Champion versus Champion.  Taylor smiled at the thought.  However, he just couldn't seem to let the several glaring inequalities in the whole situation slide.  Why, back before the restart, was Nathan Williams granted a shot at the HKWF World Heavyweight Championship?  Obviously because the title was vacated earlier by Mychael Lord.  But, seriously, why Williams?  Why T-Rex, a man who might as well have been making his HKWF debut?  Weren't their enough viable contenders in Hong Kong in the first place?  Seemingly not.  Even if they had to fly in some overseas talent, why Rex?  Why not Taylor, a seasoned yet wholly underutilised veteran of the promotion?  None of it added up, and Taylor couldn't help but let it get to him in some way.  He had toiled away in the bowels of HKWF for the better part of a decade.  For what?  The second the bell rang and Nathan Williams held the HKWF World Heavyweight Championship fifteen feet in the air, Taylor's run with the company became something less than an afterthought.  It was obsolete - he might as well not have been there at all.

But this match would be about more than that.  Whilst the effort to make amends and put his long since forgotten face back on the HKWF map, a certain degree of revenge was also very much in order.  A captivating, if untapped revenge story, as Taylor thought of it.  Surprisingly, it was one that involved Nathan Williams but for the most part excluded second rate dramas, unborn children and sledgehammers.  It had involved Sean Fiery, but Taylor found amusement in the fact that, for once, Magic was nothing more than a supporting character.  The story began in the main event of Fallout: Return To Glory and, give or take a few Mickey Mouse tag matches, had been left untouched since.  Present day and a changed landscape altogether in both GZW and HKWF, the grudge match was booked.  It annoyed Taylor somewhat, though, that in comparison to the recent Final Encounter two-out-of-three-falls match at Fallout: Collision Course, this match was being billed as a stopgap.

Ironic as it was, seeing as how Champion vs. Champion was to be a main event, whereas The Final Encounter was in the middle of the card, it was still true.  And Taylor saw right through it.  Who, exactly, was behind it?  The same person, the same body, the same entity that's behind everything, of course.  Taylor didn't know it's name, if it was male or female, who or what it consisted of, but he knew it was there.  It was everywhere in CCW.  It was in the fans and Taylor's peers.  It was in the announcers, from the HKWF Three Stooges right down to the UwU Crew.  It was there and it saw everything.  It saw everything and it was able to manipulate anything into anything it saw fit.  It wanted a fresh headline superstar, Zac Sharp popped up overnight.  It wanted to piss all over the World Heavyweight Championship, Maxx Pain stepped up and had his shot.  It didn't like how far Taylor was getting in the World Heavyweight Championship Tournament, Nathan Williams showed up.

Realistically, Williams wasn't on any sort of personal vendetta when he exploded through the ring at Fallout: Return To Glory and won the World Heavyweight title for Pimp Bizkit.  Taylor knew that.  It was bordering just business.  Of course, family ties fell into it as well, but Taylor was confident that Williams would've done the same thing had it been anyone else in his position in the Steel Cage that night.  He was doing what he had obviously been contracted or hired to do.  He was there to take the Lone Gunman out, plain and simple.  On that night, Nathan Williams was the gunman.

Stop.

Taylor, previously in a word of his own, only then noticed the words Nathan "T-Rex" Williams versus "The Lone Gunman" John Taylor staring back from the small sheet of paper on the desk in front of him with the words Crimson's At Our Best at the top.  Surely a mistake, he thought.  An error on the part of a dozy printer or typist, most likely.  He sincerely doubted that he and Williams would be booked against each other twice in two shows, headlining both.

Unless, of course...

