Chapter Text
The mortified audience stared at the rising pillar of dust and debris in the eastern wing of the arena, where the Curse Walker's devastating attack caused a calamitous ruckus and left his opponent submerged in the aftereffects of his destruction. When enough of the rubble first parted away and allowed signs of the destruction to be seen from outside, a flash of Wayna's panting face with a pained expression, and her damaged armor could be made out.
This caused the audience to erupt into a clapping furor. "Incredible! Wayna Nunnon survived her opponent's strike and is priming to turn the tables back in her favor!"
However, this ruling may have been a little premature, as when more of the dust parted, it became evident that the surviving half of Wayna's armor had ventilation tubes that bent out of shape and leaked blue chakra flares. In contrast, the right side of her armor had been completely blown off, exposing a red and violet spandex bodysuit layered underneath.
"I see, she must have used the expulsion of chakra from her thrusters as a sort of counterforce, a makeshift barrier against the overwhelming force coming her way. It was a meek countermeasure, but it must be the reason she's still in the ring, or why she's even alive at this point," Damisan surmised, being more experienced with improvised gadget-based weaponry because of his experience in the field of ninja puppetry.
"If that is indeed the case, then Wayna must have been taught about the basic principles of ninjutsu, such as chakra over matter, she's merely unable to manipulate her own chakra," Shige-H added her observation.
"Her suit's got to be running out of chakra soon, especially after half of the thing's been blown off, now, on top of that, she took some bumps. It may have been better for her to accept defeat and get ringed out at this point," Asuka sighed and shook her head, casting her prognosis for the outcome of this fight.
"She can't do that," Damisan insisted with a scowl. "I can't say I speak with certainty about Wayna's reasons for pushing herself this much, but, if she's anything like Genshi, her entire life's purpose hinges upon this fight."
"Her life's purpose?" Endo glanced at his teammate since the action slowed down a little in the arena. At the same time, the Curse Walker pumped himself up for more violent outbursts and terrifying shows of force, and Wayna did her best to stand back up and see how much of her fighting style she could still salvage in her current state.
"That's right, Genshi told me he's faced significant hardship as an athlete. He feels like he's brought dishonor to his family of lowly farmers. Not even a samurai bothered to draw his sword to stain his blade with an athlete's blood. I think I can somewhat understand his frustrations. As an athlete, he produces nothing of any value. From the eyes of an uneducated outsider, he's just an immature man-child playing his ball games well into adulthood. If the athletes win the Succession Tournament, they can have a worldwide sports event that promotes their way of life and legitimizes it in the face of the people and the noblemen alike. They'll be seen for the impressive, determined, and headstrong individuals that they are, and at last, they will have their acknowledgment," Damisan said with firm conviction of what he was explaining plastered on his expression.
"Still, no matter how legitimate is your reason, it's not worth getting killed over. Your dreams end with you. As long as you're alive–you can always fight for them another day," Shige-H sighed, frustrated at the recklessness shown by both Ryoku Genshi and Wayna Nunnon. "If people stopped throwing themselves at the grinder like that, my job would be so much easier…"
The Curse Walker grumbled, flexing its modified goliath body and surging with the malicious cursed chakra that fueled its violent outbursts and armed the walking weapon with boundless capacity for destruction. Wincing in pain, Wayna leaned down and tucked her right leg, as if priming for a kick. Her armor expelled blue chakra flame flares, singing her bodysuit where the Cursed Warrior's attack had blown it off and causing the scrappy athlete woman to become engulfed in a blue halo of basic chakra flares.
The raucous burst propelled Wayna forward as the skate baller rode on only one chakra skate, kicking with her other leg and boosting the chakra input in it to super-size the kicking skate blade to resemble the giant edge of a battleaxe. The cleaving edge of pure chakra slammed against the Curse Walker's front, bending the burly goliath's back at an uncomfortable angle, yet leaving him standing.
