Original Submission: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/7208569/

It had once been a grand gathering hall. Once it had been the core of a nexus of gladiatorial arenas built to showcase the mightiest of warriors the multiverse had to offer.

It had been The Hall of the Grand Tournament.

Around its vast perimeter were arrayed the corridors that lead to the open arenas the competitors would have attempted to kill eachother in. And in its own central hall they would gather, rest, recouperate, observe, and perhaps get a drink while surrounded in the finest splendor and the smoothest of polished marble.

The lighting and ambiance never dimmed. The Hall was forever comfortably lit. The facilities had been of the most lavish and ornate decadence one could imagine, all conjured up by the power of the Hosts. If a competitor wanted food, it would be brought, no matter the type. If they desired the finest alcohol, the bar could produce it as though it were water from a tap.

During the competition the hall remained forever clean. The floors were heedless of the throng of heels that came to tromp across it from across the multiverse. The bins for trash seemed to remain forever empty. And the blood from beaten or broken bodies never lingered where they were dragged. Nothing seemed to be permitted which would detract from the grandness of the setting.

The doors, once splendidly shined blocks of marble and gold, were now crooked and tarnished slabs that only someone with exceptional strength would have been able to grind open. And the fetid mess that lay beyond them was the picture of what the passage of time and neglect could do to the pristine and beautiful.

All of the Hall's grace was now a shattered, rotten, and moldering ruin years after the event itself ended. Something in the final combat had utterly devastated the entire dimension the Hall occupied. Rotten ooze covered the floor and walls. Solid marble had caved in through-out the structure. Plants had taken root from spores and seeds carried in by the visitors, fractured the stone floor with their roots, and grown quickly under the Hall's constant light.

Ichi-gou stepped into the muck, boots quelching on tendrils of roots and clumps of fungus without regard after pushing the massive door open with a single hand. He didn't let the decay give him pause, save for scanning the area, picking apart the airborne particulates for anything of interest, and passively verifying whether he was the first to arrive, or if anyone was waiting for him in ambush.

It wasn't a surprise he'd been dropped here of all places. He'd figured out by now that the Hosts were giving him something of a nostalgic trip through the multiverse in his combats. It was indeed a surprise to see just what sort of a shithole the Hall had become, but he wasn't going to express that to the invisible eyes and ears watching his progress.

As he stepped further in, he didn't want to give any clues to his thoughts at all, beyond the obvious reason he was here. He knew this was all entertainment for anyone watching, and he doubted they really cared about what the significance of the arena was to his past, or how much bitter hatred and frustration being there again brought him. He didn't even want to let it show just how satisfying it was to see the place in such a state of utter crap.

Quietly and deliberately, his scanning systems still sweeping the air and probing down the branching hallways of the massive space, Ichi-gou drew one of the guns on his belt free, keeping it down by his side but ready to be brought into play in a micro-second if need be.

He let that show the audience of this little drama what they wanted to see. They didn't need to know if he was unsettled. They didn't need to know if he was feeling almost cathartic at the same time.

They just needed to know that he'd rip right into whomever was unlucky enough to be pit against him.

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Back in 2011 I competed for the third time in the Grand Tournament, using my fire-ant android Ichi-gou. Because a lot of the content was very nostalgic for me I commissioned a few pieces to remember the key moments by. The first Grand Tournament (2006) was interesting, to say the least. And it was hugely popular in the roleplay sparring community, easily placing as the most heavily competed and largely attended event of all of them. And I did rather well there, considering that I was a completely unknown figure then, and yet I still made it all the way to the finals for the roleplay bracket before work IRL got too intense to do any writing.

The 2008 GT was a complete disaster in comparison. See my journal describing it (http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/2134358/)

So when I competed in the 2011 GT was a breath of fresh air, and happily enough, I won.

I did my dead level best to keep a consistent storyline going for Ichi-gou, stemming things off from not just the GT08, but also the storyline he continued from the GT08 on my old home forum. By chance, I made the first posts for fights in my rounds, so I got to write up the settings. And to keep things steady, I used locations from Ichi-gou's past events for the battles.

With that in mind, I knew I'd need to do a fight in the remains of the Grand Tournament Hall, where the GT08 took place, and which was mostly destroyed in its finals. So I had my third-round fight take place there, against a dragon-guy with powerful elemental magic and the ability to negate parts of reality.

(It didn't end well for the dragon guy)