[b]Isabelle[/b]

You feel, rather than see a break in the shots. It’s not as clean as you’d like. A few days with Novasurge isn’t enough to really get the subtleties that a neural mesh link can offer. But even so, the obvious change in the movement of light debris and dust colliding with your mecha when the shots simply stop altogether is simply impossible to miss.

There’s nothing over the comms, no words at all. This is the danger of breaking visual contact, and the reason these crevices in the station are such high risk. The Lighting Chaser is above you almost before you realize it, and you just barely manage to get out of the way from a shot from the primary rifle. She fired at closer range than it ought to be for that gun, the directed blast coming out of the crevice sends you flying and it sends her flying the other way. 

Reckless. That’s the only word for it. You can feel the simmering anger. Without a word being said, you know that she feels it intensely, that anger courses through her. But she’s barely met Solarel. This is an anger of reputation. It’s an anger of being told that someone is the villain, but having your flight instructors still tell you that you don’t measure up to them anyway. The anger of not being good enough and the anger that someone [i]undeserving[/i] is better than you. You might have felt it yourself once or twice, Isabelle. 

At this moment though, the real question is whether you can pick up the pace. Quar is mad. She’s coming at you hard, like stupid hard. You barely dodge a homing missile that circles back towards you, forcing you onto the defensive, and she’s just starting up the barrage in earnest. The strategy that your mother recommended remains sound if you stick to it, but you can’t do this and be emotionally checked out. It’s too intense, too fast, it’s like trying to be checked out of sprinting. It demands one hundred percent of your attention. It’s intense, it’s exhausting, and you’re going to be breathing hard by the end of it. But if you can keep up and move elusively through that pace, you’ll have her. 

[If you keep up here, take the XP or clear a condition for acting on your mom’s advice]

***

[b]Jolly[/b]

There’s the ripple of the cloaking field. It was just to the side of your explosion, she dove out of the way. A building side caves in where she bodied it, and you can guess pretty well where she’ll come out. 

She’s trying very hard to hide. Might just be that she doesn’t want to drop this advantage without a fight. Maybe she’s got a big reveal that she’s really holding onto. Maybe you caught her off guard zeroing in this well and she’s simply scrambling to get a moment’s respite. 

Either way, you’ve got the edge on her, but you’ll need to commit to this. Block her exit with another missile, then shift your position sideways and bomb precision strike her through the building opening with as much intensity as you’ve got. You’ll bring down her cloak without losing your aerial advantage. But, you’ll exhaust your full supply of missiles in the process, leaving you without your long-range option. If you don’t take the shots now, she’ll slip out the sides and get cover in the alleys between the fabricated buildings, obscuring your sight in your current position and forcing you to fly closer overhead where she probably went to scout her properly, making your position more vulnerable. 

She’s keeping coms silence too. You can take this as a form of triumph. Erys is taking you seriously. No gloating, no taunting. At least not yet, not in this first part of the exchange while she’s cloaked and trying to get one over on you. If she gets you in a headlock, you can expect a lot of taunts to happen, but she’s not risking her position with even a short burst of comms traffic. This does leave you free to imagine the chatter though, which probably would have been something like “what the fuck?!” as she dove out of the way of the first missile so close to her position. Perhaps you’d like to taunt her? Send it out on a wide band for all the cameras too. Tell her what a coward she is as you try to force her out. She’ll probably like it if you banter like you’re part of the Red Band yourself. 

***

[b]Mirror[/b]

Heim laughs, long and hearty, though his shield never waivers. You get to see the next layers of defense as you flip up and over. Though he positions the shield to bear the brunt of the blow, you’re more than agile enough in your flip to bypass it before he can fully turn, but what you encounter are energy shields that crackle against your beams for a brief instant and then you’re past. Layers and layers of defense to crack on this one.

