[b]OOC Note:[/b]  My previous post was a relatively Open action.  I stated clearly what my character's intent was and what he –expected- would be the effect, leaving things open for Saladin to counter it or bypass my character's efforts.

There's been no response from Saladin, and I've given him beyond the 5-day limit.  I saw yesterday that he'd been by the forum, but there was no word from him.  This post solidifies the effectiveness of the diffusion field, barring Saladin's character from being able to return to the arena's plane of existence.  I'm not going to say that ends the fight in and of itself, but I don't know what Saladin's character could do to continue the contest when his abilities can no longer affect my character or the area my character is in, and he himself can't even return to combat zone.  At best, I'd describe this as a kind of ring-out.

Given that Round 3 ends in just a few days, no, I'm not inclined to extend further time for zero activity.  I really don't want something that's had pretty much no progress being put up for a redundant judgment, and to be frank I was rather frustrated by Saladin's total lack of responsiveness in Round 2, when he didn't even return any messages I sent him after I got the intro post up.

[b]IC:[/b]

[i]"That's a whole lot of icky looking goo,"[/i]  Ichi-gou thought, standing  in the portal of the hallway's far end, gazing out into the wrecked arena beyond.

He'd been walking a good distance down the length of cracked and fungi covered stone.  Following his probing scans of the area he'd settled on moving towards the location that had the greatest concentration of detected rotting matter.  Ichi's thoughts at the time had been that if he went to wherever there was the biggest localization of stuff to rot, there'd likely be the greatest concentration of anything interesting.  There had been a Technocrat observation platform placed in a pocket dimension just outside the Hall's dimensional bubble, and reports about the place near the Tournament's conclusion a few years ago had been…conflicted, to say the least.  Lots of new life-signs had popped into the place that hadn't been registered and logged prior.  Following their appearance there had been a whole lot of movement, lots of it looking conflict-driven across the entire span of the place, and then all activity beyond the microbial level had ceased following what looked like one hell of a big climatic moment.

The whole thing had been a big mystery after that.  Following the uncertain end the Hosts had blocked any and all scans or access to the Hall.  They'd also declined to elaborate on any of the events.  Their stance to the Technocrat higher-ups, and any of the other organizations that had been in contact with them, was to say 'The combatants weren't able to contend with the obstacles they were presented with.'

Then they'd cut off contact with the Multiverse entirely, until the new Tournament had begun.

Ichi's curiosity made it damn hard to resist finding out what took place after he, Bastion, General Asimov, Kiyoshi, and Daemon had all been eliminated from the contest.  It was a bit of an unfinished chapter that he wanted to close up while he was still here.  It wasn't like he was worried about the guy with the silver hair interrupting, after all.  In the time he'd been strolling down the passageway and slugging down the bottle of absolutely spectacular liquor he'd seen neither hide nor shiny silver hair of the prick.  As near as the evidence told him, if the guy had been planning on dropping out of Ichi's detection, sneaking up on him, and landing a sneak attack, he'd been barred from it happening by Ichi's diffusion field.  The area of the diffusion field's effect was now proofed against other-worldly intrusion, any distortion of reality, or really against anything that went against the basic laws of physics.  Since whoever the guy had been had decided to tweak those laws for himself, or phase shift, or whatever he'd done, he wasn't coming back.  So Ichi had the run of the Hall to himself.

Stepping out into the sourceless light of the arena at the tunnel's end, Ichi was left a bit dumbstruck at what his eyes were showing him and what his sensors were picking up.

His eyes showed him that there were still recognizable remains of a lot of dead people, monstrous looking things clutching those dead people, and a whole lot of damage everywhere.  

Like literally, everywhere.  

The arena had been a huge place of an open circular pit where the contestants had fought among what looked like obstacles of some sort, looked like it had been made out of some kinda black stone that read like marble on his scans.  Arrayed all around that in a coliseum of tiered seats had been the stands.  There must have been a lot of people in the seats, because judging by the few that were still intact that were filled with skeletal and rotten torsos, they'd all been filled.

The seats weren’t the only things wrecked.  Scorch-marks blighted the stone from the edge of the hallway he stood in, right at the arena's ground level, all the way to the end of the top seats, and the walls behind those.  Stone fragments, some small enough to be bits of fractured shrapnel, some large enough to be building material for monoliths lay scattered over the entire place.  It was a small (not so small, really), wonder that the entire place hadn't caved in.  But when Ichi craned his head up and looked to the stone at the tops of the pillars lining the battle pit his scans detected that the rock was [i]just[/i] on the side of stability.

For the time being, anyway.  A few more years and some probing by growing vines and they'd likely come toppling down.

Whatever it was that had killed everyone must have been what all the goo spread over and decaying on everything had come from.  The remains of it bore similar biologic trace readings to the lifeforms that had appeared in the Hall.

Looking at the middle of the arena and mapping out the spread of destruction, Ichi-gou analyzed the pit as being the center of a somewhat lopsided explosion that had taken place from ground-level to somewhere in the air.  Whatever had created the blast had sent a thermal wave and tremendous concussive blast through not only the arena he was looking at, but through the entire Hall.

If you went by the words of the Hosts, Ichi-gou surmised, eying everything and stepping further out into the catastrophe-zone, it had likely been enough to eliminate the last combatants from contention too.

Ichi's sensors pinged off another unique oddity too, but it wasn't strictly related to the gore and goo.  He was detecting some Paradigm Inc. equipment in the area.  The reading was a recognition of the special alloys they used for their bladed weaponry, and was coming from across the arena near a few broken seats. 

With a quick jump, he sailed through the air, arced downward, and landed on the tier of seats where something belonging to Paradigm had been left.  Bending down and wrenching it from the stone where its blade had bitten into, apparently either thrown by someone or by the explosion from years ago, Ichi wrested free the high-frequency knife that had been owned by Kiyoshi.  

Ichi cradled the weapon in a three-fingered hand, just looking over its razored length, completely untouched by rust or corrosion even after years of being left in muck and humidity, and just let the memories of his old friend drift by.

He really had no idea what had become of Kiyoshi.  The last he'd seen of the super-soldier he'd been on a non-duty day in a casino with Ichi at a casino, right when Ichi had been given the mission that would be his last before leaving the Technocracy and striking out on his own.  Kiyoshi had been assigned to a Hybrid unit, and had been augmented with a few lupine traits, and he hadn't been armed at the time.  It was an off-duty day, so his comrade had been sporting an open party shirt, jeans, and showing off the rest of his fur without much care.  Whatever had happened to the soldier after Ichi-gou had departed to go blow up someone's moon he'd never found out.  He'd cut his ties, and that meant he hadn't been left the option of keeping tabs with people he'd been buddy-buddy with. 

Ichi-gou hadn't seen him in the years afterward.  But finding his knife here and holding it now was a bit of a shocker.  Kiyoshi had been eliminated before Ichi himself had.  Whoever took him out must have been one of the fighters who'd hadn't 'been able to contend with the obstacles presented to them', if you went by the Hosts.

Ichi slid the weapon between the strap of his belt and his back.  It wasn't active at the moment, so his cover-alls and shell [i]should[/i] have been capable of turning its edge.  But he didn't want to leave the memento behind here.  It was a bit of nostalgia, he wasn't going to deny that, but damned if he'd leave a reminder of an old friend to rot for eternity.