"So much like a serpent to conceal oneself and seek an opportunity to bite," Bishiyari muttered before lifting his golden mace and slamming it in front of him into the ground. The ravaged dirt and tile set became littered with fissures before a lotus-shaped construction of pearl-white minerals burst forth from underground.
A brown boa constrictor hissed and spat vitriol in all directions, skewered by the pearly lotus protrusion until it slumped dead. From its bloody, slobbering mouth, a pale ninja with a topless body, soaked in acidic goop that didn't seem to harm the pale skin or burn the many snake motif tattoos decorating the body of the young man, flopped to the ground.
"Can't blame a guy for trying," Hikosuru Boha, the Kusagakure ninja, smirked with a smile defined by a quartet of elongated, serpentine canines. Despite his aloof behavior, the Kusagakure shinobi flinched and winced in fear when the Siamese decuplet began walking toward him with only the complete void reflected in his expression. Boha gulped with bulged eyes and a sweaty face before Bishiyari walked right past him and approached the impaled snake from which Boha slithered out.
"Such a majestic creature. A pity that it had to pass on," Bishiyari muttered out loud even though, from the vibes he radiated, it didn't seem like he was addressing anyone in particular.
"If it's so majestic, maybe you shouldn't have butchered it, just a thought…" Boha chortled to himself, overcoming the sheer terror of being confronted by the strongest Salvari warrior and a bona fide legend of the Sun Disc arena.
"People like you make me boil. Snakes are majestic, sacred creatures. They love sunning, they love their young. Feared, misunderstood, and cast out by humans simply for how they look, although within their bodies flows the bile that's just as capable of taking life as it is saving it. You've made this magnificent creature stray from its rightful nature and turned it into what fearful people see it as and now it's dead…" Bishiyari stood up. Had it not been for his speech that strongly suggested scorn, Boha wouldn't have been able to guess what his opponent was on to.
Bishiyari possessed ten faces, at least four of them sticking out of his head while the rest were all across his decuplet body. Each of these faces relayed a different mood, even when the one in the middle closed its eyes in disappointment. When faced with such a fractured and unique existence, Boha wondered if each of these faces represented a different layer of subconsciousness within Bishiyari, making the Supreme Being of Ultimate Goodness utterly incapable of concealing anything. A mighty warrior who was always honest to himself, as at least one of his ten faces always showed something that he was feeling or thinking deep down.
"Despite the fact that I feel a strong dislike of how you've corrupted this poor creature, I have long since ceased seeing the point of hatred. Anger might twist one of my faces, but the only ultimate concept within the Supreme Salvari can be goodness, so wrath cannot overpower the hope and grace of the nine others," Bishiyari opened his eyes. The face on the central front of his head smiled kindly while the one on the biceps of his right arm scowled as if it had eaten a sour prune.
"I can only hope that you accept your defeat as a chance for penance. These snakes that accepted you into their fold see something inside you and love you even more than I do. Please, for their sake, do not quash their trust and boundless trust and become the supreme version of yourself that their loving eyes see. Abandon your corrupting and deceitful ways and seek only good karma," Bishiyari pontificated while lifting a lone index finger of one of his many twenty arms. In a blink, a lone white pixel of light was born before growing out of control into a blinding white star blazing at the tip of the Supreme Being's finger. "See this crushing defeat not as the death of your pride as a warrior, but as a rebirth of your essence into a better…"
"You sure talk and preach a whole lot, don't ya, buddy," a voice rang from behind Bishiyari, making all four faces on his head, facing in all different directions gently gap their mouths in confusion. It appeared as if Boha had multiplied and now stood all around him. Bishiyari grumbled in reaction to an ironclad grip locking him down as the body of another colossal constrictor burst forth from underground and coiled around him, elevating him off the ground while making the restrained Supreme Being churn with blood-curdling tears of his tendons and snaps of his joints. Meanwhile, the massive white star of his creation sizzled down to a sparking speck before vanishing.
