SOLARIS CITY, SOLARIS VII – Welcome back, fight fans, to INN’s Season Recap of the 3132 Solaris VII Grand Championship. Seven days, one-hundred and twenty-eight MechWarriors, and only one will be champion once it’s over! Today’s Recap brought to you by Vining Engineering and Salvage Teams; “VEST: If we don’t have it, you don’t need it!”

It was the first night of the annual Grand Tournament and what a night! With over sixty-four matches to choose from, fans clogged the streets in downtown Solaris City, frantically racing between stadiums to catch their heroes one climactic battle after another. No filler matches this evening, folks; every shot fired was for keeps, with the coveted championship on the line.

Tonight’s highlights included the always-brutal match of incumbent champion, “Roaring” Ronald Ghost Bear of Zellbrigen Stables, against Tandrek Stables’ eleventh-ranked challenger, “Jumping” Jelayna Mani. Squaring off against Mani’s custom Marauder II in the Factory Arena, Ghost Bear utterly savaged Mani in just under 40 seconds with his infamous, arctic-blue Kodiak “Ursa Rex,” with the same ruthlessness that has made the Clan champion a favorite in the arenas.

In Kobe sector’s Ishiyama Arena, fourth-ranked Omar “Demolition” Durand of the troubled, pro-Free Worlds, Galahad Stables, waged one of the longest games of cat-and-mouse in tournament history with his hit-and-run hunt beneath Iron Mountain for Gemini’s “Iron” Rance Xabat. Weaving through the artificial maze of tunnels and mineshafts, emerging only to unload a hellish burst of laser and missile fire each time, Durand’s Vulture, “Gravewalker,” finally wore down the thicker armor of Xabat’s lethal Black Knight, eventually felling the fourteenth-ranked fighter with a double-leg knock-out, despite his own damaged sensors.

But the ultimate comeback of the night came from Blackstar Stables’ Shayne “Shockwave” Kirkpatrick, in the custom Zeus “Thunderstorm,” after suffering an unholy pounding from the guns of Kyle “Bonegrinder” DePaik’s Atlas, “King Krusher” at the Boreal Reach Arena. With one leg savaged, and her gyros out of synch, sixth-ranked Kirkpatrick managed an impressive last-minute victory with a point-blank alpha strike that tore open the heavier machine’s torso and destroyed its gyros completely at the very moment it seemed DePaik would have landed the killing blow. DePaik, after the match, repeatedly challenged Kirkpatrick to a rematch, and rumor has it that Kirkpatrick will meet the Overlord Stables’ champion in a grudge match later this week.

Across the boards, it seems that the big winners in tonight’s duels have been Blackstar Stables, with five warriors advancing on to tomorrow’s round, Cenotaph Stables and Zellbrigen tied for second place by advancing three warriors each through the rankings, while two warriors each from Bromley Stables, the Wraiths, and DiNapoli Stables have managed to claw their way ever so much closer to the top slots. Pro-Combine stables were the big losers this evening, with both Toranaga and DeLon stables having three warriors each lost to the first round eliminations.

Box scores for tonight’s match and schedules for tomorrow night’s line-up can be found on our link-site, including the latest odds, for those of you in a betting frame of mind. Once again, I’m Dennis Stanzio for Solaris Broadcasting Center, an affiliate of INN, with your Championship Recap, and I am out of here!

+Awwww, it’s a rerun!
:-BlazeFire

+Still a good distraction from the crap they’ve been showing on INN lately! Documentaries about the Centauri Lancers, MechWarrior families going the way of the dodo, and those oh-so-dry Bertram Habeas articles are informative, but sometimes, you just have to have a little mindless carnage to break up the monotony.
:-KevvyCone

+And speaking of, let’s be honest! Who expected the Shockwave to land that hit on Bonegrinder, eh? I mean, he owned the field most of the time, slapping her Zeus silly, and she just nails him with that light show of hers—from prone, no less!
:-BNCFanatic

+Argh. Freaking Blackstar fans. Always gotta make us relive these moments, don’t you?
:-TVBluFist

+Hell yeah, TV! Your dePaik dropped like a sack of wet laundry!
:-BNCFanatic

+Yeah, yeah. Whatever.
:-TVBluFist