"Whoa! Contestant Ryoku Genshi has stepped up his game, crisscrossing around with red-hot wrist saws! I'm not sure he had time to aim that well with how fast he was going and all the red he was seeing, but unless contestant Mana stands up and proclaims she'll continue the match, I'm afraid I'll have to call it quits!" Rajul ruled, much to the heated anticipation of the audience, standing up to their toes and directing their attention at the young fallen woman laid out flat on the eastern side of the ring.
"Don't bother counting!" Ryoku Genshi proclaimed, reaching for his chest and detaching the metallic playing balls composed of pure fusion energy surrounded by metallic plates from eight sides and containment cells that prevented the ball from going off and causing a widespread, apocalyptic calamity immediately.
The upgraded fusion baller took off, riding the burst of his six heel afterburners and directing that speed into upward momentum, taking off upon reaching the center of the arena. Spreading his arms out wide, while his right one clutched the fusion ball sucked into the hollowed-out hole in his mechanical hand, Ryoku Genshi slammed his hands together, clapping them with the fusion ball caught in between the thunderous, mechanical claps.
The clap resulted in a thunderous shockwave imbued with volatile fusion energy emanating from the ball during the shock. The shock caused the sealed fusion reactor energy to go haywire, while the containment shells held the blast that would've resulted back, expelling only the blast wave from the batteries themselves as they struggled to contain the full might of the burst. The thunderclap wave headed straight toward the eastern side of the arena, with no favor of the seemingly unconscious Mana in particular.
Hearing rumbling and feeling the taste of blood in her mouth and painful twinges all across her body with her soaked with blood dress sticking to her irritated skin, Mana rolled to the side, using the loose tiles for cover by putting them over her and bracing for impact. The shockwave rocked the tiles and shattered them, but Mana avoided being blasted out of the fighting stage by being flattened into the gravel underneath the arena's tiles and dug into the shallow crater.
Sifting through shattered tile shards, Mana emerged covered in dust and bloody gashes where Ryoku Genshi's saws cut her, rattled and shaken, but still competing. Mana's second wind inspired the audience's cheers, for they had almost accepted that the first match of the semi-finals would be a disappointingly short one.
"Privileged, you called me?" Mana said quietly so that only she and the armless and legless athlete sealed inside a massive suit combining the most modern puppetry and military armor technology could hear and understand each other. "What on Earth do you possibly know about me?"
Extreme heat began emanating from Mana's body, so powerful that it made the surrounding air bend and ripple as if the young woman dragged through the infernal field of hellish battle and back was just a haunting mirage. Unfortunately, as Ryoku Genshi was about to find out, her quietly seething, extreme glare was all too real.
Mana took off in a mad dash as if she was completely undaunted by a marvel of puppetry and armory presented before her and intended to rip it apart with her bare hands. Thinking the young woman's daring dash to be the epitome of naivete, Ryoku Genshi raised his hefty armored arm to fling the fusion ball right at her, but, much to his surprise, Genshi found out that his arm was stuck somewhere in between clapping and returning to the default stance. Sparks shot off from a joint area where a steel card was clogging the gearwork and preventing the limb from moving.
"A card… When did… No way!" a realization struck Ryoku Genshi as he mentally returned to the moment as he was dashing and slicing Mana up without a care. Just looking to inflict damage and cause hurt, expecting the shallow and well-meaning but ultimately too idealistic woman to throw the fight at the first sight of her own blood being shed on the battlefield. Mana left herself wide open to damage just so she could hit him right back and Genshi was all too blind to see it!
Jumping into the air and turning around her axis, Mana transitioned that momentum into a forward-rolling chop that rang with all the clang of a war hammer hitting a thick kite shield. Ryoku Genshi grunted and gargled as his head was rattled inside the shell like a puny yolk, back and forth, up and down with violent, jerking reverb.
