A tall and average built man stepped onto the platform and slowly made his way down it, staring at Mana from above the entire time right before he approached the end of it. He was a man who may have been in his fifties or his sixties as despite his prime bodily condition his skin and face had quite a number of wrinkles. He had a playful pair of moustache pieces that extended from under his nose and reminded more of singular black whiskers of a large cat than facial hair of a man. The most distinguished feature of his was the long braid of his reaching well over his knees with a bell-shaped iron weight attached to it. Much of the braid was tied around the man’s head so it must’ve extended to three times that range… What a peculiar look he had.
“Ummm… I shall apologize but… You are not a champion of any events, contestant Quatal. Please make your way back to the quarters” the announcer shamefully announced. Mana’s head turned to the side curiously. She didn’t expect to be hated by someone to such extent that they’d walk out to fight her out of their turn. This man had no right to face her so why could he have been there, standing and staring at her from above on the safety of that platform.
“I may not be a champion, therefore unqualified to fight in the Ascension Gauntlet but I was paid by one and sent to eliminate this girl. Damij thought it’d be fun if I faced her and took her out” the man proclaimed, his face barely twitched, no emotion or soul beyond what he said but he kept his stare firmly on Mana’s own eyes, staring the girl down as if eyes could kill.
“Just because you were vouched by a champ…” the announcer began to talk but Mana turned at him.
“I’ve got no time to waste waiting for one of the champions to grow enough balls to fight me. What does he mean “paid by a champion”?” the magician asked.
“Quatal here is a “Hitman Contestant”. He himself does not participate in events however he takes out fighters that other fighters tell him to take out and pay him with food to do so, he requests those matches and interrupts other fights to take those undesirables out. He is quite the gourmet so his services are very pricy” the announcer explained.
Mana looked at the man curiously, she had never thought that this place would have a sanitarian like this one working here. This man behaved perhaps most how a ninja would out of all the fighters.
“Why do you do that? Is it because you feel bad for the fighters? Because they can’t fight their own battles so you defend the weak ones?” Mana wondered asking the braided man who just grinned with half his face cockily.
“No, the food of this place sucks. I was raised on only the finest delicacies so those that can afford to satisfy my appetite can have the freedom to use my services. If I am called out to fight by the Sheikh, rarely as that happens, I just quickly dispose of my enemy and build reputation. Damij and his crew often feel too lazy to do their own killing so they give me food from the Agbarmahal for exchange of my dirty services” the man explained, his voice was strong but also flowed like some sort of a twisted lullaby. It was how a viper with throat cancer would’ve sounded like if given voice.
“In other words, you take material goods from the strong to bully the weak. Come down here, I’ll take you down so I can fight Damij sooner. I’m growing more hateful towards that man with every passing second” the magician sighed and obeying her request Quatal leaped down.
“This is chaos!” the announcer yelled out, “Please cease this nonsense immediately” but his voice was drowned out by the crowd, the man looked at the Sheikh who was overly entranced by the cheers of the crowd and the hype for the upcoming battle as the previous fight had hypnotized the man. It has clearly been a while since the man had seen fights like that.
“Do not worry, no champion out there wishes to tarnish their reputation fighting this freaky youngster” Quatal mumbled, the man firmly cracked his neck to the sides letting his night black hair with several white streaks bounce to the sides weighed down by the small block of iron at the end. It appeared to have a tip at the end but it couldn’t have possibly worked as a weapon, it was too heavy and round to be a thrusting weapon and too light to be a bashing weapon. Maybe that was why the Sheikh loved letting the man use his braid?
“Very well then, begin!” the announcer relented announcing the beginning of the following fight.
Quatal’s head rapidly twisted and bent forward, the weighted braid of his shot forward like an arrow attached to a chain. Mana caught the strange attack by catching the braid and pulled by the braid but it only made the weight slip off the hairy bonds, within a brief moment, a fraction of a fraction of a second Quatal’s elbow strike forced Mana to take a lean back and hop playfully back. Quatal was fast, so far a bit slower than Apheiya but leaps and bounds faster than Fajal or any of Damij’s crew Mana had seen. Maybe there was a reason why the infamous crew left all the dirty work for this man after all…
The braided hitman caught the falling weight with the tip of his foot and kicked it up into his own palm, his body moved so fast, so efficiently! It was just like the old man that trained her except much younger, this hitman wasted no movements, his pure skill surpassed even the greatest martial artists Mana had seen up to that moment.
Swiftly with just a couple of slips of the fingers the man tied his braid back. He then smiled and dashed back a couple of meters.
“I must commend you, most I face die after this first attack” the man smiled.
