"So, shall you resign to your fate of irrelevance or will you continue to struggle and roll?" Bogemu wondered while scanning his opponent, who was staggering and wobbling in a pitiful state. Both in terms of her physical condition and in terms of where she was in the deadly board game they've been playing. Captain Li Shan looked bloodless yet, ironically enough, soaked in blood at the same time. Her captain's hat had slipped over the pirate's face, as did her long black hair that escaped their orderly formation and now wildly laid stuck to the pale patches of Li Shan's sweaty and cold skin.
Li Shan pulled out her hand cannon, aiming it into the air. With a weakened battle cry, she fired it once. This bestial grunt sufficed as a command for the game's board to obey her impressive willpower. Given how momentary exposure to the virus Li Shan struggled against for a pair of challenges now had killed a terrifying, extra-dimensional entity outright, Li Shan's endurance and willpower deserved nothing less than utmost commendations from the board game wizard. Rattling, the fiendish dice halted in position and lit up with white flames that spelled out "24".
Dragging her feet, Li Shan began the excruciating walk toward the goal. It hurt Bogemu merely looking at his opponent, however, no one had the right to accuse Captain Li Shan of surrendering and fading away into irrelevance. Glowing with a sparkling, azure aura of the mana energy that Bogemu had become soaked in after winning the last challenge, the wizard observed his opponent, finally completing her torturous journey onto the square 24 squares further from the one she stood on before.
Pink barrier walls were erected from all sides of Captain Li Shan. Gnashing her teeth in fury, the pirate captain didn't seem to thrash around or try breaking out of the unfortunate trigger of yet another virus tile. Just like before, a blood-red mist filled the air, wholly contained inside the barrier of Captain Li Shan's square as new, spiky virus cells perforated the tortured captain and squeezed its sickening bile content into her body. Bogemu fully expected to see his opponent dead as a pile of gore, having burst like a pimple from the forceful expulsion of blood after hosting so many virus cells. With a vibrant hum, the barrier's walls faded away, letting the accumulated viral mist disperse across the infinite vastness of the game dimension.
"What!?" Bogemu exclaimed in shock, seeing Captain Li Shan stand the same she stood when she triggered the viral square trap. "Here's a shock, I thought that a second trigger of the virus square would surely have killed you…"
"I guess I've become immune to this virus of ours after such a prolonged exposure," Li Shan examined her shaking hands. She spat onto her leather glove and began rubbing at the dried blood spots where blood squirted from her tear ducts and covered her face in straight blotched lines.
"Well, that's no guarantee that the virus you've got won't kill you in time and you're no closer to winning the Game of Life and Death now than you've ever been. You're one mistake away from a loss and, given your condition, you cannot afford to keep playing for much longer. Only after winning and returning to your home dimension can you remove all harm dealt to you in this one, that is to say, cure this virus," Bogemu Uneyotsu pointed out.
"Don't think I didn't notice you stalling to make this affliction eat away at me some more. Get on with explaining this next challenge already, scoundrel!" Li Shan hissed, aiming her hand cannon at her opponent. Even if she knew that shooting him wouldn't really hurt him, she'd enjoy just the knowledge that she gave him her best shot.
"I wouldn't advise that unless you wish to earn the last Penalty Mark that badly and make it all end quicker. But I digress… The square you're standing on triggered the Ark Game. It's rather simple–both of us must spend the mana energy we've got to design and build a zoo. In the end, the superior zoo with more diversity and panache shall be victorious and earn its builder more mana energy to spend on a Nexus or future challenges," Bogemu gestured with an innocent shrug, knowing full well that Captain Li Shan was well aware she lacked the mana necessary to build a zoo or do anything at all.
"This game sucks! If all it does is make the winners win more and the losers sink into an even deeper hole, why play such a game at all? Life's got plenty of that as it is," Li Shan grumbled out a complaint, looking as pitiful as her state in the game was.