"Summoning Jutsu: Battering Ram!" Boha cut his finger with a quick slit of a kunai in his left hand and pressed his cut thumb onto the ground, casting a widespread web of sealing glyphs in the air in front of him. Following a loud pop and a wall of dust, a massive anaconda emerged from the web of sealing glyphs, flung forward in a mad rush while the bottom half of a different constrictor flung Bishiyari toward the incoming tackle.
A roar of a thousand claps of thunder threatened to burst the audience's eardrums and simultaneously caused vertigo for all souls too meek to withstand the strident clamoring. Like a stomped, kicked, and smeared through the cow-shit rag, Bishiyari flew back from a concussive ring so strong that it not only shook the ground of the entire Sheikhate but also emitted a visual white flash.
"This… This should not be! Bishiyari, the Supreme Being, is bleeding!" the announcer hollered, pulling off the colorful mixture between a turban and a bandana that he donned and slamming it by his feet in shock. A pair of legs sticking out from the back of Bishiyari's hip prevented the humbled Salvari warrior from falling down and withstood the massive force of impact that made him skid a decent distance across the arena. With a strong push, they put the ultimate Salvari back on two feet and posing gracefully white several trickles of blood red trickled from a gash on the central face.
What was white became black as all that Boha could see became inverted. Before the Kusagakure ninja could comprehend the fact that his body felt too heavy to move and he suddenly ended up all alone, one with the inverted white light, Bishiyari dove in and slammed a fist into Boha's gut, lifting him off the ground. A dozen of arms of black, white, blue, and golden complexions began pummeling the stunned Kusagakure ninja into oblivion while another pair of arms pressed their hands together in prayer as all of Bishiyari's faces became sullen at once.
"Time has not stopped, nor is it ludicrous speed that has defeated you. It is the infinite weight of your own sins and bad karma that is dragging you down and rendering you incapable of answering my righteous pounds. This is what I tried to warn you about. Without a pure heart, full of bright karma, you are helpless against me. Through my fists, you will witness the superiority of virtue!" Bishiyari declared as one of his dozen legs stamped into Boha's chest, sending him soaring through an invisible dimensional barrier that shattered like a glass wall.
When Hikosuru Boha hit the ground, his eyes rolled back and his consciousness was full of void. All the serpents present within or underneath the battlefield vanished in a trail of smoke that began fuming from underground like geysers of dust. With their summoner rendered powerless and defeated, the sophisticated summoning techniques that the Kusagakure ninja employed proved to be helpless against the Supreme Being of the Sun Disc Arena and the Paragon of Ultimate Goodness.
"What a supreme warrior soul!" the announcer howled, rattling the railing in front of him to where it popped off its hinges and nearly flopped onto the heads of the spectators seated below the announcer's platform. "Scaring us with the sight of his solemn blood and testing our faith in his absolute dominance of the arena, Bishiyari, the Supreme One, has graced us with yet another victory. The Supreme Being of Ultimate Goodness has rewarded our bottomless faith in his virtue and peerless strength with yet another total victory by eliminating Hikosuru Boha, a ninja from Kusagakure!"
The audience howled while intimidated warriors stepped out of Bishiyari's way, making a path for the Supreme Salvari to walk up to his vanquished foe and pick him up by the shoulders with a spare pair of hands. A snout of a dolphin-horse statue stared at Bishiyari's back with grand interest. There weren't many competitors inside of the Sun Disc arena who saw the genjutsu that crippled Hikosuru Boha at a crucial moment. Mana was amongst those to whom the illusionary world was as natural to perceive as what was natural.
The illusory energy that the Salvari called dharma was almost a mirror image of the spiritual aspects of chakra. It was ironic that the first time Mana competed inside of the Sun Disc arena and faced the Gauntlet; it was the might and simplicity of the physical chakra that let her fight alongside martial artists many times, surpassing her in experience, talent, and skill. Now it was the spiritual chakra that proved to be the crutch that she'd use for support when she would need to wobble her way into whatever resolution awaited at the end of this bloody, cold, and broken road she was on.
A pair of benevolent and kind eyes stared right back at Mana with a pleasant smile of a face sticking out from Bishiyari's back. This Siamese decuplet literally had eyes on his back, and they noted Mana's interest and perception of his many talents in the arena.