He laughs again as you finish the move. “I do know, Hybrasilian. The one-day defender, but it’s the year after that matters! You lived with one of our finest knights for nearly a year! Ha! You’re no more an outsider than the capital knights themselves and I give them the time of day, though honestly I think Zaldar would have told me to ignore the whole lot if she were here. Solarel was better than any of the current crop. She was raw, that one. They didn’t just hand her power, she took it, rode it like it was on fire, burned it to the edges of what it could take. Nobody can fly the Aeteline now, have you heard? She broke it for them, hahahahaha!”

He’s not stationary. His mecha isn’t fast, but he’s making his way to you where you landed and he knows how to fight at his speed. It’s difficult to read the exact timing of his thrusts, when he’s going to actually put the force behind the spear, and he moves inexorably, never overcommitting his weight and always holding his balance. You could jump away and get clear anytime you please, but then you’ll be back to dealing with that ironclad defense. 

“Maybe I’m wrong though. I thought you were a true warrior and spoke to you as such. I saw your fight with the sniper. You took her shot head on, even though it blew clean through you! That’s what I want, girl! I want that strength! Give me a good fight! A fight for the ages!”

You can hear in his voice that he means it. There’s a rasp to it, a gruffness that wasn’t present for Solarel. He’s worried he won’t get a good fight. He’s not stupid, he’s reserving his missiles because he knows that if he exhausts them completely you probably have the technique to pick at his defenses without him ever engaging you. It will be long, slow and boring, a thousand arrows plinking at an armored knight before he collapses from exhaustion, but he knows full well you could do it. It doesn’t scare him that he might lose, but it scares him to lose this chance, to walk away from this without getting anything from it. He wants you to fight him head on, to be a fury and a madwoman and to meet his strength with strength. He respects you enough to think you’ll do it.

Your new display is filled up about 75% by the by. That backflip trident maneuver seems to have gone over well with it, and it’s almost ready to light up another tail for you. 

***

[b]Solarel[/b]

[u]A day ago, in a small and unremarkable office on Akar Prime[/u]
“Did you reach the mecha?” A seated dark-colored Terenian woman in a white suit asks the Zaldarian who just came into the room. 

“Yes,” the Zaldarian signed, smoothly, evenly, neutrally. 

“Good” says the Terenian woman, pushing her hair back. “That will be all for now then. We’ll let you know when you’re needed for the next match.”

The Zaldarian departed, breathing a sigh of relief at how the question had been asked. She had reached the mecha, started to make modifications even. It would have some difficulty. But Trosta had been visiting the Hangar, and several cats had seemed unusually alert for her. Even being in a different section, she had bailed out part way through. If they’d seen her, if they’d heard her, she’d be ruined. The Empress would disavow her involvement, claim she was a rogue operative. She’d agree of course, to save face for the Zaldarian empire. And that would be that. An exile. She didn’t understand why the Empress was willing to help like this in the first place, and the layers between them meant that Solarel didn’t even know. 

But she was out and none the wiser, at least until the match. She’d make herself scarce that day.

[u]In the arena[/u]
There’s a moment where the Barn Owl freezes up. You can tell from the juddering motion and the sudden halting of the arms tracking you. You line up the shot, but as you do there’s a wrenching sound and the Barn Owl pulls away. The shot goes wide, leaving a frozen patch against the edge of the stony mountain just to the side of Angela’s mecha.

“You dare!” she shouts, voice full of righteous outrage. “You dare?! I saw your last match and the great strange mecha you fought against shut down. I had my engineers go over every inch of the Barn Owl today before the match and still you dare! Aye, you will rue the day you crossed me!”

She’s not slow. The Barn Owl’s crystal fire drive has flared to life and Angela is racing across the arena. She’s not firing stationary like she did in her fight against Dolly either. She’s rushing at you as she shoots, adding to the speed of the bullets, creating a tighter field of fire. The Kathresis is many things, but it is not sturdy. Bullets are ricocheting from your shields and you need to move ahead of her because you can’t actually withstand that barrage for any sustained length of time. 

It hurts, seeing a girl fight her heart out like this and knowing that you almost denied her the chance. It hurts proving to her that she was right to see you as the villain, even knowing that’s the role you need to play. 

[Mark Guilty]