"Hmm… All this talk about "Demons from the Further Beyond" or whatever…" Asuka said while crossing her legs and resting her cheek on a knuckle, observing the brewing chaos and an abomination of exposed muscle, bones, and horns obliterating the stage with demonic lightning with all the interest of watching two pigeons bicker for a sprinkle of breadcrumbs. "And yet some crazy drag queen is manhandling that wicked demon somehow. Is it just me or do any of you guys think this Gunshi guy is a bit of quack too?"
"It's too early for conclusions yet, don't you think?" Damisan crossed his arms, looking like a caring father educating his child. "This is just one case of demonic possession that Gunshi has gone through. I believe he has countless other demons under his employ. Besides, no matter how impressive the demon is, even if it truly is some malevolent monster from a higher plane, it is still acting through a medium occupying our dimension, isn't it? It's the same case if I built the greatest and most powerful puppet in the world and asked a common villager to wield it in battle. Their combat potential would be greater than usual, however, they'd hardly be comparable to the stage of power that I intended to use the puppet for."
"These serial killers… I wonder…" Shige-H muttered while staring at the chubby serial killer in a torn dress and run-down make-up dashing across the fighting stage with a blazing, improvised torch in one hand and evading rampaging thunderbolts from all directions. "Bebe implied these magicians use a form of energy they call mana."
"It could be the case that, as with the samurai and pirates, we're all using the same form of energy differently and calling it different names," Damisan nodded, looking intrigued about where Shige-H was going with this observation.
"If that is the case, to call forth and control this other-planar entity, Gunshi would need to utilize mana too, right?" Shige-H asked, fully intending for it to be taken as a rhetorical question. "If this mana that magicians use is indeed a similar energy as what we call chakra, the samurai call kenki and pirates know as guts… Then the serial killer would need to be using a form of that same energy as well, otherwise, an armor made of pure mana would not register Kita's blows."
"Right, because of the chakra over matter principle…" Asuka tilted her cheek off her knuckle and turned to Shige-H. The voice of the amused bombshell dragged out, relaying her cheerful curiosity. "I wonder what those psychos call their form of energy? Bloodlust? Kink? Crazy-juice?"
"You're having way too much fun with things that couldn't matter less," Damisan squinted his eyes with an accusatory glare.
Meanwhile, in the arena, Kita Esatoko outran the rampant demonic thunderbolts and turned for a sharp, homing charge at the colossal mound of intertwined, rock-hard muscle and bone. With another resounding screech of a thousand great cats trapped inside of the same sack, the horned demon flexed its swollen arms defined by thick, clubbing forearms made of solid bone hammers to the sides, expelling a buzzing flock of white sparks that drew pentagrams all around it. Wherever the spark finished the problematic shape, Kita Esatoko found himself blocked off from advancing. Having already tested his mettle against the hellish barrier of the pentagram, Kita was reluctant to attack it again, choosing to take a detour every time instead.
"Terror Pit Thunderclap!" the malevolent feline hiss called out, with Gunshi Aspen's demonic form becoming sparkling with demonic electricity himself and shooting off countless thunderbolts in all directions that were quick to fizzle out before they would threaten anyone in the audience. Sadly, for someone as close to the infernal deluge as Kita Esatoko, avoiding such a widespread and unfocused attack was impossible.
"Uh-oh, competitor Kita Esatoko is certainly putting up a fight, however… When faced with a case of actual demonic possession that summons wicked thunderbolts from the pit of hell itself, what's a mere confused serial killer to do!?" the announcer relayed to the heated audience that was still recovering from the, fortunately, not literal shock to their systems of stray infernal thunderbolts shooting off in all directions and dissipating before their faces, in common cases, close enough to electrify their hair with a static charge.
Ripping apart the entire back section of his dress, Kita Esatoko dragged across the arena, leaving a bloody scorch mark on the path he skidded across. Having fallen down again, Kita Esatoko's body disappeared into the boiling baneful billow that the very presence of Gunshi Aspen's possessed state was spreading. While the exact effects of inhaling that blight remained to be seen, the audience felt fortunate that, not unlike some of the heavier fumes, the boiling miasma didn't rise, but dropped from the arena's edge and lingered at the bottom level like foam over the surface of the artificial lake. Meanwhile, another, much thinner layer colored the very evening clouds in the sky with the same color as the hellish plane from which this possessor hailed.
