The deadliest sword was, of course, the eye. To see something was to have power over it. The huntresses of Hybrasil understood only half of this. Time and again in the depths of space they had come for her; time and again she'd defeated them. Some blamed the strength of the [i]Ateline[/i]. Some of them blamed her supernatural skill. None of them, not even Mirror, had realized that the greatest danger was eye contact.

Hybrasilians had beautiful eyes. Adaptive. Expressive. No matter how casual they feigned, the shift from slit to circle foretold the pounce. No matter how swift the strike she was always moving just in time. No matter if they refused her communications channels she'd angle her sensors to pierce metal skin so she could always keep the girl beneath the armour in her sights. So that she'd always be able to watch their eyes. And so their swords became hers. 

She hadn't been stumped until she'd fought Mirror. Mirror was... she was cryptic, unknowable, mysterious but not out of any attempt to be. She'd accepted the communications channel. She'd spoken to her throughout the battle. She'd used the full range of body language, of flirtatious smiles and cutting remarks and emotional range. But none of it came through before she said it. Before she decided to do it. Her Goddess had been the same; no instincts to trick, no wiggle of the tail to herald a pounce, no habits to target. Her mind was disconnected from her body and the two only corresponded by email. It wasn't even that she was faster; if anything, her reactions were [i]slower [/i]than other Hybrasilians. But the rhythm was wrong. Solarel missed beats in complex attack sequences just because she couldn't predict what was next and found herself on the defensive. It was the difference of her entire advantage. 

Compared to that, the mathematical logic of the spirit was a far simpler problem. She could not read emotions in a camera lens but she could piece together what a lifetime of seeing the world as a house might be. This spirit was, after all, simply a house - to break a thing in the house does not deny that room to the house, it just flags that area for repairs. She was dealing with a maker and a steward, to whom loss of vision was an irritant and not a devastating strategic danger. And it was her own nature that would blind her more deeply than any loss of cameras. Solarel could see it in her eyes.

And so, the stratagem. She has looped her trail of destruction in an elegant knot across floors and layers. She has broken every camera in her path. And now she awaits, cold-blooded and empty of heat, pressed against the ceiling. Not for the Kathresis, no - for the [i]repair drone[/i]. Any moment one would be dispatched to this location to repair the broken camera, hoping to fix the net where she had torn it and thereby trap her again. It was the drone that was her target. It was the drone's skin that would get her close enough to strike her true target. One did not hunt a perasaur without a windbanner as bait, and one did not go before a God without an offering.