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[color=00a651]"That right? We keeping [i]count[/i], Aoife?"[/color]

If a sequoia could purr hungrily, then Team Kheper's tree shook the world as she crouched low beneath tight, focused brows. Within her, churning in the emerald depth of the fusion reactor embedded into her navel, her stores of Nox coalesced and channeled, much akin to her peers, her comrades, her teammates. It pooled into the soles of her feet beneath the leather of the boots and steel of the greaves, in the palms of her hide-covered gloves as they pressed upon the wet soil beneath— heedless of the muck. She had nowhere else she felt more at home— that her connection with the Earth she called her Elementum was written in fate far earlier than the Nox could ever have graced her with.

[i]Thud. Thud. Thud.[/i]

In the distance, she felt them. Hulking masses of steel and silicon, artifice and technology that she could never hope to understand how to dismantle correctly— their workings were as alien to her as a void's was. In a sense, that made it so much the better for simulation, for the spirit of this exercise. She was fighting the manifestations of something that took from the Earth, twisted it, and made it into something Other than the grand understanding transforming had given her. Were she truly a tree as her teammates claimed... than these were just as Nox-borne demons.

Constructs that her roots did not touch.

But yet.
[i]
Thud. Thud. Thud.[/i]

They trod upon them. In a trio of heavy, lumbering gaits, the rhythm of searching, she could feel their strides upon the earth. Imperceptible impacts to the other four, yet clear as the midday sun for her. She followed them closely from their path deep into the city out towards the street where Chie's gravity well lay, noting their canter, weight, and position long before they reached the girls' field of view. Already a natural in the unsubtle aspects of this— shows of force, leveraging her prodigious strength, carrying her power for destructive upheavals— so instead, her instructors almost to a head had spent their time with her in specific hammering home the importance of the finer details.

One such was this seismic sense. It was already prudent to be actively listening through her feet for them, knowing where these points of resonance had originated and locating friend and foe alike, but she had been pushed to go deeper— analyzing weight and density by depth of the impact, composition by the tone of the resonant noise, number and stride by the cadence of the footfalls. The importance of knowing ahead of time what her team would face, so she could be best used to brutalize the specifities of the opponent.

For instance—

[color=00a651]"Hoooooooh."[/color] she let out a low exhalation, almost a warrior's throaty bellow, as the walkers finally came into view, skirting the edges of the gravity well with clear trepidation that belied their artificial origin. Their onboard systems weren't entirely dumb, then? No matter. They could only work against what they could detect, and only were it not too, too late.

—She'd long known that the drones were bipedal, and that they were heavily armored 'round the legs to compensate for attacks trying to ground them. The designers understood a crucial weakness of the layout— but they could never have anticipated it to face the earth upon which those two crucial legs walked.

[i]Kleinbruder[/i] manifested in her right hand, raised high into the air above her as her brilliant eyes, alive as a forest, traced a line through the pavement to the base of the rearmost walker. As she'd been dowsing the incoming drones those same vibrations had gifted her a rough picture of the ground beneath, all of its strong, reinforced earth... and all of its weak, easily broken soil.

She dashed the silvery axe's bearded edge against the earth, and from it, a rush of cracking ground erupted forth along the length of this ad-hoc "fault line". A plume of dust, stone, and soil rocketed free and into the air as the directed impact traveled through like all the seismic footfalls before it, tearing, tearing, ripping up the street—

Until it exploded beneath the armored boot of her quarry, sending it off-kilter and into a nearby building.

There was a chance, she supposed, that it could right itself yet.

[color=00a651][i]"One."[/i][/color] she declared in triumph, before rearing back to strike the earth again.

But that was only if she [i]let [/i]it.

A meteor from the Academy's finest hit the deck, and in response to that call, a jagged spike of earth erupted forth, tearing through the foundations of the former office building as it stabbed deep into the cuboid central body of the stricken machine, grinding against armor. Juno making fairly quality robotics, there was little telling if it was immediately punctured by stone rising to meet the force of its own careening weight.

Heedless of the result, a green and silver blur rocketed towards the fray them moment she wrenched her axe free.

[color=00a651]"Let's get cooking!" [/color]