"The Gladiatrix finds herself in an awful pinch!" Rajul announced to the rustling audience that kneaded their feet against the stands, anticipating the fighting breaking out again. "Injured and having used up her card tricks to little to no effect. Unless she can show some new tricks, the battle may very well be decided already, with its outcome being typed out as we speak!"
"No way, where are the rabbits!?" someone in the audience pumped their fist in the air, objecting to Mana's relative passivity.
"Where are all the fancy tricks and all the explosions!?" more objections came from the opposite side of the crowd.
These weren't mere grievances. There was significant worry behind those voices. During her brief performance, Mana had attracted the fascination of plenty of spectators already. Those same spectators didn't want her to go out quietly. Even if she sealed her fate by using ninjutsu and going all-out in the semi-finals, ensuring that she couldn't do so in the finals, the audience wanted Mana to fight her hardest.
"So… What are you going to do, Mana-san?" Ryoku Genshi asked her out loud while grabbing hold of the fusion ball equipped to the chest piece of his armor and removing it. Clasping it in one hand and bringing it back, ready to fling it and cause a blast again.
"My mission," Mana replied, clapping her hands together with a serious expression. "But also, I'm going to convince you not to give up on yourself with this last gambit!" she boldly claimed.
"It hurts my heart to crush you this way, to break your will while you refuse to accept the truth and naively hold on to your beliefs. In that case, I'll prove to you that my decision was the correct one by showing you where it brought me!" Ryoku Genshi said while pressing the fusion ball tightly in his hands and igniting a flaring blaze in the core of the mechanical sphere as the ball hummed with activity.
With his shins and his heels igniting with a blaze of fuel expelled because of dozens of fusion reactions occurring simultaneously inside select containment units in his suit, Ryoku Genshi took off with a speeding tackle, seeking a point-blank slam of his fusion ball and a complete destruction of Mana's body, alongside with her will to fight.
Too suddenly for Ryoku Genshi to correct his course, an intense, beckoning light of flashing silver lit up behind Mana. Having been rendered blind for a few days now, the athlete had long forgotten what it felt to feel an itch in his eyes, but even the advanced tracking system his helmet assisted him with by compensating his vision and replacing it with a black and orange scan of his surroundings whited out. It was like that light came from inside Ryoku Genshi's own skull, stabbing at his eyes again and again with relentless jabs of sharp, bright flashes.
The audience gasped in excitement as the radiant rays of silver light behind Mana intensified until they became thick and almost solid, and shimmered with a dazzling rainbow outline. Five-pronged stars emerged at the tip of each beaming ray, making the beams manifest with a very real effect and curve like devastating hooks. With crashing thuds, the stars pounded into Ryoku Genshi's armor as the athlete broke his tackling stance, stunned by the dazzle that the light had on his perception despite his blindness. The barrage of star comets, carried by rainbow tails and curving like vicious hooks, battered the athlete and pushed him back, laying him out on his back.
"Spirit Starfall!" Mana exclaimed with her eyes beaming with silver light, matching the one that radiated from her back and flash-banged Ryoku Genshi into breaking his composure and tackling stance.
"T-That's!" Dashula exclaimed in pleasant shock. His twitching mouth froze somewhere between a dropped jaw and an ecstatic peal of laughter. "I see… It's only fair that you would borrow from our playbook when I stole your ace trick in a clutch situation," he cackled to himself like a sheepish monkey.
"Incredible! Just when it seemed like the Second Goddess would be humbled by a crushing defeat at the hands of an underdog, she showcased the ability to tap into dharma, the energy used by the Salvari to perform their famous martial arts techniques!" Rajul somehow overpowered the cheerful noise of the crowd stomping their feet and hollering in excitement with his comment.
"Well, well…" Shige-H closed her eyes, hardly able to contain her smirk. "With Ryoku Genshi stone-walling budojutsu attacks, who could have thought that Mana would show off her own spiritual chakra techniques?"
"So that's what you were meditating on last night, Mana…" Damisan muttered to himself while staring at the spiritual energy settling down and vanishing without a trace just as suddenly as it came up out of nowhere.
