Yeeeuuup – Juniortron was definitely counting on raw physical hardening to tough out attacks.  Her first Pompeii bolt impacted on the mechanoid’s chest, somehow diffused across the surface plating and causing some superficial exterior damage.  The second shot missed as Juniortron’s evasion-in-progress completed, sailing off past his flank as he raised his left arm to return fire.

There was no gun to be seen, but it wasn’t really much of a logical stretch to anticipate that a robot arm raised imperiously in the direction of a distant foe was going to spit some sort of distance attack at that foe.  That assumption turned out to be accurate enough to be getting on, and allowed Cee to…continue doing mostly what she’d been planning on.  [i]Autochthon’s Bastion[/i]*, on her right arm, was already in pretty much exactly the spot it needed to be in order to intercept the incoming shots.  Cee shifted the position of the shield slightly, angling it relative to Juniortron’s Pointin’ Fingers such that whatever hit her would deflect off to the side rather than hit straight-on.

When the shots came, they arrived in the form of some sort of hard-light shots traveling at a considerable fraction of lightspeed, crossing the distance between shooter and target effectively instantly.  Not really fun, but while the shots had enormous velocity they didn’t carry much at all in the way of mass.  Certainly enough to cause rather nasty damage if they hit an unprepared target, and enough for Cee to feel the impacts against her shield, but not nearly so much force as she would’ve expected from Juniortron.  Not enough to threaten the Bastion’s integrity or throw off her game, anyways.  Not yet, at least.

Still channeling energy steadily to her Lament, Cee continued her backwards dash, turning it into a lazily circular aerial strafe away from Juniortron and moving to her left, clockwise relative to Juniortron.  She was aiming to keep a good five hundred meters or so between her and the mechanoid if she could, though she wasn’t going to sweat the exact number.  Either way, she wanted more information on this threat before committing to more powerful strikes, which left a few different ways of going about the contest.  What to do, what to do…

…sacrificial lamb.  That sounded about right.

As Cee circled, she summoned up a [i]Sword Sister[/i]* next to her, armed with a classic sword-and-board combination.  A phantasmal echo of Cee’s own Bastion occupied the Sister’s right arm, while a ‘forged [i]Hyperion-DM 033XA[/i]* longsword was gripped in her left.  Sisters weren’t the brightest bulbs on the tree, reliant as they were on secondary processing nodes within Cee’s own combat systems, and they were neither as powerful nor as durable as the original…but they were generally powerful and durable enough.

Suspended from her own Halo, the Sword Sister reversed Cee’s course, charging towards Juniortron on a tight, corkscrew spiral pattern, altering the speed and exact course of the spiral randomly to try and avoid precise counterfire from the mechanoid.  Her own ‘forged Bastion was up in front of her, protecting her from incidental fire, as she accelerated as rapidly as she could towards the doing of her job.  Closing with Juniortron in a bare few seconds at most, the Sword Sister’s corkscrew path had her coming up at the robot-man’s front face from an upward angle, her longsword flicking out in a sharp backhand stroke aimed to bite into the outside of Juniortron’s left knee.  Unopposed, the strike had a damn good shot of harvesting the limb altogether – dependent on Juniortron’s construction, of course – and even if it didn’t, most people felt significantly less adventurous after taking a longsword to the knee.

Cee herself continued her circular cruise around the battlefield, her Bastion held ready to intercept more fire as it came, and contributed to the Sister’s strike with a third Pompeii* shot, timed to coincide as precisely as possible with the projected impact of the Sword Sister’s kneecapping stroke.  This Pompeii shot was targeted squarely at the mechanoid’s weakened chestplate, coming in from the killbot’s right side and seeking to take advantage of the (hopefully) compromised armoring there and/or force the thing to defend itself.  Ideally it’d be too bamboozled by the simultaneous strikes to defend properly against either…but Cee damn well knew better than that.

Now to see how Robo-Goldie responded to her play, and just how much free time he was going to give her to build up her Lament.  The answer was already “more than Juniortron was going to like”, and every moment she got where she didn’t need to redirect power elsewhere, the answer swung closer to “more than Juniortron could survive.”

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-[i]Autochthon’s Bastion[/i]: a targe-style shield forged for Cee by On High Industries, a literally divine weapons and equipment manufacturer staffed by gods of the forge, war, and other militant/productive spheres.  The shield had no offensive capabilities beyond being a solid disc of metal one can slap with, but is nigh impervious to harm and possessed of divine glyphs etched into it that grant it two special functions: the ability to drastically amplify the defensive properties of Cee’s Ether Field, or the ability to extend its nigh-impervious frontal defense in a circular shield-wall roughly as wide as Cee is tall.  Only one such function can be active at a time, not both.

-[i]Sisters[/i]: Cee can create semi-autonomous lower-functioning copies of herself, generally referred to as Sisters, with the help of her Godforge.  Sisters are impossible to mistake for Cee-actual for anyone with any kind of sensory ability – no clone-hiding or clone-dodging – and are used strictly as force multipliers.  Sisters piggyback off Cee’s own processing ability and have little real intelligence of their own, and generally are able to exert only half at best of her physical capabilities.  Sisters come in a number of informal varieties based on their equipped items – sword-armed Sisters are ‘Sword Sisters’, firearm-equipped Sisters are ‘Bullet Sisters’, Sisters with defensive gear are ‘Shield Sisters’ and so forth.

-[i]Hyperion-DM 033XA[/i]: A weapon originally recovered by the Yggdrasil Crew’s Captain, Crim El Furaga, from the headquarters of Tenba, Inc. during the [i]Machine Wars[/i] incident.  The (original) blade is forged of exotic type-T Armageddium, a material which exhibits nearly-ideal properties of weight, strength, and incredible toughness.  The Hyperion is a light, flawlessly balanced blade orders of magnitude more durable than ordinary steel swords, but does not possess any of the technological sub-weapons or dire enchantments of more showy, overtly powerful Doomswords.  The Hyperion is just a really damn good longsword.

-[i]Pompeii[/i]: A micronuclear graser round, typically fired from Gunsmoke.  The Pompeii utilizes a micronuke spark to power – very briefly – an equally compact magnetic lensing circuit that forcibly focuses the micronuke blast into a linear bolt of coherent gamma radiation – a gamma laser, or ‘graser’, in Cee terminology.  As the explosive force of the micronuke blast is not entirely absorbed/suppressed by the magnetic lensing, there is a minimum safe distance at which Pompeii shots can be fired – typically given as ten feet/three meters.
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