POTENTIAL 0
ANGRY

The wings? Oh, you’d better believe she’s keeping the wings after this. With a sweeping gesture, she takes to the skies once more, and begins the classic Superhero Aerial Defense. There’s a reason that so many superhero flicks have this as their climax: it builds tension, adds an obvious ticking clock of “when it hits the ground you lose,” and at the end of the day, there’s a part of us still scared that a predator is going to swoop down and attack us on the open plains of our communal birth. Shooting upwards, defanging the hungry sky, satisfies us and tells us: you’re safe.

This is the opposite of what @SARAHPHIM is trained to do, you know. She’s supposed to avoid everything here effortlessly, not make sure she hits literally everything coming at her. Instead of making a bullet pattern with deliberate holes, she needs to make one that deliberately knocks debris in towards the center, turning the battlefield below into a chaotic, flaming hell — and she needs to do her best not to crush Euna or Ferra in the process. Well, all she can do is pray they don’t get taken out by a screaming comet of twisted metal she sent their way.

It’s not enough. [i]It’s not enough.[/i] There’s still debris getting through, too small for her to get a bead on, but still deadly enough to kill those below. She revs up the hardlight generator until it’s as hot as a brand, a coal placed by an angel beneath her spine, and she wraps a net of searing light around the chaos, instantly incinerating the debris falling through it.

Her legs go limp, and only the wing harness is keeping her up as she screams, her nerves hot fires, her hands clenched into claws, as she gives her all and then some. Her mind is a white-seared tiger-desert of instinct. The camera drones swinging around her catch it all: the blinding web matrix, the spears and claws that expertly skewer falling death and send it hurtling into the hell this fallen angel hangs above, and the sweat dripping down her agonized face.

Forget the airplane. This is the new benchmark for ballsiest thing @SARAHPHIM has ever pulled off.

[Choosing to [i]escalate the situation[/i] below, and to take Influence over the civilians.]