Shakali pounced straight at the pair of her newly acquired targets. Her left arm went for a wide swing of a sickle while the four shadowy arms sticking out from her back flailed wildly in all directions, looking to nick her nemesis or the foolish pro athlete standing up for him for his trouble while they were fleeing. Young Kaefer twirled his net, deflecting a few of the swings and stopping the shadowy sickles in their tracks, however, instead of stopping, the arms wielding them splattered as if they were made of the same black goop that Shakali was frothing with.
"This woman is one of the Salvari, they're experienced and crowd favorites. We could use some of that ungodly strength you've shown up earlier," Kaefer whelped out while fending off a mad rush of sickle swings with a constant splattering of ooze into his eyes and face that left him blinded before long.
With a triumphant hiss, Shakali thought she saw a certain kill before her. While Kaefer was busy trying to wipe the thick and sticky black bile covering his eyes and face, the Dark Mother of War dashed right up to him and spread all of her sickle-swinging arms, ready for a mauling and a beheading. Before she could realize any of her sick fantasies, Jet flew in from the side with a spinning roundhouse to the back, knocking Shakali aside. The kick didn't throw the Salvari berserker off her feet though. She just skidded away and stabilized her stance in a snap.
"Sorry, I'm a bit tuckered out at the moment…" Jet admitted with a smirk while sweating out of his mind over his rock-hard yet compact bare-chested body. "I don't think I'll manage to tap into that right now."
"Well, I'm not going to just stand around and let you get butchered by this woman!" Kaefer clenched his fists tighter around the net he used to fling a hi-tech electric taser ball around. "Even if it means helping a potential opponent, I'll fight with everything I've got."
"That's so nice of you…" Shakali teased her young opponent, completely switching her target as she realized she wouldn't be able to deal with Jet with this young man flinging thunder balls around. "I enjoy disemboweling young nice boys best of all," she proclaimed, licking the blade of her sickle and smearing black slather all over its edge.
With an elegant pounce, Shakali swung her sickles around her body at several angles, using all six of her arms. Kaefer put his insulating net out in front of him, absorbing the shock to the best of his ability, but the force sent him flying back and down on his back. Had his chosen tool of defense been any shorter, he'd have been skewered for sure. Mashing her arms around and preparing a storm of sickles that would have sliced any man unlucky enough to get in Shakali's range to ribbons, the Dark Mother of War closed in on young Kaefer while the youth was still reeling from that last assault.
Jet swooped in, swinging on his rear while delivering a double leg sweep, then returning into a handstand position and spinning his legs over his head like a spinning top. With thunderous cracks, the strikes sent Shakali flying back and snarling. Her eyes became completely submerged in the black ooze that frothed from her eyelids, nose, and mouth. Even her skin pores wherever bare skin could be seen through her crude and barebones attire began dripping with black tar.
Shakali screeched like a banshee, throwing all of her sickles wildly in every direction. The wide range of coverage that the hurling weapons showed alarmed Jet, who was already on his last legs and couldn't take too many hits like these. The round sickles twirled like boomerang blades or chakram in their swinging trip to behead and butcher anyone or anything in their path.
Jet leaned aside and rolled onto a one-arm standing position to bend and curl his body in a strained position that should have allowed him to dodge the storm of blades coming his way. That was when the faint noise of a black ooze drip clicking against the tile cleansed Jet's mind and revealed the true nature of his opponent's attack to him. Long tendrils of sticky black goop were attached to the handles of the sickles, redirecting their trajectories mid-flight and revealing Shakali's attack to be more akin to a clawed tentacle strike rather than a mere fling of her weapons.
Kaefer jumped out in front of Jet, spinning his net vertically out in front of him and creating a protective shield directly in front of him while Jet pushed his body off the floor and collected a pair of remaining sickles out from thin air. When the Messiah of Martial Arts landed firmly on his own two feet again, the sickles clacked and scattered on the floor.
"That ooze…" Jet winced in pain, realizing that his vision was becoming blurrier than it was even back when he used every ounce of his awakened white dharma to dispatch of a Salvari warrior. Wherever the black ooze connecting Shakali and her sickles touched Jet's skin, it burnt like acid. It was like that goop was a pure desire for carnage and murder that translated into physical vitriol. Such was the power of malevolent dharma.
"Yeah, we should try not to come into contact with it. Since she's slathering her sickles with it, it must be venomous," Kaefer nodded. "Though the more she's getting scorned at us, the more of it she produces. She's already spreading it around like drops of sweat…"
"That means we need to settle it fast," Jet struck a balanced fighting pose and began gently drifting his arms like ribbons in the spring breeze. "We'll need to work together on this one. I will entrust both of our lives to your pitching ability, young man. Meanwhile, I will produce something for you to pitch."
"You should spare your breaths concocting your pathetic schemes and instead spend them saying your farewells!" Shakali taunted the pair before beginning to jerk and twitch rapidly. The belly of the Salvari amazon inflated a dozen fold before her whole body bloated like a balloon. With a robust jump in the air, Shakali positioned herself above the battlefield before expelling a condensed liquid bomb of the black goop in which her violent bad dharma manifested.
