Ch. 204: First Ever Triannual Tournament of the Grand Arts

"Hanna, I know that everyone's been looking forward to this thing for two years now, and you put a lot of Legacy's funding on the line here, but are you sure this tournament is a good idea? If the androids watch, they'll see all of our trump cards." Pigero asked me. 

"You're just figuring that one out now?" I gave him the side-eye, "Don't worry. WAN is gonna be acting as a censor for the live feed, so they won't be able to get accurate energy readings that way. Any techniques that deviate from certified, common styles will be heavily censored, like Spirit King or Pandora, so they won't be able to figure out how much energy you guys have, or how you're doing whatever it is you're doing, either." I explained.

"That's great, but what about the people watching the matches live? What if they sneak a bug or something in that way?" Lately, I'd been fairly concerned about that, as well. I knew that Gero actually did prefer to use robot bugs to collect data, and I'd begun taking countermeasures this past year, after listening to the reports from the Girls about the modifications that Gero had been making to the Androids since Frieza's touchdown on Earth. He'd managed to get some samples from Pigero and Tien during their fight against Cooler, but that'd been expected. 

As for any and all other times, I was using technology that Legacy's research division had been developing in conjunction with Capsule Corp. Ki-powered barrier devices. Since they used ki energy to project their barriers, they had the added useful property of scrambling ki signatures, making the power levels of people and attacks blocked by them completely unreadable, as well as being as strong as whatever energy was channeled into them. I had one covering every single Legacy compound at all times, as well as staff stationed for the sole purpose of refilling them. I also had one covering my house at Mt. Paoz, since we tended to train there every once in a while. We could make them selectively permeable to some extent, so people could go through them, but anything that WAN deemed unnecessary was placed on a blacklist and restricted from entry. We'd found those bugs via the barriers, and immediately placed them on the blacklist for everywhere, which made a lot of our Captains nervous about potential spying (except my dad, who's entire philosophy on the matter was 'then, we'll just get stronger!'').

"Don't worry about that, Pigero. The Grand Arts Temple has quadruple layered ki-barrier security systems, air-gapped from the outside and each other, each overseen by a separate copy of WAN's code. Only the people we personally scouted will be allowed in, along with whatever they've submitted an application to keep on their person in advance. We're even doing full-body scans, and handing out teched-out uniforms that'll keep them safe in an emergency." Admittedly, I went really overboard when it came to the security for the Grand Tournament. I'd wanted to hold it so badly, but if Gero had gotten a good grasp of the actual power that we had, he'd have been able to develop countermeasures beyond what I'd expect. As it stood, he'd already done quite a few things differently from what he'd done in the canon, making his androids a far higher threat than originally.

As far as the Grand Arts Temple went, it'd been completed over this past year, and it was an incredible work of art. A solid mass of steel mined from asteroids, the base of the actual temple was situated on the ocean floor, with the first floor of the building situated slightly above ground level. This first floor had a bit of security, a ki-barrier to keep Gero's bugs out, and another ki-barrier covering the structure to give it more stability in case of an emergency, but nothing compared to the upper levels, as this was the area where the normal tournaments would be held, the regular World Martial Arts tournament, devoid of superhumans who could control their ki and fly. Inside this first level were a dozen large stadiums with low-input ki barriers insulating the rings. When a human body passed through these barriers, it'd log it for the win-loss record books. 

These stadiums each fit between 20,000 people and 100,000 people, two small, two medium, and two large, for both the junior division and the senior division. If you didn't have a ticket and there was extra room in the stadium, you could enter the freestanding areas and still watch the fight. 

As for the second floor of the Temple, it was for logistical purposes. Dressing rooms, waiting rooms, and the security rooms were all on this floor, and as such, only authorized people were allowed past the four ki-barriers I'd mentioned previously that partitioned it from the rest of the place. Beyond that, there were two separate ki-barriers that denoted the staff area that Pigero and I were currently in. 

Then, once you got to the third floor of the Temple, you were at the top floor, where all of the action happened. This floor was technically the smallest floor, but it had the most free space, because the only people allowed up on it were people invited to watch the Grand Arts Tournament live. It also only had two, large arenas, with basic stands surrounding them. For this floor, we'd focused more on practicality, rather than aesthetics. 

But the arenas themselves were works of art. Connected to a contestant-only section of the second floor, the arenas themselves were partitioned off from the rest of the floor via four ki-barriers each. For the safety of the people watching, the contestants were each required to show up a week before the matches started and charge four ki-batteries each, in order to ensure the two innermost barriers wouldn't break during the matches, exposing the audience to danger. The third barrier was actually more like a giant screen, which would scramble the contestant's face and ensure that the audience couldn't identify them when their clothes inevitably got tattered during the fighting, while the fourth barrier was a backup just in case the first and second barriers got broken. All in all, the idea of anyone actually managing to infiltrate the tournament and get any information on the contestants felt like a joke to me. Even the audience wouldn't know anything more than the contestant's codenames, after all, and they'd all have to wear uniforms, so they wouldn't be able to sneak anything weird in, either. Not even Goku could break into the arenas themselves without taking half a day and alerting all of Legacy. I knew, we'd tested it extensively.