"Well… The Curse Walker has certainly made his entrance, but… Where on Earth is Granny Bantou?" Rajul the announcer looked around with his hand placed above his eyes to ward off the beaming sunshine of the scorching desert climate. "Could the last serial killer still competing in the Succession Tournament have escaped prematurely, intimidated by the physicality and presence of her opponent?"
"That is a possibility," Genshi said in the audience seats, attracting the wayward, wandering eyes of the Stars who had less experience and intelligence regarding what happened during the chaotic battle royale. "During the last stretches of the battle royale, Granny Bantou fought one of those magicians and… I'm not sure what happened, but… That magician seemed to have exorcised the soul of her deceased son who was aiding her with her murders."
"Soul?" Mana's eyes widened and her mouth stretched in a downward arc, making an unnaturally looking long face. "You mean like… A g-ghost?"
"I agree, it sounds ridiculous, but…" Genshi nodded to himself a few times before Mana grabbed the young man's shoulders and shook him, much to Genshi's befuddlement.
"There's nothing ridiculous about a vengeful spirit from the underworld seeking vengeance!" Mana corrected him with passionate if a little silly, conviction. The veterans amongst the Stars just covered their faces in second-hand embarrassment. At the same time, Asuka tilted her eyebrow, looking at Mana with eyes that refused to believe what they were seeing. Her own esteemed rival was terrified to such a miserable point by some lowly spirits. "No way, if I have to fight this woman, I won't do it. Can't be done…"
"Are you for real?" Asuka grumbled. "Who could have guessed, the self-righteous fop scared of some ghosts… That's rich!"
"We're all scared of something," Damisan shrugged, coming to Mana's defense.
"Let's not pretend that ghosts aren't a rational fear. I fear anything I can't cut," Endo contemplated out loud too.
"In any case, your match with the Granny seems unlikely, Mana. Even if it would come to be, by that point we should have found out the perpetrator behind Batsudoru's murder and found out if we need to do something about it. It shouldn't come to you having to deal with ghosts," Shige-H tried appeasing the psyched-out Stars member.
"Well, if Granny Bantou cannot make her way to the arena, then… I'm afraid there's no other choice but to…" Rajul was about to disqualify Granny Bantou before a trembling, lightly decayed arm, covered with warts and rotting infection, emerged from the water's surface, making the spectators able to peer into this horrific scene shift in their seats. The hand grabbed hold of the arena's corner. Chipped and sickly fingernails nearly peeled off the haunting, jerky hand with long and bony fingers from clutching at the tiles and pulling out a raggedy shape of a morbid-looking old hag out of the water.
Granny Bantou took another breath, wheezing as she threw her upper body back and jerked it to the front, expunging a mouthful of putrid sewage water from her lungs. This chilling scene proved to be too discomforting for some members of the audience, as those with feebler nerves looked away or covered their mouths to prevent throwing up.
The serial killer's flesh had suffered some serious decay, with patches of gangrene all across her destitute and famished frame. Her skin had bloated from spending too much time underwater, but famine made the woman's bloat wither away as her body devoured its own fat and secretions and left Granny Bantou pallid and wrinkled. Her pupils and irises had lost color, her teeth looked wobbly enough for a gust of wind to scatter them from her rotten, dull violet-colored gums. For all intents and purposes, Granny Bantou looked like a walking corpse.
"Mujamin… My little Mujamin… You'll pay. You will all pay…" she croaked while sewage mixed in with her own blood and slobber spilled from her mouth with every word.
"Well… I hope that the esteemed ladies and gentlemen in the audience will forgive this announcer's hesitation, given the haunting scene that had just robbed me of my night's sleep until the end of my days. In any case, now that both contestants have made their way to the arena, it's time to get this thing started! Curse Walker VS Granny Bantou, let's go!" Rajul raised his arm and drove it down, signaling for the gong to signify the beginning of the match at long last.