"Well, I wish you plenty of luck, I don't believe that I need to try all that hard, to be honest," Bogemu laughed out, snapping his fingers and slamming a four-walled cage behind him. While it at first appeared empty, the trumpet of an elephant coming out of nowhere alerted the potential observer to the fact that an elephant now occupied the shut cage. It was almost like the majestic animal had always been there.
A branching system of pathways ravaged the black void, covered with blooming patches of emerald grasslands with more loud slams signaling the shutting of more and more cages as roars, squawks, growls, and rustling of the grass preceded the magical appearance of a grizzly bear, a male lion, coated in a fabulous, lush mane, a fluffy stork, a band of hares, a lynx and a shoebill. Meanwhile, Bogemu stood there with a flamboyant pose, pointing to each of the marvels his zoo had offered.
"Perhaps I went a little overboard. Just one animal would have been enough, given your shortage of resources to work with…" Bogemu laughed into his hand before seeing the triumphant stage light move from his zoo on to Captain Li Shan's side, sending his zoo into the shadow and making all the amazing and diverse animal groups vanish without a trace and their cages to collapse onto a flat stack of weaved metal bars. "Wait, what? How could you possibly…!?"
Bogemu's gaze dulled out in shock as he saw something he'd have never thought of in a million years. An improvised cage of pirate sabers and knives stabbed into the ground and assembled in a circular formation around Captain Li Shan, entrapping her inside of the circle of blades like a featured subject of some sort of freak show. Grabbing the sabers in front of her to where they sliced through her gloves and into her hands, drawing no blood because of extreme blood shortage, Captain Li Shan pressed her body against her self-built, improvised prison.
"I know how the minds of people like you and people who build prisons and zoos work. The superior freak show is the one that ensnares a more impressive, more dangerous, rarer animal, right?" Li Shan barked out, yanking the swords that seemed to be embedded into the wet floor of the black game dimension void like they would have been stabbed into solid stone. "I may not have had that mana rubbish you used to work your miracles, but that doesn't mean that I don't have miracles of my own to offer and sacrifices I can still make."
"B-But… This is ridiculous, I went out of my way to showcase more animals than you, also… Also… My lawn was much finer than your non-existent one!" Bogemu argued passionately, looking for the golden needle in a haystack of trouble.
"It's not about lawn, you bog-brained nincompoop!" Li Shan yelled out from her makeshift prison. "I've managed to capture someone who fought tooth and nail to elude captivity her entire life! A woman who's been many different kinds of slave to many owners, someone who's earned her freedom and worked her way scrubbing decks and serving chow, someone who taught herself how to fight and did so with more passion and gusto than anyone in the Eastern Ocean because she wasn't just fighting for booty, she was fighting to earn not just her freedom, but her acknowledgment, her place in the world! No animal you manifest can ever compare to someone like that!"
"It's the virus!" Bogemu realized. "You're the only carrier of this unique strain of virus that exists nowhere else in the entire omniverse and not even in the Further Beyond… It's a virus that's been born here and now, with you as the patient zero, the only recorded case. By trapping yourself, you've created a zoo containing a unique and only member of its species, impossible to replicate or top…"
"You're just insufferable…" Li Shan moved away from the blade bars of her makeshift cage, wrapping herself with her arms to offer herself some warmth since she's been shivering for a while now.
"You've signed away your freedom for a pointless challenge? Just to win some mana? I thought you pirates treasured freedom more than anything," Bogemu shook his head in disbelief as Captain Li Shan lit up with a vivid aura of blue energy around her, symbolizing the mana that she'd gained from winning this challenge.
"Freedom is the greatest thing ever… However… Even the greatest things are worth… Sacrificing… So that you can tell people like you… To go fuck yourselves…" Captain Li Shan said, barely even moving her lips. Despite overflowing with mana, the proud buccaneer ended up fading away, standing straight and proud. As her knees gave way, Li Shan waved front and back, before collapsing to the front and slamming straight at the swords she'd imprisoned herself with and vanishing away into ash, becoming one with the mana she's earned.