Mana didn’t honor the man with a reply. She had only seen a couple of his moves but she needed to quickly make a profile out of them, if she could get a couple more of his patterns she’d never be touched by this man unless she wanted him to touch her. The magician couldn’t doubt the braided hitman’s claim even if she wanted to, that braid flew and spun at her faster than a drill, it worked as a budojutsu technique by itself, naturally hair was a very potent material that easily transferred chakra. One could’ve called it a conductor of chakra. A hit like that could pierce stone, steel, diamond even. Given its chakra enhanced nature it’d probably drill right through any material, flesh was on the bottom of that list. Mana was lucky to have caught and stopped it before it got to her. Arrogance may have killed her…
The man started furiously wriggling his head around, his hair started glowing with a feint greenish glow as the faster than lightning attacks tried to overwhelm Mana. They were too rapid, some of them were feints. The man clearly didn’t want her catching any of his attacks again. With soft and much faster taps Mana simply slapped the dangerous jabs aside sending the braid drilling through the ground as potently as a diamond drill would pierce a sheet of paper. Had the braid been longer it could’ve really left some deep holes in the grassy out of bounds area.
Quickly Mana’s body blurred, she tried to attack the man just as fast as she attacked Apheiya just to see where the man ranked. Her elbow sunk right into the man’s face sending him floating into the air before his braid hit the ground and the man dragged his body back down from being sent flying. He lost his concentration, he expected Mana to just stand there dodging those attacks until one of them tagged her and until they wore her out. Too bad Mana had no time for those disadvantages. She needed to put up a decent show for the Sheikh but once she thinks she’d drawn everything out from this man she’d finish him off. The magician felt capable of doing so.
Quatal shook his head and wiped the blood off his nose and his lip. Mana was genuinely a little surprised by how little damage the blow actually did to the man, she dashed at him at considerable speed and transferred all of that force into his face with just her elbow, that force barely spread throughout his entire face and was completely focused and yet…
“I see there is no use trying to attack you like those ordinary fighters. You are anything but, you are an anomaly capable of causing trouble for us. A worthy opponent even” the man admitted lowering his head and slipping his purple sleeveless gi off of his shoulders.
“This man is able to compete with ninja, I never thought it was possible for anyone but ninja to fight on that level. It appears we have been lied to in the Academy” Mana wondered looking at this man and remembering the absolutely overwhelming power of Damij and the woman she faced before. All of the dominant martial artists were on genin ninja level, some of them surpassed that level even. It took Mana cheating at martial arts training and devising a hack style of fighting as well as mastering the physical imperfect control of chakra to even fight them on the same level. The world was insane and full of wonders… Just in such a world a Box of Ultimate Bliss must’ve existed, Mana had no doubts of it.
The man leaped at Mana aiming an elbow strike at her face. His body disappeared, he quickly kicked his speed up to double of what he showed before as the feinted his elbow top strike into a low kick aimed at Mana’s chest. It didn’t matter if the man knew thousand or ten thousand martial art styles, if he had invented his own even… Mana leaned to the side to avoid the elbow strike but blocked the kick, sending her flying up from the sheer force of it. Quatal was quick to follow. Leaping right after Mana, striking from left and right but the girl’s upper side moved flawlessly dodging every blow. Then the man flipped around like a vertical buzz saw and tried using his braid to slice Mana in half in the air, his speed and power hopped up a bit more instantly, such unstable leaps in speed and power left a cut on Mana’s shoulder that shallowed out on the side of her neck “ she was tagged. The girl realized it due to the strange fascination of small splashes of her blood being spilt from the audience’s side. These people wished to see tension and drama.
Quatal was taken over by gravity, so was Mana. The man tried to hit her with more of his combinations. It was problematic dodging his attacks seeing how he had four limbs and then his long braid to deal with but despite it moving in an unpredictable manner, almost like a reptilian being with a mind of its own Mana was not touched again, not unless she blocked the man’s strikes and proceeded to respond to his attacks. She was a bit slower, letting the man block her strikes just so the fight would be more entertaining for the observers. Once they landed the man tried to sweep her legs at the moment when Mana was at her slowest and relied on balance the most but Mana’s own palm thrust made the man’s knee crack and him shout out in pain before rolling back and flipping backwards a couple of times using only one of his legs for balance.
“You’re slowing your attacks before they reach me” Quatal noted caressing his painfully pulsing knee as his face twisted in pain.
“And yet you still got hit. It’d be ironic to maim you so badly that the next “hit” you are ordered to do actually takes you out, be it a martial artist or a nomad” Mana replied angrily trying to burn the man with her eyes. She hated people like him, people who had tremendous power, people with talent, training and unmatched technique using that power only to oppress the weak further than life already made sure to do it. She wanted to hurt him and for once her goal of prolonging fights to make them more artistic to the Sheikh and her ideal of never actually taking a life allowed her to fight that way.
“I still have the ability to augment my abilities further, I’m still reserving my chi from completely overflowing my body, just like you are” Quatal tried to intimidate Mana, as if she hadn’t noticed.
This man was the second man Mana has heard to call the physical aspect of chakra “chi”, the old man may have referred to it a couple of times that way but he usually still used the term Mana used just to stay on the same page as the girl, the two were quite short on time.
