Scene Listing || Scene Schedule || Scene Schedule RSS
Owner Pose
Septette Arcubielle      In ages past, this place was called as the fabled 'Drowned City'- the half of the great port of Armoroad that calved off from the surface long ago and fell beneath the waves, hidden from outside eyes for nearly a century. But to those who lived and died there, it was never drowned. All the world's oceans could never drown this place's indomitable spirit, nor hide its splendor. To them, it is and shall always be the Deep City, a shining jewel in the abyss.

     The Deep City holds many wonders, but the grandest of them are the immense magical dome of air that encompasses the city and the gargantuan tree that shrouds every building and street with the shade of its boughs. The dome of air has no name, for it is merely their sky; the tree is named Yggdrasil, and treated with reverence. It is almost as fungal in form as it is arboreal: ruffled lappets and frills grow from its massive trunk that are sturdy enough to build houses of stone upon.

     On bright days, sunlight filters down through the waves to the city below, casting everything in shifting pale cerulean light as great ocean creatures brush past the protective bubble. But it is not by accident that Septette invites her guests here in the evening. Absent the light of the sun, wild bioluminescent moss gleams a gentle blue and magical lights bathe the city in a pale yellow glow like artificial fireflies, silhouetting every building in an artful dichromatic display against the darkened ocean in the distance. Perhaps some allegory can be found in the fact that the Deep City is at its most beautiful when deprived of even the surface's sun.

     The buildings are all hewn from white or grey stones, complementing Yggdrasil's pale bark. Their designs hearken to an elegant pre-Romanesque European style of construction, but grown to the size and sophistication of more modern architecture. The cobblestones, by contrast, are darker; they're worn by heavy use and heavier metal, with faintly glowing moss growing between the stones.

     The Deep City re-established travel with the surface centuries ago with the use of arcane teleporters- columns of glittering light that spiral into the sky. Those who still choose to reside here are mostly the descendants of the handpicked human soldiers who fought in the Abyssal War, though a few nonhumans dwell here as well; every so often one can spot the bestial features of a Therian or the grey skin and spidery limbs of a Vessel among the colorful market stalls.

     Septette's invitation leads to a sinkhole-like chasm nestled against Yggdrasil's trunk far from the main plaza; makeshift green serpentinite stairs, clearly newer than the rest of the city's architecture, plunge into the dark below.

     Dancing green and blue lights flicker into existence around the rambling staircase as the Captains descend, recalling playful will-o-wisps that lead travelers astray, and a single red ember smolders far below like the eye of some vast beast in the darkness: Arcubielle's core. It's at least two hundred winding stairs to the bottom- far enough for the entrance above to be little more than a memory.

     As soon as one of the captains sets foot in the bottom of the pit, hundreds of those immaterial lights sputter to life, drifting in the air like so many overgrown fireflies and suffusing the entire arena in a gentle omnidirectional glow. In the beautiful arcane light, it's revealed as a circular cobblestone plaza, with ancient moss growing between the stones and strange rusted weapons embedded in the ground near the periphery like a forlorn bamboo forest.

     "Welcome to the old courtyard," Septette says with a gentle bow, not moving from her spot at the center of the ominously boss-room-like arena. She inclines her head respectfully towards the captain as the other lights in her body flicker to life one by one, starting with her eyes- some form of diagnostics check? "I believe George wanted to go first, though I wouldn't object to other arrangements."
Starbound Flotilla     The captains wander through in their classic durasteel armor, taking in the sights. Not literally, of course, it would be a bit of a faux pas for them to indulge their traditional kleptomaniacal tendencies and start stealing furniture and pieces of walls. But they take in the sights on an emotional level. Haruto in particular seems to find the feeling of sunken resilience to be one that resonates with him particularly. He has composed at least ten poems by the time they get to the bottom of those stairs. Goddamn fishmen.

    But that's less important than what goes on here. Which is the consecutive Boss Rush of fights; the Flotilla have set up a short-range emergency teleporter and medical station to yank someone out when they're declared "out" and to quickly insert one of their own in turn. "Hey hey, fair warning Bones." George says, amid stretching. "I'm more used to, you know, the kind of places where I can improvise. Wasn't really one for the Thunderdome back in the day, you know?" He slips a few weapons into his belt and slips a few things over his hardsuit: A stun baton, a pair of odd yellow gloves, some strange boots, a heavy stun gun... And a toolbox, of course, in one hand. The Flotilla seems to be kitting out mostly for stuns today. Primarily to focus this on the kinds of harm that are easier to heal from.

    "Yeah, I'll hit the stones first. Drew straws for the other order! I draw the best-looking straws. It goes me, then Pavo, then the furball, Seft, Moonfin, and then Biteblade." Coincidentally, that's the ascending order of power for the Flotilla. George steps forward, and the other captains back, into the arena's background to cheer and shout and other such noises. "Ready when you are, Bonesy." He says, doing a few last loosening stretches, and taking an incredibly odd martial arts stance that bounces back and forth, and evokes the look of a lunar astronaut.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette nods respectfully, though the creeping mischievous grin on her face undercuts the formality a fair bit. "I am always ready," she replies playfully even as she sizes up the loose, flexible stance and strange array of weaponry. "You're showing me something pretty interesting here, you know- getting to analyze your fighting styles one at a time. So I think I can afford to show you something nifty too."

     A grinding, reluctant shriek escapes her bones as they subtly shift and rearrange themselves. Hydraulics writhe and then go still; gleaming wire tendons slacken; even glowing arcane or electronic lights gutter and go still. But then she stirs and returns to a semblance of life, with a shuddering whine like a dozen flywheels spinning up to speed. Ancient gears of nameless metals churn and twist without friction or fatigue, forcing a crude and juttering life back into her extremities.

     One arm still hangs limply by her side, and her fingers still seem rigid and clumsy. Even so, she meets George's eyes with proud defiance and raises her right hand in front of her: it crackles with electricity, mirroring his fulgurating baton.

     An instant later, she tears across the cobblestones with loping, inhuman speed, claw outstretched. She waits until she's just within the median of human reaction time, two hundred twenty milliseconds away from impact- then abruptly twists her momentum into a twirling roundhouse kick at George's ribs instead of following through, skidding to a screeching halt on her other heel!

     "Let's bring you back to earth, squishy! I don't think you grasp the gravity of your situation..." Oh god. This is going to be the worst boss banter of all time.
Starbound Flotilla     George's face, behind the visor of his hardsuit, twists with an intimidated wincing at the building noise. "Hooo, this is gonna be a painful one." He says, anxiously. "Can't wait to see the show!"

    he keeps his stance as Septette approaches. He keeps it, he keeps it, and the most precise measurements Septette can make of his movements indicate he's not changing it even as she charges, at least not in some way she can detect is any different from the immense amount of kinetic noise inherent in his motions. In fact, it's quite possible that the moment she closes in, she may realize: The dynamic stance IS meant to induce as much kinetic noise in his motions as he physically can produce, and thereby obscure subtle action amid the chaotic visual data of nonsense.

    Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way he hid the tiny twitch of a hardsuit's injector flooding his system with reflex-enhancing drugs in the moments that Septette began charging. It doesn't let him keep pace with her, sure, but he can work with it. The kick sweeps hard into his chest with a heavy crack as his arms go up, meant to interpose the toolbox between himself and that claw, but his quicker reflexes let him roll with that strike. His body bends loosely and he slips along the line of the strike, like an astronaut battered in space by some passing piece of debris.
Starbound Flotilla     His entire body seems to swing back from the strike, and then immediately curls around it in a way. Microthrusters fire hard and he flips around Septette's leg, curling his body around it and grabbing it hard with his stungloves to surge electrical danger through the limb as he tumbles over the ground. Strength-enhancing frames fire inside his suit as the tumble turns into a grab, trying to yank Septette down to the ground by slamming his toolbox into her heel, the one point of contact with the ground and the one point where her material strengths don't matter since only the stone's friction is relevant, and then swing hard at the joint just above his grasp -- he knows she'll dodge anything else -- with a heavy, traumatizing blow.

