Highlighting the June 3331 King of the Mountain (unlimited)
The guns had fallen silent from the recent battles in Cruiserweight. I was outside my ride, welding a toe back in place when Bridget (my 70 ton Commander) tapped my shoulder from behind. While she also were dismounted, the blow from a 600 kilo 3 meter tall half-troll was enough to send my left arm into the flame. My welders glove protected my fingers, but my timepiece was toast in the blink of an eye.
Turning the torch away and off, I asked what was up.
"Well my laird, they just announced another contest to run before battle day one, and I wondered if we should stay here or if you wanted to get another team?"
I swore and looked at my communicator.
She was right, a short unlimited contest was coming up. I wanted to just forgo the dubious pleasure of it altogether, but my duty to my Readers said I should join up.
Besides, there was the reward of 30 Niodes the craftsmen promised to those who got four medals in a row, and I had just secured my third.
Back in the compound the crew were not exactly overjoyed to start the fighting a couple hours early, but as the big boys would be in reserve during the fight vs the Mecha Pirates I had little compassion.
At the K3 the crowd was the second biggest in the event, we were one of the three tops where some would leave without a medal.
That meant I had better stay sharp, and push opponents away and clamor my way to the top. Of course, the supers I had left were expired, my friends had deserted me, the opponents were seasoned veterans and had in general higher tonnage than me. It was a struggle to get to the top foothill, but we managed, and I fell asleep.
My crew called me a bit later, as my timepiece was gone I am not sure of the exact time. It seemed the action had started. The top were held by Michael Beagle of Death`s Brethren. His formation were bigger than me and had me out massed by more than 550 tons.
But the only way to possibly beat him was to attack and hope for a lucky break.
My first ten attacks were failures, but then the RNG gods smiled at me, or at least to my formation. My Mech was felled, but the crew pushed on and took the top. The corpseman got me awake, but was worried about the obvious concussion and suggested we should withdraw. I refused.
Sometime later we were blown off the top by roward of the Death`s Collectors. While he didn't have quite 500 tons on me, his forces were fresh, and the duel I initiated ended when I ran out of Hatoraides and energy before him. About two minutes later the light flashed and it was over. The winners this time were:
- Div 1 210+ (22 Commanders): Dexter Berry, Warlock (2m,36s)
- Div 2 -209 (8 Commanders): Bing Paculan, T.I.o.M.T. (1h,49m)
- Div 3 -152 (19 Commanders): roward, Death`s Collectors (1m,56s)
- Div 4 -112 (12 Commanders):Jelloshots Succeddown, T.B. BlackWatch (2h,23m)
- Div 5 -96 (16 Commanders): retiredarmyman, Death`s Revenge (1m,25s)
- Div 6 -77 (14 Commanders): David Sifford, Steampunk Dragons (3h,39m)
- Div 7 -61 (13 Commanders): PappyBlacksheep, Knights of Chaos (2m,22s)
- Div 8 -45 (10 Commanders): Stug Hill, Behemoth (18m,46s)
- Div 9 -33 (6 Commanders): RedFred8 (14s)
- Div 10 -24 (4 Commanders): Chucky_, Death`s Retribution (1m,57s)
- Div 11 -18 (3 Commanders): AllenQuatermain, Cold dead Hands (1h,6m)
- Div 12 -14 (6 Commanders): BatManBW (51m,58s)
Total Contestants: 133, Total Medals: 124 (of 180 possible)
Compared to the recent Cruiserweight competition we lost more than 45% of the Commanders. Whether that was because the format, or the fact that it was announced on the eve of Battleday one and ran for only a short time isn't clear, but the last explanation seem more likely.
The dearth of Commanders was on most mountaintops, but again the four lowest were especially hard hit. Between them they had less Commanders than K1 alone.
This led to a lot of medals being sent for resmelting, three Silvers and fifty three Bronzes.
While the number of contestants was limited, the fighting was pretty hard on some of the mountains as seen by the list below.
Number of medals held for more than 30 minutes in this event:
.............Silvers......Bronzes
- Div 1 ....1 of 4.........2 of 10
- Div 2 ....2 of 4.........2 of 3
- Div 3 ....0 of 4.........6 of 10
- Div 4 ....4 of 4.........5 of 7
- Div 5 ....3 of 4.........8 of 10
- Div 6 ....1 of 4.........6 of 9
- Div 7 ....3 of 4.........6 of 8
- Div 8 ....0 of 4.........1 of 5
- Div 9 ....2 of 4.........1 of 1
- Div 10 ..0 of 3.........N/A
- Div 11 ..2 of 2.........N/A
- Div 12 ..2 of 4.........0 of 1
During the last half-hour seven Golds got new owners, one of them the last quarter-minute. Two Commanders were strong enough to hold the gold for more than two hours.
We had two unaligned winners this time; RedFred8 on K9 and BatManBW on K12. None of the Cruiserweight winners repeated their Gold performance and all the aligned winners belonged to different clans.
(By Sten Hugo Hiller - 627184)