The looming waist-up presence of the demonic manifestation arced above the noxious bane, sifting its vile eyes from left to right as it sought the enemy, who had just disappeared into the cloud of pestiferous fumes. Wielding a fire ax, Kita Esatoko burst through the veil of the pestilence wearing nothing but a silky night gown that hardly fit his portly masculine body build and was held together by a measly handful of valiant threads that refused to tear. With a feline hiss, the manifested archfiend that grew ever more powerful and demonic, larger and stronger, the more time it spent possessing the body of the fiendish priest, led to a hefty thud.
Being a proud serial killer, Kita Esatoko's "wife" personality was never pleased with merely cleaving into whatever it saw as a threat to the marital coexistence with its beloved husband that was never to be. Because of this, "wife" kept pulling the red ax and chopping again and again with an almost machine-gun-like fusillade of cracks that were quick to shatter the demon's clubbing hammer arm of bone and liberate it from its muscle. Meanwhile, the demon who looked genuinely taken aback by the savagery of one mentally split human man with an ax, leaned onto a back foot, offering its gigantic arm for the mauling as opposed to letting "wife" anywhere near the medium needed to sustain the successful growth of the demonic possession.
The terrified blazing dots of light sunken in shrouds of black spilling out from the eyeholes of the malignant spirit shook as they perceived a demented dark shroud emanating from the furious serial killer on a quest for thrashing all around it that it perceived as a threat into bloody mush. It was as if this vile intention for nothing less than absolute bloody carnage granted the mad split personality the power needed to mutilate the infernal thunderer.
Pound by pound, bone and sinew alike crashed down on the ground as the nefarious miasma spilled out from the wound, spraying into Kita Esatoko's face and making the task of continued feats of savagery that even a bona fide archfiend found terrifying impossible. While that didn't stop "wife" from committing everything to wild swings, screeching and laughing maniacally, it's been exactly since the amputation of the demon's arm that the serial killer split personality landed a single successful blow upon anything but putrid fog.
Meanwhile, the audience was left gasping, as the demonic helm of the archfiend peeked from the topmost layer of the smog. A gigantic skull emerged from the boiling bog with obsidian rods wrapped with ancient bandages protruding from the sides and then bursting forth from archaic bondage with scimitar-shaped obsidian horns. The demon's bat-like wings grew a visible, sinewy outline that became lined with fangs for spikes all across the muscle tissue.
A single beat of the fiendish wings blew the noxious bane away from sight, pumping it far over the top of the arena and spilling it off the top and into the endless desert extending into the horizon in all directions. Like a bowling ball, Kita Esatoko rolled backward from the smack of the relentless gust with such intensity that even the scalp of a dead woman with bloodied chestnut hair that he wore ripped off tiny parts of Kita's own scalp where the killer had stapled it on, spilling over with sanguine sprinkles where the stapled scalp rubbed across the floor.
Roaring as if overcome by severe physical strain, the demonic outer shell that had undergone a severe growth and development spurt raised its stump into the evening sky, shooting off the ceaseless geyser of baneful brew into the atmosphere while spouting emerald droplets of vitriol for blood. This was a fresh development as before, instead of bleeding, the fiend merely exuded the repugnant dark miasma from its wounds.
Where at first was a stump, grew a skeletal foundation for a new limb, this one no longer bound by the confines of the human anatomy and design. An arm of solid bone with shiny, burgundy claws smelling of sulfur. Magma burst forth from the tip of the rowdy monster's palm, surrounding its newly grown limb and covering it with layers upon layers of armored black metal while it sprouted a triplet of claws both on the front and back, five times as savage in appearance and size as the natural ones that formed earlier. These new impalement hazards proved to form the outlines for a war ax, as a thin and wet membrane spouting corrosive emerald fluid in all directions sprouted the war ax's blade that hardened into a proper infernal war cleaver in seconds.
The escalated construct of an amalgam between man and demon waved its mighty wings, aiming the gale they created down and blowing away all traces of the malevolent shroud that followed its very presence into the plane the demon manifested in. A single wingbeat was all that Gunshi needed to ascend into the air in his demonic form. Another wingbeat sent the demonic construct in a fast-paced rush straight toward the serial killer.
