The cool thing about probing strikes was how often they revealed things about one’s enemies.

Take Juniortron, for instance.  Now Cee had confirmation of her suspicion that the numerous ports she’d detected across his surface were all exhaust ports, at the least, for whatever motive technology he used.  She knew his blades were in fact blades and not merely distracting decorations, and she knew he preferred to solve problems with them.

She also knew he was bad at focusing his attention, and that she had him dead to rights.

Sisters were easy come, easy go – they rarely lasted more than a few moments in a high-output tussle like this one, doing the one thing they’d been conjured up to do before being destroyed.  This one was no different; the Sword Sister’s stroke had missed, but that was perfectly fine as she’d done pretty much exactly what Cee’d intended her to do and baited Juniortron into a reaction.  She’d gotten herself flipped over, whacked, slashed up, and kicked into the path of the graser strike, all of which would’ve been just [i]awful[/i] if it had been Cee.  The Sister, however, was as used to being a punching bag as ephemeral, nonsentient constructs could really get.

Besides.  The last laugh belong to the Sister.  As she demonstrated by blowing up.

The savaged, nonfunctional Sister and her armaments reverted – violently – back into the energy from which Cee had conjured her, exploding in RoGold’s face while his blades were still halfway through carving into her form.  What that would do to the mechanoid’s momentum, Cee didn’t yet know enough to guess, but she couldn’t imagine it’d be positive.  Nor was it going to save the metal man from his folley.  Cee herself was still five hundred meters distant of Juniortron, who had avoided her Pompeii shot only to allow a suicide bomber into kicking range of his artificial corpus.  He’d moved a grand total of, perhaps, three meters from his original spot before being asploded upon.  

It took no time at all for the self-styled Pirate Queen to correct her aim the fraction of a degree necessary and follow up her missed Pompeii strike with another one.  The explosive demise of her Sister wouldn’t have even properly begun to fade by the time the nuke-pumped graser bolt burned through the section of space currently occupied by Juniortron’s chest, catching him in the middle of being blown up by what he’d hoped would be his unwitting decoy.  Sucked to be him.  A second follow-up Pompeii shot burned in right on the heels of the first, aiming to catch the mechanoid while he was still disoriented from the explosion and – hopefully – the damage inflicted by the first shot.  

The follow-up snapshots were fired off even as Cee planned her defenses.  The way she saw it, Juniortron had essentially three options.  He could continue to trade direct distance fire with her, try to batter past her Bastion through main force or raw luck.  He could charge her, try to close range and put those blades to work on her to avoid more sniping.  Or he could try indirect distance attacks, provided he had some option available for guided munitions.  She had options ready for all three eventualities.  Her defensive position was good, her enemy was taking free fire, and he was giving her all the time in the world to continue pouring most of her available power draw into the Sinner’s Lament.

By now the sunspark suspended in its web of lightning within Cee’s Halo was heavy with accumulated power, and the light requirements of the fight’s ‘Forged constructions so far allowed Cee to divert a greater-than-usual percentage of her available energy draw to the system.  The Lament’s killing charge was building quickly, and yet Juniortron didn’t seem to care in the slightest.  He [i]had[/i] to know what she was doing, but he hadn’t made any sort of reasonable attempt to disrupt it.  She couldn’t detect any equivalent power build-up anywhere within or around the mechanoid so he wasn’t trying to race her to the finish.  He just seemed…completely oblivious.

Oh well.  If that’s how he wanted to run it, Cee would certainly oblige.  She always preferred the long game anyways.  Let Juniortron faff around with her Sisters and see how many Pompeii shots he could take before they started to work.  No skin off her nose if he didn’t want to take this seriously.  She’d just wait out her Lament charge cycle then shoot him in the existence when she had enough stored power to guarantee the shot.  She continued her wide, five hundred meter circle, cruising steadily with her shield between herself and her foe and her Gunsmoke in line with his evil killbot face, and waited to see if maybe he’d decide he wanted to make a go of it after all.

She’d be waiting if he did.