Matrani and Shige-H were moving in a coordinated fashion, dashing along toward the ramparts at the edge of Agbarah Sheikhate as a team. Occasionally, the curious eye of the Salvari warrior wandered off to the side and touched her spontaneously accepted partner, before returning to the desert town environments blurring by as the two moved toward one of the five streams sustaining the barrier.
"Is something the matter?" Shige-H wondered, revealing that she was aware of the drifting in her companion's attention despite never meeting eyes with Matrani.
"You're not like the other ninja in your squad. You didn't rush ahead or presume to be able to defeat the enemy without my aid," Matrani said. "I believe you were their leader, am I right?"
"It's not the responsibility of a leader to become like the team they manage. A leader must ensure that their team functions as a unit or that the method behind their madness matches what is necessary to complete their objective," Shige-H replied. "As to my odds for victory, I must admit, I'm grateful for your assistance. I'm sure that the others are too. All of us have spent most of our chakra yesterday making sure that Ryoku Genshi's suit is as tough as it can be for today's finals."
"I see, that's as mature of a response as one can expect from a team leader," Matrani smiled. Hearing this response made Shige-H glare back at her ally with a wary glance as well. Matrani looked a lot plainer than her peers amongst the Salvari. A baggy, dress-like robe, long, brown hair tied into a thick, single braid that orderly hung behind her back. If it weren't for the golden tiara defining her hairline, Matrani would've looked plain enough to be confused for a spectator from the audience rather than one of the larger-than-life personalities among the Salvari group.
"I've not seen you compete. Based on the fact I haven't seen you in the second-round matches, I assume you were eliminated in the battle royale. Are you really a God of the Arena like the other Salvari?" Shige-H wondered, stuttering through her speech as she realized while she was speaking that her question may have sounded a tad rude. Almost as if the Stars' leader was underestimating her ally. "I apologize if this sounds like I am undermining your abilities, I am not. It's simply that I'm unfamiliar with their extent."
"I am Matrani, the Protective Mother of the Salvari. Yes, I have topped more than one event at the arena. You needn't worry about offending me. I am not as much of a hothead as Shakali is…" Matrani smiled with a smile as warm and cozy as her title. While the title itself inspired little confidence in Shige-H, the fact that Matrani indeed earned a title like the rest of the warriors calmed her somewhat. At the very least, it didn't appear as if Shige-H would have to worry about watching out for the Salvari and could expect the Salvari warrior to have her back for a change.
"How does one top a martial arts event and earn a title like "the Protective Mother"?" Shige-H wondered. This time her voice came out more impressed than underestimated, which helped translate Shige's state of mind better.
"By being everywhere all at once, taking part in every battle and standing up for the weaker participants, and being honorable in competition. Also, by watching out and covering for your teammates, even if it comes at a risk of your own performance," Matrani replied.
"It sounds like you would be an excellent leader if your group didn't operate with that Supreme Salvari system, that is…" Shige-H observed while the two began bouncing up to the higher level of the rooftops since the wooden frames of the ramparts were in view. Already, their opponent loomed in the distance. It was a colossal, metallic automaton of clockwork and gears, stuffed inside the very heart of the ramparts. Its helmet had a knight-like slit, through which a pair of round red stars gleamed like torchlights.
"Is that how ninja select their squad leaders? By determining which ninja is the most useful to the team as opposed to which is the strongest?" Matrani wondered, smiling with round and soft cheeks, flushed with red.
"Not always, but it is the responsibility of a leader to be useful to their team. Always…" Shige-H stated with a firm expression that contrasted the friendly aloofness of her companion. Being handy and being of use at all times was Shige's ninja way, after all.
Rumbling and spewing dust from its crevices, the clockwork golem, radiating with a golden stream that touched and flowed into the barrier surrounding all of Agbarah, turned at the arriving warriors, grabbing hold of a stone used in the reinforcement of the outer wall and lobbed it at the two, almost as if it had no hope of hitting anything, but wanted the pair to know that the clockwork golem was nothing to mess with. Both Shige-H and Matrani dashed out of the way, slowing down for a second, before finding their positions on the opposite sides of the topside wooden support platform of the ramparts.