Kita Esatoko pulled down his sullied silk nightgown to reveal a pair of hedge shears stuffed underneath the wings of someone's old bra that Kita Esatoko wore when giving way to his "wife" personality. Undaunted by the charge of the colossal mound of flesh, bone, and spikes, accompanied by strokes of demonic thunderbolts that provided a certain flair comparable to the beats of infernal war horses, Kita Esatoko slipped the shears out and, screaming his lungs out and liberating them from madness filling them from inside, charged to collide with the demon.
"This is simply inconceivable!" the announcer grabbed hold of his bandana to prevent it from flying wildly off his head and exposing his shoulder-long, golden locks. "No conscious person in their right mind would attack such a horrific nightmare head-on! And yet, Kita Esatoko is mad enough to rush straight at him with just a pair of garden shears! Is Kita Esatoko the mad one, or are we all mad and experiencing the same hallucination right now!?"
The two forces that couldn't have looked any less even clashed closer to the middle of the arena, expelling resounding jolts of violet lightning coated with inky black outlines that seemed to smudge the fabric upon which the image relaying objective reality was painted. The audience gasped in disbelief, witnessing Kita Esatoko's half-removed feminine scalp accessory standing up as if being manipulated by an updraft of some enigmatic, supernatural force.
A hydraulic hiss signaled the pumping of intense black gas, miniature clouds formed from steam pouring from Kita Esatoko's very pores. The black clouds shot out like exhaust fumes, violently launched from a hot rod in peak activity, blasting off with a roaring engine and spouting a stream of nitrous from the six makeshift barrels. Kita Esatoko's radiation of black clouds surged around him like an aura, while exhausting with rapid pace and flowing freely behind him as if the serial killer was in a rush to get rid of it all at once.
"That must be it," Shige-H focused her stare on the curious display of booming power that far surpassed any output Kita Esatoko showed at any previous point during battle. Usually, combatants grew weaker the longer a battle progressed. Fatigue would drain their strength, speed, toughness, and strain accumulated in their limited human bodies. The opposite appeared to be the case for both of the combatants. Gunshi Aspen relied on the demonic, herculean stamina of his possessor, whereas Kita Esatoko abandoned the feeling of pain, fear for his own life or well-being, everything but sheer madness and bloodlust and surrendered himself to his wretched malady.
"The form of energy that serial killers use? It's become so powerful that it's visible to the naked eye now…" Damisan noted. "That's odd, if Kita Esatoko could crank it up to such a degree, it's strange that he held it out for this long."
"Maybe he couldn't?" Asuka replied, leaning forward with interest and finally finding the trust for the rest of the battle to entertain her to weave her hands together as a proclamation that she'd never hang her head in boredom until the end of the bout. "It's clear that the guy's losing more and more screws the longer this goes on and the more his fantasy unravels. That has to be what's amping him up right now. The kill-juice must be a type of energy that depends on how pissed off the user is, more so than chakra is."
"Kill-juice?" Damisan squinted in Asuka's direction.
"We'll figure out what to call it eventually," Asuka shrugged.
The two could stay engaged in this tug of war for only so long. A fleshy thud made Kita Esatoko wince in pain and threw him off-balance. With a head that twitched with painful impulses, the grievously injured serial killer looked down to realize that the ax hand of the winged archfiend was still developing. A genuine testament to that truth was the protruding spike that embedded itself into Kita Esatoko's abdomen and pierced him all the way through.
With a bestial and supernaturally bolstered, lion-like roar, the raging demon put all his force into the push now that Kita Esatoko's psychosis was wavering with the sudden realization of his mortality and just how close to losing everything he fought for and held near and dear to him was. This relatively benevolent feeling of regret and longing for the warm family inn business with his wife made the psychotic energy coating Kita Esatoko's hedge shears falter, which proved to be enough to chip them off and send their tips shooting off into both directions.
This wreckage of Kita Esatoko's improvised weapon proved to be enough for the charging fiend to plant its feet firmly on the stage floor and then beat its wings again, nearly blowing the audience members behind it out of their seats and sending them soaring out of the whole arena structure. The sadistic demon dragged off his impaled serial killer victim along for a ride into the sky. After sending quake-inducing gales with its bolstered, draconic wings, the abyssal demon positioned itself high above the arena, where its edges made it look like a mere ring on the ground.