    And just like that, he bounces back out of the grip by sort of "rebounding" off of either the strike against the ground or against the joint, leaping up in a quick jet-boosted flip and landing sideways, toolbox kept carefully between himself and Septette in a half-turned stance, while he draws his stun baton and activates it. He's already panting and trying to catch his breath from that heavy kick, clearly damaged and stunned by the strike, but still up for another few attacks for sure.

    "Hahaha, hey hey, don't be that harsh. A little spacing out in a fight can be good for you. Keeps things from getting too upside down."
Septette Arcubielle      The subtleties of the reflex-boosting injector may escape Septette, but the kick was her opening move for a reason: if he failed to dodge a strike at a 10ms wind-up, or even a 100ms delay, that wouldn't tell her much. But responding with aplomb to a kick aimed at the low end of human reaction time gives her a wealth of information. This fighting style is designed to introduce uncertainty and be resistant to analysis, and George is damn fast- all the harder to pin down.

     All of this has been neatly processed and analyzed by the time the toolbox dents under the impact and he grabs onto her leg. The joint and heel buckle under the rapid impacts impact- locking it would just lead to more damage- sending her sprawling backwards in a spray of miniscule, glittering black gears.

     But before Septette can hit the ground, her spine bends backwards at an impossible angle, allowing to catch herself in a handstand and gracefully backflip in place instead of landing supine. Her cold, dead eyes narrow slightly- if she's going to make it to Biteblade at all, George needs to go down soon and hard.

     Fortunately, even mostly down two limbs, he's given her enough info to calculate a plan of action- limit his mobility against an opponent with superior strength and durability, and he's fucked. She breaks across the cobblestones again, closing the distance with characteristic alarming swiftness despite her limp, and finishes with a leaping lunge with her arm outstretched- her claws seem poised to close around the handle of his baton, in a clear disarming intent.

     Yomi level three. The last time she lunged, it was a feint- he might be expecting it to be real this time. So she feints again, albeit in a different way. Twenty milliseconds out, her left arm is wrenched to life by animating magic against the protesting gears, and swings in to grab at his throat in preparation for a chokeslam. Her other arm deploys its long, curving blade- it extends behind him, preventing an escape to the left or behind!

     "Houston, you're about to have a serious fucking problem! Ready for liftoff?"
Starbound Flotilla     George is expecting something. But he also is rapidly discovering that he can't let Septette govern the premise of each attack. Deep inside his mind, he's clearly got a keen awareness, less of her tactics, and more of her psyche, and he can see the way she behaves matches up well with her intent: That of someone exposing him to different conditions in order to discover what he's like and how he acts.

    And so while he can't match her tactical pace, he's fully intending to outplay on another plane.

    She's going for the baton, and she expects a defensive maneuver intended to prevent disarming. She gets that, but only in a distant way: The toolbox is fired out like a shot, without a swing, launched forward and square into the claw's grasp with enough speed to crumple the box even more around the palm... All meant to keep those fingers closing. "Woah woah, getting handsy there lady!" He calls out. He can't keep Septette from battering him with that claw if she follows through, or from cutting the backwards mobility off more harshly with an aggressive inward swipe, but whether she shears some leg armor off or bashes his head hard, both attack vectors leave him with an option to leap up into the air... And launch a grappling hook up! Up the high walls of the pit!

    Time to go vertical. A true Robuster doesn't let the ground hold him, and neither will George, keeping his baton in a defensive posture between him and Septette as he rises up. "Hoooohahaha, you know I'm always ready for liftoff, Bones!" He calls out.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette's balance is thrown off by the unexpected toolbox impact! Her eyes clearly track the reactive swing, but even with perfect reflexes, it's too late for her to shift the momentum of her dense frame; the disarming attempt is foiled, though the toolbox crumples like a soda can in her hand. Her grasping left hand misses its mark after the jarring impact, and the encircling curved blade only has time to rake the armor on the back of his legs as he takes off! Slippery bastard.

     The grappling hook is a welcome surprise- a sign that George understands how she tends to analyze and dismantle opponents, and that he understands how to forestall that outcome. He's likely going to continue introducing new axes of combat and new tactics just to keep her from homing in on and exploiting his habits and assumptions... so it's time to prune his options a bit.

     Before the grappling hook can even attach to the arena's walls, Septette has already calculated its trajectory and summoned a red drone next to the point of impact- just barely visible as a red glint far above. As soon as the durasteel hook latches onto a crag in the rock, the drone begins burning through the rope with a laser-like application of fire magic!

     It takes slightly less than a second for the rope to burn through completely, though that's plenty of time for George to get enough lift to escape Septette's grasp. Lacking any traditional means of vertical mobility, she thinks quickly- as always- and slams both clawed hands into the cobblestones with a tremendous impact, sending huge chunks of stone and earth into the air.

     A fraction of a second later, she leaps off the ground, cracking the stone underfoot with the recoil from her acceleration, and kicks off of each airborne chunk of debris in turn like a floating stepladder to gain still more height. At the height of her ascent, she hangs in the air just above George for a bare instant- then brings both of her hands down bluntly like a hammer, aiming to dunk him into the ground below!

     "You don't look proofed for re-entry to me, squishy! Nothing stays in the air forever!"
Starbound Flotilla     George is in his element, for just a moment. Objects in motion in the air are like objects in motion in space, just with a frame of reference that's shifted a fair bit, as long as you know the right intuitive calculations to make. As soon as the rope snaps and he's in a parabolic arc, he knows what he needs to do. With one hand he readies his baton in a defensive stance. With the other, he does... Something. His robust stance is in full effect still, saturating his body with chaotic kinematic noise, so what's going on when he sort of swirls the grappling hook around in the air isn't going to be clear. He does something in the air, behind those chunks...

    Of course, he has to deal with what comes next. That massive hammerblow sets up, and George can't maneuver in the air enough to dodge at all, nor can that reeling grappling hook do anything to pull him away. He tries to interpose his baton, and for a moment, the defense holds, crackling harshly and powerfully between them. "FfffffffffuuuuuuHURK!" George's body emits a wet crack when the two hands crash through the baton, snapping it in half, and then hammer him down back to the ground. His body is limp as he falls, stunned and exhausted by the impact.

    But there's one kind of tactics that George can really use. One that he knows more than Septette about. And that's the tactics of objects moving in space, newtonian motion in absence of fixed terrain. And that's why Septette will see the twisty severed grappling-hook rope suddenly contracting. He tied a knot in mid-air, one tightening around precisely where he knew he'd have been in mid-air when Septette struck!

    He doesn't know where it might tighten, but there's enough parts and pieces on her that it has to grab something. That's why he's still holding onto the useless grappling hook as he descends; he's going to use her incredible density and their lopsided mutual center of gravity to slow his descent! He slams into the ground hard, but not so hard that it damages him, only enough that it leaves him stunned on his ass. "Ghhhhk! Hahaha, well, hey, it's not the fall that gets ya, it's the sudden STOP," He maximizes the reeling speed on the grappling hook. "At the BOTTOM!" He's intending to yank Septette to the ground... Though not so much that it'll yank her right to him. Or knowing her density, yank his arm off. And with that known speed of descent, he tosses a heavy electrical pulse grenade out, arcing it up into the air to intercept her, then pulls out a STUN-BOLT GUN, firing off a barrage of electrical bolts straight for her. And that's not to say anything about the spin the rope should put her in, and the damage of the impact when she can't land safely. He's downed, but he's going for a big finish before she knocks him out of this fight!
Septette Arcubielle      The plumes of dirt and gravel still hanging in the air from the earlier impact obscures Septette's vision- not enough to miss George, but enough to not notice the closing lasso until it's too late. It cinches shut around her ankle and yanks her into a nasty spinning tumble; she shreds the rope an instant later, but it's already done everything it needed to.

