Gripping his sheathed sword, Hanamura Soragen trod onward. His gaze sifted through and scanned all surrounding combatants, all the ogres, flying beasts of stone, and makeshift artificial humans designed to combat demons and monsters. While Soragen expected the one to deliver his death to him to hide behind the appearance of a humanoid fighter, he wouldn't have put it beyond Kato Katai to mimic someone crazy like a Cursed Warrior or Fennec's golem.
Despite his body going up in jitters, or rather exactly because of that reason, Soragen advanced, fearing death from every man around him. That was how it was supposed to be. Wicked souls such as him that existed only to cause people trouble and get their friends and brothers killed deserved to fear for their miserable lives, piss their pants and beg for the continued survival of the plague they brought about just before the righteous sword came down upon them.
A gigantic fist loomed above Soragen, prompting the wicked vagabond to stiffen. Ripples and silver flashes arced all around the body of the armored golem, slicing it to ribbons in a wink. All this, however, did not spell out doom for the heavyweight siege monster from the Fennec's crew. The ease at which the armor unraveled relayed to Soragen that this colossal body was indeed fake. Weaved together from rubbery bands and undone exactly into the primitive material that the master spy Kato Katai put it together from.
"It looks like you won't stop compromising my disguises until I deal with you," Kato Katai said, appearing in the center of the dancing and whirling rubber bands he put the fake golem together from. Complex wooden frames collapsed around the spy while he gently guided the falling bands from resting on top of him and burying him down under the pile.
"Sorry, where I come from, it's rude to run away from a battle. It gives the wrong impression," Soragen smirked with a bleeding right side where Kato's implanted communicator mechanism self-destructed inside him. "You're one amazing guy, so you still owe me that death."
Soragen took off, drawing his sword with a frontal drawing slash. His sword seemed to phase through his opponent while bending him in reaction to the strike, causing Kato's image to flicker. Turning his whole body around, Soragen sheathed and drew his sword again with a drawing slash aimed diagonally down and at the spy's heels. As expected, he struck nothing solid again. Or rather, that was to say, Soragen slashed nothing fleshy, for his sword met steel resistance for a second before slicing clean through it.
"An afterimage device?" Soragen noted the sudden disappearance of Kato's shape from the area directly in front of him at the exact moment he sliced through the grounded landmine-looking gadget. Meanwhile, an obsidian dragon with red neon patterns flapped its giant wings behind Soragen, shocking Soragen with the complex appearances his opponent could mimic in a mere fraction of a second and the full extent of the battlefield potential that Kato Katai's planning and preparation represented.
The soaring draconic Cursed Warrior breathed out a beam of magenta-colored energy, swirling with inky black dots and blotches on the wave's outline. Lacking much in terms of response, the shaggy-haired samurai drew his blade and placed it diagonally in front of him. After coating it with his kenki, Soragen must have intended to slice clean through the incoming energy wave since it couldn't have come with the same danger that the original packed.
Wonder of wonders, but the shaggy-haired samurai vanished in a booming sky pillar of energy that at first appeared exactly like the energy wave that caused the devastating reaction before becoming a rampant firestorm and ripping through the entire battlefield without compromise. The genuine article slashed through the firestorm with its claws and began searching for its copy, outraged by the attempt to emulate its appearance, but Kato Katai might have dropped the disguise or switched it at that point.
With his kimono ripped and incinerated, his body scraped and smoldering with burns, and looking like he had reached his limit, Hanamuro Soragen stabbed his sword into the tile set and pushed himself off the ground to face the threatening music playing for him. His eyes were on the verge of tearing up. He was so hopelessly outmatched, no; he was much deadlier, stronger, faster, tougher than his opponent. However, Kato Katai's training, experience, and preparation for any and all potential outcomes gave Soragen no space to show his strengths.
Kato Katai was not a competitor who played the game better, he was the fighter who changed the game while his opponents insisted on playing by the rules of the old game on an entirely different board.
"Simply incredible! It seems that Kato Katai's mimicking goes one step beyond a mere face-swap! Somehow, the shapeshifting spy has managed to replicate the raw destructive power of the Cursed Warriors as well!" the announcer yelled out after taking a moment to crouch down behind the stand to weather the explosive ruckus in the arena. "Most spies cannot use chakra and rely solely on unbelievably advanced technology. From what I've come to know, some spies use a speck of antimatter in their explosives purely because no ordinary explosive that isn't fueled by chakra could harm any warrior they'd encounter on the field. As we've witnessed from the internal self-destruction of Kato's communicator and this strident beaming blaze of glory just now, antimatter can hurt even tough warriors that augment their bodies with chakra, kenki, guts, or whatever they end up calling it!"
