"Oh! Contestant Mana took a major injury! This could spell out the end of the battle right there!" Rajul yelled out, leaning at the rails as if this would make any difference in him being able to see any hidden details that he could not see through before.
Some members of the audience held their breaths in, covering their mouths and shaking, wondering if they were about to see another unfortunate death in the arena. In contrast, others sped up their breathing from the excitement of getting to see blood. Instead of blood, they saw Mana bloat up for a split of a blink and then explode with a vivid fireball, pushing Gunshi Aspen back to skid across the stage and balance with his giant sword, while the infernal whirlwind of his making settled down.
A gale picked up, carrying handfuls of sand and a white veil. Those who only focused on the white veil being gently carried along the wind's path saw a tanned, feminine hand grab the veil and attach it to her headdress, appearing as if though from thin air in the wake of the fiery destruction of her impaled body. True to her nature as an entertainer, Mana spread her arms out and lightly bowed her head and shoulders, buckling her knee a little.
"Putting me through a real emotional rollercoaster here, lady," Gunshi Aspen smirked, adopting a defensive sword stance. "Pretending to get hurt real badly like that and then walk out unscathed, out of the blue like that…"
"Nothing personal, I treat every battle as part of my show. Especially one with such a massive audience," Mana winked.
"I've got to hand it to you, you're breaking my heart. No woman's ever pretended to get killed to get away from me. I mean, given my nasty luck, plenty have gotten killed because they associate with me, but none of them faked their deaths. None that I know of, at least…" Gunshi said with an excited grin.
Unlike Mana, who was still wary of her opponent and whatever she saw inside the eye of his demonic whirlwind, Gunshi seemed to love taking this battle less seriously. That must have been why he kept those strange creatures he manifested hidden and relied on his swordplay for now. Before he decided to rely on the true nature of those creatures, Mana would have preferred to figure out his secret and how those fiends he manifested worked. That would be integral if she was to successfully defeat this guy.
The announcer mentioned something about reading from some weird book and him getting possessed by demons. Could those visions all have been illusions, or was there more truth to them than Mana would like to believe? As an illusionist of great renown herself, Mana had a feeling that the jagged black skull fiend she saw inside that whirlwind, spitting streaming beams of fire at her, was no illusion. Still, she needed to understand how this man's ability worked. Mana needed to know what she could expect if she was to predict the tide of the battle.
Mana's intense focus on the task at hand was interrupted when a pair of thick and long tentacles, fostering fangs instead of the usual suckers, extended from behind Gunshi and slapped at the ground behind him, thrusting the unholy magical swordsman onward to battle. Gnashing her teeth, Mana extended her hand, sending a handful of burning, steel-tipped playing cards, but two skeletal hands of something vastly surpassing Gunshi's own size blocked them.
Desperate to escape being cleaved, Mana ducked under the first blow but took a mean kick to the face when Gunshi turned his entire body into a horizontal whirligig, buzzing like a windmill shuriken, offset by the massive sword he held in one hand. Upon feeling the burn of sandstone as it grazed and tore her dress in a few places, Mana pushed her body off the ground while still hurling backward and stopped her uncontrollable bouncing toward the ring's edge.
Rushing across the distance between them, Gunshi swung his sword in an uppercut-like swing off the ground, splitting the ring across with a deep ridge that opened deep enough to show the foaming and waving waters of the lake underneath, spilling into the ridge. Repositioning into a thrust, Gunshi focused the muscles of his body, giving Mana some breathing time. She extended her hand, casting a kunai with a steel wire attached as a fishing line, and reeled her top hat from the audience stand back to her hand.
"Lance of Sin!" Gunshi yelled out, thrusting his massive sword entirely with one overtaxed arm. The tip of the sword emitted a golden beam of light from the looks of it, sparkling in both directions, but this was just a visual illusion.
