Stumbling over her own sloppy steps, Captain Li Shan let gravity do most of the work as she employed wide, over-the-top swings to dispose of the pulsating, heart-like tumor she had to slay to keep herself in the game. While the first swing showed a lot of promise, albeit with the blade's edge gliding across the fleshy pocket of puss without cutting it open yet, the second one came down from a double-handed slamming position.
Li Shan grunted in pain and strain, expelling spouts of blood from the corners of her mouth with the spirited swing as she had settled on showing little to no restraint with the swing that would have been decisive in dispatching of this putrid creature. The membrane coating the heart-like core enveloped in a muscle tissue it used to cling to the void like some webbing protecting a cocoon opened from the slash, however; it didn't spill blood or something to be perceived as such. Instead, it spat sticky muscle tendons like a spider weaving a web. The newly formed tissue that sprouted at an alarming rate wrapped itself around the dao of the pirate captain, leaving her ensnared.
Letting go of her sword and staggering backward, Captain Li Shan pulled out a pair of hand cannons and began launching miniature cannonballs at the abominable womb of flesh. At first, she meant to put these shots to good use in obliterating the expansive strands of muscular flesh that were reaching out to ensnare her like they trapped Li Shan's dao. Then, as comeuppance of her desperate means to inflict all the damage she could on the monster, the blowback from her own cannons reduced Li Shan to a crumbling mess and kicked her down on her back just as much as the cannonballs opened guts-spilling holes in the pulsating, muscle-weaving heart.
Just like before, as the heart popped with grievous rips blasted by the hand cannons, it produced sprouts of fleshy webbing, consisting entirely of new, tumorous growth tissue. The tissue grabbed hold of Captain Li Shan's ankle. Snarling and cursing with the mouth of a real pirate, albeit unintelligibly because of her raging fever and excessive bleeding, Li Shan opened fire at the tumorous tissue growing over her ankle that threatened to pull her into the heart's core as it stiffened.
More and more tumorous growth tendons launched themselves at Li Shan, slithering into the barrel of her hand cannons and jamming the guns from inside. Like a weed, the muscle burst the weapons into useless junk with internal pressure while the muscular tendons erupted like uncontrollable, bloody vines and wrapped all over the struggling, afflicted buccaneer. After just a momentary delay in her fruitless struggle, the growing muscle elevated her off the ground while it continued to grow larger, thicker, and more out of control until the tumorous growth didn't just restrain and suffocate the pirate, but drew her back into the gooey depths of cherry-colored bile that Li Shan could only assume was tainted blood, devoid of any trace of blood's usual life-channeling properties.
Even as the heart drew her into its deepest inner pocket, wrapping the thrashing pirate up into a forced fetal position, Li Shan's fists and feet banged from inside, causing noticeable protrusions from inside. However, this admirable pugilism didn't achieve much, since it couldn't even penetrate the coating membrane of the main heart tissue. Even if it could, the tears would only create more holes through which more and larger muscle tendrils could spawn. Even now, the tumorous heart had grown wildly out of control, unraveling with colossal, root-like muscle growths that were threatening the integrity of the whole void the Game of Life and Death was taking place in.
However, with the game being protected and partly curated by the metaphysical concept of the end of all things, Bogemu merely smirked with a nonchalant challenge to the monster to touch him. Whether it be because of his effective taunting, or because the monster was merely functioning with a mindless "consume all" mentality, a humongous tendril attempted to whack Bogemu in the face with a lashing motion. It collapsed into ash before it could even come close to doing so. No matter how immortal and regenerative the tumorous heart monster and its growths were, all things submitted to the inevitability of the end at some point.
With a curious glare, Bogemu leaned to the side and observed the tumorous heart begin to bubble from inside. It was suffering far more rapidly and with far more threat to the shape's consistency than it did before. This could not have been merely Captain Li Shan gaining a second wind. If anything, being submerged in the gooey bile for so long could have only driven all semblance of the fight out of the drowning captain. And yet…
Much sooner than Bogemu would have anticipated it, the tumorous heart burst open and, instead of producing more growths, began expelling the rotten bile it hosted to the outside. Pumping, pouring, spilling, spouting. Li Shan's shivering and wailing shape skid across the floor, still stuck in the fetal position in which the heart left her trapped while inside. Slowly approaching the tuned-out pirate who faded in and out of consciousness with affliction, Bogemu clapped in applause as the void absorbed the melting tumorous shape back inside.
"Impressive! Maybe I overdid it with how potent this virus is. It seems to have killed this monster merely after coming into contact with you, its carrier. Much sooner than the virus killed you, might I add," Bogemu applauded his rival while offering her a hand to help her up. Grunting and panting, shivering, weeping, and drooling with blood, Captain Li Shan dragged her sorry body back to the square she was supposed to occupy for the game to continue. "Oh… My bad, I almost duped you into earning a third Penalty Mark. Completely by accident, I swear…"
"Accident my ass!" Li Shan bellowed while elevating herself into a staggering stance on both feet. "No one could have won all these games all this time against all these players. Not unless you were "assisting" the outcome you wanted to happen while pretending to play fair!"