Howling, the mad crone threw herself at Curse Walker, slipping her long and skeletal arms inside the raggedy scraps she wore that kept what little dignity the walking corpse had in her. Before she closed the distance, keeping the two fighters separate, the serial killer pulled out a fire ax with dried traces of blood and brain matter still stuck to it. Screaming like a banshee swearing bloody murder, Bantou swung her ax while jumping at the humanoid Cursed Warrior, only for Curse Walker to raise his arm and absorb the cleaving blow with no visible damage to his golden forearm.
A shockwave spread through the arena, a concussive halo that made those in the lower rows that sat parallel to the developing violent scene in the arena cover-up in their seats in order not to lose their turbans and hats. Unable to force her way any further, Granny Bantou bawled in Curse Walker's face, frothing from the mouth straight into Curse Walker's face. Unfortunately for her, the Curse Walker remained unimpressed by the developing horror show he had a close-range view of.
"This fire ax! Could it be!? Could Granny Bantou have found the very ax she threw into contestant Hakuji Shukufu's head, splitting his skull?" Rajul screamed out in a high-pitched voice, clearly affected by the disgust he felt toward the insane banshee, who showed not a hint of intimidation or respect toward the daunting physical presence she shared the ring with.
With a vocal grunt, Curse Walker twitched his forearm to the side, breaking the fire ax in an instant and leaving his opponent suspended in the air and helpless. With his massive, fractured golden hand, Curse Walker scooped the woman from the air by grabbing her skull and slamming her into the ground, then dragging her across the arena while the mound of muscle ran forward and launched her skidding further.
Tensing up his entire body, Curse Walker let out a roar that made the entire Sun Disc arena tremble and sent seismic jerks across the whole continent, softening the further they went from their epicenter. The concussive roar flattened the woman, who was about to rise to her feet, and rag-dolled her around like a pitiful scarecrow made of straw and useless old clothes.
"What unfathomable physical power," Damisan observed. "Despite being only a fraction of the size of the other Cursed Warrior I saw, this one's every bit as powerful and threatening."
"This poster suggests that the Curse Walker is a mysterious man who wanders the same mountains from which the other Cursed Warriors hail. Comparing it to Batsudoru's description, apparently, the Cursed Warriors are walking mountains come to life, given shape by carvings of an ancient race of people into the stone," Shige-H said while reading off a crumpled poster drawn on a sheet of well-maintained papyrus.
"That is bogus," Asuka rolled her eyes. "From what I recall of the terrorist group in Boulder Town…"
"Which you joined after betraying us…" Endo casually reminded Asuka with a sullen expression, without moving his glare away from the action in the arena.
"Temporarily, also, only because I believed it to be the easiest way to achieve our mission objective," Asuka corrected Endo, looking grumpy about the fact that the samurai apprentice still remembered such a thing. "In any case, those guys spoke about a foreign contact, involved in the criminal underworld, or something like that. Apparently, he was a terrifyingly big fish and everyone was surprised by how invested he was with their cause. It was that mystery figure who offered them the Cursed Warrior that walked to Stone Gulf."
"If that's the case, then this man could be no different from the walking colossus of Stone Gulf," Mana noted. "He could be a victim of an experiment to make a Cursed Warrior from a human, someone that's less likely to be spotted walking across the ocean floor from tens of thousands of kilometers away. Someone who might be just as destructive, but also able to blend in with the local population… Somewhat."
The Curse Walker bellowed, smacking with the back of its golden fist and sending the madwoman who had been all over him, scratching, biting, kicking, and stomping, aside. Like a great cat, Granny Bantou skidded across the tile set, leaving bits of her fingernails etched into stone and smearing blood where her chipped nails completely tore off the fingers.
Roaring from the top of his lungs, the Cursed Warrior raised its fist into the air. The cracks in the golden coating lit up with intense orange-red light, as if magma itself pumped through the Curse Walker's veins. With all his pent-up strength, the Curse Walker thrust his hammering fist, pounding it into the ground. The audience screamed and braced to the nearest solid object as a bright light erupted from the point of impact, swallowing the entire central section of the arena while the sandstone crumbled and turned jagged, spilling out infernal blazes of bubbling, almost liquid flames and chipped platforms of stone shot into the air from the erupting pressure of the destructive wave.
