A queue of large boulders that once the whole of a massive colosseum arena consisted of, now rotated suspended in the air around the central rock, atop which stood the human-sized man with Cursed Warrior decorations. The humanoid Cursed Warrior looked twisted and strained by the feat of employing his cursed energy in keeping the section of the arena he successfully kept in the air floating. Then the mindless powerhouse bellowed and leaned over the edge to glare down.
"So… You noticed…" Khinzira, the mercenary employed by Fennec, seeking safety for the bundle of homeless settler women that she liberated and sought to lead to a new home, one where they could stay safe, muttered while hanging from a thorny blade chain. The blade chain stuck into the rock by its diamond-shaped, kunai-like flattened tip.
Seeking a superior position, the hanging mercenary swung from her chain like it was a vine and flung herself upward into a mid-air position. Because of the tremendous length of her chosen spiky weapon, she created a field of thorny defense around her by positioning the twirling blade chain like a whirling, sharp whip. A mere twitch of Khinzira's forearm sent the lashing blade chain smacking at the nearby Cursed Warrior. The rumbling and swollen humanoid grumbled as his arms became encased in a black coating, identical to the surface armor layer of a Cursed Warrior.
With a sparkly spectacle of clashes, the twirling blade chain lashed against several levels of the burly warrior, whipping him in the side of the head, the brunt of his crossed and armored arms, and then at his thighs below. The graze on the Cursed Warrior's face ripped open a flesh wound by tearing flesh from the cursed one's cheek out, however, where it should have bled profusely, only the shine of a violet neon pattern glistened from the wound.
The crossed blocking arms may as well have been an impenetrable fortress, as, despite Khinzira's high-grade weapon, forged from deluxe chakra conductive materials, the blade whip bounced off of the Cursed Warrior's block with indecipherable grazes and flashy flocks of flares all over. The sound of ripping cloth alerted Khinzira to some limited success on the lower level, where the twirling whip ripped some of the Cursed Warrior's trousers out and left an exposed calf sticking out, but failed to much more than graze it.
The armored arm of the Cursed Warrior plunged through the invisible, whirling layers of torturous lashing while the humanoid Cursed Warrior devoted his entire body to a frontal charge despite the obvious danger of being sliced to ribbons. Against all caution and reason, the Cursed Warrior grabbed hold of Khinzira's helmet and continued to shove the airborne mercenary further, slamming her through multiple suspended rocks before clenching his hand with Khinzira's helmet and spraying blood from the eye-socket openings in the crushed tin can.
A careless motion from the Cursed Warrior flicked the overkilled mercenary's body aside to limply flop into the roaring waves below and color them red before roaring out into the air with a concussive shockwave that reduced the pebbles of shattered, telekinetically suspended rocks around him into pebbles. Before the Cursed Warrior, with no further cover to remain in the air, could follow his murdered opponent, the condor-like Cursed Warrior swooped from down low and picked its much smaller and relatively human-sized comrade up.
"Oh, no! What brutality! The Curse Walker from the Cursed Warriors utterly crushed Khinzira from Fennec's group! While the Cursed Warriors consider the experiment of making Cursed Warriors out of their pilots an utter failure, because of the complete loss of the pilot's mind, he still makes for a formidable and highly volatile warrior!" the announcer declared for some raucous reactions amongst the audience. Here in Agbarah, the civilians were rather safe from Fennec's rebellion against the Sheikhs and the Kazekage because Agbarah was located west of Sunagakure, and attacking it would have exposed the invading army to counterattack from the east, where Sunagakure was. Regardless of their relative safety, there were few fans of the brutal and reckless war that the scourge of the desert waged, if any.
"Oh, yeah…!?" Silsilat, the cowardly goon, also under Fennec's employ, whined out upon seeing the public cheer for the woman who probably advocated the hit on his and his best friend's heads earlier. "Well, I've got some words for you scum too!" he cried out, even though no one amongst the audience could hear the cowardly and hated contestant who laid with his back pressed against Cursed Warrior wreckage sticking out from the wrathful and uneasy artificial lake that was the level from which one was considered ringed out.
