"The serial killer Bambi has been eliminated! That means that there are two serial killers still competing. After losing a bunch of members early on, this faction held on for a long time by just biding their time and stalking the weakest targets, it seems!" the announcer reported the frantically shifting situation in the collapsed ring as chaos unfolded with competitors competing for space in the air, frantically trying not to drop into the artificial lake below. "This also means that we've got 26 competitors left, only 10 eliminations short of determining the Top 16!"
Fueled by this encouragement of the raging flame, the audience howled and waved in their seats as fighters summoned their deepest sources of strength and squeezed them for all it was worth to make it through the last stretches. Whatever difficulties the Top 16 could present, in many ways, this battle royale has proven to be easily the most grueling stage of the entire event.
The rampant scarlet-glowing bipedal obsidian dragon hurled toward the hooded magician Vospyka, who stood atop of a stack of nails on the ground, just a bit above the water surface layer. Being so close to the edge of elimination, very few who weren't able to control their flight or fall would have attempted to target her. But this clever ploy only exposed the suggestion that perhaps Vospyka was exhausted by her earlier encounters, no matter how successful they were, to where she'd rely on such a method to continue the competition.
Charging forward, the massive dragon with ram's horns swooped just above Vospyka to raise a tremendous gust that would have blown the magician off her stack of nails and sent her swimming and out of the battle royale. Vospyka crossed her arms, drowning reality into a realm of inverted colors as the light became darkness, illuminated only by shimmering, starlit lines that replaced the silhouettes of everything that was real.
In this sudden shift of stopped time, one blink later, the Cursed Warrior swept through its intended target and caused howling whirlwinds to ascend and begin drafting in extreme amounts of water which the tornadoes spouted into the air and caused a refreshing downpour, only to realize that its target was no longer there. The loud and shrill singing of metal being bent, pulled, and torn made the audience gasp and cover their ears as half-embedded massive nails plummeted into the water.
"Contestant Vospyka's impressive ability to skewer her opponents with nails during stopped time appears to have only been semi-effective against the Cursed Warrior Batsumon!" the announcer reported after putting on fluffy red earphones to filter out the revolting cacophony of scraping metallic alloys that the Cursed Warriors had been built from. "While the magician's nails achieved some success, they only seem to have damaged and grazed Batsumon's outer layer of armor! These living weapons are meant to be seen as god's curse against mankind for its violence for a reason! Who told me that legend? No one! I made it up just now on the spot! What else am I supposed to do when no one will explain a thing about who these Cursed Warriors are and why they have pilots inside? I don't have all the answers…"
"Hmm… Your shell is hardy indeed. While my ability usually exploits the fact that, during the stopped time, a body cannot augment its endurance with mana, because the time in which it would do so does not exist, your armored shell provided limited protection. Odd… I've penetrated any suit of armor I've encountered before, even those enchanted with magic," Vospyka muttered to herself, knowing full well that her opponent would not respond to her.
The reverse-voodoo magician who, instead of skewering voodoo dolls, skewered her targets themselves, stood atop another massive nail embedded into the ground that held her suspended above the water surface by a narrow margin. By employing impeccable acrobatics spinning in mid-air and throwing additional colossal nails to embed into the ground to provide her platform for movement, Vospyka moved around while flinging an additional lance-sized nail toward Batsumon.
While initially, the Cursed Warrior deflected a barrage of lance-sized nails with the backside of its wings, then flapped them for a wall of gust to blow the incoming projectiles out of the air, then caught one dangerous nail and melted it in its heated to the point of redness hand, in a blink, all color became inverted and a few nails punched through Batsumon's armor, bursting the flying bipedal obsidian dragon with streaming scarlet neon lights into flocks of sparks and electric jolts where its systems were malfunctioning.
Inside the head of this ram-horned bipedal artificial dragon, a four-meter-tall, muscular man with a cartoonishly lean waist and arms that reached the ground stared through the beast's own mosaic lenses on its face with simmering wrath on his face. The pilot wore the standard Cursed Warrior pilot uniform in military boots, red suit trousers with Bordeaux-colored suspenders, a tight white shirt, and a red vest and blazer with military shoulder pads. What made this pilot stand out amongst the flock was the fact of his size, forcing him to control its Cursed Warrior from a cockpit while crouched and hunched over, also, his untidy and spiky strawberry blond hair in addition to visible cybernetic patterns and exposed metallic plates that suggested that the man had been cybernetically augmented or rebuilt after some sort of gruesome accident.
