon for a robotic monster slayer. With focused movements, the Exterminator slipped, weaved, and hopped around the magnetic waves like a laser trap while extending mechanical hands out and blasting controlled sonic waves at the troubled Jishi who had no way of telling where they were coming from.
"While my sound waves are of a certain intensity, you cannot see them with the naked eye. Meaning that I can freely use them to cause sonic booms and deflect other sound waves in all sorts of complex trajectories, and you'll be none the wiser. I can see all of your moves and you can't see mine coming at all!" the Exterminator proclaimed with a bold finger point. Just like the compact speakers on his head, the finger beamed a high-pitched, incredibly precise sonic wave that made Jishi clutch his abdomen and crumble, flopping from the air straight to the ground.
"My ultrasonic field has gone nowhere. It's just that your magnetic waves have all died down. Ultrasound can be devastating to animals, monsters, and humans alike, depending on the pitch and the volume. The right pitch can kill all beasts while humans won't be able to hear it or be disturbed by it. That's the highly effective killing machine that is me–Exterminator Model: Ultrasonic Repellant!" the Exterminator, who looked suspiciously like they have a boombox for a head, struck a pointing pose at the fallen ninja youth. "You chose me as your opponent because you thought you had an innate advantage over me, but the truth is–I'm so well designed to counter your abilities that I would be your natural predator if we lived out in the wild world of war of all against all."
"So, you think you've got me beat, huh?" Jishi Hitokawa looked up. As if to punish his defiance, the Exterminator blasted a tunneling sound wave at him. The loud clamor of shrieking steel as the vibrating sound tunnel tore it apart like a sheet of tin took no time at all to dissipate, yet no traces of the Konoha ninja remained where the Exterminator blasted at him.
"Impressive! Realizing that his opponent can track his magnetic waves, Jishi Hitokawa used the signature Substitution Jutsu that any ninja can use to escape with a temporary burst of incredible speed used to replace oneself with another object and switch places with it. This gives the young Konoha ninja a chance to slip away from his opponent, regroup or recover, and rejoin the fight!" the announcer pointed out to the baffled spectators in the audience how the Konoha ninja managed to slip away before the sound wave hit him point-blank and where all the noisy scrap came from.
"Slip away?" a voice made the ecstatic Exterminator who was cheering for themselves with a silly fist-pumping dance tuck their boombox-shaped plastic head in. Almost immediately, the Exterminator slammed their hand onto a switch in their gadget belfry, but, to their chagrin, nothing happened. "You must not know who my teacher was. No student of Kusagoro Juugo lets a beating stop them. It only makes us pissed and more stubborn to win!"
"What's going on? Why isn't my ultrasound working!?" the Exterminator leaned back with their hands wrapped over the corners of their head.
"Don't you know? The ultrasound waves can't travel in a vacuum, whereas a vacuum doesn't affect magnetic waves at all!" Jishi Hitokawa jumped out into the open, riding a massive platform containing in its configuration a long, plastic tube and a bloated rubbery balloon functioning similarly to a suction cup. A light rub of the hand upon the inflatable rubber electrized it and forced it to inflate, making the plastic tube draw air and create a conical shape of vacuum around it.
"A vacuum pump!? But how did you build such a thing so fast!?" the Exterminator shook their head in disbelief, rattling as if their failure to compute his opponent's actions made their whole body stop working.
"Simple–my Magnet Ninja Art allows me to magnetize anything I touch. The seals on my armor allow me to use chakra pulses to extend the range of my technique, but I can use it just as effectively with my physical touch. Because I didn't create any magnetic waves, just magnetized this junk with my touch–you couldn't see it the same way you see strong magnetic waves. Building this vacuum pump was just a matter of escaping your field of vision and touching the right junk!" Jishi pointed his finger at his opponent in triumph. "If I crank this up enough, I should be able to snuff you out of all sound waves without hampering my magnetic waves. The battle is back in my favor!"
Jishi shot off into the air, propelling himself with a magnetic field. With his ability to set off his vacuum pump and nullify his opponent's sound waves at any time, he felt like he could move around and attack with total impunity. To demonstrate this point, Jishi set off a chakra pulse that attracted heaps of scrap around his lower body and formed a gigantic foot, slamming it down for a devastating stomp.