"All of you are so quick to cheer for one of our deaths, just because we took gold and orders from Fennec! All of you and all your self-righteousness deserve to be crushed and dumped into the sea too! None of you care that Khinzira was just a mercenary doing a job, that she had to abandon her principles and once again serve a man to provide food and shelter to the tribeswomen she rescued, and that she was only doing it to settle them on the patch of desert land that Fennec promised all of us as ours!" Silsilat wept in complete breakdown. He was by far the weakest and most cowardly member of his faction, yet, in a cruel twist of fate, he was the last of Fennec's mercs remaining.
At least if one ignored the steampunk clock golem that was thrashing and grabbing for anything to break its fall, wrestling Cursed Warriors and kicking off from falling wreckage or using destroyed remnants of Cursed Warriors for footing to stay from splashing into the artificial lake and getting itself eliminated. Ignoring this colossal warrior wouldn't be as silly as one would make it out to be when one considered the golem was utterly mindless now that most of its keepers had been eliminated. Killed or gravely wounded and dragged off to the infirmary.
"Hmm… Somehow we've avoided defeat at the hands of that monstrous ninja," Bishiyari, the Supreme amongst the Salvari, observed with a tranquil statement while hovered suspended in the air, enveloped in a dharma aura and levitating in a praying position. "Though the destruction of the entire arena is regrettable. We are now gods without a domain."
A loud pop made Bishiyari stiffen up. He felt the icy touch of a metallic hook wrapped around his back. While it attempted to put a squeeze on the Salvari, as if to entrap him, it lacked even a remote approach close to the world of strength necessary to discomfort Bishiyari.
"That is odd," Bishiyari stated after turning around with a hook still clenched to his back. "I didn't sense any hostility on anyone's part. Have all of my earlier battles dulled my instincts this much?"
A dire sound of reeling steel wire snuffed Bishiyari's contemplations out. With no significant effort, the Salvari tore the steel wire away and then glared at the incoming boulder that was attached to the impressive mechanical hook gadget that his assailant employed against him. With his eyes closed, Bishiyari pressed his hand against the boulder's surface and colored it with the golden shine of a complex lotus motif before slicing it up into pieces.
The Supreme One's eyes shot wide open again when he heard a howl all too familiar to him–that of the Cursed Warrior. The obsidian draconic shape swept down straight at him with a scarlet blaze pulsing around its wound back fist. Bishiyari grunted in pain as the fist blasted him away. The utterly aghast audience of spectators observed as their favorite skid across the lake's surface before bursting with a showering pillar of water that expelled enough droplets into the air to rain down all across the district of the sheikhate.
"The boulder wasn't the attack, it was the diversion to conceal the approach of the Cursed Warrior, huh…?" Bishiyari muttered to himself, floating on the water's surface with no grave injuries yet still struggling to wrap his boundless mind around the fact he'd been eliminated with this trick.
Meanwhile, atop the draconic Cursed Warrior that scored the outrage-inducing elimination, laid a cardboard box fashioned like a sandstone block. The cardboard box tilted neatly, revealing a battle-hardened veteran spy underneath holding in his hand a dispenser armed with the exact reeling hook mechanism that ensured the Cursed Warrior's successful attack.
"The reason you couldn't see it coming is… Because I feel no malice toward my targets. You're just part of my job. Nothing personal. You would've been a troublesome guy to see in the Top 16, luckily enough, you can't trick a soaring weapon of mass destruction with your illusions," Hit Boomslang, a veteran spy turned mercenary, flicked a smoke out from under his cardboard box before shutting it down and beginning to crawl away from undue attention.
"Unbelievable! Imperceivable! Incomprehensible!" the announcer finally regained the gift of breath in his chest. "T-T-The… The Supreme Being of Ultimate Goodness, the Supreme One… The mightiest Salvari… Bishiyari has been eliminated! This is the first time that the peerless god of the arena has tasted defeat! How!? How could this happen!? The Cursed Warrior Batsumon!? No! Something else was at play, some wicked miscreant had arranged that rock to obstruct the Supreme One's view until it was too late! Then… Then… The arena! Yes… The arena has been destroyed, and if the ring was still there, the Supreme One would have crashed right onto it!"
With a hopeful look, the announcer turned to the Sheikh for confirmation, but the ecstatic and red-cheeked, chubby man, surrounded by veiled and scantily clad women from all sides and holding an exotic sweet in his right hand, shook his head and waved his left hand to continue the event. Needless to say, this caused a considerable uproar in the audience. One after another, the raucous crowd kept repeating the same excuses, but they only had each other to bounce them off of, since no one with the power to change anything moved their finger to enact that change.