Splitting his arms into multiple, smaller cannon-like tubes, Ryoku Genshi thought to have shed all the obstructions in his cannons, but some of the smaller explosive balls that he used for his impressive barrage of ranged artillery fire before became clogged somewhere in the complex system of tubes and gears, finding a steel card, overflowing with chakra of the jutsu sealed within and using it to fuel its toughness and ability to resist pressure that would've folded an ordinary sheet of steel.
Slipping another card in her hand, Mana unsealed the Lightning Release chakra sealed inside and landed on the ground, slashing Ryoku Genshi's front and leaving a noticeable light graze across the front of the protective puppetry suit with prosthetic limbs and military-grade weaponry. Squeezing that card out of everything it was worth, Mana made it sparkle with blue electricity as she slashed diagonally across Ryoku Genshi's heavyweight armored frame and then down low by the knees, where the oversized thigh connected to the subtler and more aerodynamic shin.
Ryoku Genshi slipped into a tumble, falling flat and shaking a handful of playing cards out of the various crevices and spaces where they would have blocked crucial access to other tricks and features of his suit. As Mana approached Genshi, the athlete who sacrificed chunks of his body for the perspective of being able to dream of success stumbled back, dragging his upgraded Fusion Ball suit across the lightly charred and shaken battlefield.
"I was born to a family of a last survivor of her people and a ninja who threw away a successful career for the sake of human decency. Raised by the village that employed my father to spy on my mother's people and gave the order to slay all but one and a half of them," Mana said while slowly approaching Ryoku Genshi while the suit of armor twice her size was fleeing from this petite young woman, desperate for distance.
"Instead of being born to an established clan, I was born to a family of no renown, on the contrary, one that saw through the joke that the Will of Fire really is. I was never expected to accomplish anything but to be another tick in the casualty statistic that discourages young, talentless ninja like me from applying to the Academy," Mana continued to educate Ryoku Genshi on the context he, apparently, so sorely lacked as the thunder and lightning in her card snuffed out.
Just as Ryoku Genshi was about to pick himself up, seeing this as the foundation upon which he could build his comeback, Mana flung the card beneath his feet, leaving the final spark of the card to fall upon the face of another, one that fell out from Genshi's oversized suit of protective armor with ridiculous offensive capabilities, supplied by the enigmatic sponsors as an alleged upgrade of the usual Fusion Ball suit, meant solely for field roughhousing.
"Again and again I pushed myself beyond the point of breaking, losing faith, and shattering against the wall of my own limitations, but even at my lowest point, becoming a champion in this very arena. Wishing nothing more than to protect people around me, yet seeing those same people and my friends fall. Living my life chasing around an impossible dream of world peace and happiness for all, trying to lead a world that won't stop demeaning me and kicking me when I'm down by example," Mana growled as the card underneath Genshi lit up with sky-blue light and howled like a wolf saluting the blood moon on a hill in a forest clearing at midnight.
A whirlwind of Wind Release chakra unsealed from the card with a sealing glyph, activated by the last dying gasp of the Lightning Release chakra card and unleashing a localized typhoon that rattled the external puppetry suit and each of its individual pieces up to the smallest gear and bolt. Genshi shook left and right, clutching and hunkering down in a desperate plight to keep his suit holding together since, without it, he was armless and legless. Just a cruel depiction of everything he threw away, exposing which, Genshi realized, was Mana's intention.
"The only thing I'm privileged in is being the main character of a story written by an author plagued with self-doubt and everlasting sadness. A voodoo doll they can stick their nails and needles in and abuse to feel better about their struggles," Mana yelled out. Because of the depth and severity of her frustrations, Mana's voice matched the volume of the raging wind and reached Genshi inside the cluttering and clanging armor that struggled to keep it together.
The gale dissolved sooner than Mana would've hoped, leaving Genshi's armor slumped and hunched over, almost like a puppet that had its strings cut but somehow rested in a comfortable and balanced position, therefore maintaining its relatively seated, upright position. That way, Mana found herself within Ryoku Genshi's reach with only the Sealing Release technique as a viable way of setting off any of the other cards with weapons, ninja tools, chakra, and jutsu sealed inside them. A pinch, in other words.