Down in the arena, Ryoku Genshi was grumbling and writhing on the ground, struggling to pick himself up again. Unlike before, when Mana battered his armor with physical energy attacks that were basically just enhanced taijutsu strikes, this time it seemed like the rain of starry spirit comets had pummeled Ryoku Genshi's very fighting spirit, ignoring his armor altogether. It was only when Ryoku Genshi emitted a blazing pulse halo of flames from his back thrusters that his weary bag of bones stuffed into a heavyweight machine shell could stand upright.
"Tell me, Mana-san, did you know dharma techniques from before, or did you just master it last night?" Ryoku Genshi inquired with a pained voice, panting from within his armor which was audible despite the cybernetic voicebox that was altering his voice to come out more industrial and machine-like bending his speech and manipulating it to sound as it intended.
"It would have been impossible to learn something like this overnight. Even if wielding spiritual energy is easy for someone who can already mold it into chakra, shaping it into specialized techniques is another thing entirely. It requires focused training and time to hone such things, however… I was fortunate to have used spiritual energy during my time trapped in a stone body. I didn't need to train, I merely needed to meditate on my latent, suppressed memories and recall that experience. Of course, my skill in devising and improvising on simple illusions aided a great deal in coming up with a handful of spiritual techniques in such a short time…" Mana explained, feeling no pressure to exploit the opening she'd made and rush the battle into a premature conclusion. After all, Ryoku Genshi rushed to settle things in one slam, and that was how he got caught wide open.
"Well, you certainly are something else…" Ryoku Genshi shook his head inside the hefty helmet that did the best possible job technology could have accomplished in protecting an ordinary human head from the inconceivable shocks of high-speed impacts. What even this impressive technology failed in, however, was to alleviate the shock that came from within the brain. "It's like all this armor, all this protection is utterly useless."
"That's right. Against spiritual energy attacks, you must employ your fighting spirit, your intelligence, your emotional drive, draw strength from your experiences if you want to stand back up. That's why, unless you truly believe in yourself and your dream–you'll lose!" Mana claimed, pointing her finger at Ryoku Genshi with a bold proclamation.
"I guess we'll just have to see about that, won't we?" Ryoku Genshi barked out, extending his arms and recalling the mechanical hands into the cannon barrels his arms formed. At the end of those barrels, twin smaller fusion balls locked in and lit up with fusion flares. Instead of drawing that energy into the suit and empowering his movements, Ryoku Genshi focused them into propellant streams that he fired from the open cannon barrels, aiming straight at Mana.
Mana breathed in and out, causing a visible mirage around her as, despite the heated atmosphere in the fighting stage, threatened by bursts of focused fusion flares, Mana's breath came off cool as snow before her entire body became enveloped in an aura of heat that contrasted her breathing and surpassed even the heat emitted from Ryoku Genshi's flares.
"She's… She's using budojutsu again!" Damisan exclaimed, pointing down at the stage as Mana became one with the blurry mirage and skillfully evaded the incoming jets of fusion energy bursts. Mixed with her blitzing acrobatic evasion that pushed her body beyond its breaking point during these stressful instances, Mana's eyes lit up star-white as she flung occasional Spirit Starfall comets hurling at Ryoku Genshi, slamming against the rooted human-turret while Ryoku Genshi continued to insist on his attempts at catching Mana inside his fusion energy wave bursts.
"No, she's switching between budojutsu and dharma, just like Dashula did yesterday," Shige-H corrected her squad mate. "It might just be that the space between Mana's switches is even tighter than those of Dashula's!"
With the fusion ball that Ryoku Genshi intended to slam into Mana point-blank being once again inserted into the fusion baller's chest, it lit up with violent hot fusion reactions again, igniting the crevices in the athlete's armor and causing the thrusters to emit powerful, fiery flares. Yelling from the strain that this intensity put on his body, Ryoku Genshi created a burning wall behind him as the fusion flares emitted from his back and shin thrusters merged like flapping wings and the blazing waves fired from his cannons had their job made for them. With energetic grunts, Ryoku Genshi merged the two cannon streams, with entrapped Mana having few other options than to cross her arms and brace for the heated, supercharged streams of fusion flares engulfing her.
