Spectre entered the cockpit of his Mad Cat MK II. The formidable 90-ton battlemech was the terror of Steiner loyal pilots anywhere. He may have been a mercenary, but that didn't limit him to impartiality, did it? Here in the Solaris VII Steiner Coliseum, the Lyrans still had to fear him on their home turf.
Spectre examined the weapons panel. The LRM 20's and LRM 10's allowed him to launch a sixty round barage if he fired both missile silos, the medium pulse lasers mixed refire rate and high damage, and the Clan machine guns punched nice holes through any armor. His mech was good, and he was better.
He'd changed the jump-jet ports into heat sinks (a technique very effective, though people seem not to think of it often), and the ferro-fibrous armor provided well-rounded protection at minimal weight. The mech responded to his every command, and reached a frightening 70 KPH. Time to blow some Lyrans through the roof.
Trumpets blared and bannerrs were dropped. This was only the beginning of the excitement, as the mech pilots lurched their battle machines through the gates. The fans cheered. Spectre was the only one not greeted with massive applause (not being a crowd favorite, for obvious reasons). The Davion logo on his mech did not help his popularity.
"What say we play nice, friends until we take the rest of these jokers out?" The mech jock to Spectre's right broadcast a message to him on a secure channel. "Why not?" The horns blew, and Spectre took an immediate right turn. "Wait, what are you doing?" Spectre opened fire, and was greeted with an ejection pod flying up to the roof. The arena had been filled with fighting, and Spectre was unharassed as he turned left now, finding a target, locking on with his sixty messengers of death, and firing.
The heavily armored and armed Sunder fell forwards as coherent light and a stream of bullets mixed with the force of sixty missiles knocked the mech off balance. Spectre moved in for the kill, stepping on his opponent's back, caving the mech's armor. The ejector pod took off immediately. Another 200,000 c-bills for the merc-turned-arena champion Spectre.
By now, the fighting had turned to groups of three or four mechs more or less evenly matched. Spectre turned to one of the less evenly matched mechs and took it down with one barrage. Aiming is the key, take down only as much as you need to.
With three kills, Spectre decided to get some attention. He joined one of the fighting groups, blasting away at one foe at a time, until the foes were no more. When there was only one opponent left, Spectre charged the Atlas, which caused those who bet on him to grimace. The Atlas' autocannons and superior weight would give him an advantage in this fight.
It was clear he needed it. In addition to being pin-point accurate, Spectre knew how to make his mech move. The mech became an extention of his body as he dodged out of the line of fire, taking cover, popping out, taking another shot (or multiple, since he had a heavy rapid-fire loadout), then taking cover again. Where other pilots would twist the torso of their mech, Spectre moved laterally. This caused his opponents, bewildered by his high speed (even in an Assault-class mech), no small amount of damage.
The Atlas, however, belonged to a decent pilot. He shot off Spectre's missile launchers (though they were almost out of ammunition, so it did almost no good). He then moved on to the lasers.
Spectre closed. In a moment that had fans on the edges of their seats, his arm became wedged in his opponent's torso. The crowd gasped. Spectre fired. In the ensuing explosion, Spectre lost his arm, but his opponent lost the championship.
A rookie in his first year of Solaris won the championship that year, and continued on to defeat Exarch Katrina Steiner alongside Victor Steiner-Davion. It was a battle that would go down in history.