A burly man with long, hanging, greasy hair and a sleeveless white and green bodysuit charged straight at the exposed back of Quill-Man, the final remaining superhero. Quill-Man's eye flashed backward in a quick glance accompanied by surprise that someone would be bold enough to bull-rush his back, which was covered with quills and ready to skewer all challengers.
Whether it was because Quill-Man suspected there was something hidden underneath this rush and chose to move or because he truly considered the attacker capable enough to take him off his feet, the last superhero vaulted backward. This resulted in Quill-Man positioning himself behind the Union Ball forward Hanomahal Moenaka.
While the Union Baller took off, charging toward stacks of other combatants, Quill-Man wasn't just going to let this athlete off the hook for attempting to tackle him. With inhuman agility, the quilled superhero launched himself into a breakneck bullet-like dive forward, hooking his left arm to pull Moenaka's feet out from under him and forcing the Union Baller into a stumble.
"You picked the wrong guy to piss off," Quill-Man brandished his shoulder and elbow blades before him, sticking close to the ground to best utilize his thorned and well-equipped back.
"You won't last long playing Union Ball if you're going to let the way the guards are put together intimidate you. I fear no man, no matter how bulky or slick," the Union Baller proclaimed, showing the elongated ellipsoid ball he used to play his favorite game with his right hand.
"Some men are best feared and left alone," Quill-Man muttered with a gravelly voice, taking off first. This may have been a clever play, given the information available to him. Hanomahal Moenaka described himself as a "forward", meaning he favored charging offense and, as proven in his last fight against Paljang Cookiwon of the Stomping Fist style, that playing style translated well into the field of combat too.
Appearing before the greasy-haired forward, Quill-Man jumped up with a twirl of his back and elbow blades. A vortex of slicing lines elevated Moenaka into the air. While a potent ripping noise filled the fighting stage, it wasn't the slashed flesh of the Union Baller that made it. It was the Union Ball itself that got cut up like a sliced and diced tomato. Fortunately for Quill-Man, he only began his offensive, and he's already proven himself to be swift enough to catch his opponent off-guard.
In a move that was previously unseen, Quill-Man collapsed on all fours and became encased with an aura of flashing yellow electricity. It surged across the quill blades positioned on his back and formed spiky blade constructs before shooting off like a floor of spikes. Moenaka blanked out, being used to having both of his feet stuck firmly on the ground, he didn't have many aerial evasion options, so he just clutched himself and got ready for the incoming hit.
"Quill-Lightning!" Quill-Man yelled out, strained by his own surge of electricity and tested by the daunting task of shape manipulation on such a scale.
A loud grunt filled the air as the skewered and bleeding Union Baller ended up impaled on Lightning Release construct spikes that shocked him like salt to the injury and then dissolved in a violent discharge that flung him away.
"Quill-Ball!" Quill-Man yelled out, becoming a cannonball with his quills sticking out all around him. Encased in the Lightning Release chakra, Quill-Man rode the greased lightning itself in a cannonball shot straight toward the exposed back of his opponent.
Turning around, Hanomahal Moenaka opened his arms, stunning Quill-Man once again with his daredevil attitude. This time not as much as a grunt left Moenaka's lungs as the incoming spikes skewered his front but, by facing Quill-Man with his front side, this opened up a momentary chance for a counter-attack. With sheer force of his arms, the Union Ball forward forced the human cannonball apart and, holding Quill-Man's head with his two own hands, slammed it with a brutal headbutt.
With his opponent's harmless front side now fully open to Moenaka, the Union Baller grabbed hold of Quill-Man's head once again and rode his body down like a skateboard before swinging Quill-Man around and slamming him into the tile set like he was some piece of rag. Quill-Man's raspy grunt echoed around while, still clutching Quill-Man's face, Moenaka charged forward, dragging his opponent through the ditch of his own making.
Having completed the drag across the ground, Hanomahal Moenaka pulled Quill-Man out from the ditch and threw him gently upward with a light push. Just the bare necessities of what one needed to fling a fully grown, well-developed man over your head. Demonstrating incredible toughness and flexibility given his injuries, the Union Baller flipped with an overhead kick and punted Quill-Man aside, dragging through the tiles and ripping his bodysuit apart.