"Bishiyari… It was very unfortunate for that boulder to end up where it did and obstruct the view of a construct with no ill feelings of its own, guided by a pilot that's just blindly following orders," Hathmonpachi observed while shaking his head and lamenting the elimination of one of the strongest warriors amongst those that survived Kusagoro's rampage.
"Luck had nothing to do with this," Dashula, the second last remaining Salvari, noted while Hathmonpachi's abilities provided plenty of fortunately placed obstacles, ranging from debris to bypassing Cursed Warriors, in mid-air for each of the two combatants to suspend their position in the air without falling down. "This was a carefully considered hit. Still, given these conditions we have to work with, the fact that the one who positioned that rock there evaded even Bishiyari's notice, we have little chance of finding that competitor right now. Our priority is making sure that we survive this stage and at least one Salvari moves on."
"Oh, I'm feeling particularly lucky about the odds of that," Hathmonpachi clapped his hands with a cheerful grin of bountiful and blushing cheeks.
Yoibetsu-N thrust his feet downward. While the Kumogakure ninja was enveloped with his Lightning Armor, the technique gave him a jolt to his nerves and amped up his muscles enough to be able to soar through the air by simply walking with lively kicks that propelled cushions of compressed air downward and propelled the electrified Kumogakure ninja upward.
Just when Yoibetsu seemed to be in a perfect position up in the air to survey the battlefield and assist those struggling with the current battlefield conditions the most with their elimination, the eyes of the Kumogakure ninja switched to something behind him. In a swift, thunderbolt blitz, the electrified Kumogakure ninja vanished from his location and positioned himself in a different spot on the opposite side of the battlefield.
"Motherf…" something very potty-mouthed with the voice of a grown man, yet looking like a linen girly doll, cursed. The unfortunate serial killer trapped inside the body of a raggedy linen doll hovered in the air a bit with its hand raised over its head, relaying the idea that had Yoibetsu noticed it just one blink later–he'd have had to deal with a knife in his back.
"You are incredibly sneaky to have slipped underneath my clothes like that," Yoibetsu-N noted, looking back at his attempted murderer as the doll finally felt the demand of gravity and began free-falling. Meanwhile, Yoibetsu-N thrust his feet down a few times and pumped himself higher. He still had some chakra to spend, it should have lasted the Lightning Armor long enough for at least a dozen more unfortunate souls to get canned from the battle royale.
"I'll show you exactly how sneaky I can be!" Bambi, the serial killer linen doll spread its arms to the side and let the rushing wind catch the bottom of its skirt, spreading it like a blooming flower and carrying the featherweight doll gliding across on a turtle-pace glide downward. While the large kitchen knife that the serial killer doll held in its hand dragged it down from being able to freely glide for any period of time in the air, the weight of the knife only dragged it down at a sluggish pace as the improvised, utterly shameless flotation method it employed added to how long the doll would have taken to land. "You'll slip up eventually, either you or someone else will. I'll ride their backs all the way back to you and stab your fucking eye out!"
"In that case, maybe I should make sure that doesn't happen?" Yoibetsu-N teased the serial killer doll by playfully stretching his body out in mid-air and scratching his chin, pretending to be deep in thought of what he should have done when his mind was made up the moment this doll attacked him. "Flying Solebutt!"
Soaring forward and maneuvering around the chaos brewing in the air, Yoibetsu-N attacked Bambi with a spinning, aerial solebutt kick, forcing the raggedy doll to block it with its knife. Cursing, the lightweight doll flew off from the backlash to the colliding forces, and its elimination became imminent. Showing exactly how shameless it was, the linen doll spread its dress again to soften the fall, this time forcefully with its hands. Gnashing its teeth, Bambi flung the kitchen knife it clasped in its hand at Yoibetsu-N's face, only to be reflected with a backhand slap coated with Lightning Armor.
"My, my! Bambi shows exactly how much turning this sheikhate into its own hunting ground costs to it! Not even Bambi's personal sense of shame gets in the way of that, as Bambi will spread her dress and flash everything that the dressmaker endowed her with to the audience! Let's just feel grateful that Bambi isn't a real girl!" the announcer noticed the clash between the Kumogakure ninja and the serial killer doll brewing in mid-air.