"Hmm… If I can't find you, I'll just cut down every runt from the litter in my way!" Soragen flashed a maddened stare at a handful of combatants in front of him before blinking away and appearing two hundred and fifty meters further. With a pleasant click, the shaggy-haired swordsman sheathed his sword which no one saw him draw, causing a flashy, silver cascade of hundreds of cuts to rip through all the combatants hit by Soragen's berserk all-out attack that targeted anyone and everyone in his way.
Somehow, this absolutely insane strategy proved itself successful, as the collapsing image of Bishiyari with ravaged skin revealed flashes of a black spandex bodysuit with cybernetic patterns that assisted the bodysuit in projecting holographic images of clothing or armor that Kato Katai sought to replicate. Preceded by splashes of blood that leaked from the mouths of fake leathery faces stuck on the fake Bishiyari body, Kato Katai pulled himself out of the fake Bishiyari costume through one of the jarring fake mouths. Seeing how his body sparked with electricity and appeared to be malfunctioning, Kato Katai ripped it off and flung it aside, standing before Hanamuro Soragen just in a tight black t-shirt and black cargo pants.
"Whoa! The risky gamble of turning every single competitor against him appeared to pay dividends as not only did Hanamuro Soragen find his sneaky opponent but also disabled Kato Katai's holographic projection technology used for these impossibly skilled disguises!" the announcer did his job in directing the audience's attention at the western end of the stage where Kato Katai pulled out a combat knife and prepared himself to defend against the onslaught of the degenerate vagabond.
Normally it would not have been much of a battle, however, given the sum of the damage that Hanamuro Soragen suffered after his earlier unsuccessful attempts to pin Kato Katai down, this may have just brought the difference in skill, speed, and power closer to where the victor wasn't immediately obvious. Kato Katai started out first, throwing his knife away, which shocked Hanamuro Soragen enough to throw him off-balance. That knife was the only thing that the spy could have used to protect himself against Soragen's blade. Now the spy was not only outmatched in terms of physical stats, but also completely unarmed.
This surprise kept Soragen's feet planted firmly on the ground, leading to the vagabond merely pulling his blade and deflecting the knife before attempting to shift his position for a charge and a drawing slash to finish his opponent off. Before that could happen, a noticeable beep alerted Soragen and made him pull his eyes away from his opponent and onto the surface of the blade of the knife he just reflected. On top of it, there was a tiny, blinking red light. A signal of some sort.
Diving from the air, an armored flying machine similar to the draconic Cursed Warrior that Kato Katai had copied earlier swept down and rammed Soragen head-on, sweeping him off the ground with an unchained roar of its engines and taking both itself and the raggedy samurai off into the sky. Kato Katai pulled out a controller gadget from his back pocket, pressing a single button on it which, in terms, caused a vicious howl and white-out from containers of antimatter explosives stored inside this flying apparatus. A robust magenta firestorm colored the sky, a bubble spreading a thin and slicing shockwave all around it that would have dispelled any trace of clouds present in the noon sky.
A smoldering and unmoving humanoid shape fell from the thick of the spherical firestorm, splashing into the makeshift lake area outside the arena before surfacing with a burnt back. Hopping into their rowing boats, the healers split the lake apart like arrowheads before pulling the dazed and burnt Soragen into their boat and heading for the infirmary area.
"And it's over! The clash between Hanamuro Soragen and the youthful, peerless talent in swordsmanship and pure battlefield skill he represented and the spy Kato Katai, representing experience, strategy, and deception, once again reiterated why ninja weren't considered obsolete despite the samurai being superior in terms of head-on combat prowess! It appears that the newcomers in the spies are even stealthier and even more deceptive, carving themselves a neat spot in the rankings of the world's mightiest warriors!" the announcer cheered for the survivor who may have won the battle but ended up sacrificing his ability to shapeshift effectively.
Meanwhile, more to the northern end of the stage, a baffled magician with spiky dark grey hair and a muscular, tanned body covered up only with villager's rags and decorated with scars gasped at the sight of a cartoonish castle that he hadn't noticed earlier. The strange structure that seemed to defy the laws of reality it inhibited by being completely solid and imposing the cartoon logic it followed upon anyone touching it or stepping inside bent out of shape outward as if it was a blow-up balloon castle.
Stroking his unshaven chin with a rough stubble sticking out, the rather brutish-looking magician pulled out a thick tome from his side pouch and flipped through its pages. "Writer's Block!" the man read aloud the name of the spell he found before looking at the front gate of the cartoon castle with a daunting stare that told the castle to move or be destroyed. An expansive bubble of black grew out of proportion, surrounding the magician equipped with a claymore on his back and beginning to expand over the cartoon castle.
In a strange twist of events, where any sword or siege tool would have adopted the castle's cartoony qualities and failed to leave a dent in it, the expansive black bubble of Writer's Block began eating it away as if replacing the space the castle stood in with nothing but expansive black void of absolute nothingness that only the user of the spell and the equipment they had on them could survive.