In the first few moments, it looked as if the entire fabric of paper upon which the story of the universe was being written in was being cut through with red-hot scissors, setting the sheets on fire as they cut cleanly through. However, a horrifying rumble made the audience cover their ears and turn away from the eruption of debris that reached all the way to the upper layers of the atmosphere. The tournament grounds and the ground beneath the very Agbarah Sheikhate quaked, threatening to cast every spectator out of their seats.
"Yer spear is broken!" a brown rabbit holding a claymore sword that it thrust with both hands into the tip of the Leviathan's Cross, grounding Gunshi's thrust from above said proudly while sitting on top of the diagonally etched into the ground sword with his own massive weapon resting over his shoulders. "Ye've got a lot 'a nerve ta call on me after all dis time. We thought ye've forgotten all about us back in the forest!"
"Zoku-chan…" Mana smiled at her first ninja rabbit partner. A nimble rabbit sword fighter wielding a sword twice his size. "I'm sorry, it's just that my enemies are often so dangerous that I do not wish to put the ninja rabbits in harm's way."
"Am I seeing things!? The whacky abilities of these magicians truly have no limits! Just when it seemed like Gunshi Aspen would score a winning blow, contestant Mana called forth a talking rabbit swordsman to her aid! It truly looks like we've got to brace ourselves for anything at this point!" Rajul addressed the baffled crowd who didn't entirely understand where that rabbit swordsman came from.
"Hmph!" Gunshi Aspen showed an effort-led grin of gnashed teeth, yanking the grounded sword upward and ripping it out of the ground while flinging Usuzoku into the air.
"Ay, ay… What's da big idea!?" Usuzoku grumbled while the uncontrollable and forced rise of the sword he stood on shot him upward like a catapult. Gunshi's floral shirt ripped open, rustling behind his back like a cape, and revealing two human faces of molten flesh attached to tendril-like growths extending from the shoulder blades of the unholy magical swordsman. Flames spilled out from the eyes and mouth of these tormented, molten human faces as they spat fiery, streaming biles of vitriol to the floor, propelling Gunshi Aspen into the air to clash with the airborne sword fighter rabbit.
"So, I guess I'm not the only one with some conjured help in this fight?" Gunshi smirked, exchanging a few aerial sword blows in mid-air with Usuzoku before overwhelming the ninja rabbit with the strength and size of his sword, shoving Usuzoku's defensive block to the side with a devastating slam of his lump of iron, preparing to cut the rabbit down.
Usuzoku's face twisted in pain as the down-coming sword split the brown rabbit into two, cutting neatly through his pheasant-like striped fur like a hot wire through a wheel of cheese. However, instead of blood, only brown tufts spilled out from Usuzoku's innards. Confused, Gunshi shook his head, shaking off the blurry vision and realizing, much to his horror, that these tufts were minuscule versions of Usuzoku himself. The uncontrollable army of ninja rabbits bounced rabidly at the sweaty and horrified Gunshi, who began mindlessly thrashing in the air as if fending off illusory foes.
"Don't think dis makes us even," Usuzoku turned his nose up after joining Mana's side, the ninja magician held a one-handed hand seal prepared, while she cast her illusion that she reflected off the polished blade of her partner straight into Gunshi Aspen's eyes, saving her partner's hide in a crucial moment. "Just 'cause ya saved my hide in a fight ya pulled me into, don't make ya some big hero or somethin'!"
"Come now, Zoku-chan, don't be so grumpy," Mana smiled. "We work well together, don't we?"
"How can ah stop actin' grumpy when ya keep addressin' me bah dat ridiculous, cutesy, childish name!?" Usuzoku lashed back at Mana.
"I just can't help it, when you're so cute," Mana bent her head to the side with a polite and pleasant smile. "Besides, in our line of work, if I stopped calling you "Zoku-chan", you'd suspect me to be a shapeshifter of some sort and take my head."
"Eyes on da enemy, girly!" Usuzoku snarled, turning its snout up and whiffing at the air as if the rabbit swordsman could literally smell the bad omens turning the atmosphere in the arena stuffy.