The pilot smashed the control panel while frothing, bubbling secretion from his mouth. "That bitch!" he bellowed as signals of structural damage to the Cursed Warrior began popping up all over the various screens and status reports available to the man. Panting and heaving, the pilot realized that the control over the Cursed Warrior was now surrendered to autopilot, because of his wrathful outrage. As he looked up to stare through the glowing scarlet lens, trails of machine oil squeezed through the crevices where metal molded with the man could be seen.
With control being handed to the autopilot, the skewered and scraped Batsumon took a few bold swoops into the sky and roared with the troublesome noise of roaring machine engines mixed with a bestial clamor. The noise cast a concussive shockwave around the Cursed Warrior, while the manmade monster prepared to swoop down and attack its opponent again. Vospyka pulled a pair of nails from behind her dark hood and crossed them in front of her like swords, preparing to dance with this monstrous automaton like a matador skewering a raging bull.
Instead, the Cursed Warrior whipped with its tail, expanding it to lash Vospyka with it and knock the magician into the water beneath her. Had this attack knocked Vospyka over from her nailed-down platform, she'd have plunged into the water and would have been eliminated immediately. Vospyka wouldn't have that. She halted all time by reversing and inverting the colors defining the visual aspect of all of reality like a filter applied to its canvas, thrusting nails into the elongated tail that was incoming.
However, there was nothing solid to nail the tail down to. Instead, the stacked nails grazed and damaged Batsumon's tail, but couldn't quite penetrate it. The surface was too small; the armor was too compact and stacked up. The tail bent and continued to stretch, smacking Vospyka at her right side and sending her flying out of control, headed toward the edge of elimination.
Not willing to gamble on its opponent merely being eliminated, and such an eventuality not even being programmed into the autopilot of Batsumon, the Cursed Warrior vaulted through the skies with a mad frontal roll before slashing at Vospyka with its nails. Time stopped and colors became inverted again, Vospyka realized that if she used this occasion to attempt an attack, she'd fail to protect herself and get eliminated. Meanwhile, given how her opponent was a mechanical titan and not even human, she couldn't be sure that impaling it where its armor had been peeled open and weakened would even kill it. Instead, Vospyka corrected herself by impaling a nail into the ground and then pushing one up into the air where the Cursed Warrior's arm was incoming to slash her with its nails.
In another instance of singing, cacophonous metal nearly deafened the audience. The gruesome sound of ripping cloth and splattering blood followed it immediately as Batsumon pushed straight through the nail, letting it stab through its arm while it concluded its reckless slash. Vospyka froze in mid-air. Her eyes had been staring onward with a dazed expression just a blink before she frantically threw up blood and her body opened up with gruesome, torn wounds.
While bleeding profusely, just out of sheer luck, Vospyka fell and hung onto with her limp, hanging body on the nail she just now impaled for balance. Her disgraceful position and gruesome wounds allowed her hood to slip off and fly off with the gale, revealing a dark-skinned woman with white hair and tribal facial painting underneath and a soaked with blood brown corset, an apron, and a red skirt. Blood trickled down the nail that unconscious Vospyka hung on to.
With an automated roar, Batsumon's tail opened with the sliding armor scales revealing the glowing neon source of energy underneath which caused the monster's tail to flare up with scarlet and pink flames before smashing its tail into the general area where Vospyka laid. The woman's body soared into the air like a rag doll, thrown there by the force of the resulting blast while the nail that held her up melted into purple goop.
"Obliterate her to bits!" the pilot bellowed, thrashing inside the cockpit while he had little to no control over the operations of his piloted beast. Roaring while flexing its terrifying visage in the middle of the collapsed arena, Batsumon blew out a stream of scarlet and pink flames from barrels inside its mouth before winding back its fist and drawing it into a fist. With unrelenting and uncompromised pure force, it threw that blazing fist forward, overwhelming and incinerating the airborne magician to a trail of ashes. Being knocked unconscious and critically injured, she wasn't able to use her mystical time-stop ability, leaving Batsumon free to rampage as his time was his alone once more.