     The little robot may not have any experience in freefall combat, but she's a dreadfully quick learner: the parabolic arc of the grenade is analyzed and dissected, even accounting for her spinning fall, and she lashes out at it to skewer the device on the very tip of her longest blade. It detonates on proximity anyway, but the added distance from her body attenuates the effect; blue smoke still curls from her joints and electrical lights gutter erratically as electricity coruscates under her armor plates, but it could've been much worse!

     The electrical bolts come next- three of them, arranged in a pattern that makes dodging all of them impossible with her limited mobility. A yellow drone materializes beside her, matching her rate of descent as she plummets towards the ground, and charging up for something with an ominous whine. Septette manages to barely shift out of the way of the first bolt by contorting her heavy limbs to distort her center of balance and skew her irregular tumble; it passes under her ribcage, nearly grazing her spine, and impacts on the far wall. The second strikes her in the chest, drawing an angry smoldering mark on the inner workings.

     The third bolt is just about to strike her square in the face when the drone finally kicks in, producing a yellow ethereal shield that resembles a magic circle in front of the falling yggdroid. The stun bolt slows down dramatically as it passes through the center of the circle, then glows brighter and flickers ominously!

     "Volt Prophecy!" The amplified electrical bolt launches back at George with uncanny accuracy, especially given Septette's current predicament- it's like an old-school game of boss projectile tennis! Finally, a fraction of a second after it all began, she hits the ground on both knees and one hand for a three-point crash landing; shock systems strain and fail to adequately compensate the uncontrolled impact. Ancient clockwork systems blow out entirely, scattering still-whole black gears across the ground as most of the machinery grinds to a halt.

     That doesn't stop her from pulling herself to her feet on backup systems and kicking a huge falling chunk of stone towards George, though- the boulder-sized fragment splinters on impact with her foot, sending a spray of stony shrapnel in his general direction! But the explosion of rock is itself a feint: she closes in rapidly behind the projectiles, looking to exploit his injured state to finally place the ornery man in a submission hold.

     "Stellar performance! You've got me over the moon here, George," she growls through a charmingly bloodthirsty grin.
Septette Arcubielle      INTERNAL DAMAGE REPORT:
          MECHANICAL SYSTEMS: HEAVILY DAMAGED
          ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS: LIGHTLY DAMAGED
          ALL OTHER SYSTEMS: BASELINE
          DRONE CONTROLLER STATUS: 3/3, BASELINE
     CONCLUDE INTERNAL DAMAGE REPORT
Starbound Flotilla     George suffers the bursting blast of stone as he tries to get back to his feet, rolling with the contusions that accumulate as he tries to scramble up. He's slowed down now; in his old age, his endurance isn't what it used to be, and he's just not used to knock-down drag-out fights. "Huuuuhhhhrrrgh! Well, I gotta aim pretty high when it comes to fighting you!" He pants, exhaustedly.

    He can't get to his feet in time to match up with Septette though, all he can do is rocket his way backwards with arm-based microthrusters, trying to get one last bit of distance as he fires a few more bolts. And her unusual anatomy makes it incredibly difficult to manage most of the hold-counters he knows, which he tries in quick succession after discarding his electro-bolt pistol; the slippery son of a bitch practically spins and flips around the arms Septette brings to bear, but the circle is closing and he can't get out of it now.

    It seems George is far more of a subverter than a combatant. He's definitely one of the weakest of the six captains, but his style is meant to exploit a rarely-used niche of strength that the Flotilla -- and in fact the majority of combatants -- tend to never cover or defend against: Socially-oriented subversion combat. Well, it's not up to Septette's power now. She'll be able to get him into a submission hold eventually, and once she does, she'll be able to declare him knocked out of this fight!
Septette Arcubielle      Those last few hasty bolts don't have much opportunity to strike her- it's a testament to George's marksmanship under pressure that he manages to graze her face with another coruscating shot as she approaches. But when the little machine finally gets in solid grappling range of George, it's functionally all over: she looms over him, all five feet of glowering steel, before pouncing almost playfully and locking her hands rigidly around his arms.

     He might be able to put a few more dents in her more delicate components even now, depending on how bloody-minded he's feeling, but once she's latched on, there's just no way to apply enough force to break free. Squirming out won't work, either: her arms bend at unnatural angles to keep hold of him. Even time-honored techniques like stomping on a foot or headbutting the face aren't very effective against someone who feels no pain.

     Septette gives him a couple of seconds to let the finality of his predicament sink in, then pulls the goofy old man into a light hug before letting go with a warm look on her face. "I feel like I've learned a lot today already, George. I know it's not always easy on your body, but I hope you enjoyed it too. Thanks for the experience." She might even be literal about the XP, too!

     But he'd barely have time to walk back to his team before Septette gets up to some new shenanigans. With barely more than a cursory nod of warning for Pavo, she scoops the fallen stun gun up in her foot, tosses it up behind her back, then turns around to grab it and fire a bolt at the yellow drone behind her. The drone reflects it with a splash of crackling golden energy- then she bounces it back, and the drone reflects it again in an ever-accelerating dance.

     Barely a second later, she abruptly sidesteps rather than reflect the bolt- and the massively amplified, reflected projectile blazes across the courtyard like a lightning bolt directly towards Pavo!

     With all that dramatic windup, it's highly unlikely to connect squarely- but the shrewd look in Septette's eyes hints that she's looking more for how Pavo dodges, rather than whether.
Starbound Flotilla     George pants in exhaustion. "Hell, hell," He mutters. "Hahaha, hey, it's always been my dream to fistfight skeletons. Fighting bone law is the way to go." He's a fair bit more awkward about getting pulled into that hug though. One thing that Septette gets to find out in the brief embrace is that, despite his relative comfort with her uncanny nature in all other contexts, his whole body tenses up when embraced. It's rare that he's ever done anything but be absolutely relaxed in all ways that matter, even in the midst of the fight he flowed like water. Not for one moment, though.

    It is not Septette that made him so tense. It was an act of affection itself.

    But it suddenly shoots out of his body as quickly as it rushed in, and he seems to pretend it didn't happen in the first place. "Was a great time, hey! There's always a weird experience to have out here, though hell, you've got a weirder one to give us than I've found in a lot of places."

    And with that he's blinked away, and Pavo right into his place, just in time for the demonstration. This opening hit is a sudden sort for her. "Ahoy thar, lass, what be yer plan with all that--" She starts, before the bolt is suddenly rushing towards her. Her method of dodging is far unlike the others though. Where George might roll with punches, where Moonfin might parry, where Albert may tank the strike or go for cover, where Seft might raise a shield, or Biteblade might deftly parry, Pavo has her own method that has served her well.

    Draw an Erchius flintlock and fire immediately into the bolt, with lightning quick reflexes. When you're a pirate, you learn to draw and exert maximum force in minimum time, even as a means of preventing damage. The bolt's magnetic confinement is weakened, diffusing much of its payload into the air around it before it reaches her. When it strikes, she stumbles a little, but only a little. Her whole body crackles with arcing lines of light as she recovers from the stunning effects of the impact. "Hhhhhh. Avast, ye tricky scallywag, ye near had me." She says, with a grin on her beak, lightning still conducting up and down her body. "But that's far as ye will go in layin' one tricky claw on me!" She draws a strange device dramatically, and leaps high up into the air, before PLUNGING it into the ground at her palm.