Before the destruction had its chance to cool off, the haunting sound of a crying infant filled the stage. The audience grew restless, looking around, standing up, and stepping on their toes to peer into where this creepy noise was coming from. From the looks of it though, this was a foolish task since everyone heard the wailing almost as if it was happening right behind them.
"What's this noise? It's everywhere! So eerie!" Shige-H complained as even someone as powerful and experienced as she became spooked by this chilling sensation of sadness that permeated the atmosphere all over the place and the inescapable lamentation of a toddler who, if the intensity of its cries was of any indication, was experiencing all the worst aspects of life all at once.
"It's the ghost! The ghost of Granny Bantou's baby!" Mana's lips stretched in terror across her face as even her tanned complexion paled in fright. Something inside the magician's chest was begging for her to stand up and bolt as far away as possible. Like the sixth sense one had before an awful catastrophe, except there was nothing enigmatic or subtle about Mana's sweat-inducing terror. It took all of her willpower to remain seated, even then, Mana squirmed in her seat and panted as her heart bumped inside her chest, looking for a way to tear its way out through the ribcage.
"Calm down, Mana-san, that cannot be possible," Genshi came to Mana's aid. It was just as likely that he heard Mana's breathing stepping into overtime trying to drag the young woman to a premature grave by overworking her heart and running her lungs out of breath as it was that the sensors Damisan equipped him with relayed Mana's poor physical state. "Another competitor exorcised the spirit of Granny Bantou's son. The poor child found his afterlife."
And yet the crying of a baby, so tormented and heightened that it suggested the infant that inspired the phantom to have been tortured while these sounds were being recorded into the fabric of the aether, would not stop. Granny Bantou crawled out from the wreckage of ripped, shuffled, and tossed-around tiles covered in bruises and bleeding profusely from her smashed mouth, missing teeth and fingernails, and torn flesh. Patches of grisly burns decorated the woman's body and her wounded, bloodshot eyes bled from their tear ducts, forming an impression that she cried blood.
Strange to some, elementary to others, Curse Walker appeared utterly unaffected by the chills of the ever-lasting torment of a baby's apparition. Not until Granny Bantou snapped her spine backward and cracked her jaw open at a ludicrous 135-degree angle, letting out an augmented version of the phantom wail, this time fully visible as the ripping sound wave rippled through the air. The Cursed Warrior extended his fractured golden arm as if to block the incoming wave of phantasmal force.
The cries met Curse Walker's hand with a thunderous bang, expelling swirls of murky green energy. A whirlpool of malicious miasma that surrounded both contestants and would not tolerate happiness or absence of misery in any shape or form in any living being. What was even more shocking–the haunting wails were pushing Curse Walker back. Bit by bit, the spectral sound wave surpassed the terrifying might of the Curse Walker and rippled its golden forearm with cracks that glowed magma-orange underneath.
"U-Utterly unbelievable! Granny Bantou's child was exorcised during the battle royale! Where is all of this bad seed energy coming from!?" Rajul demanded an explanation, leaning over the edge of the announcer's platform railing as he shouted in an authoritative tone. Something that the announcer could not understand–he could not explain. Being a consummate professional, Rajul firmly believed that for his audience to fully appreciate a battle, they had to understand all of its complexities and relate to the shifts of its tide.
"You… Took my child away… Again! It was only fair… I took YOURS!" Granny Bantou croaked with a madwoman's howl. Exclaiming with a masculine and artificially augmented voice, Curse Walker swiped his arms to the sides, almost as if he grabbed hold of the spectral force and ripped it asunder. Twisted with violent intent, the fleshy goliath wounded back a fist to smash the loudmouth old crone's skull or punch her head clean off, whichever came first. Before this could occur, the noise of churning flesh made the Cursed Warrior stiffen in place and blank out.