"It's indeed one of the Fennec's automatons that the mercenaries brought to the Succession Tournament," Matrani said clapping her hands before her, in a pose of prayer, and then thrusting a strong right hand at the enemy, beaming off an energized wave with a fiery tip, resembling the head of a lion. "Fist of Mother Dawon!" she chanted out.
The beaming wave of dharma rumbled the golem but dealt little to no damage to the clockwork colossus. Turning around and focusing on the Protective Mother of the Salvari, the golem thrust a powerful hook that smashed Matrani's half of the uppermost platform to bits, causing several layers of that half of the ramparts to collapse with the Protective Mother of the Salvari dropping to a lower level with the collapsing ramparts.
"Your dharma will not be too useful here," Shige-H proclaimed, taking off her half of the ramparts with an aerial diving punch straight at the armored nape of the back of the golem's neck. Being a medical ninja, Shige-H surmised that the area that showed the most effort in being protected should have been the golem's weakness. "This golem is an artificial construct, so it doesn't have much fighting spirit to begin with!"
Shige-H's punch reverberated through the ramparts, causing the golem's armor to let out a squeak of peeling and bending metal and turn toward the Allied Ninja, desperately waving its hands around in an attempt to catch Shige-H and squeeze the life out of her. As Shige-H dashed, flipped, and vaulted over the golem's hands, it occurred to her how strange of a decision it was to place this giant in this cramped, restricted area that had nothing but wooden support beams and platforms. It was as if it had nowhere to move around in this way, even though neither did its opponents. Perhaps it was a willful decision on the engineer's part to put the golem somewhere it didn't need to run or move around too much, covering up for a flaw in speed or agility and dumbing the battle down to a slugfest.
With a graceful backflip, Shige-H evaded a wide swing of the golem's smacking arm and landed atop a wooden support platform in the ramparts surrounding the giant clockwork colossus. With dharma spilling from Matrani's eyes and forming a trident construct in her hand, the Protective Mother of the Salvari dived and plunged the trident's fork into the back of the golem's knee. Thinking little of it, the giant turned and swatted at the Salvari warrior, only for the back of its knee to scream out in a metallic screech and then let out a satisfying pop.
The noises and the successful assault on the giant surprised even the Stars' leader herself, with Shige-H perking up and gazing down to Matrani's level to see how the Salvari managed to harm an artificial construct with a weapon of wholly spiritual energy. Rumbling and tumbling, the golem fell to one knee, fruitlessly grabbing a support platform and dragging it down with a deafening crash alongside it. Still, Shige's eye caught a thick spear of wood etched into the armor on the back of the golem's knee.
Matrani concealed a wooden piece of debris behind the flare of her dharmic trident, driving it into the back of the golem's knee and further dampening the metallic monster's mobility while also lowering it to a more accessible level of elevation. Taking off the platform, Shige-H wound back her fist and lit it up with a blue flare. She didn't have much chakra, but this opportunity certainly called for whatever Shige-H had. With a proud battle cry and a thunderous, crushing blow, Shige-H slammed her fist into the top of the golem's head, denting the helmet out of shape with so much force it blew the mask covering the golem up off.
The revelation of an internal, massive yet eerily humanoid face made Shige-H stiffen up for a moment. It was as if the face was suspended on hooks, attached to different angles of the hollowed-out helm. With the mask blown off the face, a face easily the size of Shige-H's entire body became revealed. It had been stitched together from what Shige-H, as a medical ninja, identified as sheets of artificial human skin. The type of material used for skin grafts, stitched together with hooks. Strangely, the clockwork head roared with a concussive shockwave potent enough to throw Shige-H off its back and make her fall through a wooden stack of boards, slamming her back against a thicker support platform below.
A powerful battle cry made Shige-H's head perk up and glare in its direction. Even the mechanized golem halted in place and turned its head a full 180, reacting to the sudden emergence of powerful dharma behind it. Matrani was overflowing with fiery orange dharma with a distinct golden glare from her eyes. Just like her fellow Salvari warriors, Matrani manifested four more pairs of arms behind her, emerging from the vivid dharmic aura she radiated from her body.
The clockwork golem turned around with its arms stretched to the sides, donning a T-shape stance while whirling around and smashing any vertical support beams to bits. Avoiding this slow but devastating attack, Matrani took it to the air. Shige-H gasped in awe as Matrani's dharmic aura surged into her lower body, exposing the dharmic arms to the elements while the dharma formed an orange blaze construct. A regal mount with bestial jaws and a lion's mane which granted a stronger pounce to Matrani's daring leap, enabling her to accumulate more force and gain more altitude.