"Tsk…" Bogemu bit his thumb nervously. He's never felt like this much of a loser after winning a Game of Life and Death. He achieved a complete, almost perfect victory. He played Li Shan around like a helpless lamb, led to the slaughter, he even had some fun on his way to the slaughterhouse. And yet… He didn't even have the chance to make that insufferable woman pay for her insolence. She's become yet another irrelevant soul to haunt the infinite void of the game dimension.
"Wh… What on Earth happened again!?" the announcer gasped, grabbing his bandana and nearly knocking his glasses off his face. "Bogemu Uneyotsu is standing in the remnants of the arena, however… Contestant Li Shan is nowhere to be seen! Just like before, the battle seems to have resolved in an instant, with only the victor left standing!"
This outcome left the audience scratching their heads. This was essentially the same as having two fighters flipping a coin and deciding the winner. While most of the audience members looked apathetic to this figurative no-contest bout, many had just frustrations that they let out with audible yells and curses aimed at the arena. If this was the nature of the fight that this magician would be involved in, at the very least, he should have lost that fight. What if he advanced all the way to the finals, robbing the audience of the excitement and entertainment of a proper, nail-biting fight?
"My, my…" Bogemu scratched his head, looking around at the outraged patches of spectators yelling at him and throwing their fists into the air in disgust at his fighting style. "What are they so outraged about? They couldn't have been fans of Captain Li Shan, after all, she's just an irrelevant loser now."
Bogemu felt one of the handful of bandages keeping his head stitched up having become dry from being subjected to dry desert winds and tainted with sand. Feeling like they had to be replaced, the board game magician turned around and headed to leave the arena, waiting for the bridge to rise this time before walking off and disappearing into the dark.
"We'll be having a brief break, ladies and gentlemen until the arena is repaired. Then, we'll proceed with our fourth match–the ungodly priest, channeling the demonic forces of the Further Beyond - Gunshi Aspen, will face off against the serial killer Kita Esatoko!" the announcer reported, but not even the excitement of seeing another heated competition appeared to ease the audience's frustrations at the lackluster match. Ironically enough, they had no clue of the valiant struggle they'd been robbed of.
"Well, we're in luck," Asuka shrugged. "Our magician is perfectly intact, from the looks of it."
"Yeah, but… I don't like it. Something about this guy is seriously off," Shige-H stroked her chin, hesitating on ordering her squad to approach Bogemu Uneyotsu and bring him in on the know about Mana's condition.
"Yeah, the way he won this match strongly suggests that he's tempered with time somehow. It's either a mass-scale illusion, which would make him an illusionist more dangerous than Mana herself, or he can genuinely bypass the tide of time. Either way, he is a troublesome man to upset and we've no clue about his motives in this tournament or his character," Damisan pointed out. "It is entirely possible that, if we attempt to approach him with a proposition, he will just freeze all of us in time and make us vanish without a trace, like Captain Li Shan did."
"We should make Endo do it," Asuka suggested. "We can afford to lose him and he's honestly doltish enough to give it a fair shot. He's too witless to be scared of anything."
"Absolutely not," Shige-H shut it down outright. "Endo's approach would put this man directly against our group. We don't wish to antagonize him, we wish for him to trigger the Soul Diffusion."
"I can track him around, and see what I can find out about him. If anything, we've still got that next guy as a viable option. The announcer said that he was a magician too, wasn't he?" Damisan volunteered, standing up alongside with the crowd that was slowly flushing out toward the backstage cooldown facilities where they could rest up, buy some souvenirs, or stock up on snacks and drinks.
"No…" Asuka sighed. "I'll do it."
"You will?" Damisan turned back with an inquisitively raised right eyebrow.
"You're just going to screw it all up, stealth isn't exactly your strong suit. Besides, you're too compromised, given that Mana's the one that's at stake," Asuka teased Damisan with a fake yawn.
"Compromised?" Shige-H turned back. "What do you mean by that?"
