"Nnnnnnnnngh, hfffffffffft! You. You! You absolute!!"

Mira is trembling. Her painted lips are quivering and her eyes are so shrunken that her irises are vibrating like they're being bounced around in a snow globe. Her fur bristles and darkens as the flesh under it flushes with pure embarrassment. Her hand lifts several times to smash a hole in her console only to stop abruptly and fly toward her face instead. It doesn't make it there either; she has absolutely no idea what to do with herself in this unexpected moment of being Seen before she's ready for it.

But then she laughs. Strained at first but then rising higher and higher, trills of mirth so absolute it borders on insanity. Her fingers find her face after all, and she squeezes her skull like one of those evil (read: stylish and cool) Animes to keep from toppling over out of her chair as her Goddess braids bounce and tumble over her shoulders and her face. It builds so high that laughing starts to take the place of breathing and desperate gasps for oxygen start to steal her voice from her. 

While that happens, several skyscrapers topple over into rubble. Concrete, steel, and glass fall in avalanches and make a lethal mess of the battlefield. The ruin of nations, set to giddy, girlish laughter. Bright bursts of light flare up in the smoke, and then another building screams and falls on its sword, as though it had sinned and only crushing Solarel with its dying body could absolve it and buy it a place in the Skyscraper Afterlife. 

"Priced into your battle plans! Aha! Ahahaha! Priced into!! Gffffawhahahahahahahahaaaaaaaaaa! You idiot! I've missed you so much. My heart aches! Aha! Ahaha! Hahaha, ahahahahahahaha! How! How is that the most romantic thing anyone has ever said to me?! I can't accept this! I do not! I won't! Lose! Like! This!"

She can't stop her laughter. But she can force it into dark chuckling. And as the tone shifts, so too does the battlefield. No longer does the Gods-Smiting Whip hide in the chaos and the ruin. Now it [i]hunts[/i]. Now flickers of motion inside the smoke turn out to be rogue Tails that fire off like shotguns and then zip back into the darkness. Sometimes it's half a rooftop instead, launched upwards by who-even-knows what mechanism. The sounds of her thrusters and the feet of the Gods-Smiting Whip crushing the debris it creates echo around the battlefield.

Everything is a weapon. Her field is spread wide, impossibly wide and enormous in the manner of the stars, until even the Aeteline must stop and feel small in response. Sometimes she lunges from the smoke and dust herself, claw blade shining on her forearm as she slashes wildly before she disappears in a sudden explosion and a shower of blinding sparks she creates by striking her spear. The First Form: The Claws that Steal the Sky given new power by this mysterious weapon in her hands. Not that she is uncatchable in these moments. In fact these exchanges turn into increasingly severe damage trades the more she attempts them, and it gets harder and harder for her to disappear the more the tactic grows stale. But she does it anyway, because in this moment the aesthetic of the hunter is more important than absolute victory. 

Or because One Layer of Defense means that getting her leg blown off is a small price to pay if it proves her genius. If it contributes to her sense of inevitability. 

> if it's that easy then prove it.
> prove you are worthy of my blade.
> come and kiss me before the end.
> let me feel your touch.
> your God is worthless trash.
> i only want to feel you.
> so i will only permit you to join me in the sky.

"Nine Drive System, Partial Configuration." 

The Gods-Smiting Whip roars to life, lifting out of the dense cloud of dust that used to be a cityscape and up into the sky. Up, and up, and up, and up, on wings of fire. Her Tails are nowhere to be seen; all eight of her free floating ones are hidden somewhere away from the obvious target of her physical body.

"The [i]Second[/i] Form."

Wait. The what? Think through the tournament for a moment. The First Form: claws and fangs and weapons worthy of a knight. The Third Form: shields and chains and traps worthy of a trickster. The Second Form... the second? Has she ever used anything like that? Have her tactics even implied she was holding it in reserve? 

From eight different angles, light and heat burst from the scarred earth. The shots are not precise, but there are so many of them that they create danmaku fans of sparkling death arcing around herself as the center of the universe she is creating. They spiral and pulse to music that nobody can hear.

"The Rain of Starlight."

The curtain of lasers streaks through the skies in distinct waves. But the promise of a bullet hell isn't an impossible to dodge super attack: it's a puzzle that's meant to be solved. Raw skill checks aren't enough to clear the space to the pocket of freedom where she waits with only her fullerene spear and the Control Tail to protect her. Though those are important, it takes a sharp and above all playful mind to see the shape of the openings in the curtains that are meant to be dodged through. 

The ones that can only be slipped through imperfectly, so that light will kiss the mecha with every wave successfully dodged. Painting a brief flash of heat and a nip of teeth across the inside of a thigh. On the stomach. Against one breast, and then the other. A shoulder. A hip. The neck. 

Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, and excitement rising higher into the infinite skies, where gravity is nothing but a suggestion and the sharpest of claws are mere foreplay. A place where perfection is impossible, actually, and messy emotions are the only guides worth following.

But while she waits for this almost-final embrace, her audio feed cuts out entirely. She smiles in total silence, and reaches for a headset to make an outgoing call in her bubble of secrecy.

"Hello?" she chirps into a special line gifted to her for her audacity, "Have I reached Adriana Teresio, Queen of the Consortium? Delightful. I wish to inform you of a theft. I am, as you say, about to steal your show. Would you mind terribly dispatching such skilled pilots as you trust to your broadcast station? I'm afraid you have a limited window to deploy before I and my accomplices enjoy a dreadfully boring escape. 

And we musn't have that, don't you agree~?"