The metallic hand prosthesis disappeared inside the mechanical barrel again, giving way for two pairs of sickle-like hooks closing in vertically and horizontally. Opening the sickle hooks, Genshi slashed with his hand, trying to grab hold of Mana. Still surrounded by heat that distorted the surrounding air, a calling card of budojutsu in use, Mana vaulted backward. Genshi's sickle arm grazed the floor, leaving crossed scratches on the tiles before he turned his entire body to swipe sideways. At the same time, the fusion baller engaged the sickle hooks in his other arm as well.
Mana vaulted horizontally in mid-air, jumping over the sweeping hooked grab and narrowly missing getting snagged. Beefy metallic thuds coming from Ryoku Genshi's quarter alerted Mana to another complex transformation of Genshi's armor. The sides of the armor's heavy arms split off, falling off, hanging only by handles that kept it attached to the center of the suit's body. The hanging pieces began aiming like remote turret guns, handled entirely by the narrow shafts, keeping them attached to the armor's corpus.
Familiar electric sizzle made Mana's muscles twitch and her head perk up with adrenaline-fueled awareness. The audience reacted similarly when the detached arm-piece cannons fired stray bolts of Lightning Release chakra, emitted through thick goggle-like eyes up front. The ones that were the most baffled by this show were the Sunagakure ninja, who identified this being an experimental, handheld version of Kumogakure's chakra cannon.
Taxing her body to the limit of what she could pull off without augmenting it with chakra, Mana took off high into the air and vaulted over Ryoku Genshi, figuring that there was no way for the armor to aim those cannons in a 360-degree angle. Unfortunately, Genshi must have been well aware of the armor's limitations, for he didn't even try to lift them higher than a static angle and instead aimed his reduced-in-weight hook arms and detached them from the wrist up, shooting them and securing a sickle hook grab around Mana's waist.
"Uh-oh! Contestant Genshi has gotten his hands around contestant Mana! This cannot lead to anything good! Fortunately, it would seem that Ryoku Genshi also shed a lot of power and weight from his arms to make those electro-guns, but what he lost in wallop, he gained in agility and flexibility!" Rajul reported while Ryoku Genshi flipped the restrained Mana over his head and slammed her against the arena tiles, head-first, leaving her suspended in an awkward upside-down position with her legs dangling over her flattened head.
"Oof! I don't think the human spine is meant to bend that way at such speed!" Rajul exclaimed, reacting similarly to the audience that collectively groaned in second-hand torment at seeing Mana hitting the floor at such an angle.
Mana's consciousness brought her back to a state of panic. Her throat, her nose, and every part of her airways were clogged with sticky and warm blood that was pouring down her throat or squirting out her mouth and nose in red bubbles. The ninja magician twitched in pain, but, before she could regain her composure and figure out a plan of counterattack, Rajul recalled her and secured his wrist back to his armored arm, at the same time as he pressed his electro-gun lens straight at Mana's waist and fired point-blank.
A flashing cerulean beam drilled skyward, carrying Mana along for the ride at its tip like an unfortunate, unhorsed knight stuck on the lance of their opponent. Heat pulsed through Mana's body from the central point in her gut, making Mana choke not on her blood, but pitch-black smoke that vented its way through her nose and mouth in fistfuls of black clouds of gaseous char. With whited-out eyes and smoldering with black smoke trails, Mana hit the ground from up top, sprawling out as a small pool of blood began accumulating underneath her. Only brief twitches in Mana's fingers and toes and her facial muscles relayed she was still alive.
"Come the fuck on!" Asuka shifted her legs in unease in the audience's stands. "It's clear she's using chakra already, so why not blast that cocky cripple with some serious attacks and blow him up, or bring out all her rabbits again?"
"Because Mana isn't using chakra, not yet," Shige-H noted. "She appears to be insistent on either losing or winning without spending any chakra."