Something was holding it in place!
With a shocked expression that was entirely alien to the human amongst walking mountains, Curse Walker turned back only to see something that would have killed any lesser man of fright. Staring back at him from above was something heart-stopping. A rotting corpse, pale green of flesh, wet and slimy, one-eyed with only a handful of teeth graving grown out. Legless and dragging its crushed lower half out of the water as the colossal phantasm emerged from the lake and leaned over the arena, grabbing hold of the Cursed Warrior with one of its arms while the other one kept it halfway up. What was the absolutely most demented about this abominable projection–its proportions highly suggested that it was an infant of a hairless, round head.
The audience went wild. Women fainted on the spot, men turned to each other, their mouths ajar. Because of the blaring screaming in the arena, neither man staring at the pale, open-mouthed image of another could hear their neighbor screaming. All of them were deaf because their ears were full of dread fleeing the lungs. There was not a single person in the arena who did not wish to be blind, for they'd seen the seeded and watered soil of the place which nightmares grew from.
"What in the…!?" Rajul blanked out, turning around and slowly dragging his limp body down with his back grazing against the railing while the stunned announcer witnessed the outlandish horror amongst the crowd he was to entertain. "I had foolishly hoped that I was the sole witness to this… This appalling evil that has crawled its way from the lake! For how long has it lurked in our sewers!? One thing is for sure, after this match is over with, the heads of its cleaners will roll and the replacement staff will cleanse it with fire and vitriol if needed."
"Oh, dear god!" a lament filled the air, breaking through the cacophony of unintelligible screams. A sobbing woman was screaming her vocal cords out until they were swollen, jagged, stringy, and torn. The one comforting the poor soul and cursing their fortune was indeed her husband. "It couldn't be, it couldn't be…" the man kept on repeating but the woman's screams and feeble attempts to rake her own eyes out so that she would not need to face the apparition resembling her missing child showed more sense than the man's more reserved babbling.
"W-Wait just a goddamn second!" Rajul jumped to his feet and gripped the top of the metallic railing that helped him not to fall out from the platform in his passionate flailing sessions. "This abominable phantom, it can't be! It can't be a child of Agbarah!"
While all the howling and screaming had distracted the one-eyed, miserably abused, upper half of a spectral, overgrown toddler, the malicious spirit clenched Curse Walker tighter and slammed it against the ground, letting go of the sprawled goliath, but then proceeding to pound it deeper and deeper into the ruined tile set and the crushed layers of gravel and dirt as the baby chuckled like it was ripping apart a bothersome fly and satisfying its innocent curiosity that would have been morbid if the baby was any older and more sensible.
"Yes, smash! Pound! Bite! Kill! Kill them all, abandoned child of Agbarah! You will kill them all and have your revenge in time!" Granny Bantou wrapped herself up, laughing maniacally and writhing on the wreckage of the arena grounds.
"Abandoned!? You stole our baby! You stole it, you horrid hag!" the husband, who was once too baffled to make any sense, now found something more evil to provide him with fragments of mind that had shattered just a few blinks earlier. "You're the one that our son should be ripping apart and crushing! She's cheating! Disqualify her! Execute her for the kidnapping, abuse, and murder of our child!"
"Please, calm down…" Rajul turned to the outrage brewing amongst the audience as more and more of the mob chose violence as their tether to material reality that still made any lick of sense. "This is no different from any materialization or invocation techniques. This isn't grounds for disqualification. Besides, this is just a spectral child. Its appearance is too horrid to make out any features. This is no ground for execution or lynching… Settle down, please!"
While violence was escalating toward its zenith in the arena, more violence was about to break out in the audience and the outrage threatened to spill out inside the arena. The increasingly resentful mob of spectators would soon crave blood and risk their own well-being just to get their hands on the madwoman and inflict punishment upon her as grievous as the one they imagined her inflicting upon the kidnapped child before she turned it into… Whatever was smashing the embedded into the gravel and wreckage Curse Walker at that moment.