"Temperance, impure demon of stone…" the lips of the face on Bishiyari's back muttered without as much as a whisper leaving them, yet Mana's ability to read lips translated the whimper drowned in cheers and roar as something that made her cracked cold and desolate stone body quiver.
Further from the developing scene, a panting, chubby pirate with a plain bandana extended his hand and elevated it to his eye level. Before him loomed an immovable green monolith of a vaguely simian shape. With the free hand of his injured arm, Lao Zhuzi tapped his dominant wrist, forming a fist that howled with air pressure. All this air pressure only grew larger and more ferocious when bolstered with more chakra, or guts, as pirates knew it. Going through a myriad of exotic-looking hand seals, the pirate captain completed his combination with a forward thrust hand seal resembling an open tiger's mouth, launching the compressed air pressure with a ripping white gale that expanded into a gigantic tiger-shaped construct of compressed air.
"Catfish Mouth!" the fisherman's son turned pirate howled, never doubting for a second that a technique that has taken down entire dreadnoughts, extinguished fleets, and made mighty captains submit would once again not fail him.
As if answering all the pirate's hopes, the aerial catfish slammed directly into the Cursed Warrior, sending it stumbling back and forcing it to lean down and hunker up with its arms, wrap itself around with its tail, and make itself as difficult target to fling out of bounds as possible. Cracks spitting electric crackles formed all over the Cursed Warrior and its slick obsidian body proved to be vulnerable and covered with grazes. The thrashing monolith monkey nearly drowned in the howling aerial dome and fell down on its back flat after it concluded.
This successful hit didn't come cheap to Captain Lao Zhuzi; the chubby pirate collapsed on one knee when sweating and panting. No matter how deep he drew his breath in, he just couldn't stop feeling short of breath and his heart felt as if it would crawl up to his mouth and take a leap of faith. With a pair of eyes only able to translate the rise of his opponent through blurry images that appeared to be skipping moments in time, Lao Zhuzi observed the monkey Cursed Warrior rise again, having only suffered superficial damage.
"This must be my payback for having such an easy time adapting to the lifestyle of a pirate, being a fisherman's son. Only makes sense that some good luck warrants heaps of bad to wash it down," Lao Zhuzi greeted the impending doom of a slowly advancing obsidian goliath with a kind-hearted smile. Despite being in one of the nastiest lines of work in the whole wide world, one would not find the Fisherman's Son Lao Zhuzi cursing or acting obscene.
With an inhuman whoop, the gigantic beast of obsidian wound back its fist and slammed it down where it saw the chubby, happy-go-lucky pirate captain. Instead of feeling the warm puddle of human blood and innards under its fist, the beast resonated with high-pitched whoops upon seeing the short and chubby pirate dancing around its long and almost band-like arm on a mad rush to the monkey's head.
"Seeing a gigantic monkey reminds me of old times," Lao took off the upper sections of the Cursed Warrior's arm with a dainty hop, positioning himself directly in front of the face of the gigantic monkey. "I knew a captain native to my home shores who liked to cut monkey feet and make necklaces out of them. Perhaps this too gives us ample reason for some good, old-fashioned fisticuffs?"
When Lao Zhuzi's foot slammed into the monkey's lower chin, it threw the entire head back wildly. Pulling out a wooden stick, attached to an almost invisible steel wire reel and a playful toy with a hook at the other end, the Fisherman's Son hurled the hook like casting a line for a good fishing session. It wasn't entirely clear what Lao Zhuzi's line hooked onto, but with a strong yank, the captain reeled the monkey's head right back for a knee shot that blasted with a sonic boom.
With his arms intertwined behind his back, the chubby and cheerful pirate landed on the monkey's shoulder, beginning a frantic run down its back until it was all the way down to its tail. Grabbing hold and digging its feet into the body of the obsidian beast, like a turnip farmer, Lao put his whole body into a mother of all heaves. The audience gasped and boomed when the feet of the obsidian monkey took off the ground and hurled over Lao Zhuzi's shoulder, slamming at the western section of the arena just a few meters shy of dropping out of bounds.