The converging blaze streams whirled around in a fiery hurricane so bright and hot that the audience had to lean back and cover themselves to hide from the heat that brushed their cheeks and protect their eyes. The last thing they saw before the unpleasant smack of scorch hit their faces was Mana getting trapped and swallowed into the eye of the firestorm, making the spectators gamble with the risk of blindness and minor burns just to get a little peek and confirm the fate of their favored semi-finalist.
"Please tell me she substituted out of that!" Damisan yelled out through the roar of the converging blaze rivers with a voice brimming with anxiety.
"Knowing Mana, it's unlikely…" Shige-H stared at the bright vortex of flames with an equally stressed expression.
As if listening in to the worst fears of the audience, the raging wildfire howled, lashed, and bent around before finally snuffing out. The death of the flames left only a scraped, bloodied, and ragged body, hovering weightlessly in mid-air. The limp bag of bones and flesh must have been held up solely by the surge of the fire and now that it was gone, gravity caught up with it, dragging Mana back down with her black hair perfectly contrasting the dirty white rags of her dress in the fall.
Instead of plummeting all the way, crashing down on her face, and staying that way, a loud thud left the crowd stupefied. Even Ryoku Genshi didn't reset his enhanced Fusion Ball suit and dump all the powerless fusion balls that stayed loaded in and just glared at Mana's feet, planting firmly first against the floor with her grazed knees buckling, but keeping her body upright.
"She cut the fall!" Rajul exclaimed, causing the crazed crowd to go off at once in mad cheers as Mana's body stiffened and glared at the pro athlete with a mean scowl of a delinquent looking for her pound of flesh. An outline of mirage-like heat emanated around Mana and by now it occurred to the spectators that this heat had nothing to do with the flames that should have burnt her to a crisp.
"She took the hit!" Endo leaned forward wide-eyed and wearing a loose jaw.
"She's on her feet!" Asuka cheered with a pump of her fist.
"Here she comes!" Shige-H saluted, digging her nails into her arms which were riddled with goosebumps.
True to the prediction of her squad leader, Mana repurposed the momentum and the energy her body was brimming with into a mad, headfirst dash straight at the ill-prepared athlete. Just before the blaze consumed her, Mana had switched from spiritual energy to physical, making her body stronger, faster, and also tougher than usual. Tough enough even to withstand a combined attack of two fusion flare streams swallowing her and grinding her up with only skin-deep scrapes and shallow burns. Now it felt like the physical energy burdened Mana's taxed body and demanded release.
Fortunately for her, she had just the right recipient right in front of her!
Reacting to Mana's challenge, and imminent threat of severe damage to his suit, Ryoku Genshi aimed his cannon-like arms and fired the empty steel fusion balls, snuffed out of all their flame and energy, like bullets. Mana moved with such ferocious speed that the bullets phased through a mere afterimage and the young woman dashed right up to Ryoku Genshi with a spinning aerial kick aimed at Genshi's helmet. As if his cannon arms were swords, Genshi blocked the strike, only to hear the steel sing sorrowful lamentations and bend from impact.
Bouncing off the impassable block, Mana swung the back of her hand. This was no attempt at a humiliating slap, however, as instead of a clang of a white glove meeting tempered steel, the hit sounded lighter and hollower and produced a vast cloud of paper sheets. Ryoku Genshi wasn't smacked with a glove, it was a fake bouquet of paper flowers that Mana hit him with.
"A smokescreen?" Genshi voiced his thoughts out loud, trying to sift through the annoying paper tufts in the air, acting like petals of a smashed bouquet and slowly settling down into a light drizzle. He didn't have the time to wait for them to settle down, however, not with amped up and desperate Mana up in his face and on his trail.
Desperate for a response, Genshi swung his arms around, trying to swat Mana or to, at the very least, to discourage her from a frontal attack. He'd have accepted just keeping her where he could keep track of her even. It was when Genshi's arms swung around, filtering through the paper chaff that Mana had left in the air, that he realized those tiny pieces of confetti had something scribbled on them. These were no mere paper tufts!
"Paper tags? But you need to set them off using chakra to activate them. Have you finally accepted that you can't beat me without relying on your chakra, Mana?" Genshi taunted his opponent, just to gauge her reaction. The constant unknown of the mad trains of thoughts running terrifyingly on time in Mana's head left the crippled fusion baller uneasy even inside a thick marvel of military technology. The best corporate money could buy and build.
