When the smoke cleared, Piccolo wasn't looking too good. He was covered in small scratches, bleeding from the mouth. But he wasn't out of the fight yet. It was clear that he'd managed to put up some sort of energy barrier at the last second, otherwise he'd have been critically injured.
"Bull, you were a worthy opponent. But this battle is over." Anyone watching with the ability to sense ki would agree with Piccolo. They both looked equally injured, but Nappa's ki reserves had basically bottomed out after that last attack. Meanwhile, Piccolo still had quite a bit of energy left.
…
"BOOHOHOHOOOSSSSS!!!!!"
'BAM!'
…
Nappa descended to the ground, while Piccolo hovered above him.
And split into two Piccolos.
Then three.
Four.
By the time he finished splitting, there were eight Piccolos hovering in a circle around Nappa. Both fighters gathered their energies for what would be their final clash.
It was a brilliant flash of light. Eight energy waves from eight Piccolos all converged on one source. Nappa.
Nappa, to his credit, had one last card up his sleeve. A last resort. Simple, but effective. Channeling the last of his chi into his right fist, Nappa punched the sky with everything he had.
There was a roar, the mere sound of the two titans' energies clashing enough to cause the ears of all of the high-profile spectators of the fight to pop, even though the actual force of the blasts were easily stopped by the strong barriers over the field.
Then everything went still. The only sounds were the clatter of tiny rocks, broken from the stage beneath Nappa, as they fell to the ground, having been ripped from the ground and suspended in midair by the sheer force of their clash.
Even Frieza's final form would've taken massive damage from the shockwaves that Nappa's punch created, or the eight energy waves that Piccolo had blasted down.
And sure enough, when the smoke and lights cleared, both fighters had taken massive damage. Their outfits had been reduced to tatters, and they both bled profusely. Four of the eight Piccolos had disappeared, and the remaining four began freefalling, not even enough energy left in their bodies to hold themselves up in the air.
But the Piccolos still had the energy to merge back into one, injured Piccolo as they fell. And that Piccolo landed lightly on his feet.
Meanwhile. Nappa sank to his knees, then fell on his face, completely drained.
Ruby waited a moment for the outcome of the match to sink in for the 5,000 people watching, before announcing the victor. "Bull is unconscious! Satan wins! That was an intense starting match, huh? Just wait, we're only getting started." She moved onto the arena floor as she talked, handing a scaled-down Senzu to Piccolo as a few other attendants moved to help Nappa. "Unfortunately, it seems that the fine-tuning we did to the arena floor was not quite… up to snuff. As such, we will be taking a half-hour break in order to repair it." She said, kicking a loose rock.
We hadn't forgotten to strengthen the floor with energy, but the problem was that it was a lot more difficult to make objects harder with energy, when opposed to simply holding that energy and using it on the air, like we did with our barriers. After all, while certain materials did hold energy better than others, they all leaked. Even the batteries, specially made for holding energy, leaked about 1% per day.
We fixed this by storing the infused energy inside batteries, but energy tended to spread out and leak massively when infused through the floor rather than transmitted through the air, and the ratios were difficult to calculate.
So, we hadn't quite managed to strengthen the floor of the arena as much as the forcefields on the walls. There were measures in place to ensure that it was impossible to blast down to the lower floors, but the last clash between Piccolo and Nappa had contained so much power that it'd blasted pockmarks in the floor around where Nappa had been standing. No big craters, but still enough that it'd need to be fixed. Luckily, Legacy engineers could finish that in minutes.
"But don't worry!" Ruby continued her announcement, "After the break, we will continue with the matches. We still have seven matches left today, then we'll take a 24 hour break to allow our fighters to rest, before continuing with the next layer of matches."
There were going to be four layers of matches. The current one, then the quarter-finals, semi-finals, and finals. Between the first and second rounds, we'd made sure to give the fighters a full day to recover afterward, but the quarter-finals would start in the morning, the semi-finals in the afternoon, and the finals the next morning, for about ten hours between each.
There was no point in this tournament if someone started a match off too tired to fight at full power.
"The next match will be Apollo vs O- …Wait, it seems that Ox has been… tied up. We'll leave that match for later." Ruby couldn't help but release a little chuckle as WAN informed her of the change via an earpiece. Ox- Collin, had apparently irritated Vegeta into knocking him unconscious, by screaming loudly as he watched the fight between Nappa and Piccolo.
"The next match will be Saiyagirl versus Nova!! In one half-hour! Make sure to stay and watch!"