With a dull crack, the lower jaw of the demon's thick skull snapped open, spilling a torrential downpour of magma from its mouth, aiming it vaguely at the impaled serial killer to let the ooze of molten metal cook him thoroughly like a chunk of human barbecue. Seeing a solid chunk of human flesh resting on the spike sticking out from the top of its ax hand and taking it as a confirmation that Kita Esatoko melted away alongside the stream of molten metal that sprayed wildly across the desert landscape below, the airborne winged demon stretched its limbs off to the side with a strong flex and let out a triumphant roar.
"Could it be over!? It doesn't appear that Kita Esatoko has escaped the demon's clutches before the stream of magma hit him and, unlike the fortunate members of the audience who are too far below to be in much danger and who enjoy the protection of ancient Agbaran sandstone over their heads, nothing was protecting Kita Esatoko from harm!" the announcer called out, sounding genuinely worked up about having just seen a serial killer wanted throughout all the Land of Water take a dip into a shower of molten metal.
A defiant swipe of two arms sent a layer of molten metal splashing back at the fiend that spat it out, making the amalgamation of muscle, draconic wings, obsidian horns, and bone flinch and shriek out like a bag of cats submerged in a vat of acid. Much to the surprise of the puzzled audience, the impaled serial killer hung on to the cause of his impalement while an intense, streaming aura of black energy blocked off the worst of the torrent of molten metal and then pushed it back into the face of the possessed priest.
"H-Honey!" Kita Esatoko bawled out with tears as thick as peas streaming down his pain-ridden face. "I can't sense you, Honey, where are you!?"
"D-Dear… I'm… I'm sorry… You'll have to… Carry on without me. I protected you one last time. You'll… Need to fight now. My only wish is… That I'd have been able to join you in… The new home we'd build together…" Kita Esatoko replied to himself with a significantly weakened and softer voice.
"H-Honey!" Kita Esatoko shrieked out, mad with grief and terror. "No! You can't go! I can't keep going on without you! We've always been together, just you and I!"
"All those things… That I could do… Fighting for you… For our dream… You can do them too. You must… Survive…" Kita Esatoko muttered with the best attempt at a feminine voice he could do before relaxing and flopping on the demonic spike he was impaled on as if he were dead.
"Oh, no!" the announcer hurried to fill in the gaps of what the bewildered audience struggled to understand. "Kita Esatoko's "wife" personality has overheated and overreached, causing it to vanish! This might be over, folks! Kita Esatoko's dominant personality is a renowned coward and a lowly scoundrel, incapable of hurting a fly!"
"So, Asuka's theory was correct," Shige-H stood up, alongside a few more standing audience members who had to stand up to see the sky-bound battle better. "This serial killer form of chakra relies entirely on the emotional and psychological damage of the individual, it's essentially an ordinary form of chakra, twisted by the malice of its user. Because this "wife" personality was the root cause of Kita Esatoko's psychological issues, its disappearance could also rob Kita Esatoko of that malevolent energy he taps into."
"I see, it's not too different from overdoing with chakra augmentation. The "wife" was so devoted to protecting her family, wholly contained inside this one body, that she stepped over the bounds and shattered the limits of what it could do, slapping away the stream of molten metal with just the intense flow of the dark energy serial killers employ for their techniques," Damisan put it together.
"Well, game over, I guess…" Asuka sighed, sitting back down with a deep sigh. "Good luck snapping that magician out of that state, 'cause I'm not doing it."
Overflowing with ravenous, demonic savagery, the horned demon's skull snapped its jaw open and pulled the limp serial killer's body for a chomp of its head. Demons from the Further Beyond didn't really use human brains for sustenance or anything, but the sadistic beast relished in an opportunity to both punish this lowly worm of a lesser plane as well as the accursed priest by having him ingest human brains and carry that taste in his mouth around the whole day.
A strident boom ripped through the air. The demon's starry, blaze-colored eyes rolled back in the black void that contained them and twitched a few times. Kita Esatoko's tightly clenched fist was sticking out through the back of the infernal beast's skull, having caused a violent explosion that spilled out with molten metal, ripped-up muscle tendon bits, and shattered skull chunks. Kita Esatoko's eyes, still streaming with tears, now burned with intense hatred as the grieving serial killer nearly bit his own lower lip off.
Alongside his impaled opponent, the sky-bound fiend with a blown-out skull hurled down like a comet streaming baneful bog and streaks of magma, still unconscious. Game over it was not.