    The arena is changed! Pavo isn't going to settle for something so flat, so she's intending to use the Starbound Flotilla's inclination towards ENVIRONMENT SHAPING. When that device slams into the ground, tremendous beams of energy rise, shafts of some sort of solid light. It's almost like the technologies seen in that strange Earth world they raided before. Pavo leaps up, and begins to bounce between the almost forest-like series of skyward rays, attaining a persisting vertical advantage from her Avian aerial superiority and launching into a series of multi-angle blasts from an ELECTRIC FLINTLOCK.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette paces a loose circle around Pavo, watching the parrot pirate (parrate?) defend- if it could be called defending- against the improvised attack. Aggressive propensities; quick reactions and high agility; good marksmanship. But if what she's extrapolated about the Flotilla's apparent ordering scheme here is correct, Pavo still isn't near the top of the totem pole in direct combat ability... and that means that despite her demonstrated strengths, the bird must still have some definite weaknesses.

     She gives the beams of light a respectful berth until the moment that her opponent voluntarily touches one- that tells her all she needs to know about their safety, and she wall-runs straight up the side of a nearby column to keep pace! Septette can't reliably match the Captains for ranged attacks, so she's left with little choice but to pursue.

     The first column flickers and fails after her clawed feet tear one chunk too many out of its hardlight surface, and she barely manages to leap to another before it dissipates entirely, just as Pavo starts to light her up. The discovery that they're destructible changes her tactics, too: Septette begins rapidly moving from column to column, keeping her silent drone far overhead to monitor Pavo's position while breaking line-of-sight as much as possible, using the new terrain itself against her ranged attacks.

     The first few leaps see her take substantial damage from the flintlock pistols- one bullet in particular lodges itself in her shoulder joint, ringing the death knell for her clockwork systems as gears crunch audibly and grind to a halt. There's a pause in her movement as she hides behind an intact column, and a noise rings over the din of battle like the shrieking of violin strings. Then she's back in the fight, having changed over to her system of wire tendons!

     After a few more moments of dancing between the columns of light, it becomes clear that Septette is playing a patient game here: tire Pavo out, deplete her ammo if possible, and all the while winnow down the number of columns while minimizing damage suffered. And the columns being destroyed aren't indiscriminate- they seem to follow a peculiar pattern, albeit one that's difficult to put a name to...

     "I didn't take you as one for beautiful scenery," Arcubielle calls out from behind a column! "But it's a foolish cat who chases a fresh bird. You've got to tire it out first... nothing can fly forever, and death pursues the man who flees."
Starbound Flotilla     Pavo caws out a laugh. "Yarharhar! I sure can fly longer than ye! Ye have a great power, lass, but I'll be the one runnin' ye aground!" She takes a circular approach, flanking around Septette each time she takes cover by bouncing around distant beams, always at least one layer further out from her. But she's not just dealing with the aerial confrontation. Pavo finds Septette's ascent into her territory to be worth changing up tactics.

    It looks like she's drawn from George's playbook, in expanding her toolkit as Septette closes in on her. Her own grappling hook is drawn, and she shows off the secondary effect of the ascendant rays: She can swing AROUND them! Her incredibly powerful, intuitive aerial kinematic cognition abilities mean this is her element. When she begins to use the grappling hook, her armor's rocket-boosters, and her aerial agility, they come together into functionally powerful flight; she begins ZOOMING around rapidly, flanking at incredibly high speeds, and rapidly striking. The speed of her reflexes hasn't increased, precisely, but she has far more intuitive ability to predict things in mid-air than any of the others, and so Septette will find that her practical speed of reaction is amped up well too.

    She begins showing off the advantages of her active firearm counters: She can rapidly "counter" Septette during her assault on the environment from a distance, by firing at predicted landing points! While the beams wear down more and more, Pavo has a highly reactive way of navigating that prioritizes keeping her evasion and maneuverability up, even if it doesn't keep the structure functional.
Septette Arcubielle      Her aerial acceleration leaves a lot to be desired, but Septette makes up for a lack of real maneuverability with tricky manipulation of her center of gravity; even in the disorienting lurch of midair combat, her movements remain precise and purposeful. Once she's got a handle on Pavo's angles of approach, each jump is made in the same peculiar way: she tumbles midair to absolutely minimize her profile relative to Pavo's vantage point at all times, and covers as much of her remaining silhouette as possible with her nearly-indestructible blades! A handful of bullets still get through, but it seems like it'd take quite a while to wear her down in this fashion...

     And it doesn't take long for the little robot to analyze Pavo's approaches and figure out the vague cognitive processes behind them. The thing about intuition: no matter how fast or accurate it may be, it rarely touches 'even' yomi levels. The intuited action is almost always the shortest path between the present state and the desired one. Pavo may see the holographic jungle as a sprawling three-dimensional map, but Septette sees it more simplistically and analytically: as a networking problem.

     Each pillar is a node; Pavo can only move between nodes that are in range and line of sight of her leaps or grappling hook. By pruning nodes, the network begins to collapse into a single solution.

     Pavo's intention to stay one node away from the yggdroid restricts her pathing even further- and her options are winnowed even more as Arcubielle leads her into a subtle dead end. From a spatial-reasoning perspective, there's nothing particularly dangerous about that sector of the battlefield. But from a networking perspective, there's only one pillar that Pavo can intuitively move to while still keeping her preferred distance from Septette. "You're used to ships of wood and men of iron, matey- what I've got in me is tougher than iron, and I'll teach you not to forget it!"

     The sole hint that something might be wrong is that, far below, the yellow drone dematerializes. It and a blue drone re-materialize in a specific spot hugging Pavo's predicted pillar, abusing the holographic material's peculiar refractive properties to hide in a blind spot that's neatly concealed from the pirate's approach. If she grapples to it, the blue drone will sever the grappling hook after she approaches with a supernaturally sharp fragment of ice and the yellow drone will unleash a taser-like shock! If she jumps instead, both elemental blasts will simply be aimed directly at her.

     As soon as Pavo commits to approaching the trapped pillar, the robot makes an abrupt change in her movement: she leaps towards a distant pillar as expected, but loops a curved blade around it, allowing her to run around its circumference in a tight circle and slingshot back in the opposite direction, hurtling towards Pavo with blades outstretched! The sudden change in momentum should throw off her intuitive reactions for at least a split second, and that's enough time for all three prongs of the trap to converge!

     "You can send me to the deep, Pavo- but I've already seen every terror that it holds," she roars gleefully. "Tell me you've got better threats than that!"
Starbound Flotilla     Pavo is not the most cerebral of the Flotilla; her intelligence is far more focused on engineering rather than tactics. So when she gets things closing in on her, she has very few options, relatively speaking. Her counter-attack tactics don't work well on a multi-angled approach. She can feel the closing in when that grappling hook snaps, jostling her out of her aerial flow and leaving her to slam into the trapped column in an uncontrolled spin. Crashing into it, she plants a foot-talon, bracing into a wall-grip, and then fires up straight at the taser shot, diffusing it as well into a light stun, leaving her body crackling with lightning once again, grunting and straining but less harmed. It means she can't dodge Septette though. And with that momentum on Septette, she can't manage to counter-shot THAT sort of damage...

    "If ye think yer god-wrought strength be somethin' I'll back down from..." She tosses one flintlock to the side, and draws her cutlass! "I'll show ye what I do to the strenght of gods, lass!!"
Starbound Flotilla     Her blade slides out and SWIPES... Through that pillar! And with a quick rocker-boost THROUGH the fading and shattering pillar, she dodges back. It doesn't escape the dangerous blades, but it prevents Septette from using her overwhelming density to shatter Pavo's delicate bird bones with the impact. "YARRR!" She calls out, sustaining the brutal impact of the blades on her armor with much less damage than the crashing impact would have caused. But a gush of sparks and a thin spray of blood indicates she's not gone unscathed, in armor or flesh.