Instead of shrinking down, the expanded chakra skate burst in a shattering sonic boom shockwave, propelling the violent giant to skid backward on one knee, holding to the solid footing of the ground beneath his feet for balance while Wayna gnashed her teeth and dashed onward, pushing through the pain and fatigue and brushing aside the impossible odds for victory all for the sake of acknowledgment of the fact she was alive and that she's skated on water, ice, and stone just to see if she could.
"Simply astonishing! Despite suffering injuries and her impressive armor being partly busted after taking the Curse Walker's last attack, contestant Wayna Nunnon fights on, showing that warrior's spirit! She may have run away from conflict and skated her way to survival in the Battle Royale, but, in this stage, she fights boldly and stands in the face of some of the toughest competitors, no matter the cost to her own body and future as a professional athlete! That's the kind of dedication that even we, consumers and aficionados of bloody and violent forms of controlled warfare can respect! It's exactly what we're looking for in warriors competing at the Sun Disc arena!" Rajul exclaimed with a booming, yet respectful tone, inspiring the audience to cheer for the death-defying act and remarkable courage of Wayna.
Jumping off the ground, Wayna kicked with her left skating leg, creating a transparent aerial slash that was visible in the air even before the Curse Walker put its arms out together to block the strike, seeing its dark robe tear open and vivid sparks spew out from its charred scales around the forearms before the charred scales shed into golden and metallic fists. Switching her dominant legs, Wayna shot her right skate up in the air while supporting her body with the left firmly etched into the ground, shooting a straight cleave at the Curse Warrior's chin.
Proceeding with her push, Wayna took off and whirled a kick with both her feet, adding the rowdy shattering effect to each of her chakra skates before the armor reformed them from the chakra kept in its storage seals. With an arm for support, Wayna swept her left leg, hitting the Cursed Warrior low, then performed an elegant pirouette and slammed her left skate into the Cursed Warrior's face. After landing, Wayna's right leg turned to a blur, unleashing a flurry of sharp kicks at her opponent that forced the Curse Walker to block with crossed arms and hunker down in place to weather the storm of chakra skate cleaves.
Grumbling and growling, the Cursed Warrior skidded back with an expression that was equal part pained as it was brimming with battle fury. Even though Wayna Nunnon was full of fighting spirit, that alone didn't make her crazed offensive combination leave any deeper marks than her usual attacks did, achieving but mere grazes in the charred scaly skin as the Curse Walker rushed on ahead, catching Wayna Nunnon off-guard as the walking weapon of mass destruction barely flinched from all those combined attacks.
With wound back punches brimming with malevolent, cursed chakra, the Curse Walker launched a devastating upper hook that prompted Wayna Nunnon to backflip out of its reach, forcing the athlete to brace as the leaking burst of malady hit her head-on and reduced her to her knees. With tainted golden fists, sparkling with black vileness, the Curse Walker swiped its beefy arm with a considerable backhand, but Wayna dashed against its tide, to the Cursed Warrior's side.
With misshapen eyes, leaking with radiant sadism, and ethereal flares of wickedness, the Curse Walker slammed a hammer arm into the ground, expelling a blast pillar of tainted curse chakra into the air and throwing Wayna Nunnon aside like a rag doll. Engulfed in his own overflowing taint, the Curse Walker delivered a two-punch combo, sending concussive shockwaves that knocked Wayna Nunnon down and sent her tumbling back, ever closer to the edge of the arena.
"WHOAGH!" the berserk living weapon bellowed out a battle cry, extending its arms to the sides and spinning around in a standing, spinning clothesline that put to work all that overpowering curse chakra and created a malicious dome around both combatants, swallowing both of them up and spitting Wayna Nunnon out rolling on the ground, her armor completely shed from her body with only her skating boots and greaves surviving the outburst.
The Curse Walker began staggering around the arena, thrashing and pounding at the battleground itself and completely ignoring his writhing and grounded opponent. The staffers protecting the audience jumped up on the protective walls, worrying that the uncontrollable goliath might leap out into the audience stands and begin mauling and ripping apart innocent spectators. Watching from the sidelines in the backstage area, even the Salvari were anxious and wondering if they were up for an unscheduled fight to protect the colosseum that puts bread on their table and fills their hearts full of glory.