Gunshi Aspen was falling through a dark void, enveloped by a violent storm of ashes and cinders, before slamming down inside a system of empty ruins. A once majestic city of marble, sunken in magma that's since hardened into sky-scraping mounds of charcoal that would cut the hands and feet of the brave soul trying to scale them clean on touch.
Looping chains tightened around the wrists and heels of the unholy magical swordsman, spreading his arms and legs and leaving him trapped and dangling while black tendrils lowered themselves, appearing seemingly from the bosom of the very darkness shrouding the mental plane Gunshi Aspen was dragged into during a time of dire need.
A rotting and burnt mass of flesh lowered, suspended by the shadowy tendrils like a puppet with a flayed human face, borrowed eyes, teeth, and tongue that still behaved as if controlled by separate wills, working separately on their own, as opposed to heeding a common mind, to gaze at Gunshi Aspen's face. Annoyed by being whisked away, the unholy magician spat back at the demonic face gazing at him, only for the wild tongue to lick the spit and pull it in, munching on it for a second before the demented demonic manifestation spoke.
"I can't believe you're intent on leaving all that fun to yourself, Way. You know, we consider witches to be an irresistible delicacy in the Further Beyond. It's why we tempt them with our unruly power and unimaginable sights and knowledge they'd otherwise remain blissfully ignorant of," the demon spoke to the restrained and dishonored young priest.
"I remember you," Gunshi grumbled, trying to force himself out of his binds to give this fiend a piece of his mind. "You were the one who killed Korudora!"
"Me? I distinctly remember your tendrils snapping her neck and stuffing her from inside out with delicious darkness until her feeble mortal flesh burst," the face attached to the shapeless, molten tumor cackled with its eyes rolling around wildly as if they were just googly toys.
"You remember it because you took over my mind and my body!" Gunshi began wildly thrashing in his restraints, even though they existed more within the confines of his own mind and this was merely a projection of a far vaster evil existing on a much higher plane, able only to squeeze this much of its demented horror through the limited vastness of the living portal of the Omniversal plane that was Gunshi Aspen, the Unholy Priest.
"Details, details… In any case, you should be glad that we crept in and pulled you from the witch's mirage. You were sleeping on the job again. Oh well, I guess it's good because when you sleep, we get to come out and play," the flat and twitching face attached to the burnt tumor spreading the tendrils of literal, corporeal darkness cackled to itself.
"You… Just wait, just wait until I win this tournament and establish a nexus on this plane! With the higher-ranking magicians and the Triumvirate able to act on this plane, they'll close the portal inside of me and keep you devils stranded in your miserable realm for good!" Gunshi snarled defiantly.
"Or… Just maybe… The nexus will give us a nice gateway to this plane through you. I guess that depends on who's in control when the time comes, doesn't it?" the demon lowered its demented visage and neared its flayed face almost to the closeness of touching with the tip of Gunshi's nose as it jerked up and down in delighted, unhinged chortle.
"Shouldn't he have fallen down already?" Mana stretched her lips to the left side of her face in worry while gazing at the bellowing, curling, and writhing in mid-air swordsman. Flames spouted from every orifice of his body, his nostrils, even his eyelids while the tormented magician began peeling his skin and flesh off only to reveal scaly red flesh underneath and light up in hellfire like a living torch.
"That ain't no ninja pellet like any I've seen…" Usuzoku stuffed a piece of smack from somewhere in his pants pocket into his mouth to nibble on while he took up his sword and put it up and in front as a defensive measure.
"This man isn't a ninja. I can sense his energy, so it's probably some alien form of chakra, but… The techniques he's using aren't like any form of ninjutsu I've ever felt before. He's sprouting strange limbs in places and growing body parts one second while making them disappear the next. I just can't get a good read on him, I'm afraid," Mana sighed.
"Just like before, Gunshi Aspen is changing his shape, turning into one of those giant monstrosities that gave Kita Esatoko so much trouble!" Rajul yelled out as a reaction to the drastic and disturbed metamorphosis that Gunshi Aspen was undergoing inside of the sky-bound, colossal bonfire.