    But by pulling back, she gets into a quick almost-grapple. While she's not even CLOSE to being as good as George is, she does use what she knows, which is aerial kinematics. She delivers a heavy swipe at Septette's midsection, though not expecting that to deal much damage. What she does expect to deal damage, though... Is when she KICKS off! With high precision, she establishes a trajectory that's meant to throw Septette off of any path that could reach the other pillars, and instead slam her into the walls of the arena in an uncontrolled spin at full speed while Pavo escapes to the few remaining pillars.
Septette Arcubielle      The clawed kick connects with Septette's bare spine, sending her careening off at an awkward angle. It doesn't shift her enormous momentum by much proportionately, but that's still enough to nudge her out of reach of the nearest pillar! This time, her velocity is more threatening... but she also has a better idea for how to deal with the crash-landing.

     The leading edge of her body- regardless of what edge that happens to be at any given moment during her precarious tumble- glows a shimmering red and unleashes a constant gout of flames, cutting her speed by a precious few percentage points in the fractions of a second before impact. When there's just a hairs'-breadth between herself and the wall, she triggers an ice spell instead, covering the wall with a layer of ice that shatters violently on impact, harmlessly dissipating another fraction of the energy.

     But what's left is still enough to cause damage: she visibly convulses on impact, and high-tension wires whip and flail when severed as their energy is chaotically released, causing further internal injuries. When she peels herself out of the vertical impact crater, it's with a staticky bellowing howl: not a declaration of pain or cry for help, but a roar of defiant vitality.

     Intent on not giving Pavo an easy bead on her, she scuttles along the wall: first on all fours in a rapid scampering motion, and then as she finds her footing, in a pure wall-run that exploits her talons' sharpness to gouge new foot-holds with each step! Even with those awkward constraints, she manages to weave unpredictably up and down, even letting go of the wall periodically and dropping a short distance before latching on again. It's scarcely more predictable than someone moving erratically on the ground.

     "Not for what I was given by Yggdrasil, but for what I TOOK!" The last word escapes her throat as a yell when she leaps from the wall, catching herself on a pillar- not by grappling to it, but by gouging it with the tip of one blade and hanging there for a split second, supported by the embedded edge like a piton.

     "God-machine, living relic, perfect soldier- HAH! We might as well have been GARBAGE!" She launches off of the pillar by completing the frozen swing, using the kinetic energy of the recoil to launch herself towards another as the last one dissolves; her feet never touch ground, but by cleverly abusing subtle leverage and recoil with her unusual center of gravity, she bounces between pillars solely by slashing at them, with such grace that she almost appears to glide.

     The drones open fire with weak elemental projectiles, darting in and out of cover in mechanisms designed to minimize Pavo's line-of-sight to them, and even abusing their slow projectile speed to fire at locations where she's going to be without exposing themselves to her present location at any point. Their shots are carefully staggered: they come one at a time, at intervals precisely matching Pavo's fire, practically inviting her to counter them all instead of shooting at Septette. "My creator is DEAD. My adversary is DEAD." Each emphasis is punctuated by a hammer-blow as another pillar falls, slowly hemming Pavo in!
Septette Arcubielle      "And I LIVE because I became something more than what I was MADE! So do your worst," she growls- her voice distressingly intense, but still comfortingly void of malice. "Everybody's got their limits- and NOBODY'S FOUND MINE." She tries to lunge again again once Pavo's mobility is sufficiently restricted, claws outstretched... but just outside of melee range, something glimmers and sparks for a brief instant between her fingers.

     A tiny pinprick of blindingly intense light expands to a sphere in milliseconds... and keeps expanding, the air around it shimmering, then burning, then turning to plasma in an expanding conflagration that gives barely enough time to dodge. Septette crosses her blades in front of the expanding shockwave, dampening its effects on her, yet the pressure wave is still enough to change her momentum sharply and knock her back into a graceful landing on one of the last remaining pillars. There she perches, pensive and sizzling, peering through the clearing smoke for a sign of Pavo... with one as tricky as she, Arcubielle can never be too sure.
Starbound Flotilla     Pavo tosses her cutlass aside, as well as the severed grappling hook, and draws a pair of flintlocks, leaping and diving through the air in elegant and graceful spinning shots, defusing and diffusing each projectile as it approaches, and still somehow even managing to fire a few shots off towards Septette as she does each time, though unlikely to reach her properly with that distance and that wall-based agility. It's acrobatic, it's stylish, and it's clear what her advantage over George is: Her youth, her lighter bones, and her more agile body structure just make her far more battle-ready than George is in terms of sheer potential, though not tactics.

    Nowhere is this more apparent than how she approaches this last bit of conflict. "Oh, aye lass!" She caws out. "There's no value in a god's strength but what ye make! A god takes and takes only! I'll see what ye've made, then! DRAW BLADE, CROSSBONES! YER ABOUT TO FIND YER LIMIT!" She calls out, in a confident tone, as she discards both flintlocks and draws a fresh pair of cutlasses, and LEAPS off of one of the last remaining pillars... They're all but totally worn down now. Both cutlasses in hand, she streaks towards Septette, intending to counter-strike right in mid-air melee!

    "Avast...!" She manages to get out, when she sees the gleam of light. And the rapidly expanding shockwave grazes her as the thrusters slam back, burning out and explosively overloading just to keep her out of the sudden rush of plasma. Shielding fields rush to protect exposed skin, exploding violently as emergency capacitors never meant to activate are forced to engage, turning the plasma burns to something less dangerous. She's slammed up, in a dramatic parabolic arc, and her whole form is obfuscated by the rush of smoke and dust kicked up by the huge blast.
Starbound Flotilla     And then the smoke clears. The arena seems empty, except for the other Flotilla captains waiting at the edge of the arena, protected by an ad-hoc shelter built during the earlier stages of the battle. But where's Pavo? Her vital signs are still reporting active...

    The remaining dust and smoke clear. What first is obvious is a heavy pair of massive gems, ringed by elaborately inscribed stone and metal. The gems themselves seem to churn in elaborate multidimensional ways, shining a bright red as they emit their brilliant yellow light downwards. They support what can only be called a sort of militarized pirate two-engine autogyro. A pair of heavy cannons are fixed at its sides, and Pavo herself sits astride the central control structure, riding it as if it were some sort of elaborate flying motorcycle. It's more like a hovering miniature gunship if anything. Her armor is utterly wrecked, rendering her incapable of direct combat and especially disabling her swordsmanship, but her bloodied and bruised body can still eagerly operate her powerful vehicle. A moment more, and armor folds into place, projecting thin barrier fields up to protect the pilot. She yanked a whole miniature gunship out of her Matter Manipulator while the smoke was clearing!! Pavo has gone to STAGE 2 BOSS MODE.

    "Let's see what the difference is between the power ye are and the power ye make, lass." She caws in a ragged breath, yanking a pair of control handles back in her hands to load the heavy bolt cannons. And without even a second more of pause, she begins to circle the arena, firing at Septette with the tremendous kinetic energy bolts and trying to keep a distance from both the pit walls and from Septette herself, though never exceeding a relatively reasonable height ceiling for the fight itself.
Septette Arcubielle      A second form!! Septette's face settles into an almost giddy grin as she spies the mech through the clearing haze- Pavo's managed to surprise her again. There's a protesting yawp, like the shriek of a wounded cat or an abused violin, as her wire tendons are pulled against their limits yet again. Then she leaps laterally off the pillar in an explosively rapid motion, latching back onto the cavern's wall a fraction of a second later and scrabbling along it. This time, her movement is strangely directionless: she tacks back and forth, weaving unpredictably and only slowly edging towards the ceiling. It's enough to let her dodge or parry most of Pavo's shots, but not all; here and there a bolt shot still explodes against her exoskeleton, abrading internal components with shrapnel.

     The drones congregate below Pavo, on the assumption that the motorcycle-like chassis will make it difficult to see below and behind the canopy. Septette fires a single translucent, gossamer bolt at one of the drones, then turns her attention to peppering Pavo's gunboat with minimally-threatening elemental cantrips: just enough to keep up a token offense and avoid arousing suspicion. "My magic is my own," she replies proudly, "and Yggdrasil has no claim to it! A defect in creation, a special flaw- the core began to bleed energy, but I survived. And more, I learned to shape it, direct it, drown foes in my 'blood'!"