"Unless you wanna end up like that ball of yours, I'd cry uncle as loud as I can," Quill-Man grumbled while pushing his bruised, semi-exposed face off the ground and confronting the Union Ball star face-to-face once more.
"The rules of Union Ball demand that you push onward, not backward. Moving backward is how you lose," with the hazy eyes of a man-possessed, Moenaka tilted a pumping forearm that pushed and cheered himself through grievous blood loss. The greasy hair fell all over the athlete's face, obscuring his clouded eyes and bloody face.
"Heh, I stand by my word from earlier. Some men are best respected and left alone. You are one of those men," Quill-Man showed a smirk with the left, still concealed half of his face before taking off and grabbing a pair of broken and dislodged quills from his uniform. The superhero plunged both of them into the ground, dragging them across the stage and pulling them out for a cross-shaped slash.
Before his opponent could catch him sleeping again and unable to build momentum, Moenaka pulled a grazed stone tile with a hefty chunk of dirt from underground and put it in front of him. The cross shape slashed clean through it, opening up shallow wounds on Moenaka's chest but, with gritted teeth and a crystal-clear look, the Union Baller toughed it through.
A shoulder charge through the sliced-up dirt and stone shattered it into pebbles, causing a violent white burst that put the bang in flashbang. Quill-Man cried out in pain and let the concussive blast carry him back while Moenaka charged forward, ramming his head as if he was a goring bovine. Quill-Man took off into the air, letting the Union Baller charge clean through. Moenaka turned his feet and skidded for as far as inertia let him, taking off and tackling Quill-Man from the front while the superhero was still falling down.
"Oh! He's got his front! Moenaka caught Quill-Man on the front! And he's heating up with his charge toward the edge! He's going to eliminate Quill-Man with a ring out!" the announcer shot an index finger into the air while turning sideways and forcing every bit of the breath left in his chest out for the enjoyment of the audience. "Is this it, are the superheroes done!?"
"Don't get cocky!" Quill-Man objected to the elimination by throwing his feet back and using the body of one of many competitors that Moenaka swatted aside with his bold charge forward. "Quill-Drill!" the last superhero bellowed, spinning his head at a static angle directly above his opponent in a turning, drilling-like motion meant to both skewer and obliterate any fortification or defense. Even King Wulithmes' invulnerable body crumbled against the Quill-Man's blades before.
The Union Ball forward shocked his opponent by becoming fluid like water and unstoppable like a rolling boulder and switching between the two methods of movement in a blink of an eye as he stopped and rolled around the vertical tunnel of slicing and dicing and then resumed his charge from a different direction, rushing right past Quill-Man and avoiding every nip and tuck of his quills from a respectable distance.
Quill-Man whooped an unintelligible response when Moenaka's hand brushed past and grabbed hold of his boot, taking the skidding and bouncing superhero for a ride, wrapped inside his failing uniform like some tight sleeping bag. With a masculine growl, Quill-Man ripped out of his own suit and flopped his nude, sweaty body onto the ground like a newborn baby.
Seeing an opening in Moenaka's hesitation and sudden stoppage, Quill-Man threw a flying kick that aimed straight for the Union Baller's chin but Hanomahal Moenaka reacted in an instant, wrapping the shredded uniform around Quill-Man's heel and vaulting him over the shoulder for a slam against the grassy patch outside of bounds. When the gravity took its toll and the concussive shock replaced the ecstasy of weightlessness, Quill-Man let out just a surprised, low-pitched cough and rolled over on his sides, writhing in pain.
"He did it! Hanomahal Moenaka, the unstoppable force of motion, the breakneck tackling machine, eliminated the last superhero from the competition! This makes it two factions that have lost all their members now! So unfortunate, given the momentum that Quill-Man has been building up. Let's see for how long Hanomahal Moenaka can carry on with his lamentable injuries and cheer for him from now on!" the announcer spoke his ruling on the clutch elimination. "Quill-Man's blades may have been able to cut and pierce through anything, but the pro athlete demonstrated that even perfect blades could be navigated around and outplayed by targeting Quill-Man's front and making the superhero's uniform work against its wearer!"