Then the sound came that shattered Genshi's heart just as it raked through his ears and ripped through the audience. A clang! The radars replacing Genshi's sense of sight reported a drastic increase in temperature all at once. It registered movement and relayed Mana's location, diving out from the paper cloud. The sparks coming from the collision of a kunai against Genshi's armored shell caught a few tiny paper chunks that popped and caused a chain reaction of localized mini-explosions. Grumbling, Genshi spread his thick mechanical legs and braced to withstand the wave of chained blasts like the walking tank he was.
The audience gasped, whooped, and clapped, admiring the light show and the rowdy ruckus of combat while Mana skidded outside of the blast's range and observed the chained explosions, clenching her fists and squeezing trickles of blood from her wounds in painful anticipation and wanting for the indomitable giant to fall down as Genshi was thrown forward and backward, sideways, up and down inside that cloud of fiery bursts.
With the blast having subsided, Genshi stumbled out of it with dents and scrapes on the outermost layer of the armor. As expected, a physical attack merely grazed the paint of the athlete's sponsored suit of armor. Mana's hands loosened their clutch and her frustrated expression could only hide her disappointment with the outcome from her opponent.
Slipping his mechanical fists back out from the barrels and splitting them into separate pieces while bending the forearms and locking them up, Ryoku Genshi resumed the ordinary humanoid formation of his armor. The fusion ball in the center of his suit lit up with bright lights, beginning internal hot fusion reactions inside its containment seals that pumped energy back into the suit.
Empowered by the sudden burst of energy, Ryoku Genshi dashed onward, throwing the heavy mechanical frame of his militarized sports uniform charging at Mana. A transparent bubble of heat, similar to the burning atmosphere upon an object's re-entry, formed around the rushing athlete. Rippling with a mirageous heat outline around her body that trailed with faint vapor, Mana rolled through mid-air and threw a rolling flip kick only to meet Ryoku Genshi's block down the middle.
"Spirit Meteor!" Mana exclaimed, switching to spiritual energy and lighting up the torchlight in her eyes, replacing the intense heat emanating around her with spiritual light as she punched down and sent a lone five-point star projectile shooting between Ryoku Genshi's legs and bursting behind his mechanical heel, causing the massive armor frame to lose its balance and stumble backward.
"Spirit Ring!" Mana clapped her hands upon landing and then spun them around her chest as if trying to shape a pot from a spinning mold of clay in front of her. A bright white mass of air washed away from behind Mana, robbing her of the spiritual light in her eyes and extinguishing her spiritual energy aura only to form a whirlwind of rainbow-tipped stars around Ryoku Genshi and leave the stumbling goliath spinning in place, according to the whims of the spiritual energy vortex.
"Contestant Ryoku Genshi is off-balance and trapped inside the starry typhoon! Unless he weathers this storm and returns to the fight, he might be in trouble!" Rajul exclaimed alongside the audience applauding and cheering for a colorful light show Mana was putting up employing the tricks of their favored handful of competitors and representing the signature bundle of tricks in the Sun Disc arena in budojutsu and dharma.
One by one, the swirling, rainbow-tipped, starry comets began breaking formation and plunging straight through Ryoku Genshi's armor, making the hulking armored behemoth stumble as if he'd suffered a hefty blow that rattled him even through all the armor and left him reeling. If Ryoku Genshi was to survive this hailstorm of spiritual whirlwind, he needed to prove the mettle of his own spiritual energy–his intelligence, his experiences, and his beliefs. They needed to be adamant to withstand these attacks.
"Tsk…" Ryoku Genshi grumbled through pain and fatigue. With his spiritual half being battered by these blows instead of his physical body, the pro athlete found himself panting, hurting, and short of breath despite suffering no physical injuries in all this chunky armor. "I won't… Give in! My dream… I'll keep fighting for my dream!" he declared, standing valiantly against the vortex of starry comets of spiritual energy.
Mana's and Genshi's battle of convictions continued, approaching the climax of their collision, at which point fortune would determine the chosen one whose experiences and beliefs were stronger.