[Fight: [b]6[/b]]

Given how, frankly, unbelievably fucking cool she'd been up until this moment, Solarel had kind of lost track of the fact that step two of her plan was 'win a swordfight against God'.

She'd spent a long time hunting lesser prey; girls who wore their hearts on their sleeves and their secret techniques in their eyes and cyberwarfare suites that were, frankly, an embarrassment to their civilization. The divine realm on Roevg was a terrifying all-against-all eternal battle between endlessly predatory spirits, evolving into hyperspecialized niches on the fringes of available processing power. Overpowering comparatively submissive Hybrasilian and TC divinities, built to service their human and catgirl mistresses, had been so trivial for so long it had blunted the edge of her silver blade.

Her gold blade was having problems enough of its own having to deal with someone who didn't have body language and could sync together postures from swordsfighting manuals and a dozen different martial arts styles on a frame by frame basis. It wasn't emotionally invested in any of the techniques and so she couldn't see any of the tells she might usually look for; it wasn't weakened by parasitic barnacle geists attached to its fringes and dragging down its reaction speeds; it wasn't limited to humanoid motions or muscle transfers when it came to its goal of putting the pointy edge into things. This was hard! Most of swordsfighting was really just applied yoga, and when someone didn't need to worry about pulling any muscles, breaking their wrist, or even extending their arms for another couple of inches to get a hit in then all the weight of instinct was suddenly against her.

What was the angle? Where was the angle? She just couldn't see it yet.