"Oh, no! What a tragic end to the magician Vospyka, who has been so dominant until now! She was always a renegade in her faction. Whereas the other magicians sought to understand and control everything, Vospyka thrived in the chaos and unpredictability of her mystical abilities and loved the utter randomness of magic… If there's one piece of comfort she can take into the afterlife, it's that she died facing just that kind of unpredictable and irresistible monster in an event that's proven to be completely impossible to predict with major league powerhouses of this tournament like King Wulithmes, Sachiko Tanogen, Kusagoro and many more having already been thrown out!" the announcer ruled in Vospyka's elimination.
Overall, the magicians were doing incredibly well so far and had an incredibly strong showing in the battle royale with four masters of outerversal mysticism still competing for their right to build their nexus from which they could help use their knowledge to help this world ascend to an unimaginable level of development and prosperity. Yet that right still had to be earned through combat and this world showed remarkable resistance against that idea.
Meanwhile, the spy Kai hovered in mid-air riding a red mechanical hoverbike that burnt down a pair of seals inserted into slots on both of its sides to use the chakra sealed inside them in order to run properly. Hovering with an ignited aura of dharma, the Salvari Dashula descended before the spy with his arms crossed and glared at the spy with empty eyes gleaming with azure flames of pure dharma.
"You've done well to avoid trouble so far, sadly, victory does not always come to those who avoid conflict. That is something that Bishiyari may have believed in. Still, Bishiyari has been eliminated," Dashula pointed out while the horrified spy turned around and blasted off with a raging flame cast by the engine fueled by incinerated ninja scrolls.
Dashula lifted his right arm, showing off the glorious golden trident he wielded in battle and letting his rampant dharma coat it before roaring and changing color to pure flame. With impeccable aim, Dashula cast his trident, which blitzed forward like a flaming ray of golden light and penetrated clean through the vehicle that Kai the spy rode, sending the spy plummeting down into the water as his bag of tricks had run dry by now.
"Kai, the spy, has been eliminated! This leaves only Hit Boomslang remaining as the sole representative of the spies! It appears that the spies and ninja who are becoming natural rivals in the outside world due to how they do similar work and are forced to compete for clients and missions are performing similarly with both the spies and the ninja having just one member representing them remaining!" the announcer reported with cheer. "Just 24 competitors left folks, I can almost see the finish line now and with the arena having been blown up, eliminations just keep coming one right after the other!"
"Enjoying yourself bullying the weaklings?" Hathmonpachi playfully teased his fellow Salvari.
"Hardly," Dashula sighed and closed his eyes, snuffing out the dharma flame gleaming from them. "Damn that Bishiyari! I don't care about being the supreme Salvari, I don't want this country or to manage it. I just want to fight strong opponents and push my body and spirit further. Why did he have to get eliminated?"
"Calm down, when you're in charge of Agbarah, you can always just relinquish the rule to Bishiyari whenever you want. Who's going to stop you? You're the ruler, right?" Hathmonpachi waved his chubby hand while twisting his mustache with the free hand.
"I see… I can even demand that Bishiyari fight me for it!" Dashula's eyes shot wide open, changing the color of the dharma flaming as his aura grew from tranquil blue to blazing red. "He rarely fights me without good reason and we rarely end up matched up against each other in tournaments, yet he pushes my abilities like nobody else. The Supreme One, if it is for the fate of the entire Agbarah, he will face me with his full power! I can hardly wait!"
"Whoa, whoa… You still need to win, remember?" Hathmonpachi smacked the back of Bishiyari while the two hovered in the air, suspended by their burning dharma auras.
Omobito Tabahaku flew on top of his levitating claymore. He had collected a decent bit of scratches and scrapes after facing off against Sachiko Tanogen, yet he pulled off an unbelievable victory. It was tough to imagine for someone who lived and made their bread eliminating outerversal demons on the higher dimensions that there would be people resting happily on the three-dimensional plane who could push him to his limit and force him to agree to date them just so he could get them to stand down. The troubled and bruised magical swordsman picked his nose and flicked the booger off into the restless, artificial ocean below.