The additional arms on Matrani's back merged into one, forming a singular shaft composed of eight joined arms. With these dharmic arms clutching a singular fist, the dharmic weapon turned into a mace as its upper half became rounder and more fit for overwhelming, hammering pounds. The rumbling metallic goliath acted in desperation to keep the amped-up Salvari away, attempting to slap its arms together in a thunderclap. Matrani whirled with her golden dharmic mace, deflecting the smashing arms in opposite directions and opening the golem up wide.
"Dauntless Gada!" Matrani chanted out, slamming the dharmic weapon down upon the golem's head. Shige-H scrambled to return to her feet, trying to scold the Salvari woman for forgetting her dharmic attacks had little effect on the golem. However, it appeared that the golem halted in place, taking a resounding blow to the head, however, instead of staggering or falling, the clockwork giant simply tuned out.
Not sure what this was all about, but not feeling like wasting this chance, Shige-H clenched a right fist and ignited a base blue chakra flare around it, condensing a great deal of physical force in her fist and taking off with a spear-like dive, tackling the steampunk goliath straight in its core. Shige-H's body rammed into the golem's back, right in the area between its most armored chest pieces and its waist parts, causing the parts to bend out of shape and peel open and for a loud concussive burst shockwave to shoot out evenly in all directions.
Shige-H gritted her teeth, feeling the shockwave washing through her entire body. Usually, she'd have enough chakra to augment her entire body to better withstand the aftereffects of her own Chakra Enhanced Strength punching, but being low on chakra made her compromise and take some moderate risks here and there. The golem didn't react in any verbal exclamation, only its distressed metallic parts sang a tragic elegy and popped one by one. Boisterously, the armored giant flopped on its front, leaning over the stone walls and hanging onto them as a beaten boxer hung themselves on ring ropes.
"I don't understand, did you hide something behind your last attack again? It seemed like the golem froze up!" Shige-H exclaimed, leaning to the side to address her temporary ally from further away. Seeing the golem collapsed but not defeated made Shige-H reconsider regrouping with her ally and stay parted on different halfs of the ramparts, leading to the golem chasing one target and opening itself up for counterattacks from behind courtesy of the other.
"This golem is not the product of the desert, it's not the mythical walking servant of the First People," Matrani said, pumping her fist and patting her biceps while the dharmic lion with a flaring golden flame head let out an energized roar. "It's a man-made suit of armor. Not too different from the puppets of the puppeteers from Sunagakure, though perhaps larger and more autonomous. Still, it is a construct of materials, all of which have their own chakra frequencies and are prone to failures."
While the concept of "knocking the fight out of a suit of metal" sounded ridiculous to Shige-H, she couldn't argue that everything had its own distinct chakra frequency. If chakra was the fundamental creation or destruction energy, the yin and the yang behind everything in the living universe and the oblivion beyond it, then everything that was created had a certain frequency of chakra of its own, meaning that even inanimate objects could have been disturbed by spiritual attacks in some cases.
"You didn't just stumble onto this, you've encountered this phenomenon in the arena, haven't you?" Shige-H smirked with a glint of respect directed at her ally.
"Perhaps, but more importantly, I couldn't afford not to be handy in this team effort," Matrani nodded. A raucous rumble interrupted the banter between two women who began respecting each other more and more with each punch thrown in this fight. Slowly, the clockwork monster pulled itself off the wall and hopped in the air, quickly turning around and swatting aside countless wooden support beams and platforms, causing a hectic storm of rushing air and pelting wood chips everywhere in the area.
The golem's stomp caused a widespread collapse of all surrounding towers and for terrifying cracks in the wall of the Agbarah Sheikhate to appear. The rampant air vortex picked up, mixed, tore up, and tossed aside both warrior women, leaving them reeling on the hot desert sand, resting across ancient sandstone laid out when these walls were first built, while the ticking, clanging, and rumbling behemoth approached them, having liberated itself from its engineered restraints.