"That's the thing about monkey paws, they say," Lao Zhuzi panted, crouched over his knees for a few seconds before straightening his aching back and stroking it with his crossed arms while his gentle face shifted into a warm smile. "It fulfills your wish, then it all blows back in your face in some other way. My fellow captain with an unhealthy superstition over monkey feet necklaces ended up dying on an enemy ship. The same one that his men had bombarded, unwillingly turning their own captain into a fatality of their raid. If that isn't a monkey paw situation, I don't know what is…"
The monkey Cursed Warrior extended its hand outward, shooting off packed bolts of golden flames off the tips of its fingers that arced in a honed trajectory like missiles homing at the bruised and tired pirate captain. Lao drew his hands back, going through a myriad of hand seals that didn't resemble a single seal that the ninja used. After completing his seals, Lao Zhuzi extended his arms, expelling a turbulent black cloud restrained and sicced at his foe only by the same airwaves that he could control as a hand-to-hand specialist.
Instead of sending his aerial tiger's mouth whole, Lao Zhuzi used it to encase an entire thunderstorm and then threw the entire concoction at the enemy. The dark cloud resembled a fishy body in shape. The crackling electric light in the separate puffs of the storm clouds resembled how the light danced and reflected on the scales of a fish. A terrifying maw opened with the entire catfish thunderstorm seeking to devour the Cursed Warrior's arm whole with stray and strident thunderbolts serving as golden whiskers of this stormy leviathan.
"Gunpowder Catfish Mouth!" Lao Zhuzi chanted shortly before his storm that he tamed and turned into a fish collided with his opponent and swallowed up the arcing golden fireballs into the storm's eye.
The audience had to grab hold of their hats, turbans, and other headdresses to keep them from flying away. Upon collision with the monkey's hand, the voracious cloud and lightning catfish devoured it whole, leaving the monkey Cursed Warrior leaning and stumbling backward. The explosive resolution sent turbulent gales far and wide and dissolved in vertical whirlwinds that ripped and tore the twitching, lifeless Cursed Warrior, dimming the neon lights glowing through the mosaic patterns across its obsidian body.
Decimated, the Cursed Warrior flopped on its side, still resounding with smaller explosions scattered throughout the body of the bestial monolith. One of these explosions claimed the beast's head, separating it from the shoulder and seeing it roll off to the wayside. Another resounding blast spat a halo of flames from inside. Then came the screaming. Muzzled by a thick, armored shell. But the sounds of knocking and screaming were impossible to confuse.
Something, or rather someone, was inside the head of this walking monkey. That someone now became trapped by the very weapon of mass destruction they piloted and were doomed to burn down in its wreckage. With his hands stuffed behind his back, Lao Zhuzi approached the burning, discarded monkey's head and kicked it, flying out of bounds and plunging into the lake outside of the arena. While this would give mercy to the burned pilot of the Cursed Warrior, it also provided them with another problem–being sealed inside of a busted cockpit of a devastating ancient weapon and drowning to the lake's bottom.
That was not a problem that a rushing band of healers with wooden arms and steel cables pulling the detached head out of the water couldn't solve. Meanwhile, Lao Zhuzi stuffed his hands behind his back and massaged his hurting back before drawing his sleeve across his face to wipe the sweat off.
"All this is becoming too much hard work for me at my age. I'd very much like to retire and live an easy life as an administrator of a neat little corner of paradise. Perhaps a Sheikh? No more monkey paws for me, thank you…" Lao Zhuzi waved at the collapsed and still smoldering wreckage of the Cursed Warrior before turning to walk away from all the spewing heat and fumes.
"The Fisherman's Son, Captain Lao Zhuzi, has overcome impossible odds in defeating the Cursed Warrior Batsuchin! What's even more unbelievable, we've just found out that there are people, actual pilots, controlling these invincible colossi from the inside! It doesn't seem like these Cursed Warriors justify their name, then again, in this age of modern science and incredible medical advancement, that could be said of most curses, isn't that right?" the announcer made the elimination of the monkey Cursed Warrior official while the audience just couldn't cease their waves of cheers and standing ovations to the notable warrior capable of accomplishing the monumental task of defeating a Cursed Warrior all by themselves.