With a forceful chant, Kaefer flung his taser ball at the blob, causing a strident blast and, combined with the force of the detonation and the strong electrical discharge following it, the black bile splattered around in an acidic rain, too widespread to deal too much damage at once. Meanwhile, Jet lowered his arms and completed his katas. A visible white outline began radiating around his body and pure white shine emanated from his eyes. Jet's eyes became beacons of living starlight as the Messiah of Martial Arts tapped into the dharma of pure goodness again.
Knowing that he didn't have nearly enough time to overcome Shakali with this dharma power-up, Jet took off with a forceful expulsion of energy that expelled from his feet like a bursting halo. Having dashed right up to Shakali, Jet drove a swift yet devastating jab into her gut, bending the Dark Mother of War over and stunning her in place while Jet backflipped. After finishing his elegant glide, Jet erupted into a stomping barrage of thrusting kicks that battered Shakali and left her utterly rattled.
Jet finished the combination by landing on his left foot and instantly shooting his right straight into Shakali's face, punting her away, and headed for elimination. Jet knew better than to rely on something that situational. He put his hands together and drew them back before thrusting them forward. The entire white dharma coating him channeled into a lone, round white star which Jet launched, hurling straight at Shakali.
"As if…!" Shakali hissed, vomiting black bile from her mouth and using the stream to provide her a counterforce to vault her body to flip away from the incoming white dharma ball. Jet collapsed on one knee, panting heavily with his body still reeling from the sum of the strain that channeling white dharma put on it. He shouldn't have powered that up again until he fully recovered, let alone challenged another Salvari with it.
"I've got it, Jet-san!" a loud yell shocked Shakali, forcing her to turn back and over her head where Kaefer had vaulted off of a mountainous ramp to scoop the white dharma fireball with his taser ball net. "Not gonna escape this!" the young man exclaimed before turning his entire body into an over-the-top pitching swing and hurling the white dharma bomb right back at Shakali.
The white dharma expanded on its way to becoming larger than the entire body of the Salvari berserker. It swept her entirely off her feet, carrying her across the battlefield before slamming her into the protective wall and exploding with a white skyward arrow that flung Shakali into the lower atmosphere before letting her slam back down on the ground with a deafening thud.
"What an unbelievable upset! The combined forces of Jet, the Messiah of Martial Arts, and Kaefer Farfaello, the professional Taser Baller, put them ahead of the Dark Mother of War of the Salvari–Shakali!" the announcer bellowed out, much to the chagrin of the audience that booed and pumped their furious fists into the sky, distraught over the violent Salvari goddess of the arena being eliminated in such an unfair handicap match.
The Dark Mother of War writhed and rolled around on the ground, grumbling. Against all odds, despite the disastrous hit she took in the concentrated energy ball of all of Jet's white dharma, she peeled her oozing with black body off the ground. At that point, the frothing of the black goop representing her violent and vile dharma had become so intense that it surrounded Shakali whole and drowned her out in a tremendous mass of wickedness in mucus form.
Shakali began shambling, dragging her vile corpus which now resembled a blob of gelatinous black secretion toward the arena. The blobby mass-produced new limbs according to the desire of the gelatinous collective, never settling on a certain concrete form and constantly shifting, oozing, and flowing. Jet and Kaefer froze in place. Their triumphant cheers and high-fives vanished upon the sight of the humongous black mass dragging itself toward the arena.
"You cheeky… Crush you… Squeeze you until your innards pop out through every end…!" the shifting black mass of bile cursed with augmented and shifted Shakali's voice that seemed like it was filtering through layers upon layers of the ooze and escaped through thick, blowing bubbles of compressed air.
A firm step made both Kaefer and Jet awaken from their terrified stupor. A man composed of features and parts of ten different people, donning several pairs of arms and displaying ten different slumbering bodies across his chiseled musculature, positioned himself in between Shakali and the pair she wished to destroy and dissolve in her vengeful bile of vitriolic dharma.
"Stand down, Shakali!" Bishiyari demanded with an authoritative voice that burst with a sonic boom of a golden halo. The booming order rattled and shook the creeping, slimy monster that Shakali had allowed herself to become. The golden ring of righteous dharma surrounded and scanned the malevolence of Shakali, forcing the black dharma to dissolve like melting ice and turn into water before being absorbed into the ground. This left only the humiliated and stunned Salvari amazon behind.
"B-But… Supreme One…" Shakali argued with all the authority of a capricious toddler. "This one eliminated Darthkama. He wields dharma like he's one of us! He dared steal it from us!"
