To all appearances, the Sisterplosion had done its job and caught Juniortron off his guard.  The alien robot-man was briefly sent tumbling, wisps of smoke-like light leaking from increased damage to his front torso plating.  As it turned out, however, Cee was not the only synthetic being on the field this time.  The agile mechanoid ice-danced his way around the snap-fired Pompeii shots Cee had sent winging his way, demonstrating both the same resilience of brain Cee had so often won fights with and much the same exquisite control of his full-body engine system as she demonstrated with her Halo.  A slight frown creased her features for a moment – while the full-body engine likely took up significantly more processing load than her own Halo and was obviously more vulnerable to damage or disruption, it was likely that this target was even more agile in the sky than she was when all his shit was working.  An advantage Cee was not used to being on the losing side of, and yet more reason to be thoroughly irritated with the mechanoid.

Who proceeded to use that full-body engine to whip up a minor cyclone, using it and heavy boosts downward to rocket himself quickly up into the sky.  Cee angled herself upwards to keep her shield between herself and her foe, her frown deepening ever-so-slightly.  Any aerial fighter instinctively knew that altitude was as much of a weapon as actual weapons; “high sky” was as important in an aerial contest as high ground was in a dirt fight.  Neither combatant was one liable to be significantly hindered by attacking out of the sun – though Cee’d love to see Juniortron try it, and receive the painful lesson it’d earn him of Cee’s own capabilities – but the advantages of superior altitude were still there.

Juniortron clearly knew it, hanging there in midair with shards of his wings flaking off into the sky around him, posing like something out of an action movie.  She was tempted to put the built-up charge of her Lament through the manbot then and there, but she knew better – the mechanoid’s seeming tranquility was no such thing.  Whether he came down behind a giant palm strike, attempted to crash into her surrounded by a meteor corona, or did something else altogether, Juniortron was preparing a strike, not idling while he defragmented or whatever.  It wasn’t the right time for the Lament.

Given the five hundred-ish meter distance she’d maintained from Juniortron when they were level with each other and his rapid ascent, the mechanoid was close to seven hundred meters away from Cee by now.  Enough to rule out most shorter-ranged techniques or weapons, though Cee didn’t figure that situation would last long.  She could throw out a few more pokes, try and score some additional dings, but the odds weren’t good that anything she tossed out naked like that would be more than a waste of time and energy.

Instead, she continued her circling cruise, maintaining her altitude and keeping both shield and revolver in position.  She ‘Forged a new set of loads for Gunsmoke while Juniortron was waiting for an eagle to jump off of, but did not fire any of them.  They were instead held in reserve against a few of Juniortron’s likely plan, Gunsmoke held unerringly in line with the mechanoid while she decided to try a different tack.  Rather than waste time on more pokes, Cee bent her efforts to donning her [i]Red Moon Cloak[/i].

The Red Moon Cloak was not actually a physical garment, but was instead an artificial aura wreathing Cee and an expanding area of space around her, within which the perception of those around Cee was twisted.  Based on a madness-inducing technique she had studied from the Einst bloodline’s unusual abilities, the Red Moon Cloak diffused external viewers’ awareness of Cee’s presence, causing her to look, sound, smell, and/or ‘feel’, if one had ephemeral or ethereal senses (or technological sensors, in this case), as if she was occupying every single point in the space influenced by her Cloak that she possibly could, all at once.  The tableau wasn’t physically possible – there wasn’t so much a seething, Lovecraftian blob- mass of Cee bits as there was the simple, yet utterly contradictory knowledge that the one, singular Cee Juniortron was facing happened to be occupying more than one point in space in a manner which violated basic physics.

Figuring out where Cee herself was within the Cloak’s influence was impossible for most individuals; organics found it extremely difficult to focus on the Cloak in the first place, swiftly developing nasty headaches and overwhelming urges to look away as their brains tried to cope with the inconsistencies and impossibilities the Red Moon Cloak presented them.  Synthetics fared either better or significantly worse; some machines simply rejected the nonsensical data as an obvious anomaly or ran system checks to verify their inputs were functional, while others damn near fried themselves trying to compute their way through the chaotic interference.

Juniortron was not likely the sort of low-class robot that’d burn himself out trying to logic his way around the screaming illogicality of the Red Moon Cloak…but unless he was somehow able to pierce or negate the Cloak completely, at the very least his aim would be thrown quite badly off by the thousands of places his senses would be telling him his foe was.  It put Juniortron in something of a pickle – any wide-area attack meant to saturate the rough sphere of space under the protection of the Red Moon Cloak would likely be too weak to effectively break through Autochthon’s Bastion, while singular heavy blows meant to try and strike the Agent through her shield, or deal damage despite the barrier’s intervention, would be simplicity itself to evade when aimed blind at the cloud-of-potential-Cee that was all most foes could discern through the Cloak.

Whether Juniortron shotgunned and was blocked, sniped and missed, or wasted time trying to decide on a different plan altogether, it gave Cee more time to build her offense and read her foe.  His reaction to her Red Moon Cloak would be quite telling of his sensory capabilities and probably another good clue to his offensive abilities, and any delay the Cloak earned her would mean more power channeled to the brilliant sunspark growing in her Halo.  More power the gold-wreathed robot-man would eventually have to eat.

Cee could only hope he was sufficiently hungry to warrant the meal.