"Come on, boss-lady… Not even Mana's that tough, fast, and strong? Didn't you see her clear out from lightning bolts and withstand a direct hit like that?" Endo turned to the Stars leader.
"It's not chakra she's using," Damisan answered for Shige-H. "It's the physical aspect of chakra. The opposite of what the Salvari were using during their match yesterday. Where their so-called dharma is mental energy, spiritual chakra in other words, what Mana is using is physical energy–physical aspect of chakra."
"It may have helped her survive so far, but… If she keeps this up, she'll get kicked to the curb or murdered without dealing any serious damage to that miserable cripple," Endo grumbled in discontent. He wasn't entirely wrong. Mana's flashy card tricks have only grazed the armor's paint job so far and given it some fancy battle scars to show its toughness off during future fights.
"I indeed underestimated you and nearly paid the price for it," Ryoku Genshi said with his voice getting augmented through the armor's voicebox. "It's a bit ironic. After getting so far solely for being underestimated and looked down upon as a lesser kind of warrior, a lesser kind of man, to nearly lose it all because I underestimated someone. Fortunately, my benefactors were well aware of your Lightning Release ninjutsu and additionally bolstered this armor against it."
"I see…" a husky, feminine voice that betrayed Mana's hurt came from the sprawled, face-up body of a burnt, battered, and slashed-up young woman who coughed up smoke and rolled over on her side, no longer rippling the air around her or radiating any of her previous heat. "So that was it, huh? Fire, wind, and lightning… I bet your sponsors did their best to protect you from all those things."
"What are you doing?" a feminine voice came from the audience stands. Mana's ear identified it as belonging to the sponsor lady representing the corporate interests looking to advertise and branch out into the World Sports Games that Ryoku Genshi sought to bring about to the world. "Attack now while she's vulnerable, don't let her use budojutsu again and damage the armor!"
"I'm not happy with this suit, you know," Ryoku Genshi admitted, ignoring the outrage from his enigmatic benefactors in the spectator stands. "I asked those two to build me an ordinary Fusion Ball uniform, like the one I came here with. I didn't want to become this… I wanted to win with my Fusion Ball skills, my movement, my tackles, and the untamed power of an atom rustling inside the fusion ball. All this weaponry… It's not what sports are all about. Sports is supposed to help keep the peace, not to use the tools of war."
"Oh…" Mana grumbled while peeling her bleeding and bruised body off the ground and glaring at Genshi. "So… Are you going to shed them and fight me as an athlete then?"
"I think we both know it's far too late for that, Mana-san," Ryoku Genshi said, popping out his metallic fist from the barrel and letting it whirl like a mechanical drill for a few dozen spins before locking it back into place. "For Fusion Ball and other sports to thrive and receive the recognition they deserve, the athlete in me had to die. I'm the sacrifice that was necessary to realize my dream."
"I see…" Mana breathed out, sounding a tad disappointed that so little had changed in her opponent's disposition. Stumbling and struggling to walk straight, Mana dropped Konoha's Strong Style stance, instead adopting a more free-form, balanced, and open taijutsu stance.
"I really don't wish to hurt you, Mana-san," Ryoku Genshi said, putting up his dukes and beginning to slightly bob and weave in his chunky armor. "I believe what you told me, the conviction in your voice that backed up your indomitable willpower and skill in sleight of hand with a dash of artistic flair hammered what you argued into my skull. Perhaps you started from the position of being as much of an underdog as I am, and maybe you've built yourself up to the tall step you're standing on now. However, you have no dream to defeat me for. You've already told me you don't want this land or this title, and that's why you can't beat me."
"That's where you're wrong," Mana replied. While one of her emerald eyes was closed from the blood dripping over her brow, the other stared back at Genshi with grand intensity and integrity. "Seeing you stumbling and giving up on yourself like that has given me a dream that won't die until I make you believe in yourself again. Even if I have to pull you out of this abominable shell to do it."