Mana thought for a moment about how little patience she had to just stand and play around with this man. She needed to excite the public more, she couldn’t stomach this fighting, it annoyed her more and more every second she did it. There must’ve been a quick shocking way to excite everyone so she could have ended this fight quickly…
“Show me” Mana requested, “I know that the smartest augmentations are those that utilize fifty percent of body’s flow, give me all hundred, I want to see it”
It wasn’t like the girl was excited for this supposed power she’d see. She hated it, she hated two people breaking their own bodies and abusing their own power just to entertain other people but this was her shortcut “ trick her opponent into showing their all, showing so much power that most fighters would rather lose than to strain themselves so badly. And yet if once this fighting is over there will be martial artists who wished to engage in this brutal art of combat it’d be their decision, Mana just wished that no one was forced into this. That was the goal worth stepping over one’s principles and grinding them into dirt for…
Purplish glow began to emanate from the man’s pores, it was chakra, imperfect and very primitive and yet… Physical chakra was usually green or red, depending on how much it strained the body. The pure chi was completely salad green, any other color would’ve suggested either an unhealthy chakra system, imperfect chi flow control or great damage to the body that caused such unhealthy energy be put into rotation. Mana was sure that the man’s chi had more to do with a great spiritual concentration being there, not yet potent enough to produce full out chakra but this man had potential to be a ninja, maybe he was trained by one at some point. Currently his “chi” was closer to chakra than Mana’s.
The man dashed at the magician, he ducked down and punched Mana’s gut lifting the girl’s body off the ground before pummeling her gut some more. The man dashed behind letting his messy flowing braid wrap around Mana’s throat. The man then caught his own hair and began angrily flailing Mana around with that braid. He slammed her on multiple sides, flung his braid into the air letting the magician’s body to land on his strikes. Mana removed the braid off her neck because it was beginning to strangle her for real. The man span like a cyclone letting his braid slap her in the cheek, after a successful attack the man stopped and turned at the other side slapping Mana on the other side. Finally once the man’s attack ended Mana stumbled back and fell on her back.
The public was completely outraged, it was a very healthy sort of outrage, for an entertainer at least. They were shocked and confused but Mana knew it was the sort of confusion that only added to the fight. None of them expected the man’s full power to be so overwhelming, no one thought that the man was willing to bring his full hundred to the table and that it’d be this potent. No one expected the man to hit Mana who had evaded his blows just as powerful and as fast and previously easily kept the upper hand. The public was beginning to feel a bit worried that this new favorite of theirs was about to meet her doom.
Mana sat back up and laughed out. She wiped blood off of her cracked eyebrow that was getting in her eye and getting in the way, she checked her teeth and found that some of her gums were bleeding and her lip was cracked, that constant taste of blood was in her mouth. The magician hated it… Still, she was happy, she amused the public, she remembered that sensation of performing a good magic trick if just for a single painful moment. This time, just for a fleeing moment, she let the crowd believe she was losing. That she could actually die and that added much more to their excitement than an hour of her imitated fighting would’ve.
“You… You were faking it!?” Quatal yelled out angrily, even more shocked than the public was seeing Mana getting pummeled. Someone they saw being incredibly nimble and able to evade pretty much any blow.
“Yep, I was playing around, your hits were pretty strong, I had to devote some of my “chi” to augment my endurance so that they didn’t cleave through me like butter. Had I been the girl that entered this arena I would’ve died but I’m not that person anymore. You cannot beat me, even when I purposefully sacrificed almost half my physical chakra to get beaten around and barely take any damage” Mana explained.
“Liar!” the man yelled out leaping at Mana and spinning around, trying to hit her with his braid again, hoping that it may have been just his own underperformance or some problem with his chakra system due to the strain.
A backhand slap disrupted Quatal’s rush, knocked the white into his eyes and it appeared like it completely knocked the man out. Mana was not content with just that, she jumped kneeing the man into the chin and as he was lifting off into the air she grabbed hold of his braid and pulled him down, not wishing for him to fly too high up while unconscious, driving her palm into his face and slamming his head to the ground. This fight was over, truthfully it should’ve never even began, the man had never actual chance of beating Mana, it was just that the magician was so full of rage for how this man lived and how much pride he had in such a life that she felt content on stooping to that level to stop him. Maybe it wasn’t the right answer but all that mattered was that he would not hurt or kill people who didn’t wish to be there ever again. Once Mana changes this place he’ll be left unable to kill and fighting only opponents that wished to be there and fight. That’d make all the difference in the world…
“My physical chakra is dwindling… To think that I’ve learned nothing from abusing my chakra augmentation against Hisako-san…” Mana thought clenching her chest as her heart made a couple of extremely painful pounds inside her chest. If felt like it was trying to knife its way out of her chest. This budojutsu was very primitive, very unstable. Still, Mana just needed it for one more fight, then she’d only use it for emergencies, the power that let people without chakra manipulation fight on the level of weaker ninja. It was a power she needed desperately until she gained her own identity back…
“Damij, enough! Come out and let me change this arena already by beating you, the symbol of everything wrong with the Sun Disc now!” Mana screamed out, letting the pain in her chest fuel her anger and the volume of her voice. She was worn, tired and she wasted time and physical chakra to make these fights a better show. She may have been powerful enough to beat Damij initially but her current condition may not have been…
The last fight where contestants fought as slaves of the arena was approaching quickly…
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