The time to the match passed quickly. By the end of it, Arin felt reasonably confident in her ability to handle the recoil of "barbaric" AK-47 she'd chosen for her primary, her shrike vogels, and the particulars of her alien shielding device - which had gone through rigorous inspections before she was allowed to have it.
As a result of those inspections, however, she'd been able to relay her thoughts on the psychic call for help she'd felt, and while they could make no promises until she won, she was pretty sure that she had the Sports Chief of the Polity on her side as far as reserving a future Wager to help the Ainaxians.
She just had to win enough times to keep humanity in the league...
"What do you think about all this?" she asked her teammate as she sat on the circular platform that would rise to bring her to her first match.
Aside from being coated in the same Warsport-standar nanotech armor Arin was wearing, Slzsh seemed to be the same boulder, albeit festooned with grenades, with a reflective shield resting against her, and an oversized sword that would have made a decent surfboard had it not been made of diasteel-tungsten alloy.
"Yep... just you and me..." Arin said to her erstwhile inanimate partner.
Or I guess just me...
She sighed. Arin had grown used to fighting multiple opponents in the Paragon Games. It wasn't pleasant, but it happened... especially when she'd moved up in the tiers. The worst had been Tier 2. The closer she got to the top, the more people seemed inspired to push her back down.
She was still thinking through fights where she'd been outnumbered when the platform finished its rise to the arena, revealing for the first time the battleground humanity chose to stake its future on...
The sounds of seagulls greeted her ears. A humid heat and bright sunlight. Palm trees swayed in a light breeze, with pineapple plants and all the miscellaneous growth of a tropical island on Earth.
The platform halted; an aberration of black metal on a white-sand beach.
A closer look told her that the gull sounds were faked, just like the skies.
A smirk crossed her face as she realized what was going on.
An urban or otherwise metallic environment would favor Arin too much. Thus, as the host for the match, the Human Polity needed to keep things fair, or at least mutually detrimental to all parties involved, with the burden of approval in the hands of all parties.
The arena limits were clearly marked by the rim of the kilometer-diameter dome, and slightly visible to the apex 500 meters above where she stood.
It was quite the deception, making the Zyr think humanity thought they were weak to water, only to have their opponents agree to a half-wet stage that would disrupt them for a completely different reason: Sand.
Arin was no fan of sand. After all, it was coarse and rough and it got everywhere. Especially on her tail which was quite sensitive. But she could work with sand, and had done so during her third match in the Paragon Games, when she used a cascade of iron-sand bullets to overwhelm her competition during a fight on a volcanic beach in the Constitutional Monarchy of Hawai'i.
She remembered the lava had been mostly there for show, with heavy shielding applied over it that would bounce a person away with a decent amount of damage, but no such obstacles seemed present on the island.
A quick check with a magnetic surge told Arin that there was exactly as much iron as she could expect on a standard Earth silica beach... about half a percent per cubic centimeter. An amount so tiny it would take her quite a while to accumulate anything combat-worthy before-
BOOM
A sudden explosion announced the opening move of her opponents as a dome of fire consumed the very center of the island.
Well... I guess they'd approve of any stage if all they planned to do was nuke it flat...
Standing around the loading platform was just asking for the wrong impression, so Arin decided the best thing to do would be to head right into the battle.
She was quite surprised to find that there was no crowd or announcer that she could hear. Most of the Warsport fights she'd watched were in arenas, complete with both. And when they weren't, there was always a heavy running commentary. The silence made the whole thing feel serious...
"Hey, 'Swifty', you coming or what?" Arin said to the boulder still resting on the platform.
There was no answer. Just the gentle pulse of the nanosuit's running lights.
"Suit yourself then," Arin took off.
If she took out the Zyr Paragon as quickly as possible, that would give her more time to work on Paragon X... and maybe get in a nice, long interrogation... before she had her revenge.