"Fighting you made me glad that there's a ban against knives and all other bladed weapons in Union Ball…" Moenaka muttered to his opponent, who rose to his own wobbly two feet with numb and lagging movement. Being exposed to the audience, Quill-Man wrapped the remains of his tattered uniform around his extremities and another strap around his face, using the holes through which his quills poked through for eyeholes.
"Honestly, I'm a little glad you got me," Quill-Man applauded his opponent from the sidelines, refusing to accept the help of the shrouded healers that rushed to his aid. "Slicing you up to ribbons would've been such a loss. Don't push it too hard and die of blood loss now."
With a limp step, Quill-Man wobbled to the infirmary accompanied by the healers who stayed outside of the range which the hero's hand could reach in.
"W-Wait up just one second!" the humanoid Exterminator with a camera for a head waved its elongated and elastic arms that spread out with wires for fingers long past the sleeves of the Exterminator uniform it was rocking. "I attacked you back when I thought you were a genuine, bona fide monster! Not a human piloting a walking fortress of mass destruction!"
Utterly oblivious to the pleads of the Exterminator, an obscurely humanoid Cursed Warrior with a dome for a head and tremendous three-finger hands reached out for the camera-headed Exterminator. Instead of submitting to the colossal living monolith, the Exterminator Model: Night Vision let its fingers untangle and desperately browsed the humongous body of its foe for connections. The knowledge that it was something that could have been piloted made the Exterminator keep a speck of hope.
Just as the building-sized hand wrapped around Night Vision, a cascade of visible white electrical discharges resonated throughout the Cursed Warrior's entire body, shorting it out temporarily and leaving it slumped with its head and arms weighed down toward the ground.
"Man, this is just not my day!" Exterminator Model: Night Vision fussed to itself. "I just can't seem to hit a single monster!"
The torn Exterminator's uniform hanging over the sleek body of the Exterminator relayed this exact fact. It was a remnant from just a few minutes earlier when the Exterminator's gung-ho attitude picked it a fight with Papagei the Sky Warrior, whom the slender Exterminator confused for a genuine monster as opposed to a man in a customary Sky Country bird warrior suit. Now the clumsy and unfortunate Exterminator seemed to have attacked a Cursed Warrior just before realizing that it too was just a person inside of a monstrous shell. Albeit one that was much more destructive and dangerous than a mere bird suit.
A terrifying rumble behind the hopping and prancing Exterminator nearly made it trip up and forced it to cast its noodly wire fingers to wrap around the jagged edges of wreckage and swing atop some chunks of debris where it could hide. The chest, devoid of any properties of a specific gender, wrapped in a layer of black rubber and plastic, inflated and deflated to a ridiculous degree. It was almost as if the manmade body of the Exterminator could hold dozens of times the amount of oxygen that a normal human could keep inhaled.
"I hit that thing with a concentrated pulse of EMP, directed straight through the connection node in my finger… If that thing has a modicum of technology, even if it is EMP-resistant, it should've shorted it out for certain! Just what on Earth is that thing, honestly!?" Exterminator Model: Night Vision panted to itself, hiding behind a rocky protrusion in the mound of debris.
A loud and crunchy thud made the baffled Exterminator peek from behind with a pathetic "Eh?" being all that the altered humanoid with a camera for a head could muster. Immediately after pulling its head from the cover, the camera lens came face-to-face with the Cursed Warrior's lone round ring symbolizing its eye. The monolithic warrior had leaned down and grabbed the very mound of debris that the Exterminator hid behind and lifted it in its hand.
It was almost as if the Cursed Warrior was waiting for the Exterminator to realize that it was within its opponent's grasp. And yet, for whatever reason, the Exterminator failed to do so and just stared at a blank point, as if it was looking right through the sky-obscuring walking fortress with peerless destructive tendencies. It was only when the camera lens switched with a little click and became pitch black as opposed to the usual phosphorous-color gleam that the Exterminator flipped out and grabbed its head in terror.