"I'd have never taken you for such a sour loser, Captain Li Shan," Bogemu sighed in disappointment. "Trust me, if Death had an excuse to end my pitiful existence, it would take it without hesitation. The fact that I still exist is living proof that Death has no such excuse and the game is being played fairly."
"I've played against many spirits-smelling cheats. It comes with the territory of being a pirate!" Li Shan spat a mouthful of blood to the side to the best of her ability to barf it out while getting none of it on herself. "Dice, cards, or figures on a board, I'll admit, this is the first time I'm playing against this particular brand of a cheat, but I'm confident that you'll end no better than the rotten sea dogs whose arms we've "bloomed"."
"Bloomed?" Bogemu pinched his chin with his index and thumb, raising a curious eyebrow.
"Slide a sword vertically into the cheat's hand, then keep on sliding as far as it goes, then repeat the same process horizontally. After you're done–turn the blade and see the arms "bloom"," Li Shan reported, sweating up as intense of a downpour as she bled out from her eyes, nose, mouth, and other orifices.
"That's an interesting punishment, I'll remember it for the sake of using it in a game some time," Bogemu pressed his hands to the sides of his skull to tighten the lock of his split head together better. Then, with a snap of his fingers, he made the fiendish dice appear over his head, rumble and shake to all sides. Until eventually they settled on a side that lit up with white flame, spelling out the number "42".
The game void shook before flipping over completely. Both players plunged into the darkness, seeing the reflection of the game's board at the bottom somewhere alarmingly far beneath them. The transforming realm spat out squares from the board that shot as rising cinderblocks and connected to form roads of different contents, consistencies, shapes, widths, and types.
"Oh, it's the Pedal Game. And I appear to have missed out on the unfortunate trigger of this horrible virus of our mutual invention too!" Bogemu switched his position from a more chaotic, flappy falling position to one more reminding of a controlled freefall. "I advise you to use the same method you used to command those dice to roll to build yourself a vehicle. The goal of this game is to complete the circuit that's risen using your assembled vehicle. The track will change according to the whims of the game, so you must adapt on the fly and modify your vehicle using your imagination and authority over the game's realm."
Bogemu rolled in mid-air, transitioning into a standing, needle-straight fall before comfortably landing his rear end inside of a tube-shaped rocket car that just appeared where he landed. Just as Bogemu leaned out to peek at his opponent and confirm if she pulled off the assignment of producing herself a vehicle to navigate this track, Bogemu's brain almost escaped the constantly splitting skull of his when a loud horn of a ship made him turn his head in the opposite direction.
Of course, a pirate captain would choose a colossal dreadnaught. However, Bogemu thought little Li Shan's chances of sailing anywhere across a solid dirt road in that thing. It only then occurred to him that such a ship shouldn't have stood straight in the first place. Baffled, Bogemu leaned his head out to witness a quartet of cycle-type wheels attached to the sides of the pirate battleship, keeping it straight and on the road.
"I see you're adapting your vehicle of choice already. Let's see how much of this wacky race this ridiculous car of yours can complete," Bogemu issued a challenge he knew his opponent couldn't hear while gripping the wheel of his rocket car firmly.
Accompanied by deafening rumbling, the playing board turned into a system of ancient rocky road platforms hanging above a lake. Perilous in their age, their instability, and the fact that almost a third of the road system had withered and given way, collapsing into the lake below, making one have to choose their path carefully, the rocky roads curled into a tower-like shape.
A scarlet energy ball emerged from the lake's surface, hurling up and positioning itself in between both racers before lighting up on burgundy-colored fire. A golden energy ball followed, positioning itself slightly higher before erupting into lemon-colored flame. Then came an emerald ball that burst into a lime-colored blaze immediately after taking its position at the top of the hovering stack. With the emergence of the last sphere, the riders took off.
Bogemu's rocket car launched a stream of deep blue flames from its rear, decorated with golden brown streamers and sparkly starlit sparks, the magician took off, racing across the road platforms. Because of the aerodynamic shape of his vehicle and the immense speed he accumulated, it wasn't too hard to shoot off from one road platform to another when he reached the end where the road collapsed.
Meanwhile, Li Shan's dread-cycle was far less speedy. When Bogemu took off, a pair of massive cannons stuck out from the rear end of the racing battleship, shooting off their load into the air and propelling the rolling battleship forward out of inertia. The bold pirate captain had to deal with the same issues as Bogemu did, however, since her vehicle of choice was far heftier, she couldn't just rely on its speed and shape to jump across platforms of collapsed road. Where speed and weight failed, innovation compensated. Upon reaching the end of the road, Li Shan's battleship plunged, but then spread wooden wings as horizontal sails and glided across the edge toward the road platforms ahead.
"Well, you've moved from the starting line and didn't immediately fall off the stage. Riding in that thing, that's an achievement," Bogemu noted to himself while glaring back at the rowdy battleship rolling across on cycle-shaped wheels that didn't seem to let the massive mismatch of weight bother them at all. Clenching himself together, Bogemu shot off toward the top of the tower.
