"No chance. Absolutely none."<br/><br/>Imphrael walked through the streets of Mechcity, steely, ice-cold voice responding to the offer with a blatant refusal. "I don't do jobs in Laven. My place is here, in the arenas, where hackers get disqualified and the match is based on the skill of the player, and skill alone."<br/>"So the champion's afraid to lose - is that it?"<br/>"If I lose, I lose to someone who beats me fair and square." Imphrael grunted, turning to face the spellcaster face-to-face. "If I lose, I lose to someone who earns my respect for being a better player. Not some two-bit hacker with his balls up his nose. Because then when I lose I know I have only myself to blame, and I can live with that, because the solution is simple: Get stronger." he said, the Iron Angel's haunting faceplate barely an inch from the hooded spellcaster. "What do you learn when a hacker beats you to the ground?" he growled, obviously irritated. "How do you fix it? If you kill them, they just respawn. If you block them, they find a way around it. The only solution is to ignore them."<br/>"The Iron Angel... what a joke." the spellcaster grunted with wrinkled lips.  "You haven't ignored them." he said, head tilting up as the hood revealed a disgusted smirk. "You've run away."<br/><br/>Chains burst forth from Imphrael's arms, swirling angrily like a hurricane, and yet his voice maintained that metallic, eerie coldness. "Grid me."<br/>"So we're going to solve our problems with violence now, are we? Naughty, naughty."<br/>"Grid me."<br/>"No." The smirk widened. Without his consent, there could be no grid. Without his consent, Imphrael was just a load of talk.<br/>"Not here. If you want me, you're going to have to follow me... to Lavendara."<br/><br/><div style="text-align: center">----- x -----​</div><br/>The violet planescape was just as Rael remembered it - damp, featureless, the seemingly unending chasm of purple going on like a labyrinth, and the spellcaster just out of reach ahead of him, laughing like a maniac as his teleportation power kept him just ahead of Rael, until he finally turned around, the grin wider now, wicked like a demon, and then it dawned on him. A trap.<br/><br/>"Dinner is served!"<br/><br/>Hackers threw themselves from every corner of the map as the grid formed. Bloodletters. Rael roared with a bone-chilling fury as his chains whirred into action, lashing at them as best he could. One down. Two. Lashed, wrapped, and hurled out of the grid. And then the ground moved. Pixels encasing him in a block of the very stone the entire landscape was made of as he roared as loud as he could, chains whirling with a desperate fury, lashing at the hackers as he tried to slow down the process. They weren't going to kill him, just to let him respawn. Imphrael had been enough of a humiliation to the gang's attempts to rig the tournaments that they had something a little bit more... permanent in mind.