"Take this!" Bambi grabbed hold of her middle section and violently tore it open with its own two hands, making it look as easy as pulling apart a raggedy linen doll actually was. Pulling a handful of fluff from her own sewn guts, Bambi flung them in a disrespectful slap straight into Yoibetsu-N's face, giving the mean-spirited and potty-mouthed doll the distraction it needed.
Having moved close enough to exchange blows with the falling doll, Yoibetsu-N pulled aside to avoid being smacked with a handful of sewing junk that the dressmaker stuffed Bambi full of to give her girly body shape. Oddly enough, that junk proved to be very conductive as, even flying close to Yoibetsu-N's Lightning Armor, it forced a strange reaction that snuffed the concentrated aura of Lightning Release chakra out and spanned it over a much longer area as a field of static electricity.
"Yeah, that's right, punk!" Bambi pumped its hand cheering on itself. "You've soaked me with static electricity after hitting me with that last attack. Looks like that static electricity field's making your fancy ninja arts all janky. Too bad for you!"
The pesky linen doll grabbed hold of Yoibetsu-N's thigh and began scaling it to the side, like a spider. After crawling up to Yoibetsu-N's ninja pouch, the linen doll pulled out a kunai. It began frantically stabbing Yoibetsu-N wherever it could hit as the Kumogakure ninja, who just now found himself in freefall and surrounded by a field of static electricity, struggled to catch the slippery parasite and pull it away from him. While Bambi's hands weren't as strong as those of the serial killer back when he still had his man's body and the kunai was a pretty elementary tool, Yoibetsu-N still took some mean and shallow cuts and stabs all over his backside, hips, forearms, and thighs before pulling Bambi away and punting it away.
"You asshole! I'll cut your fucking head off and flap your loose jaws as an apology for that!" Bambi barked out while flailing the kunai it stole from Yoibetsu-N's pouch around wildly, hoping to get some more lucky stabs in despite the drastically increased distance between them.
With a dire grimace, Yoibetsu-N looked around, realizing that the ground was rushing in rather quickly and that he'd end up making a big and embarrassing splash that would end up eliminating him next unless he did something about that powerful field of static electricity.
"That's right, fuckwad! You're out of options and the ground's comin' in hot!" Bambi teased Yoibetsu-N by pushing out its little stitched-up hand. It tried bending the left and right sides of its flat linen hand to give the closest impression to flipping the bird it could do without actual digits.
"Hmm… I guess there's no helping it," Yoibetsu-N calmed himself down with a sigh and pressed his knuckles by his side, positioning his feet at shoulder width and tensing up his entire body. The problem with Lightning Armor was that it was made out not of natural electricity, but Lightning Release chakra. That meant that a powerful enough Lightning Release chakra source, or that of natural electricity like the static electricity field, would always drain the source of Lightning Release chakra and absorb the jutsu Yoibetsu-N tried to pull off. However, that went both ways.
"Lightning Armor: Level Two!" Yoibetsu exclaimed, bursting with an explosive and violent aura of sparkling blue electricity that sparkled with the aftereffect of white and volatile lightning sparks all around. The upgrade in Lightning Armor turned up Yoibetsu's hair and spiked it while simultaneously amping up the electricity in his nervous system and muscles, causing a rapid and considerable increase in stimulated muscle mass.
"You can't!" Bambi gasped. "You'll get shorted out, dumbass!"
However, instead of the field of static electricity from electrified airborne sewing junk beginning to drain Yoibetsu-N's chakra, the exact opposite happened. Yoibetsu's upgraded Lightning Armor began absorbing the field of static electricity, causing the electrified fluffs in the air to hasten their descent down into the water.
"Aww, frick…" Bambi cursed shortly before a shrill shriek of a living thunderbolt that positioned Yoibetsu-N directly above the linen doll, in an almost completed position of a backflip. This gave Bambi just a microsecond to blank out and process its upcoming demise as Yoibetsu-N slammed down his descending kick in the back of the linen doll's head, pumping the doll with enough tension to explode into a field of tufts and torn linen straps.
With the serial killer's mind and soul being cast out from the destroyed body of the linen doll, the world was rid of the serial killer Bambi's threat forever.