"That's a stone in your garden, boss," Asuka smirked. "Can't even see what's brewing up on your own team behind the curtains."
Immediately after roughing up the waves, the blond bombshell vanished without a trace with a Body Flicker, stunning a few bystanders, but they appreciated the sudden increase of free space more than they looked taken aback by the sudden disappearance of another spectator. Shige-H couldn't pull her eyes away from Damisan's muscular back, covered by his wild, long hair.
"What did she mean by that?" Shige-H asked again, this time asking Damisan.
"You should ask that of Mana after she wakes up back in her own body. Now's not the time," Damisan saved himself the trouble. The fact that he acted so worked up as to not even turn around and face the squad leader made Shige-H think that perhaps now was exactly the best time to sort out this hidden matter that was going on in her squad.
Bogemu was crossing the backstage hallway without a care in the world. It felt to Asuka that her tracking skills were an overkill in this affair since the man couldn't even be bothered to as much as look over his shoulder even once. Regardless, Asuka stuck to the ceiling or the walls, using a hospital sheet she found on an abandoned stretcher as a Cloak of Invisibility jutsu medium while she was sticking to the walls.
"You're quite something," Bogemu Uneyotsu said out of the blue, after just stopping in his tracks. "You're tracking me with no ill intent or latent desire to cause me harm, something that would trigger the Game of Life and Death. That's so unusual that I'm willing to humor whatever it is that you want."
"Of course I don't want to kill you, killing intent makes tracking less effective. Makes you sloppy and unnecessarily obsessed with the target," Asuka emerged from behind her Cloak of Invisibility after a sigh. The kunoichi folded the hospital sheet she used as a disguise and placed it on the windowsill for the staff to pick up at some point. It was only when Asuka emerged that Bogemu turned around to look at the one that had been stalking him.
"Interesting, interesting by how thoroughly uninteresting you are," Bogemu muttered in moderate surprise. "I can't put my finger on your identity and, based on what I'm sensing off of you, there's no reason I should be able to. Which makes it that much more amusing that you're trailing me."
"You need to work on your game, pal. You're not gonna hook many girls with that kind of attitude," Asuka teased the magician, just to try to conceal the fact that she's lost any semblance of advantage in this conversation now that Bogemu knew where Asuka was and the fact that she's been following him around. "To be honest, I was just looking into you. You know, what you're after, what you're into, that sort of thing."
"Hardly an unusual activity for a kunoichi. What's unusual is your target. Why would you be interested in little old me?" Bogemu shrugged, playing off his significance as a competitor and a viable threat in this tournament.
"What do you know about Soul Gems and Soul Diffusion?" Asuka asked, figuring that she'd be better of scoping out how useful her new acquaintance would be over being frank with him and revealing the situation of the Stars unit without it being absolutely necessary.
"They're hardly cosmic concepts… What's interesting is that you, a local third-dimensional entity, know of those things," Bogemu crossed his arms. Now he could no longer conceal his interest. Even if he had no use talking to Asuka now, he'd talk to her just to satisfy his curiosity about this strangely well-informed ninja. "My, my… Could something be brewing behind the scenes of this tournament? And here I thought that this would be a simple series of fun and games and that the toughest part - the chaos of the battle royale - was already behind me."
"Would you be able to trigger a Soul Diffusion of an inert soul so that it can pass from a Soul Gem back to its original body?" Asuka asked more directly.
"My specialty isn't as stable as that, but… I could wager such an outcome on a roll of a dice, sure," Bogemu Uneyotsu smiled.
"I didn't ask if you could, I asked if you would," Asuka's glare at the magician squinted with focus.
"I might," Bogemu shrugged. "But I'll need to know all the details that you're keeping tucked away from me to make it happen."
The hook was cast, and the catch got hooked, it even let itself get reeled back into the shore, yet, somehow, Asuka felt an uncanny chill about the entire thing. It wasn't necessarily that this entire affair was too easy, more so that there was a gnawing sensation deep down that she may not have been the only party in this exchange with information tucked away.