     Far below, the drones bounce and reflect the bolt among themselves: yellow, red, blue, yellow, in an ever-accelerating dance. Each time, it glows a little brighter, as if it were constructively interfering with their reflectors somehow. She keeps up the distracting banter, even as her precarious ascent nears the top of the chamber: "Desperation lends further strength to the strong at heart, Pavo! And all these decades clinging to life, to function- every quirk and flaw in my body has become a weapon, every defect turned outwards into a weapon. I'm as strong now as I ever was whole!"

     The drones spark and flare dangerously, looking like they'll give out any moment. The projectile, now reflected and concentrated dozens of times into a raw white bolt, fragments and splits between them- then converges back into a single searing, roiling beam. As she kicks off the wall in an unprecedented lunge towards her flying quarry, the beam streaks upwards, aiming to punch a hole clean through the engines!
Starbound Flotilla     "Oh, aye? A power ye /grew/ then?" Pavo calls out as elemental blasts ping off her shield, blasting and blasting away, over and over. Her vehicle twists and turns, with the massive engines rotating and whirling dramatically to give her fantastic tracking on Septette to offset the downsides of a fixed gun. And the upside? Huge power and the ability to sustain tremendous recoil. She seems to intuitively understand how to best maneuver to offset the stress of managing a high-powered weapon's recoil against a relatively less stable pseudo-gunship.

    She actually seems fairly canny about this. She knows Septette will tactically solve out some sort of solution against her vehicle. She also knows Septette will need time, and take a moment to figure out what's going on before she does. The damage Septette accumulates between the launch of this vehicle and the end of this bombing run of sorts is her goal, not the permanent end of things. "Then ye take what the world calls yer flaw and ye turn it into power! Good! 'Tis worthy of respect, lass! When ye dare to go beyond what the world is willing to call right, and when ye find yer real strength!!"
Starbound Flotilla     Then comes Septette's sudden reflected blast. Pavo's counterattack is actually sort of incredible: She catches the "INCOMING FIRE" alert on her HUD -- though Septette was right, she didn't get to see it build up because of where it was placed before -- and does a BARREL ROLL in her machine, flipping it sideways and drawing a flintlock to aim directly down! The flip doesn't last very long, but for how long it lasts, Pavo's heavy flintlock fire pelts the bolt aggressively. Unfortunately, she can defuse it some, but not much; she has to complete her flip and let it slam into the base of the ad-hoc autogyro's left engine, searing a hole through it. The heavy gem sputters and flickers, unable to maintain full lifting thrust.

    Time for Pavo to end this. "And if it's yer pain and yer flaws and yer damage and yer wounds that give ye STRENGTH!" She calls out, slamming several release systems. "Then I'll turn to use that too!!"

    The right engine detaches, its ring unfolding into an elaborate series of wings that turn the engine into a hovering personal platform, which Pavo slots into at her back. The other engine had the same functionality, but doesn't nearly manage the same transformation. Instead, a segment of ring gets wrenched out of place and turned into a handle of sorts. It's a massive ENGINE HAMMER!
Starbound Flotilla     "AVAST, YE SCURVEY DOG! I'LL SHOW YE WHAT I'VE LEARNED FROM YE TOO!" She shrieks like a hawk, and with her ad-hoc jetpack, she DIVES towards Septette's position, swooping down and intending to strike her with a massive overhand engine-powered swing! The engine itself is just about prone to explode as well! This is Pavo's FINAL STRIKE!
Septette Arcubielle      Her perception of time slows to an absolute crawl as Septette carefully assesses her options. This is bad: she's hanging in mid-air, with nothing to kick off of or maneuver with, and staring down a full-fledged desperation attack. The hammer-blow itself is likely to do moderate damage, but the way it looks primed to explode is far more worrying...

     Taking that explosion head-on might be the most dramatic option, but it just isn't practical- especially not if she wants to fight all the Captains in one go! Instead, she calls on her deep reserves of melee combat experience to attempt a maneuver that would be humanly impossible: the blade on her left arm whips out as she hurtles towards Pavo, striking the inside of the hammer's haft just below the head and momentarily stopping the swing from completing!

     If her estimation is correct, the hammer will detonate in a split second regardless of whether it actually strikes her directly, but this gives her just enough time to attempt a peculiar kind of evasive maneuver: Septette hooks her right arm-blade around the flight generator on Pavo's back and uses the grip to pull them close together, twining her arms and legs around Pavo and even opening her ribcage to press them closer together.

     There are only two possibilities here: either Pavo has some form of friendly-fire protection from the hammer's explosion and Septette can exploit being inside its 'bubble' to shield herself from the brunt of the explosion, or there is no such protection, and she can shield Pavo from the brunt of the impact with her own body. Given that she wants the Captains to be able to recover as quickly as possible, both options are beneficial.

     "It looks like I taught you well," she replies, looking straight into Pavo's eyes- "but sometimes, you've just got to get close to people to learn everything they have to offer."
Starbound Flotilla     Septette is right, the Starbound Flotilla tend to key their personal shielding systems directly to the frequency of their own energy systems. Of course, such methods only work partially, and not remotely against kinetic systems. Septette will still have to deal with the brunt of the shattering fragments of gemcraft, and Pavo's sphere of dampening on her own damage only blocks a half or so of the detonation, but it's more than enough to make it a good strategy.

    "Ye tricky--!" Pavo shouts, as she's yanked directly into the hug, flailing awkwardly. George might have been in a better position here, he might have had some scheme to get one over on Septette because she engaged in a grapple, but by grabbing Pavo at least she's prevented further damage just for now. Pavo's own body is wracked with the damage that comes from the detonation, something she had hoped she would be able to remain active through. Unfortunately, it's not to be: She's far too weak to escape this hold, and can't remotely re-initiate the fight. She'll have to stay in Septette's grasp when they hit the walls, or the ground. "Aaargh!" She calls out, trying to yank herself out of the grip. "Well ye best be learnin' plenty if yer gettin' this close!" She shouts, still trying to wriggle her way out of the hold even as the pair begin the descent.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette's proximity tactics leave her little room to properly block the explosion's shrapnel. The tan plates on her body shift and angle themselves to shield her vital systems; everything but the tension-wire systems and remaining clockwork motors locks down in a kind of protective stasis. Those systems, there's no saving: critical cogs dislodge and slip from the concussive blastwave, and bronze-colored wires shriek dramatically as they're severed by the red crystal shrapnel!

     The yggdroid's body locks up and goes stiff for a fraction of a second, unable to compensate for the damage. Then her exoskeletal plates rearrange themselves into their default configuration and electrical lights flick on- her third healthbar, so to speak!

     Life returns for her extremities just in time for her to exploit the extra kick of momentum provided by the hammer's explosion: it launches her (and by extension, Pavo) far enough for her to reach the opposite wall of the chamber, where she latches on with her clawed feet and begins a controlled sliding descent that carves deep gouges into the stone.

     "Let's see how you enjoy a keelhaul!" Septette slams Pavo into the wall as they fall while holding her tightly against it with her feet, using the passing rocky crags like sandpaper to tear off the hover engine and whatever's left of the pirate's armor! It's a delicate maneuver, however: as soon as the armor gives way in one spot, she immediately turns Pavo to prevent the abrasive rock from digging into her skin.

     When they finally reach the cobblestone floor a few seconds later, the yggdroid performs a surprisingly delicate maneuver: she kicks off the wall and lands on her tiptoes with the pirate held above her head, then crumples her legs and bends her arms at a steady rate, ensuring that the sudden deceleration is smoothed out and doesn't break anything important! It ends in an awkward princess-carry position, but she puts the bird down on her feet a moment later.

