The waste beam simply wasn't going to work, and why it kept cycling through the combatant's minds was beyond La Màquina. She already had a hand on the Robrute's head, placed there to deflect the attempted headbutt, and it didn't take much of a sensor package to detect spiking levels of radiological threat. Snapshot or sustained beam, whatever the Robrute attempted, he was not going to atomize La La Màquina's head.
The crush beam was a new threat though, and one Màquina could do relatively little about. Her positioning chest-to-chest with the Robrute and her two-fisted control of his head meant the initial blast went the way of the waste beam, sailing off into the distance without impacting La Màquina, but in this instance the mechanoid seemed to have some sort of bizarre ability to reclaim and redirect a portion of his directed-energy attack back at her from behind. That was just great. This first blast she was forced to simply tank, the diffused beam striking her in the back and causing savage contractions to her structure. The crush beam couldn't crush her outright, not in that weakened split-up form, but it was not pleasant. A grimace of distaste showed beneath La Màquina's mask as the beam strained and frayed myomer in her back, slipping a few overstress warnings into her cushioned internals. Her kinetic spreaders proved to be less than fully effective against this attack; they helped, but this wasn't the sort of short, sharp impacts they were meant to deal with.
No crippling damage from the strike, not even anything severe or serious just yet, but it was a warning to La Màquina that her foe did possess at least one weapon she'd have to keep an eye on.
The venting process which suddenly sparked up in the Robrute's hands and arms, readings if shifting and spiking power, presaged an attempt to point-blank blast Màquina's arms under the bruiser's grip. Alongside a sudden reversing of his thrust, it looked like the Robrute was attempting to separate Màquina from her limbs and himself from Màquina. Seems he'd had enough of her pounding on him inside his effective range. A sensible enough goal, if not one he'd succeed in.
The steam venting and power redirection were enough of a warning for La Màquina to redirect her own power to stiffening up her myomer layer in her arms. She wasn't possessed of the thick, heavy passive plating this Robrute was; her armor was in the active utilization of her Fuego de la Orden's power to reinforce and rigidize her musculature in the face of attack. Everywhere Màquina had muscles, everywhere her myomer covered her, she was armored – and her myomer covered just about everywhere.
It didn't make her invincible – when she released her own grip and allowed the Robrute's reverse thrusters to carry him away, the protoskin over Màquina's left elbow and lower forearm had been blasted away, strands of frayed and severed myomer sparking and twitching in the blast-scarred wake of the Brute's beams. The right arm, within its red-and-gold glove, was less badly damaged but still showed signs of charring and the twitchy, jerky movement of damaged muscle. It deepened her scowl for a moment, but only for a moment – after that a blood-freezing grin stretched across the masked warrior's face. Elbow braces of shimmering golden material fizzed into being over both arms, patching the damaged limbs and reinforcing the joints with slim servomotor frames.
The braces weren't all that La Màquina's Diablo's Foundry provided her then, either. To either side of the Beuaitufl Iron Demon, a pale phantasm of herself assembled themselves out of lines of golden power and the thrum of building energies. These were Sisters – snap-forged clones of La Màquina herself, utilizing her own body as a template to create semi-autonomous duplicates of herself. The Sisters were not exceptionally powerful, each able to reach perhaps a third of Màquina's own speed and strength and with only enough intelligence to carry own the short-term task they were assigned upon their creation. This particular pair of Sisters bore their own Halos, if without Cee's own hextet of wings, and each bore their own set of Backhands as well.
They also bore their own versions of the Iron Demon's bloodthirsty smile and poor disposition; each Sister flew at the Robrute at their highest acceleration upon finishing their construction, following a spiraling path with just enougn variables in it to throw off precise aim, in an attempt to close with the mechanoid and beat him upside the everything with their combined twelve war fists. Simple brawling beatdown Sisters, these were, tasked with nothing more complicated than “get to asshole, avoid getting hit if you can, and punch asshole forever.”
Màquina herself hung back, cruising around the circumference of the battleground above the Ring to her right, warily circling her foe. She clasped her truehands together in front of her, fingers meshing in an almost prayer-like posture, and all four Backhands began to weave and sine around in a complex dance behind and around her. Power began to build and shift within La Màquina's core, following the dictates of her weaving hands, flowing up her arms and towards...whatever she was doing between her clasped palms.
Robrute had won the distance he'd desired to create between himself and his foe, but fighting from the other end of a set of gunsights was where La Màquina preferred to be. No other fighter in the whole of the Luchalliance could match Màquina's versatility, proficiency, and lethality in a ranged duel. Whether the Robrute knew it or not, Màquina was exactly where she wanted to be. Could he afford to let her finish what she was doing, build what she was building, while her Sisters distracted and delayed him with a frenzied fit of frenetic fisticuffs?
Could he manage to do anything else, with two six-armed punch bots descending upon him from differing vectors, ready to box in his escape and trap him between them?