Nothing focuses the mind like a lion attack.

Divine speed plastered over a lot of sins. While her shield seemed to her opponent like an immovable wall of light that blocked and blinded at every angle, each impact ran up through her arm and jolted her shoulder painfully. She wasn't strong enough to absorb the blows without comment, wasn't skilled enough to roll with them and deflect them at angles. "Lucky mediocrity," was the growling assessment of Variance when it came to her combat abilities, and the words rang in her head even now. 

Her style is a band-aid over her flaws. She is either a brick wall, taking the impact of the strike head-on, or she's elsewhere - blurring back in glittering lines. It looks effortless, like a swan gracefully and supernaturally sliding around her opponent, leaving them wild and frustrated, but like a swan underneath the surface is furious paddling. [i]Shit. Shit. What do I do? How do I close this out?[/i] Each impact hurt, moving this quickly was tiring, and she simply could not see a path to victory from where she was now.

She'd relied on Asterion for far too long. As long as she'd covered her fierce friend's side, blurring in to intervene whenever an attack was leveled against her, then she hadn't needed to think about how to [i]end[/i] a fight. She could just defend, Aster could just attack, and they never had to figure out how to balance themselves. She has no idea how to get out of that pattern on the fly, and so with clash after clash, she defends the scared teenager while making no gains and no progress. [i]Shit. This is so much harder than I thought it'd be.[/i]

But even though she was flailing, it [i]looked[/i] like she was toying with her opponent. The followup wasn't coming because she was humiliating her foe in a move that'd make perfect sense to an Annunaki, surely not because she had no idea how to subdue an angry lioness.

[Defend: 2d6+3 [b]10[/b]. Take influence over the kid]