     "There ya go, Pavo. You really pushed me out there." Septette emulates taking a deep breath and setting her shoulders in a gesture of resolve, then glances at the remaining captains with a tired yet cocky smile. "Who's next?"
Starbound Flotilla     Pavo shrieks a hawklike noise as she slams into the wall, crashing against it. The bruising accumulates badly, as the engine shears off, and the armor rips apart. She continues her struggling effort to fight, firing off her flintlocks over and over, but she can't manage to hit anything at this close range. Metal twists and churns, power lines break dramatically in explosive arcs of light, and huge bursts of light blast out of her body like sprays of blood from the impacts.

    As the armor's systems finally are completely destroyed, Pavo's aim becomes even worse when dexterity-enhancing mechanisms are lost. While her body might still be in fairly okay condition -- heavy contusions aside -- she's definitely out of the fight in as much as it's possible to be out of the fight in a significant way; she's lacking any further options to meaningfully threaten Septette!

    And then they reach the ground again, with Pavo twisted up in Septette's arms and sort of curled oddly in place. Squirming and flailing, she sort of flops out of Septette's arms and stumbles onto her taloned feet when she's released. "Aye, aye, ye got me, lass." She grumbles, panting exhaustedly. "Tough ol' tincan, ye are, Crossbones. A good fight, aye. All I could do to push ye a little more." She goes off to collect her discarded weapons, while the next Starbounder to engage in combat enters the arena!
Starbound Flotilla     With a burst of light, ALBERT has arrived! He's not pulling any punches with this one. No, he's brought what appears to be a full-on TANK to the battle! Well, it's a light tank, only large enough to hold one person and not too much larger than a car, but its shiny white gleaming surface clearly marks it as some kind of powerful Miniknog design for an enforcement vehicle. The four segmented morphic treads that root it to the ground look incredibly flexible, and the cockpit of sorts that shifts about in the middle of it is heavily armored. There's a pair of odd pod-like attachments attached to it as well, a strange feature with no clear purpose just yet, but they seem rather unrelated to the series of turrets and missile launchers that bristle from the main pod, as well as a few mounted on the tread-like segments.

    The top pod section unfolds in an unelegant, militaristic way to expose his upper body briefly, the rest of him sunken into an elaborate full-body control suite. "Arcubielle." He says, and then grunts. "You have sixty seconds." Gonna give her a minute to recover from that state of tiredness, but only a minute. They're escalating hard, it looks like. Albert locks his control handles back and the pod closes once more, then projects a brilliant white translucent shield in front of it, the shield emitters on the front two treads suddenly shining.
Septette Arcubielle      INTERNAL DAMAGE REPORT:
         MECHANICAL SYSTEMS: NONFUNCTIONAL
         TENSION SYSTEMS: NONFUNCTIONAL
         ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS: LIGHTLY DAMAGED
         ALL OTHER SYSTEMS: BASELINE
         DRONE CONTROLLER STATUS: 3/3, BASELINE
     CONCLUDE INTERNAL DAMAGE REPORT

     The damage is substantial enough: she's on her third 'health bar' now, and although George and Pavo may not be specialized for dueling, they made a strong accounting of themselves. The fatigue, on the other hand, is entirely feigned. There is no muscle to tire, no breath to catch, no battery to deplete- if Septette can do something without damage, she can do it a hundred thousand times.

     So when Albert offers her a full minute, Septette performs a few quick estimations: she could heal some very minor damage by using fire and electrical magic to spot-weld, but without proper equipment or replacement parts, the benefits would be negligible. It's a better use of the break to gamble on catching him off-guard!

     "I think," she murmurs- still holding that quavering and exhausted tone for a moment longer- "that I'll pass on the offer, Albert." Then she explodes in a flurry of movement: she closes a good fraction of the distance between them in a fifth of a second, then tests the limits of the tank's automated targeting by taking a hard left before her initial sprint can register in normal human reaction times!

     Her subsequent movements are highly erratic: she spends a different amount of time running in a straight line before tacking every time, trying to home in on exactly how long it takes for Albert's tank to refresh its target lock on her and form a new predictive model of her path. But each tack takes her closer, until- scarcely a second after she gave first warning- she closes to within melee range and tries to sink a white-hot blade into its treads! "C'mon, Al, you're killing me here! I thought that I was your tank!"
Starbound Flotilla     Albert grunts, "Fine." Almost as if he expected something like that. The tank is actually shifting backwards from the first rush a moment after Seft hits that hard left, achieving an admirable fraction of Septette's acceleration speed with its elaborate, articulated tread segments. "Evasive maneuvers. Firing." Good thing too, a shotgun-like spray of bolts rips out of one of the few fixed weapons. A pair of turrets on the left swivel, locking onto her with a frankly disturbing amount of speed... "Locked. Firing. Firing. Locked. Firing. Locked. Firing. Firing. Firing. Locked..." They're definitely not using any visual acquisition, not at THAT processing speed! But what are they locking on to, if it isn't Septette's disturbingly distinctive visual silhouette?

    As her blade comes in close, the whole tank spins rapidly with a distressingly uncharacteristic degree of speed, interposing the shield between her blade and the tread, albeit only just barely, and only at Septette's right side. "Starbound one taking cover--" She shatters through it, but not so heavily that it doesn't slow her strike down, so that when the tank continues its turn, it rolls with the slice, avoiding having the morphic tread get turned to scrap, even though some of its guts and redundant systems are sheared clean through. "Incoming anti-armor. Evading." Albert grunts. His voice is the middleground between a tank commander and an ace pilot in its calmness. The blade draws sprays of sparks and slagged metal like a spray of blood, but the tank spins and whirls and backs off, diving back with an agile series of movements.
Starbound Flotilla     "'Killing you here'. Won't be that much. Correct though. Designed this for people like you." He grunts. Well, he's not actually being lethal in his intentions, but hell, there's just no sense of humor on this guy, or at least any time there is, it's the bleakest and darkest he can manage. Speaking of fighting Septette, he mutters, "Switching targeting mode." The four tread-pods shift around the central pod, moving from a traditional tank-like position to something more squared off, each continuous tread equidistant from the last.

    "Power core to Tera Mode." He says, and his weapons -- many more than before -- begin to fire rapidly. Even those that can't seem to acquire a lock are firing; Septette finds that her region of the arena is soon SATURATED in heavy fire. Falling missiles, wide shotgun-like blasts, spraying and sweeping machine-gun fire, and similar, turn it into a sort of militarized bullet hell. But that doesn't mean precision shots aren't applied as well. "Locked. Firing. Firing. Firing. Locked..." He continues, even while trying to cut her off with the vast array of weapons constantly blasting away with the intent to force her into a limited range.

    "You've been fighting Starbound unit support." He mutters, grimly, between bursts of gunfire. "Not anymore. This is full combat efficacy." And he's right for sure, it's a cut above the other two, no doubt about that; from here on out, Septette is past the intro stages of this game.
Septette Arcubielle      The Starbounders have kicked things up a notch- and although nothing has overtly changed in her arsenal or tactics, Septette has upped her 'difficulty slider' as well, layering on defensive enchantments and subtly altering her fighting style to discard the last pretenses of human limitations.

     Every time a missile or similar explosive nears her, it's prematurely detonated by arcs of magical electricity that leap from her carapace; she never seems to be wherever the bullets are thickest in her predictive dance, and the most threatening armor-piercing rounds are selectively cut out of the air with supersonic reactions that are visible only as flickers or blurs in the air followed swiftly by gunshot-like cracks.

     Even with those uncanny defenses, the withering assault is eroding her health bar significantly: every rocket that explodes spackles her with ragged shrapnel, and for every bullet she deflects another gets through, simply by virtue of the fact that her blades can't be everywhere at once! "I didn't take you as the type to call your attacks, fluffy! Isn't that a bit hot-blooded for your tastes?"