Instead, the Curse Walker suddenly snapped back to life and plunged its golden fingers deep into its own chest, snarling and frothing golden liquor from its mouth like a rabid beast. With bulging eyes and a crazed expression, the Cursed Warrior ripped its chest cavity open, exposing a beating heart that resembled the soaring, swimming, and crawling Cursed Warriors that fought alongside the Curse Walker in the tournament. A black, stony heart with shiny and staticky mosaic patterns, golden liquid pumping inside the configuration while the heart proved to be the core of all this overflow of cursed energy.
With its obsidian heart, beating with the curse of unlife itself, the Curse Walker dashed to Wayna Nunnon and grabbed hold of her head, raising the battered and bleeding athlete in the air and over its head, as if showing off his trophy to the audience. However, instead of crushing her skull in its hand, the Curse Walker did something no one thought it to be capable of–it showed restraint!
With a restrained squeeze, the Curse Walker made Wayna Nunnon scream with the agony of feeling her busted open head being split apart by crushing pressure. With a psychotic sneer, the Curse Walker pulled Wayna Nunnon closer in and peered into her pained expression.
"Well, well… I didn't think Mr. Walking Weapon to be able to experience kinks, but the bastard seems to be enjoying it," Asuka crossed her legs, smirking at the sight that shouldn't have inspired amusem*nt in any normally adjusted person.
Shige's eyes squinted with focus, aimed toward the beating obsidian heart in the chest of the monstrous man. Something felt off, why would it feel obliged to rip apart its own body and expose something as sensitive as its core? It couldn't have merely been enjoying the pain and suffering of his opponent, there had to have been some kind of deeper purpose to all this. Sadly, the Curse Walker had neither the ability nor the interest in humoring their curiosity.
"If Mana was here, she'd have been able to understand what this Cursed Warrior is doing," Shige-H gnashed her teeth, frustrated at her inability to read the enigmatic fusion between man and weapon.
"There's nothing to understand," Endo scoffed. "Just look at how much more powerful his aura is growing. That taint is nearly licking the audience in the front lines. It's not that he's kinky about pain, it's that it literally feeds him and kicks his cursed chakra into overdrive."
"I see," Shige-H stroked her chin, feeling like she agreed with Endo's observation. As a leader of Stars, the medical kunoichi felt compelled to find out more about the Cursed Warrior's fighting style so that she could help Mana prepare if ever she had to face this man-thing in a fight. Such eventuality was likely only if Mana made it to the finals, but still… Now that they've decided to oversee that the Curse Walker is destroyed and that the goal of its hirer must not be met, they had to find out what made these Cursed Warriors tick and how one came around destroying them.
The audience began shifting uncomfortably in their seats, looking at each other to check if everyone was sharing this uncomfortable ride of horrendous emotions that hit them like a tidal wave crashing from the stage. The Stars noted the shift in the audience's disposition from their seated positions. While the ordinary folks in the audience weren't able to perceive chakra, even they felt the terror that the overflowing curse chakra sealed inside the Curse Walker, feeding off of Wayna Nunnon's suffering, instilled in them.
"I-Is it just me… Or is it… Getting freezing in here…" Rajul shivered. His voice became sullen with oppression and slathered with the blues. "F-Freezing? In the middle of the desert, in the afternoon?" Rajul murmured in disbelief of his own words. "Yes, that's right… Freezing. Also… What's this feeling I'm getting, like nothing is ever going to be alright and that we're all spiraling toward the inevitable tragedy that is our impending doom at breakneck speed?"
The scratches on the Curse Walker's body began to close. The golden liquid glowing from underneath the obsidian scales leaked out over the cracks and then solidified, turning to char and covering up the cracks. Even the pounding heart, burning with a ghastly flame of intense malady, withdrew behind the barred shutters of a decorated with glowing golden patterns obsidian ribcage, as the golden goop washed over it and then the weave of ordinary human skin and patches of obsidian scales covered the gapping wound up.
