“I dunno, it’s like. Being a cat and a brawler, I get to choose how I play. I know you know, that feeling when you’re moving like everybody else is in slow motion, is terrain for you to work with. I think a lot about teams because I get to decide whether I’m going to be the person moving for the scoring zone or the person moving to hit my opponents. Someone like Bit might be faster in a straight line with her mech suit, but if I’ve got a plan for how to reach her, I could take her out no problem and if I’m against her, I could match her in scoring ability and take her out when she commits. Most of the time, most of the time it’s like that, like I can see everybody and how they’re gonna move and just be better. But…”

Machia. This was a question about Machia. It was always going to come back to being a question about Machia. The whole practice session with Decima was her thinking about Machia while she had already lost to a trick too. “Did you see my last match? Where Machia just moved around me and Maxima and Musashi like she was made of water? And then when I try to think about that, when I try to think about how I should have moved, I tune out the rest of my instincts and open myself up to getting hit by stuff I should have noticed if I’d been paying attention.”

Sammy lifts up her head and sighs, breathing out her worries to the sky above Gata. “I don’t know what to do when most of the time trusting my instincts is the way to win but every once in a while there’s someone like Machia or…like whatever ghosts you’re talking about where something comes out of the blue that blows those instincts away, like I don’t even know what I’m seeing no matter how many times I play it back in my head.”