The magical swordsman picked up on the thick air of dark foreboding and took a plunge off his magical swordsman, which served as his witch's broom in a sense. Grabbing it in mid-air, he placed it in the way of a katana slash and met the blade of Ichijiki Muramasa, the last remaining samurai in the competition. The two men stared at each other for a second with Ichijiki looking down on his opponent because of his awkward, upside-down position and a generally repulsive, disheveled appearance.
"What you want?" Omobito grumbled out before pulling his claymore and slipping it underneath his feet to keep him afloat while Ichijiki Muramasa absorbed the force of their collision and vaulted with a backflip to land atop a sticking-out piece of wreckage far below on the restless lake of water.
A disturbing, low-pitched reeling noise distracted the trope magician, forcing him to turn around and draw his claymore from beneath his feet to block a two-blade swing from the one-eyed swordsman who somehow blitzed him from behind. Once again, the two met blades. This time, however, Ichijiki lingered in mid-air and continued to push his crossed swords in an attempt to overcome Omobito's block. The magical swordsman seemed more entertained by this attempt than anything.
"You've eliminated our secret weapon and reduced our chances of success. If we return to the Iron Shogun having failed to secure this land for him, the only way to restore our honor will be seppuku!" Ichijiki replied, beginning to frantically slash with his swords and put Omobito on the defensive for a second as he had to navigate his cumbersome sword to intercept the flurry of two speedy swords relentlessly swinging at him. Just as it seemed like Ichijiki would find his opening, the samurai was called back down by gravity but kicked off of the back of a bypassing Cursed Warrior to throw himself at Omobito again. "Then you went on and charmed Sachiko-san, threatening to rob her of her powers."
Clashing blades in mid-air and compensating for his lack of speed and technical skill with a sword with the sheer size and weight of his chunk of steel, Omobito smirked with a mean-spirited grin while pressing on yet finding himself outmatched by the much more agile and technically sound swordsman who, once in a while, needed to descend and find footing to kick himself back up into the air and continue the engagement.
"What's wrong? I thought that you autocratic regime types hated whimsy cartoons! If anything, I did you a favor by taking her off your hands and off your country," Omobito taunted the last samurai who crossed his swords to absorb the mighty blow and skid backward through most of the arena of distance. "Hmm… Impressive, seeing you prisoners of the third dimension block my strikes and your puny swords refusing to crumble will never cease to amaze me."
"It's kenki. A sword is just as hard and sharp as the spirit of the swordsman wielding it," Ichijiki proclaimed before swinging his blades and forming slashing crescent projectiles of compressed air to attack Omobito from a grand distance. Omobito turned to the side, then bent his head to the right to avoid the incoming attacks before nonchalantly flinging his Trope Grimoire into the air to read off its pages.
"Trope Grimoire: Broken Bird!" Omobito chanted out, coating his magical-gem-incrusted claymore with a mustard-colored coating of ethereal flames. Growling, he took off at Ichijiki and swung his claymore, swallowing the battlefield in the mystical field of ethereal mustard-colored flames. Before Omobito could recover from his own trope magic attack, an ear-raking howl made him try to race his glare to look behind him, but he was too late.
A cross-shaped bloody slash decorated the exposed back of the trope magician. His eyes rolled back, and he plummeted into the water with a noisy and painful-sounding splash.
"You uncultured fool, you pretend to know a thing about the tropes of our exalted works of literature, yet you remain blatantly uninformed that the Broken Bird trope is most commonly associated with women. It has no effect on me," Ichijiki gracefully landed on one of Vospyka's embedded nail platforms and sheathed his swords while carefully correcting the bands protecting his missing eye. "Although, before I cut you down, you raised a fine point–with Sachiko's cartoonish superpower extinguished, nothing keeps us from eliminating her. She's been a thorn in the Iron Shogun's side for a long time now, after all. This could be more useful than this entire eyesore of a country, in the end."