Frantically fleeing for its life, yet doomed to its fate inside a massive, clenching hand that crumbled a mountain of debris into dust with a firm, ironclad grip, the Exterminator screeched out, covering itself up from its fate. The audience and the sweaty announcer gulped, wondering if that was it for the artificial clodhopper, while the Cursed Warrior clapped both of its hands together and began rubbing it, while sprinkling chunks of smashed camera pieces and plastic and dropping kilometers worth of cinematic tape on the floor in all the junk it crushed and ground.
The Cursed Warrior declared its victory with a grumble, spreading its arms out and striking a pose of tense focus while it shook the surrounding ground with a resounding cybernetic whoop. It was a hint of some curious behavior, knowing that these walking forts all had living pilots residing inside them. The dome-headed monolithic monstrosity was about to move on, beaming away a concentrated azure beam that burst into flames and raised havoc in its path from inside the ring in the center of its dome. That's when it stopped attacking and looked down.
The tape had been clogged all over the Cursed Warrior's leg, almost all the way to its knee. Maybe the walking fortress could have pulled its feet and torn it apart, but it decided to not risk falling down and stopped. The Cursed Warrior reached out with both hands, resolute to peel and unravel the kilometers of tape its leg found itself bound in.
As matters often turned when heaps of tape of any kind was involved, the tape began wrapping itself around the monolith's fingers. The fact that it had three-fingered hands and neither of them were thumbs only mucked things up further. Plowing and tearing through jumbles of tape, curiously enough, the monstrous walking fortification only ended up more entangled in it. Whereas in the beginning it only covered the foot and the calf, now the entire walking superweapon became webbed up in it.
A devastating azure beam shot off into the sky from the central ring in the Cursed Warrior's dome head. Something strange happened as a hectic flock of sparks shot out from the dome, forcing the fortified superweapon to stumble and shake its whole body as if in pain. With the exposure of its core in the dome to fire off the destructive beam that singed through layers upon layers of tape like a laser beaming through butter, the severed ends of the tape began creeping inside of the structure. Like pesky vines.
The Cursed Warrior stumbled back, pulling and tugging at the film tape with all its indomitable force. A crack that made the audience wince and tuck their heads in filled the area. A chunk of black armor flopped onto the ground, exposing a hidden, cement-like filing underneath the armored black layer. The more the Cursed Warrior tugged, the more it began falling apart. The continuous rips of the film tape, severed pieces of armored layers, parts and gadgets, and chunks of entire limbs crumble down to the ground.
As if it had awoken for a second life, the world's largest clump of noodles in the shape of film tape flopped down after the fallen pieces, burrowing and moving around like sentient guts and slipping into the discarded bits and pieces to assemble a new and improved body from a mixture of both the Cursed Warrior and Exterminator scrap. What stood up was a four-meter tall, slender humanoid that was black and bright with neon patterns, like a Cursed Warrior, but had a fortified and upgraded camera with a glowing neon lens for a head.
Flexing its biceps for the show, the Exterminator beamed out an identical destructive azure beam from its lens that the Cursed Warrior employed to obliterate its foes with an unbound destructive burst. The beam slammed and punched through the entire hulking frame and sent the Cursed Warrior stumbling, tripping, and falling on its side while smaller explosions littered its body to showcase the countless malfunctioning internal systems.
Not that the pilot would have abandoned its Cursed Warrior shell anyway, but the remains of the Cursed Beast exploded and scattered its finer parts and chunks of armored layer across the whole arena before the pilot could even consider abandoning his post. All that was left of the devastated Cursed Warrior now was just a caved-in and collapsed scrap shell, providing yet another shelter or battleground, depending on what the contestant wandering into its concaved corpse was looking for.
"I… I'm not sure what I just witnessed, but the clumsy Exterminator Model: Night Vision who came ill-prepared for a daytime competition has somehow stumbled into yet another victory, this time–against the dominant Cursed Warrior Batsupu!" the announcer ruled with a point of his hand, looking perplexed at the peerless luck of the Exterminator who kept brewing itself a trouble stew yet also kept up rising to the occasion. Somehow.
"It's okay!" Exterminator Model: Night Vision waved its hand at the announcer, looking chipper about its triumph. "I've upgraded the lens of my camera to no longer keep me blinded during the day! This is a whole new me!"