Once there, the road seemed to end, but there was no finish line in sight. Instead, the tower had many colorful wooden rods rising and plunging into the clouds while lanterns beamed and danced across the sky, pointing at different clouds and giving them exotic colors because of the intensity of the light beams that the lanterns projected. All around the tower, compact spheres of different colored Earths spun around toward the zenith somewhere beyond the clouds while ladders, wheels, and trapezes were scattered all across the top level of the tower.
"Okay, into the heavens then…" Bogemu mumbled to himself as he visualized a button on the control panel next to the wheel of his rocket car, which he smashed with an open palm. Instead of escalating him forward, the wheels of his car began turning backward, however, instead of taking his car backward, they merely aimed it toward the sky like a cannon. By slamming the center of his wheel and pulling on a crank lost somewhere in the control panel, Bogemu shot the front half of his rocket car into the sky while opening the doors of his car and firing a pair of grappling hooks from compartments he just now imagined in his doors.
By sticking to the trapeze handles, the grappling hooks allowed Bogemu to spin and ride the force of inertia, hurling himself across to the next level of trapezes and spinning wheel mechanisms that slowly, yet methodically brought him to the peak point of ascension before beginning to journey downward. However, before they could turn back down, Bogemu shot off them to the next hurdle, employing his rocket car like some action circus acrobat.
A shrill battle cry made Bogemu lose focus for a second as he glared down only to see Li Shan blasting off the end of the road and into the sky with her gliding, physics-defying battleship with an uncontrollable volley of cannon fire. By positioning her dreadnought vertically, the buccaneer could continue her ceaseless volley and keep on moving higher and higher. While the ludicrous weight of the ship that should have made such a method of travel impossible didn't seem to cease such ascent, it at the very least hindered it, making Li Shan fall even further behind.
"I see, you don't need to win this race, just finish it without crashing. If you finish it, even if you finish it second, you will suffer no punishment for this result. Only if you fail to finish it, will you earn the final Penalty Mark. Though, I suppose, if you crash during the race, you'll retain the damage suffered during it throughout the game as well…" Bogemu noted with little worry, given how he was vastly above his opponent and about to touch the uppermost layer of clouds that would bring him to heaven upon bursting through.
Bogemu's rocket car blasted a hole through the bubbly and soft cumulus, shooting him off into the heavens above. Much to Bogemu's surprise, the race still wasn't over. The white clouds expanded like an endless desert, as immeasurable as the void of the realm in which the Game of Life and Death is played. The wheels of Bogemu's car spread to the sides and turned sideways, transforming into horizontal fans that would keep him above the cloud level.
Far off on the horizon lay a small town of empty wooden houses, surrounded and emphasized by mountains of storm clouds around it. Bogemu envisioned a pair of goggles on his forehead that he then slipped down and began adjusting to gaze into the vast expanse of the cloudy town. At the furthest edge of the town, just by the northern entrance to the cragged whirlpool of storm clouds, was a rotten, old, wooden arc that spelled out "Finish Line, Hurrah!" on it.
Bogemu revved up his rocket glider and leaned forward on it as if it were a metallic horse. The magician wore a rich smirk on his face, at long last seeing the finish line of this game. A rumble and a tooting war horn made chills run down Bogemu's spine as the freaked-out magical racer turned his head behind him, witnessing a battleship shooting through the clouds with a long face. Having collapsed by the wheel, Captain Li Shan tied her arms around its helm while keeping herself kneeling by biting into part of the helm and forcefully gazing forward with bleeding eyes.
"She's caught up this close!?" Bogemu yelled out in bewilderment before popping out a pair of cartoonishly oversized rocket engines from the sides of his hovering vehicle and shooting off red flames with golden brown streamers and glowing platinum stars. This way, Bogemu overtook the ship on its way down. Hearing fusillades behind him and never letting up for a second, Bogemu felt sweat sticking his robe to his back and running down his forehead as he raced with a gigantic battleship sailing across the clouds, this time without the use of cycling wheels, toward the finish line.
"Alright!" Bogemu's speedy vehicle made a final, victorious drift as it spun out of control past the finish line, leading up to the rows of storm clouds. As both vehicles entered the storm, they realized they were back on the playing board in their respective places. While this perilous game could have easily claimed either of their lives by having a racer crash before finishing the race, or one could have accepted a Penalty Mark by simply not taking part in the race, also, while the result of the race was a decisive victory for the much faster and more experienced Bogemu, truthfully put, the two players stalemated each other by completing the race.
Then again, staring at the kneeling and panting Li Shan, who clung to life and fought against the odds, battling a horrific and torturous virus that should have long since claimed her life, even a stalemated game was a game lost to the pirate who didn't have the luxury of time working for her. If the game lasts any longer, any of the upcoming games might end up being the last for the brave pirate captain, even if she ended up winning the challenge in the end.
That would have been a true win-the-battle, lost-the-war, kind of situation…