The Code of Glorious Conduct had been satisfied.  Now, La Màquina was free to rampage.

Her foe was barreling towards her, right fist cocked back, for quite possibly the most telegraphed haymaker in Luchalliance history.  It seemed the red-smirking Creep-o-tron was trying to use the painfully obvious punch to disguise his dispersal of both a distortion-like wave of sorts and some manner of red mist.  Màquina set her systems to work analyzing both phenomena, searching for whatever threat they represented, but in the interim she had a big dumb robrute to discipline.

Discipline would start with one simple lesson – one does not strike a lady.  Not unless one is prepared to be struck back sixfold.

La Màquina’s [i]Warrior’s Aura[/i], the loosely-governed cloud of power which surrounded her at all times, would keep the fog and waves off of her long enough for her to figure out what they did and defeat them more properly, but the punch and the robrute it was attached to wouldn’t be so easily dissuaded.  That would take some actual work and some pretty precise timing…which was something La Màquina’s synthetic mind was superhumanly good at.

She delayed her reaction, standing there with a sneer on her masked face, until the moment Mr. Robrute committed to his blow…then exploded into motion.  Her left arm snaked up and out of its position, her forearm slamming into Robrute’s wrist and deflecting the heavy, easily predicted punch aside.  La Màquina’s right leg slid forward, the toe of her boot kicking rubble out of the way as she stepped inside Robrute’s own stride, getting right up close, chest-to-chest.  At this range the mechanoid’s reach advantage was thoroughly nullified; he’d have trouble getting any real power behind any blow he could launch at La Màquina.  Her left hand turned the deflectional block into a snatch attempt, her hand twisting around to try and lock its fingers onto the mechanoid's arm just below the elbow.  Her right arm snaked out to do the same to the Robrute's left, seeking to bind up both his limbs with her own.

And all the while, as she moved and blocked and stepped and grabbed, La Màquina's [i]Diablo's Foundry[/i] was working.  Behind her, a heavy brace firmly fixed to her back and shoulders snapped into existence, four copies of her own arms sprouting from it on specially gimballed shoulder joints.  La Màquina's [i]Backhands[/i] – one of her favorite and signature techniques, the ability to grow four extra arms with which to pummel her foes or wield her innumerable array of weapons and stolen techniques.  By the time La Màquina had set her feet again after the sliding forward step, bracing herself inside the Robrute's stride, her Backhands had formed and were performing their attack commensurately with Màquina's attempt to bind her foe's arms.

The two uppermost Backhands, positioned behind and above Màquina's natural shoulders, were almost perfectly positioned to rotate upwards and start unleashing a hefty barrage of blows right upside the Robrute's smoke-spewing grill.  Hooks, jabs, straights, crosses, all the fisty stuff, fired at superhuman machine gun speed from a variety of angles at the mechanoid's head.  Straight at his face, hooking in to either side of his skull, uppercuts to the chin, hammerfists to the dome – La Màquina laid into her enemy with just about everything she could throw at him from her position of advantage inside his reach.

Her lowermost Backhands remained in a wide guard, ready to intercept any reciprocal shenanery the Robrute decided to lay her way, while La Màquina grinned beneath her foe's big fat thoroughly assaulted head.  No doubt the big bruiser had expected some sort of slick dodge – he was, after all, much larger and heavier than she was and built on a stocky male frame besides.  Fight Logic held that she would be at a sore disadvantage in close.

Fight Logic, La Màquina had found, rarely accounted for one combatant having three times the striking limbs her opponent did.  Robrute had miscalculated, and now he was going to have to [i]Pay the Penalty.[/i]