Anxious, the Exterminator struck a pose to channel their sound waves, but a flash of a sealing glyph connected to a matching glyph on the makeshift scrapyard vacuum pump canceled out the sound waves. The heavyweight foot of swords, armor chunks, shuriken, kunai, and senbon slammed down with full weight and left the poor Exterminator buried under it with a nasty crunch. As an additional method of punishment, alongside the concussive shockwave of the stomp, Jishi channeled a magnetic ring alongside it to tear at his opponent's molecules from inside their body for some additional devastation.
Landing down on the ground, Jishi slammed his hands onto the floor, burrowing with a mighty magnetic chakra pulse underground and expelling it underneath where his heavyweight scrap foot pinned his opponent down. The resulting outburst of magnetism blasted the Exterminator clean through the compact scrapyard of discarded weaponry, shooting them out into the air tattered and bruised. Jishi extended his hand again, propelling the scattered weapons and ninja tools to hurl at the helpless Exterminator and skewer them.
Exterminator Model: Ultrasonic Repellant extended their hands and feet to the sides, Jishi's eyes wandered off to the side, realizing that his attacks put his opponent high enough in the air for the vacuum cone to only hamper the travel of the Exterminator's sound waves rather than snuff them out completely. Unexpectedly to the Konoha ninja, the Exterminator grabbed a scimitar from the air and lobbed their own forearm off. Before landing, the Exterminator grabbed it with the other hand and, immediately after touching the ground, threw it at the vacuum pump.
Not wanting the device to take any unwanted damage, Jishi set it off, proving that the suction of the vacuum sufficed to slurp the chopped-off limb whole with a few coughs. This was the strangest method of attacking one's opponent that Jishi had seen, then again, these Exterminators had proven to be resourceful foes, completely unlike the easy prey he took them for.
"This is desperate, isn't it?" Jishi grumbled through his teeth. "Instead of chopping your limbs off and throwing your life and career away, you should give up and go back to work exterminating monsters."
"Exterminators sacrifice their bodies to become living weapons. Nothing in the arm I've thrown is my own. Besides, no Exterminator sees themselves as important enough to look past their ultimate objective. The handful of monsters I can slay are irrelevant to the operation we will start after setting up in Agbarah," the Exterminator pointed to Jishi with their only remaining hand.
"You're making a mistake. Your sound waves are sealed," Jishi turned to his vacuum pump. Something was off, however. A bright white pixel gleamed from inside the plastic of the suction tube. Startled, Jishi hovered over to his makeshift machine to inspect it but he had to drop down before reaching it for the pixel expanded to a blazing nova that ripped the machine apart and engulfed the scraped Konoha ninja, catching him in the blast zone and flinging him out of bounds in an instant.
"The one who made a mistake is you. Sound waves might not travel through a vacuum, but a vacuum can be a poor host for little pockets of super-heated air. Like the pocket generated from a powerful sound wave that has nowhere to escape to from a discarded sound gadget that's just building up heat," the Exterminator spread their legs out and tried striking a flashy Kabuki pose before realizing they were posing with their missing hand, prompting them to switch up their posing sides before shyly prancing off to look for remains of their blown up arm to reattach.
"I'm… I'm not quite sure what happened here, but Jishi Hitokawa from Konoha appears to have been eliminated, leaving 78 contestants competing for the spot in the Top 16. Let's see, I think Exterminator Model: Ultrasonic Repellant used their arm as a sound-generating device to jam into the complete vacuum in the tube. Because the intense buildup of sound waves generated from the limb had nowhere to escape to, they quickly built-up heat which was the catalyst for a violent thermobaric explosion, since Jishi kept up pumping air from the outside, sparking the explosive reaction that proved his own undoing!" the announcer kept counting fingers up from his right hand, as if he was doing basic arithmetic. "Battles that make your head hurt like this aren't really my cup of tea, but I'm sure that someone in the audience must have enjoyed them! It's not quite the simple, brutish fights we host in our events, but it's always grand to see some exotic fighting in our arena, isn't it!?"
The audience roared with a tumultuous wave of cheers. While plenty of them didn't quite understand what had happened and some of them still didn't make any of the science in that battle made even a lick of sense, they could, at the very least, appreciate the explosive finish at the end.