"To be honest with you..."

Mirror stretches at her console, straining her arms until her shoulders crack in pleasant release. She's halfway to yawning again but she suppresses it for the sake of the show. Batting aside these test shots is kitten play, she can do it without even paying half attention. She starts to twirl her trident as a makeshift shield rather than swatting aside individual blasts just to revel in the sheer laziness of the battle. 

"I would prefer to disappoint you. A crushing loss serves me at least as well as a nap. There is only one match worth spending all my secrets for, and until it is fought and won even claiming my wish is of secondary concern at best. Though make no mistake, Kiriala of the Ginger Tiger, I will be the one to win this tournament in the end."

Closer. Closer. She does not move. Her tails twitch in anticipation of a kill shot, but her fingers slide over the buttons without the slightest twitch of commitment. She lets her trident finish its movement with a slashing flourish that tilts it behind the body of the Gods-Smiting Whip. Now she dodges the lasers with tiny, non-committal movements. Little twitches of movement through her great mecha that bend it almost imperceptibly out of harm's way. 

Of course, twitch movement like this is difficult in the extreme at the mecha level. Even attempting it is risking one of her secrets, or at least revealing that she has one. But what choice is there? She is not only relaxed, she is [i]bored[/i]. And the consequences of her decision regarding this little test have left her fingers with unacceptably little to do. 

With a suddenness that screams snap decision making, she drops the Nine-Tails into a crouching position. Trident still held behind her back, free hand placed onto the ground with splayed fingers, corresponding leg stretched wide out to one side. A Huntress' pose, through and through.

"How! Ev! Er! Had you accepted my offer without a question, I would have bifurcated you on the spot for your disrespect. You have passed my first test. I now repeat my offer: will you not relax with me?"

She leaps into the air, as high as she can get on only the strength of her legs. It is only once she is clear of the beautiful, swaying grasses that she engages her thrusters and truly begins to [i]fly[/i]. Up she goes, where the light of the sun kisses her freely. Where the true power of her mecha manifests over all the small dreamers to afraid to fly on fire. Where laser fire is easy to dodge as she makes her charge down from on high. Where she has retreated at the beginning of every single fight in this entire tournament. 

She does not bother checking the meter for her chains. No points for creativity to be earned here. But that has always been the point. Every opponent, the same strategy. A tendency, now locked into dossiers as an obsession. Whatever adaptive tactics she may display later on in fights and however terrifying the power of her Gods-Smiting Whip may be, her favorite maneuver is this one. Possibly it is a compulsion, something she [i]must[/i] begin her matches with owing to a disease inside her brain. 

Whatever explanations they come up with, to date she has not been punished for it. No one, not even Solarel, had yet countered her comet dive. They all simply allowed her to take position, maybe even end the fight from the very beginning, and only after would any kind of chaos or interesting challenge play out. 

Will you be more of the same, Beloved of Maeahu? Will you allow her to pass through the entire qualifiers unpunished for her obsessive hubris and standardized tactics? Have you at least read up on her enough to expect it, or is the game that you are playing the same challenge of sight-reading that Mirror had settled on for you?

In every other match to date, Mirror's flight and charge have been accompanied by a barrage of high-energy lasers from her free floating tails. This much, then, is different. There is no attempt at covering her position from up here, she simply weaves and twirls her way through the strafing into an attacking position. In the past she has displayed a kind of zeal for almost obliterating her environments, and has left more than one arena so demolished that even Zaldarian technique wept at the job in front of it. 

At the last moment, Mirror switches the angle of her thruster fire and cuts from a full charge to a hover. The gravitational forces it exerts on her body are enough to twist her stomach, squeeze her skull, and pry a grunt from between her lips. In a moment she will need to take a hand off her controls to hold her head and keep her vision from blurring too much to keep fighting. But the moment of energy shifting marks a perfect moment where a trident can be hurled with the force of a hellfire missile barrage. 

She smiles as her primary melee weapon transforms into a bolt of divine punishment, and smiles even wider when she imagines Slate's face at the moment she realizes she'll need to find a replacement for it at the literal last second before the main tournament. Then all at once she cuts her engines and lets herself drop into the dancing grass below, leaving a rippling imprint of her landing but not a scorch to be found. 

She has already made a promise not to allow herself to come to serious injury. Now she adds a promise on top of that: to preserve this beautiful and relaxing arena but whatever means necessary. 

(Center of the Web has been activated for +1 Forward in the scene. Mirror likewise Defies Disaster to begin her fight in earnest and scores a [b]12[/b])