Much of her fire hit, even with the remaining snow on her windows sublimating in the sudden burst of heat and blurring her vision.  It wasn't as if there was much to visually discern, just shoot at something that wasn't white didn't look like a rock!  Ingrid's body broke out into a sweat immediately, her skin exposed to the suddenly sauna-temperature cockpit and only hidden by the bare cooling jacket.  What she found with her initial burst of damage was...

...a still living [i]Firestarter[/i]!  She swore, looking up at the flickering target status display at the side of the window.  Even with additional fire from her lancemates in the hills, the readout on the little shit hadn't recorded so much as a single systems failure.  Either it hadn't picked it up yet, or that pilot was luckier than he had any right to be.

Comms chatter started picking up, both from the ever-fluent Family Man up in the hills and from the increasingly talkative enemy forces - she dialed down the volume on her neurohelm's headset a few notches as they just kept going, offering only a clipped "Stop with the alliteration!" back at the [i]Firestarter's[/i] pilot.  She pulled her 'mech to the north, ignoring the groan of internal structure from the heat.

Maybe it was this maneuver, or the gun being knocked around, that saved her from worse.  Beyond the deafening explosion, Ingrid's main warning that something had went wrong was the way her entire mech's torso spun to the left!  The force alone was enough to not only send the [i]Ostroc's[/i] gait off-balance, but send her into the side of her seat with force!  No, she wasn't large enough to fill the seat, even in something as tight as a Battlemech's cockpit!

Pushing aside the digital, calm report of [i]"Left arm: destroyed,"[/i] Ingrid saved that grief for later as she focused every bit of mental muscle she had into keeping her ship upright.  Even through the bursts of napalm stretching across her flanks, everything came down to keeping up!  Falling down in the enemy's midst would spell certain death.  From an outsider's perspective the [i]Ostroc[/i] looked as if it were about to fall on its face for a few seconds, its feet moving faster to try and keep under itself.  She even touched her long arm down into the snow for a moment to push against the ground, and with that, she had barely just kept herself in the game.

Unfortunately, with both this and the burden of heat that she had forced upon herself, keeping upright was going to be about all she could do for the moment.  Ingrid made her way slowly back to her lancemates' sides, saying "Hold!  I'm not there yet!" across personal comms...