"Do you have chakra for one of those hard-hitting punches left?" Matrani turned to her ally with a raised eyebrow. "While I might be able to cause some more structural failures in this giant by disrupting the innate chakra of its materials, it's self-evident I cannot deliver the winning blow."
"Sorry, I'm not so sure…" Shige-H clenched a fist hard enough to make her forearm shake, but the first promptly released.
"I see…" Matrani smiled, closing her eyes and once again lighting up the golden torchlights of dharma from her eyes when they opened. "In that case, let me show you why they call me the Protective Mother of the Salvari."
Unbothered by the looming threat that was approaching with rumbling steps, Matrani crossed her feet and hovered above the ground, flaring up with intense blazing dharma that flared with brightening, golden mane, like a sun with the face of a roaring lion. Despite the intensity of her dharma, Matrani's face was serene, as she lifted her right hand to shoulder height, pointing her palm outward and the fingers pointing up, as she turned diagonally toward Shige-H. "Abhaya!" Matrani chanted out.
One blink later, a pillar of booming aura ignited beneath Shige-H's feet, surrounding her with surging blaze energy, burning with golden light. Stupefied by this surging fighting spirit, the Allied Ninja examined her hands and body, marveling at the light of dharma bestowed upon her by the Protective Mother of the Salvari. It wasn't that Matrani had increased the chakra Shige-H had left, but the Salvari drastically boosted Shige-H's spiritual side, anything that had something to do with spiritual chakra: fighting spirit, experience, intelligence. Shige-H felt almost unbeatable!
Having inspired her ally not to lose her fighting spirit, Matrani vanquished the blazing dharmic sun behind her and formed another majestic dharmic beast, which she mounted in mid-air. Matrani's surging dharma formed four additional pairs of dharmic arms, all armed with different weapons. Roaring with the majesty and volume of ten thousand thunders, the dharmic beast pounced into battle, with Matrani swinging her ten arms in a violent dance that even Shakali, the Dark Mother of War, would be proud of.
"Incredible. It's not like Matrani had boosted my chakra, but… This is such a rush! I feel powerful, I feel outright invincible! Yes… I have the body, Matrani lifted the spirit," Shige-H looked at her shaking fist, that felt like it could pound mountains into oblivion and extinguish suns. Reeling back, Shige-H took off, blitzing into a broken chunk of rampart debris, then vaulting onto a wall to avoid a devastating smash of the enemy, aimed at Matrani and her dharmic beast.
Rushing in from the side, Shige-H vaulted overhead of the golem and wound back her fist, splitting the sky with a golden bolt that smashed into the top of the golem's head and ripped clean through it, unraveling the rattled and misshapen layers of armor until Shige-H felt her bloody knuckle pressing against the scorching desert sand below. With a vociferous barrage of booms, the remains of the clockwork colossus collapsed behind the perched Allied Ninja while Matrani gently unmounted her dharmic beast and pressed her feet against the ground.
"So it wasn't just a feeling, the punch really packed a wallop," Shige-H stared at the exposed knuckles of her bloody hand. She felt reverberations and fractures flaring up all across her body, in the wrist, the elbow, the shoulder, even the hips, but… Somehow, the pain didn't feel like that big of a deal.
"Sometimes we don't truly know what we're capable of. We let limits like our faltering faith and feeble, fallible human spirit stop us. It is the role of the Protective Mother to bolster that faith and let us push our bodies to their true limits, even if this boost is temporary," Matrani blessed her ally from afar while observing the golden stream of chakra sustaining the barrier fade away from the golem's wreckage. "A leader is a type of mother too, don't you think? Perhaps that too is part of the role you must serve for your teammates as their guiding light?"
"Huh…" Shige-H straightened her back and looked up at the towering buildings deeper into the Sheikhate. "So, those mercs spent their downtime repairing their tin can soldiers?"
"I suggest you return to the infirmary. It may feel like these limitations of the body are meaningless now, but they will drag you back down to the level of your plain human insecurities in time," Matrani said, advising Shige-H against chasing her teammates and assuring that they too came out victorious.
"Nah," Shige-H shook her head with a smile. Her hazy and serene eyes radiated confidence and faith in her teammates' abilities. "Sometimes a mother needs to cut her kids loose when she thinks they're ready and let them fly on their own, just to see how high they'll go. And, maybe… A leader is not that much different from a mother, in some ways."