Bony joints and insectoid-like limbs sprouted from the bubbly and malformed body, bursting forth with a shower of blood and bending like some sort of twisted, biological scythe. Six charred and black arms and a pair of thick, jagged legs burst forth, while the twitching body-bag that was once Gunshi Aspen bubbled and boiled from inside the bonfire. With a bestial roar, a horrific, black skull ripped out from the malformed and disfigured, quartered torso like an insect hatching from an egg and casting the shell aside.
"Of all da fecked up enemies, ya've just had ta call and sic me on dis freak, didn't ya?" Usuzoku groaned, taking up its sword and preparing to do whatever good a mere claymore could have done against a six-armed, skeletal, and fiendish abomination like this demented case of demonic possession at hand.
"What's the matter, Zoku-chan? The great rabbit warrior is afraid?" Mana playfully teased her partner despite in no way feeling confident about any part of this herself. If anything, she was a little excited to have a chance to give this demon a piece of her mind after it spat a beam of hellfire at her when it pulled her into that hellish hurricane earlier.
Usuzoku grumbled, exclaiming a mad berserker battle cry and jumping into battle with those thick and powerful hind rabbit legs of his. Usuzoku's blade clashed with the adamantine volcanic corpus of the titanic skeleton with deafening clangs as the rabbit swordsman pranced, vaulted, flipped, rolled, and swung around in a mad flurry, knowing that, if at any point he stopped cutting, he'd get crushed, cooked, and eaten at once.
The horned, skeletal devil inhaled, putting its lower four arms to work to create a sort of jagged wall of volcanic charred spikes before him while its impressively horned skull breathed in deep and cast an uncontrollable mass of flames from its mouth. In an instant, just before the flames would have engulfed and roasted the ninja rabbit, the swordsman was replaced with Mana's body, teasing the fire-breathing devil by blowing out an aerial kiss.
While the choice to substitute herself with her rabbit partner seemed odd to the devilish shape that Gunshi had taken, Mana's ruse was revealed when, upon being showered with flames intense enough to rend the flesh from her bones before roasting it to charcoal, dispelled in a vocal pop and a tiny whirlwind of Wind Release chakra. With the ninja magician replacing Usuzoku not with herself, but a Wind Clone version of her, the dissolving clone and its Wind Release chakra still interacted with hellfire as if it were some form of ordinary flames, causing a rowdy shockwave and a blast to threaten to collapse the fighting stage.
Bellowing in pain, the six-armed, skeletal abomination collapsed on its rear, pushed on its back by the uncompromising force of the resulting blast from the combination of its own hellfire and Mana's Wind Release causing a violent reaction when fueling them to erupt lawlessly. The tips of the volcanic titan's many spikes lit up with flames, like torches, catching tongues of its own hellfire.
"Dat's somethin' new," Usuzoku scoffed in reaction to Mana's newfound boldness. "Ye've never flipped a bastard off before pulling a prank on dem."
"I've seen the face Death itself selected to wear for meeting me. I issued it an open challenge and cheated it in a way that left it confused, liberating the beast from its imprisonment. I'm done apologizing, I'm done counting odds. The world won't change unless I lead it with example and it won't see my example unless I make it undeniable. I don't care if this demon is real or not. We're taking it down and we're pulling Gunshi out of its carcass. Then–we're beating him," Mana boldly declared, crossing her arms and standing alongside Usuzoku on the vanguard before the stumbling volcanic titan.
"Is dat it? Anythin' else?" Usuzoku made a mean smirk, acknowledging Mana's unrealistic expectations.
"Yeah, by the time we're done, this crowd will chant my name again," Mana glanced at the stupefied crowd that was dazzled by the boldness of a lone woman and her rabbit partner taking on this blazing hellion.
"I can get used ta dis new you, girly," Usuzoku took a deep breath and exhaled once before leaping boldly into battle with the fallen fiend.