Yeah, that was it.  The entity had gotten a glimpse of Jackie Lee's way of thinking in booking the two champions and mangled it into something they could call their own.  Whatever it was, the entity wasn't stupid.  It certainly knew what it was doing, tapping into that previously untapped market of himself and Williams going at it, and it was sly enough to book it's version of Champion versus Champion to air before the HKWF's.  Smart thinking.  Taylor had to think twice about the reasoning behind placing such a match in the first round, though.  Had the entity no faith in it's two champions?  Was it not confident that both Taylor and Williams, if laid out in the brackets correctly, could make it to the final?  Clearly not.  Once again, the entity showed a scabby, weak side of itself.  Personified by the booking committee, it's primary goal was for Williams/Taylor to happen on a GZW screen before happening on a HKWF screen.  The committee needed insurance, and so the brackets were laid out as they were.  It began to make sense to Taylor.  He saw how the World Heavyweight title tournament was set out, and he saw errors in judgement.  Errors in reason.  Errors in logic.  Errors.

Back then, they'd rounded up the first sixteen people they could get their hands on.  It was a classic case of throwing as much shit as possible against a brick wall to see what'd stick.  Fortunately, Taylor himself emerged as the strongest contender.  However, by the very nature of the tournament, it could have just as easily been someone as incompetent as the now obsolete Joshua Cleaver or the underachieving Kaine.

Obviously, that had had it's repercussions and the scolded committee would've learned from their mistakes.  Their insurance policy was to place the obvious big money match in the first round, to ensure it'd happen.  They'd hardly care if the match was main event quality, so long as they get the ratings from the drones tuning in to see what they're told to be the be all and end all.  Of the month, at least.  

Taylor stared down at the card once again and examined it, taking in every single detail this time.  To keep up the level he'd only recently reached, he'd have to know exactly what he was going to do.

GZW World Heavyweight Championship on the line throughout the tournament.

He read the sentence in italics and took it in.  Of course, he already knew that it was the case, but something was different.  From catching up on old archive tapes of the previous Lord of the Coliseum tournament, he'd seen James Corbin, as champion, facing the same dilemma.  He only now realised that nobody could ever really understand something like that unless it was themselves being affected.  The message was directed solely and primarily at him, he knew that.  He saw it as something of a privilege, but also knew what was facing him.  The bottom line was that Taylor would have to win the tournament.  Were Nathan Williams to eliminate him in the first round, there'd be outrage.  With both titles around his waist, the GZW belt would fall into inactivity.  The belt couldn't go back to Pimp Bizkit.  Taylor was still in the process of mending the damage done by the Absentee Champion, the Court Jester.  

Then who else?

Sean Fiery?  In theory...  But Taylor felt that Magic would see the title belt as just an added bonus, an afterthought to winning the title of Lord of the Coliseum, something he failed to do last time.  Fiery was practically above the World Heavyweight belt.  At least that's how he was marketed.  The belt would do nothing for him, and he certainly wouldn't do anything for the belt.  Fiery was obviously after the crown of Lord, but Taylor literally couldn't allow that to happen for the sake of his title.  It was a number of paradoxes balled into one, but Taylor still saw clearly.

What about the rest?  Kid Kaos had been there and had tried to do that, but failed.  Not only that, but Taylor was still gleaming over his clean victory over Kaos a week previously.  Jay Jameson, being billed as the newcomer and wildcard?  Taylor certainly saw potential in him.  In fact, it bore a striking resemblance to that shown by Justin Sharp back in 2001.  Jay certainly had the tools to go far, but realistically, there was no way that any man, in his second or third match within CCW, even, could leave with the top title.  Of course, the exception of Zac Sharp did linger in Taylor's mind, but he knew he owed it to himself and to the belt not to allow lightning to strike twice.  He didn't want to become what Billy Bond subsequently became.  The kill switch on Jameson's momentum was within Taylor's grasp.  It was all on him to push it.

All that remained within the tournament, in Taylor's eyes, were merely placeholders, glorified jobbers to make the predetermined advancers look good.  Having beaten them both, Taylor knew that neither Kaine nor Seven, for all their silence and bullshit monologues, respectively, were going to get anywhere near his belt or the Lord of the Coliseum moniker.  The entity could preset the tournament geared toward their way of thinking, planning for the right people to win the right matches, but ultimately, it was down to the eight participants, and furthermore that he was the man to beat.  Knowing that, he smiled.