"If wielding dharma was stealing, all the Salvari would be thieves and I would be well within my right to punish all of you," Bishiyari replied. "It is not the ability to wield dharma that makes us Salvari. It is our nobility and kindness as warriors, our shining example shown through our actions in the events of this arena, and the love and adoration of these people. By refusing to accept the laws of this arena and attacking your opponent after you've been eliminated, you threaten to undo all of that and destroy everything that makes the Salvari who they are. You spit in the face of these people and their entertainment. I know your hot-headed nature, Shakali, you are our Dark Mother of War, after all. However, if you refuse to heed my warning and continue feeding this sick obsession with killing this man, I will destroy you myself."
Shakali growled and snarled, frothing black bile from her mouth just inches away from where Bishiyari was standing but just as the tension between them was about to reach a critical point, Shakali grunted, turned away and walked off to the infirmary to have her rattled ribs and concussion checked out. Content with the decision of his fellow Salvari, Bishiyari turned around and nodded at Jet and Kaefer.
"Even though we are both competitors in this battle royale and our eyes have met, giving me full right to defeat both of you, since I am here to scold my hotheaded peer, I will move on until the next time we meet," Bishiyari nodded at the two.
"She didn't look happy. I thought you were the Supreme One amongst the Salvari…" Jet gave the pathway to the infirmary wing one good look with a hint of worry in his eyes. He'd rather not need to look behind his shoulder for the rest of this tournament and have to deal with Shakali's never-ending obsession with him if he could help it.
"I am the strongest one, yes. I was the one who first polished the spiritual element of chakra into dharma. I have also elevated dharma to the highest level of mastery amongst the Salvari warriors. However, I do not presume to be someone who can contain Shakali's rage. I am not above becoming an object of her wrath, either. Most of the time, I have no choice but to step out of her way, lest I taste her fury first-hand. That being said, her behavior here threatened the very foundation of what makes us Salvari, and I think that deep down Shakali understood that. It is only because we have come to an agreement that she simmered down," Bishiyari humbly admitted before turning and walking away.
"We survived…" Kaefer collapsed on his rear with a wide smile that still had plenty of uncertainty in it. It was as if the young pro athlete still struggled to wrap his head around the fact they had eliminated Shakali.
"We have won, given the conditions. However, if this battle was not under tournament rules, I can't shake off the fact that we would not have been so lucky. The fact that we needed to team up against that woman just to have a chance and that we didn't even defeat her, in the end, will not sit right with me as a martial artist," Jet crossed his arms with a pout.
"Hmm… You're a strange guy. Can't you just enjoy the fact we won?" Kaefer stood up and examined his Taser Ball equipment with a check to see if it would carry him throughout the rest of the battle royale.
"I am glad that woman did not butcher us. Still, it is that discontent that drives us martial artists to keep improving and growing stronger every day. It is something to welcome into one's heart, not treat as a flaw," Jet smiled before adopting a martial arts pose and committing to a few shadow strikes and kicks. Feeling the rising burn in his ribs, the Messiah of Martial Arts clutched his chest with a wince. Having extinguished the last of his white dharma just for a chance of victory, he'd have an increasingly tougher time earning his survival from this point on.
"Hmm… I suppose if my opponent was a taser baller, I'd feel bummed out too if we eliminated them without me having a chance to test my mettle against them in Taser Ball," Kaefer sighed.
"There you go, I'm glad you understand. Perhaps we martial artists and you pro athletes aren't that much different after all. It's just that the rules of the martial arts you guys practice are much stricter than ours…" Jet laughed out before the two impromptu partners bumped each other's fists and walked off their separate ways to work toward their position in the Top 16.
A braided beauty with pink dharma beaming from her eyes and radiating from her like energized aura approached Bishiyari as the Supreme Salvari sought for the next challenge suitable for him. The appearance of Manshuri, the Dream of Abundant Love of the Salvari, was a surprise to Bishiyari, who expected the rest of the Salvari to be eliminating competitors in all the different areas of the ring.
"Half of the Salvari have already been eliminated," Manshuri said with a worried expression. "How is this possible? The only times that Salvari have suffered defeat in this arena is against other Salvari."
"You are not wrong, however, we may have taken our status as Gods of the Arena for granted. Perhaps we have fallen asleep in our laurel crowns? This is the biggest in scale event that any of us has been a part of. This arena has been our entire life and now the rest of the world that we have neglected has come to us. Perhaps it is just karma rewarding us for our faults in refusing to step out from our comfort zones and see more of the world?" Bishiyari pondered out loud. "In any case, our status as the Salvari will be rendered meaningless if one of us will not be the one to win this tournament. I refuse to admit that everything we've accomplished here, all the glory we've accumulated and all the people we've entertained, all the victories we've tasted have all been for naught. You were the one who taught me to create dreams and that which isn't with dharma, while I merely employed it for strength. How about you use that ability of yours to craft a dream of Salvari victory and inspire us to fight hard to make it come true?"
With a light peck on the forehead of his fellow Salvari, Bishiyari walked off with his worried peer looking at his back and the reflections of a pair of faces sticking out from Bishiyari's robe on his back that slumbered with their eyes closed. Manshuri couldn't help but wonder if by shutting off these faces from the whole of his essence, Bishiyari wasn't purposefully shutting himself off from something truthful as well.