With the expansive black void leaving a visible, bubble-shaped indentation in the cartoon castle that didn't refill itself, the inner layout of the castle became visibly apparent from the outside and a middle-aged woman with short, brown hair and tired eyes, dressed in waitress uniform with a katana hanging by her side, turned at the burly lumpkin magician with a puzzled look on her face.
"You're a samurai, aren't you?" the crude man in a dirty, white sleeveless shirt lit up a smoke before reaching behind him and undoing the seal that kept his claymore with magical gemstones etched into the blade from its leathery package. "There are only two of you left. Everyone seems to think you guys are the top dogs when it comes to one-on-one combat and raw battle power. That means that I better kick you guys to the curb before advancing to the Top 16 stage where we'll be duking it out in one-on-one fights."
The face of the samurai waitress blushed as her mouth gapped wide open in a strange and asymmetrical O. Her eyes glistened with a teary shine as she pressed her hands to her cheeks, shaking her head to snap herself out of being awestruck by the perfect image of a chiseled bad boy in front of her. The toon force swordswoman slipped her hand down to the black necktie, undoing it and flinging it away to give her neck some more space to help her shortness of breath.
"Are you even hearing me right now, woman!?" the messy-haired magician shook his fist over his head, flipping out at the sight of his chosen opponent visibly falling head over heels for him. "I said I'm kicking you out of the competition!"
"If it's with you, I'll go anywhere you go," Sachiko Tanogen pressed her hands to her right cheek and bent her left leg playfully before producing actual, pulsing, red cartoon hearts in over her eyes that beat at the exact rhythm of her own heart.
A trail of a lone sweat drop ran down the rough face of the claymore and magical tome-wielding magician as he bit hard into his smoke. So hard that he shredded the other end of the cigar and was prompted to spit it out as its contents spilled out into his mouth. Seeing this woman just converting her immediate surroundings into some sort of field of cartoon logic and acting completely irrationally sort of put the magician on edge. He was used to slaying mages who used spells to weave reality at their whim, but every spell known to the magicians of the higher dimensions was recorded, cataloged, and able to be accessed by flipping through the pages of the respective grimoire. This woman seemed like a wild card, she changed reality according to her feelings, emotions, and wants, not according to the spells she knew.
Suddenly, a punch walloped the back of the burly magician, making him stumble. The crude magical swordsman looked down at his chest where most of the pressure he felt came from, only to grunt at the sight of a heart-shaped arrow tip sticking out. Following the liberal artistic depiction of an arrow, the magician turned around and saw the other side sticking from his back and a swarm of tiny cartoon angel babies on puffy white dove wings flapping about with matching arrows aimed at him.
"What the actual fu…" before the magician could curse, the giggling cartoon angel pulled out a massive mallet that in no way shape or form could have fit behind its tiny back and slammed the magician straight in the head before tucking it away where it came from. With a shriveled right side of his face, the curly-haired cartoon angel waved its finger in front of the stunned magician, as a gesture that cursing was a big taboo in the land of cartoons.
Desperate to shake off the stupor of having been hit by a wooden mallet, something that should not have harmed him in any way whatsoever, yet hurt as if it completely ignored the toughness and mana coating the burly magician, the magical sword fighter saw pink hearts with starry rings around them waving around his head in an orbiting trajectory. Angered by the outlandish sight, the magician flicked the pink hearts away one by one before pulling out his gem-incrusted magical claymore and pointing it at his opponent.
"That'll be enough, you witch! I'm warning you, this claymore has been equipped with gemstones, able to absorb and store magical spells. If I imbue it with the power of Writer's Block, it will eat through your cartoon chicanery and you'll have no way of protecting yourself. I usually turn my strength against magicians who step out of line and try to take over all of existence or hurt the cosmic order. I've no intention of turning it against some lowly 3rd-dimensional woman living in the land of childish cartoons," the angered magical swordsman proclaimed.
"I'm sorry, tall, cool, and handsome. Ichi's Cursed Seal can only be removed by true love. I'm willing to give it a shot, as long as you are," Sachiko smiled and extended her hands for the magical swordsman to grab hold of so that they could prance off into the sunset.
"What on Earth did I get into here?" the stunned swordsman stared at the cloudy thought bubbles popping out from over Sachiko's head where the two of them were depicted prancing over the flowery hills, singing and dancing together and surfing rainbows on their rear ends with colorful hearts floating around their heads. "What sort of spell can even fend off this kind of mad sorcery?"
Frantically, the swordsman extended his hand and telekinetically hovered the massive grimoire he carried around to float out in front of him, sifting through the pages to find the perfect spell to counter Sachiko's toonforce so that he didn't have to resort to Writer's Block and potentially delete an innocent woman who just belonged to the faction that the magical swordsman sought to eliminate.