Well lah dee diddle-dum dah – looked like Juniortron wanted to take the whole mecha-angel thing all the way up to 13.

Cee’s own Halo, and the spread of wings floating around it, had been decided on by her way-back-when Ghalakrast R&D unit; they had wanted their champion to overawe enemies with a brilliant display of righteous power and prominence, terrifying the Undesirables she’d been originally conceived to hunt.  Cee herself didn’t really care one way or another about the angelic visuals of her Halo – frankly, if she could’ve traded in the gaudy, mostly-decorative wings for that intriguing amplifier system Ghalakrast had engineered into Missy Eight-Bit’s own Halo, she would’ve done so with a smile on her face.

This guy, though?  Shrouded in faint, foggy-looking golden light, bearing golden honeycomb blades on wrists and ankles, flying on more-honeycomb wing-branch…things, glaring at her with his red ring of mad – Juniortron was definitely pushing the whole avenging-archangel look pretty dang hard.

The time could’ve been better spent.  The mechanoid’s breakneck approach to Cee’s position was nonetheless not really breakneck enough – the two of them each had plenty of time for preliminary, pre-fistpunching scans on each other.  Cee could tell that the Plaxploder-running creep looked to be fairly well universally covered in vent ports for whatever was producing his whole I-Am-Robo-Jesus thing; there was no real difference between the ports exhausting his golden corona and those to which his wings and blades were anchored.  He’d been built on a loosely humanoid model, forgoing any sort of humanizing elements in exchange for looking like some sort of evil killbot with pretentions of religion.  Which, for all Cee knew, he was.

Certainly Juniortron there would be able to read the energy gathering within Cee’s Halo, would be able to discern the cloud of power surrounding her.  Her gun was there for the world to see, and it was hard to miss the targe held easily in front of her middle – coincidentally, right about where Juniortron’s braking burst of power would hit, if it didn’t disperse the way it was supposed to.  All of that was obvious.  What wasn’t obvious was where the colossal nuke-driven gamma sword she’d skewered his collapsed Plaxploder with had come from, or where all of her hidden secret weapons were.

Other than the secret weapons on her chest, anyways.  And there was really nothing secret about those.

Unlike Cee, Juniortron had no readily apparent defensive aura or shield in place.  She was figuring he’d be counting on whatever those vents did and whatever innate toughness his frame boasted to deal with incoming attacks.  Given the wingblades on each major limb, Cee had the cretin pegged as a close-in bruiser by preference – elsewise he probably would have tried to shoot rather than blitz her personal space.

"You are in the way, Android. I give you one chance, now, to leave. You do not –"

Ahh, the Villainous Ultimatum.  A time-honored tradition of Rimward scraps like this one – one side invariably told the other “buzz off and I let you live” in a menacing voice, trying to be all oppressive and stuff.  Occasionally they even worked – this guy’s whole Robo Jesus schtick would probably scare off some of the junk-trawler idiots who’d occasionally work up the nerve to contest a juicy piece of salvage.  Cee, though?  Cee had faced down Villainous Ultimatums from much nastier things than Juniortron here.  She’d long since ceased being impressed.

Which was why, even before the day’s punching clown quite finished delivering his Villainous Ultimatum, he was dealing with Cee’s answer in the form of righteous high-velocity violence.

Many super-swordsmen the multiverse over prided themselves on their Iaido quick strikes, able to draw their swords from their sheathes and transition into an attack against the opponent in the same motion, with breathtaking speed that often seemed to defy all logic and reason.  Many such swordsmen felt they had a lock on the ability to switch from resting stance to brutal attack in a heartbeat…but they were wrong.

Gunslingers had been working to perfect the art of the quickdraw for as long as pistols had existed, for much the same reasoning – shortening the time between Rest and Kill as much as possible preserved the gunslinger’s life and allowed her to end her foes before they could fire in turn.  Cee was no exception.  In point of fact, she had put considerable time, attention, and effort into engineering and optimizing her quickdraw; combined with the speed and precision of her artificial chassis, and she had shaved the time from holster to discharge down to levels ordinary humans were unable to properly perceive.  Gunsmoke just seemed to materialize in Cee’s hand, while her arm went from hanging loose at her side to pointed at the glowing robo-dude and squeezing triggers without any intervening motion.  Maybe Juniortron could perceive it – probably, in fact – but perception and reaction were two entirely different things.

Either way though, Juniortron would find himself facing a double-tapped two-shot of [i]Pompeii[/i] rounds.  The originator of the micronuclear bursting cells Cee had employed by the truckload in her Krakatoa, a Pompeii shot consisted of a single micronuke charge and just enough magnetic lensing to focus the charge’s blast into a nuclear-driven graser shot, when the round detonated about three meters beyond Gunsmoke’s barrel.  The result: a piercing bolt of intense, focused gamma on the antivehicle scale, rather than the anti-Kaiju scale of the Krakatoa.  Two of them, in this case.

Normally of course, Cee’s shots were targeted with the precision of a master surgeon – or a machine.  This time though, with no real idea of Juniortron’s internal workings or layout, she targeted the bolts at her foe’s center of mass, one high on the chest ‘bout ten centimeters beneath the base of his throat, the other another ten centimeters beneath that.  Given the creep’s semihumanoid construction, it stood to reason that the chest would be where the greatest concentration of vital systems was.

Having Shot First, Cee flung herself backwards in the same moment she drew and fired her weapon, skidding quickly enough across the corroded outer hull of the [i]Venture[/i] to leave a pair of unusually energetic trails of flame in the wake of her heels, alongside a scattering of swiftly melting shoe remnants.  The rest of her Indiana Y outfit fuzzed and vanished, replaced by her Feikona uniform – form-fitting black cherry bodysuit beneath an open-fronted, half-sleeved black jacket, traced with lines of golden force and capped with slim, tech-armored boots.  Her gunbelt remained, as did Gunsmoke and the Bastion, as she rocketed backwards under her Halo’s power.

There were, theoretically, four shots left in the gun to her enemy’s probable knowledge.  The Pompeii rounds took next to nothing to ‘Forge and so she’d been able to maintain a hefty flow of power to her Lament, building the charge suspended in her Halo ever higher.  Frankly, as proud as Cee was of her quickdraw and as unquestionably lethal as the technique was, the shots were often the martial equivalent of Cee flipping her enemy the bird – meant more to piss them off and provoke a reaction than to end a fight.

Not that she’d complain if she hit something vital and dropped Juniortron with her first two shots.  She just wasn’t naïve enough to count on it in any way.  That was what [i]second[/i] shots were for.  Or third.  Or however many it took for Cee to find the right place to put a hole so she could get back to digging around for [i]sweet sweet TREASURE[/i]!