They were running out of time, and time was something they needed to have more of. Axton was just a few hours from being disqualified, and the asshat authorities were stalling in a truly obvious way. They had already allowed Axton’s new War Suit to be loaded into a drop pod to be sent down to the surface, but now they were trying to argue that it should be sent more than 100 miles west of his current position, right where the Champions were waiting on live tv with guns aimed at the sky.

No. This would not be allowed to happen otherwise, they claimed. It was truly fair for everyone involved, and no one should care that the Champions somehow managed to get an Anti-Air auto turret with explosive shots dropped in the same place where the authorities ‘randomly’ decided to drop Axton’s new War Suit.

And this, as you might imagine, is where the shit began to hit the fan for everyone involved on all sides.

First off, the clear and blatant cheating on live tv was obvious to everyone involved, and despite the ratings, there was no goddamn way that this would fly, especially with so many people watching. This was, of course, just the tip of the shit mountain that was gradually beginning to collapse towards a certain group of people, but it was the tipping point.

The foolish move was to broadcast their obvious attempts to make a new fan-favorite person lose in such an unjust way on live tv, and with investors watching the galactic net, no less. First came a few minor complaints, then a growing storm of animosity blew in until the chat was filled with regular people unsatisfied with how the Champions had been so easily able to stand by and win by default and ‘conspiracy theorists’ who claimed that rampant, blatant cheating was going on for a long, long time.

Then came the Players, and that… that is when shit mountain began to truly collapse. Players were people who, for the most part, didn’t care if there was cheating going on, so long as it didn’t affect them negatively. However, Axton and Thomas, among others, had already put a few formerly disregarded comments on a few sites in the real world, and once they were found again, the Player community became livid.

It was fine as fuck for them to cheat. After all, they were real people, so why would they care about a fictional world with fake people? But NPCs cheating? NPCs using underhanded and hack-like tactics against Players? Oh, no. That was something that they would not, could not abide by.

And once the Players got involved, that only hastened the angry cries from other people around the virtual galaxy. After all, a few Players had done some damn fine work in X Sector, doing Y acts for Z people, and for these people to exploit such nice people was just appalling, and they would now be finding other sources of gladiatorial blood sport.

And when it came to be known that Axton Ryder, an Outworlder who put his life on the line for nobodies on a backwater colony oppressed by the tyranny of a corrupt and greedy stooge of the Andromedan Empire and who also had an amicable relationship with an Admiral of The Revelry was the one in this jam, well a few more flags of destructive vengeance were raised.

Axton was the one who provided The Revelry, and the greater Galaxy and all within it, with the arcane and hidden knowledge of how to make custom War Suits! He was a hero, regardless of where you were from or which faction or group you served! While he was an enemy of the state to Andromeda, he was still respected, despite being vilified, for his open ‘gift’ of teaching anyone who came across him who didn’t try and fight him how to put together originally random pieces of machinery into something new.

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They still hated his guts, but they appreciated the fact that he let them get this info as well as others, though they would honestly have preferred he give it only to them t begin with.

And of course, blood sports are not exactly legal, which inevitably meant that this entire planet and the station orbiting it were connected to The Revelry, and they had a very positive relationship with Axton, and they were seeing diminishing returns with those two cheating Champions at the top of the charts for so long. Besides, all that negative press could cause issues to the bottom line, so maybe they should just play by the rules given to them and do what their ‘big brothers’ want, no?

And then, after this death spiral of anger and general disdain began to get even worse, something even worse happened for the people who ran the Battle Royale and the station high above it. As had been stated a few chapters ago, the station was essentially nothing more than a rotten, nearly broken husk with a nice façade trying to make it seem like it was well maintained. Of course, it wasn’t, and that issue, after decades, if not centuries of lying hidden from the prying eyes of the rich and powerful you had their fun there, finally made itself known.

Now, there are several things a pleasure station needs to keep its guests happy. One, of course, is life support, and another is gravity. Yet another is lighting, and one after that is.. well.. to make a long story short, the power that flowed through the entire station almost entirely went out. At best, there was only life support, minimal gravity, and a bit of dim lighting left on, and even the water supply system had completely failed.

This was, to put it mildly, the shit icing on the shit cake, and that, more than anything else, was what forced the people who had been trying desperately over the past few hours to play this up on live camera as some big misunderstanding all while digging themselves deeper into their own hole to give up and let Daxter and his now utterly irate crew redirect the drop pod to its true destination.

And as the backup generators clicked on and the execs that were trying desperately to salvage the situation that they had made began to breathe a sigh of delusional relief thinking that the worst had passed, they made the stupid mistake of saying on live tv that Axton would lose regardless because they had a few hacked War Suits headed to suicide bomb him.

But they quickly had other things to worry about than their ratings and careers, as they now had a crowd of very angry spacers and a gathering number of angry people who were pissed as all hell that they had been unknowingly roped into this bullshit to worry about.

…

Meanwhile, a drop pod was screaming towards Axton’s rough location, with an extremely durable set of speakers just begging to get close enough to the surface to begin screaming their message at the top of their mechanical not-lungs. Once the pod did reach the appropriate altitude, it began to emit a long, drawn-out cry that those who used a certain mod for a certain game (or just another game entirely) would find familiar.

“SPAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACE!”

…

Also meanwhile, a few War Suits with dead pilots and lots of explosives strapped to them were slowly plodding their way towards Axton’s location on nearly broken legs. If they were piloted by actual living people and not by living people many, many miles away, they might have been able to avoid the massive lump of metal that was falling dangerously close to them.

Of course, they weren’t, so they didn’t, and the pod slammed down on them with enough force to smash them into the ground, but not enough force to trigger the explosives. The impact also crushed their IFF tags, so they were now unable to be remotely operated, let alone detonated.

And, to add insult to injury, not even a few seconds later, Axton himself walked warily from the undergrowth and looked at the drop pod in front of him.