[center][img]https://i.imgur.com/PosaXRV.png[/img]
[@Crimmy] [@Shiyonichi] [@GarlandDaHero] [@Plank Sinatra][/center]

[i][color=a0410d]Watch me, Shourichi.

[url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjvA3-tnvz8&]I got this.[/url][/color][/i]

Her faith wasn’t misplaced. Anju and Summers pulled through, and drew their attention away from the Gespenst screaming through the air. She was past their lines before they even realized what had happened, a gunmetal comet streaking through the Irish sky. By the time the Crusaders realized, she was too far gone for them to act. They had their hands full with the rest of UTX, there was no time to chase down a single Gespenst. They would have to hope their vanguard could deal with it.

What worry, after all, was a single Gespie?

The Landlions didn’t miss a beat, one swiveling immediately to fire on the PT rocketing down from above. One of its comrades did the same, two sets of Railguns taking their shots. Their firing trajectories were on point; their paths would cross at exactly the right time for them to nail her machine. Could she take it? Probably, but that there was too much risk involved. She knew that they’d strike home a second before her computer did, and she’d decided on her course of action already. The Gespenst was already programmed with the movement data it needed, it was simply up to the pilot to act on it; that was Piloting 101. The TAC-OS took most of the fine tuning out of the equation, and let the pilot simply pick their course of action. Pilot education, even just the crash course, was then centered around knowing what decisions to make.

One of the big lessons, the very first they taught you if you took a Tesla-Drive-equipped machine, was that it didn’t take the enemy to kill you. If you made the wrong decision, your own machine could make you blackout and crash. Physics was a cruel mistress. The machine would try and warn you if you were pushing the limits, but it’d obey.

Lateral movement would be too slow. Odds were at least one of the rounds would hit if she tried to move aside.

So Hazel [i]slammed[/i] on the thrusters in full reverse, and felt her harness snap tight around her torso while her stomach tried to force its way up her throat. The TT slashed its speed by two thirds in the span of a few heartstopping seconds, Hazel’s blood rushed to her head and she saw [i]red[/i]. The little voice in the back of her head reminded her that this was redout; she was experiencing somewhere over four times the force of Earth’s gravity. It was pushing the blood away from her feet, increasing blood pressure inside her skull drastically. Its increasingly quiet commentary emphasized that if she maintained it, she would black out in a few more seconds. She didn’t really like that voice’s negativity, but fuzzily admitted to herself that yes, it had a point. 

She just needed to hold it…. [color=a0410d]A seco[/color][color=DC143C]nd lon[/color][color=ff0000]ger…[/color]

The rounds lanced by a couple of meters ahead and below her, and the color receded from her vision. It had been close. Really close. Her positioning was just right, or the negative g-forces would’ve kicked in too early and fucked up her brain. But it worked. It worked, and now she had her own angle.

Ignoring the wet feeling on the top of her lip, Hazel triggered the thrusters again and resumed her advance. She was keeping above the Landlions, almost lying flat on the Gespenst’s stomach in midair once she repositioned. The Landlion’s firing angle would be a lot more awkward if she could stay above, and it wouldn’t be able to use its body-mounted Machine Cannons at all. Better for her that way, she could strike just fine. Her lips curled back as if in a silent snarl, letting instinct take over and fire her Burst Railgun at the Landlion that fired first. She needed to make short work of these units, or they’d reach the Loch. 

Better to strike from more than one angle.

Bidden more by her will than any mechanical command, a pair of bladed devices ejected from the TT’s frame and unfurled, flying towards the second Landlion at an angle. The pilot had never used them in real combat before, only in simulations, but she’d make it work. The devices didn’t need manual control. They were at her command. If she was fortunate, the Crusader wouldn’t expect them to come at him from the side. 

[color=a0410d][i]”T-Link Ripper!”[/i][/color]