With a grunt, the Curse Walker tossed his limp opponent aside, clenching its fists and howling out into the sky. Panting, Wayna Nunnon stood up and scanned her hands, accidentally eyeing the torn holes in her skintight bodysuit where the armor was no longer protecting her. This was so strange. Her opponent healed up all his scrapes and looked amped and fired up to go, but… Somehow… So did Wayna. From the looks of it, wounds still inevitably plagued her body and she should have been drained and beaten by now, but…
Wayna felt great!
Closing her eyes and regulating her breathing, Wayna put her entire focus into her chakra skates, realizing that her opponent's fired-up thrashing was her opening to eliminate him. While it would have been useless to try to hit him any further, given how not even Wayna's strongest hits could leave a lasting impact, and the Cursed Warrior proved to be able to rejuvenate itself from his opponent's suffering, quite literally devouring all negativity, pain, and misery from inside her and converting it to cursed chakra to burn inside its core, there was still a viable target that would have allowed Wayna to win.
With a vocal grumble, Wayna jumped up and slammed her chakra skate's heel at the ground, shooting off blocks of stone at varied heights out in front of her. Taking off in a determined dash, Wayna skated and took off those stones, jumping into a nearby crater and skating into it, then past it, treating its outer edge like a ramp to take off into the air. With a nasty mug, the Curse Walker turned to his opponent mid-air, ready to obliterate her whole.
The Curse Walker pressed its arms together, extending and aiming them at Wayna like they were the barrel of a cannon. Golden-colored chakra began brewing deep inside the cupped arms, swelling the Cursed Warrior's arms to a ridiculous degree and ripping them free of the restraints of his robe. As the strident, golden energy beam brimmed inside the Curse Walker's hands, Wayna Nunnon flipped over her front in mid-air, pouring all her remaining chakra into her skates and pumping them with such influx of energy that they both expanded to colossal size and resembled a giant's ax more than the blades of skates.
"I might not be able to hurt you, but there's one thing I can bust through even in my position–the arena!" Wayna Nunnon exclaimed. "For the sake of earning my validation, for the acknowledgment of my life's purpose, I'm willing to put my life on the line. Even if I die, I'll win!"
Wayna's legs swelled with tension, more tension than she'd ever put her thighs through as the red and purple spandex ripped open in multiple places from the tension of her swelling muscles. The Stars gasped in surprise, seeing Wayna bursting with a passionate aura of the physical aspect of chakra that poured into the base and natureless chakra stored in the last few storage seals in her boots and gauntlets. The colossal chakra skates turned red instead of the usual blue color of basic chakra release.
The skate baller unleashed a mad flurry of stomps with her colossal chakra skates, cleaving into the very fortifications of the arena around the Curse Walker. After all, at that point, the Cursed Warrior had pushed her to the corner, meaning she had to obliterate most of the fighting stage to leave him weightless, then one good stomp for good measure…
"GROAARGH!" the Curse Warrior exclaimed, thrusting its arms out and firing the golden sphere of cursed chakra, erupting from the barrel of his arms in the form of a strident energy beam and hitting Wayna Nunnon head-on, ripping her bodysuit to shreds, tearing her tidily tied hair and leaving the athlete a battered mess before she plumped into the lake outside of bounds.
"It's over, it's over!" Rajul exclaimed immediately after the Curse Walker's energy beam burrowed out through the skies and trailed off to the vast oblivion of outer space. "The Curse Walker wins the third quarter-final match with a strident cursed energy wave! The attack only hit and grazed contestant Wayna Nunnon, it didn't engulf her whole, so let's hope that she recovers soon and that we can see her observing the rest of the tournament! What a match!"
The rowers raced across the rippling lake, pulling Wayna Nunnon out of the water and placing the broken and battered young woman with rolled-back, whited-out eyes into their boat. They got to the first aid immediately, even before reaching the backstage area, stretching the pro athlete out, and racing her off to the infirmary.
Now only the final match of the quarter-finals remained.