     All the while, Septette's mind is working ceaselessly to pick apart the details of this new scenario: what the rate of fire is of each weapon, what's being manually targeted and what's being fired according to a targeting algorithm, how the targeting algorithm attempts to cut off escape routes and determines likely pathing, and countless other variables that can help sharpen her tactics. The mere fact that the tank is attempting to zone her out with bullet-hell-style attacks is a strong indicator that it wants to avoid being in melee range- so that's where she'll fight it!

     The varying rates of fire on the different weapons create a kind of complex polyrhythm- one that can be solved. There's a split second where an abnormal number of high-power weapons should 'sync up' and fire all at once! At that precise moment, Septette artificially boosts her speed by firing an explosive fire spell behind herself like a temporary afterburner, and flicks a curved blade at the exposed tread in a peculiar overhand motion once she's in range! "Look, I'm a tin can and you've got a can-opener. No hard feelings, but I've gotta shut that shit right down."

     The strange arc of the blow means it isn't as forceful as it could be, but if it connects, the blade will embed in a way that allows her to use it to catapult herself on top of the tank, as if she were pole-vaulting! She'll try to come down on what's left of the shield with an enormous stomp, aiming to get onto the tank itself and force it to shoot its own hull to pry her off!
Starbound Flotilla     "Trained. Second nature. Bruiser trashed, shields going up." Albert grunts, in response to Septette calling his, uh, calling. "Necessary for coordination." He resumes it, a pilot-like chant of constant tactical flow. In a fight, he's the commander, the guy offering all the coordination, the nerve center of the Flotilla's ability to stay working as one cohesive unit in the chaos of battle. "Tally hostile twelve o'clock closing, buster six, tracking." The tank darts back, trying to maintain distance, though it can't successfully out-accelerate Septette's rocket-jump. "Ripple." Every turret swings in towards her in a gush of bullets and missiles. There's that impossibly quick lock again, but now there's a little more clarity that it's focusing hard for her right side...?

    The tread is slammed, meaning that now both forward treads are pretty well damaged. And when she bounces up, she comes down hard on the remaining shielding system, blowing it out and breaking it. "Shield bent, fore treads sour, hostile above. God damn it, get OFF!" There's that burst of his usual irrational anger fits. Something heavy locks into place inside the tank. One click on the left, one on the right. "Power core to Exa Mode. Subunits live as fragged." Something whirs to life, like a flywheel spinning up, or a jet-engine going active. And then, one of those two little mini-pods on the side of the main tank pod suddenly spins, and then whirs over the surface of the tank, intending to slam Septette with a heavy impact...

    Or a punch! In fact, both pods have unfolded into TREMENDOUS ROBOTIC HANDS! An elegant series of rockets built into the "wrists", as well as a link to some kind of fancy energy emitter and remote articulator on the tank itself, keep both hands suddenly aloft in close proximity to the tank as it tries to heavily PUNCH Septette away.
Starbound Flotilla     Stage 1.5 bossmode. Albert's machine has floating hands and seems to fully intend to violently BOX Septette if she gets close! Though they can't -- or don't -- seem to fly at any significant distance from the tank, the tremendous hands are large enough (though perhaps not strong enough) to lift Septette's entire body, making them a huge and dangerous threat. "End of the line, RQBL Seven. I've closed every gap." Heavy force in melee, and horribly quick locks at range... This one's going to be tough, even though the tank is now slowed down a lot. Though there's a few gaps in both long and short range...

    And with his reactor core in Exa Mode, it seems like the bullet hell just gets more and more dense. "Treads sour, core is joker, power diverting." He goes less mobile, but the air is gradually beginning to approach having more ordinance in it than clear air, now mixed with a variety of slower-moving energy projectiles. He tries to keep his tank facing her but doesn't focus on pulling back and keeping distance now, trying to gamble on his ability to physically box Septette back with those huge fists keeping her from doing too much damage in close quarters. "Configuration locked. Tiger for engagement." He says, a grumpy frustration seeping into his voice.
Septette Arcubielle      The melee assault is, ironically, a moment of reprieve- the bulky fists themselves act as line-of-sight blockers when they come in to strike her! The first punch is narrowly deflected as Septette shoves against its side before it can impact; the second glances off her shoulder, drawing a heavy spray of sparks and the scream of rending metal! "Don't fucking CALL me that! You, you're just a machine-man! A machine man with a machine heart! How DARE you?!" The staticky roar that escapes her throat is devoid of mirth- something about that really set her off.

     In her momentary rage, the third blow catches her squarely on the chest- but even that seems to have been a calculated risk. One leg bends up at unnatural angles to plant her foot on the incoming fist; the other digs into the armor plating along with both arm-blades. When the heavy blow lands, she kicks off of the foot to accelerate even further, tearing deep gouges into the armor plating with her embedded blades as she's launched away!

     The gentle trajectory of her descent gives her precious milliseconds to think: her superheated right arm is sparking and pitted with dozens of shallow impacts, and that's surely no coincidence. With 90% confidence, Albert's tank is using thermal targeting over visual or arcane detection. With 80% confidence, it will fall back on visual confirmation when deprived of thermal lock-on potential. And there's a simple way to beat both...

     A third of the way through her parabolic arc, her left blade begins to crackle and crystallize, abruptly plunging to below -100 C. Then she brings her two arm-blades together, creating a huge plume of steam and fog that obscures the rest of her descent- her core is just barely visible through the dense mist as a fuzzy red light, and the temperature on her right arm plummets to match ambient heat!

     Some of the language- 'bruiser', 'tiger'- goes right over Septette's head, but other pieces of jargon have clear equivalencies in her peculiar military tradition. 'Bent'- destroyed; nonfunctional. 'Sour'- injured or suboptimal. 'Joker'- running out of mana. It's just enough comprehension for her to get a vague lock on what's going on inside the tank: power core is being strained, mobility is limited! "You'll get no joy from me, then- I'm not the sort to be captured!" The puns, it seems, know no boundaries of dialect.

     As the fog spills out to cover half the arena in a thick shroud, Septette seems strangely passive: every now and then an unmistakable light flickers in the dense mist or a resounding footfall clatters, but for the most part, it seems she's waiting to see how Albert adapts to the new situation.

     'Seems' is the operative word. The blue and red drones are nowhere to be seen- they've been dispatched a hundred feet underground, agitating the lava rivers of the Molten Caves with careful temperature disturbances! Nothing dramatic happens just yet, but the ground shudders almost imperceptibly, and peculiar thermal readings start to bubble up from below...
Starbound Flotilla     The strong reaction to her military-styled callsign in Albert's way of speaking is something he wasn't ready for, but also isn't the sort to... Well, VISIBLY care about at least. He notes it, and it sits somewhere in the department of worries and concerns, but he's not going to stop what he's doing to wait and comfort her. Albert is business and nothing but. As she's launched away, he continues firing, and firing, and firing... Until suddenly, his lock on the superheated blade is lost!

    The guns spread and spray with a far less precise aim. Even moreso when the steam suddenly rushes to consume the arena "Hostile is faded, no joy." He mutters, with an increasing frustration. "Broke lock. Starbound One is popeye, Fox Four, Fox Four." His weapons light up with new, fresh, unguided shots. Can sheer, overwhelming military ordinance tear through the environmental cameoflage? No, of course not, that would be patently unreasonable.
Starbound Flotilla     Instead, he dares to pop the hatch of his tank. Not a lot, but potentially enough for Septette to exploit it. What he does, though, it begin lobbing grenades out of a grenade launcher. heavy foam-forming things, designed to coat wide areas in dangerous adhesive hull-repair expanding foam. Yes, he seems to be intending to use his battlefield shaping, debuff-craft, and ranged weaponry craft skills all in tandem, and-- Well, certainly he doesn't expect to actually trap Septette. But he does intend to make it so that she can't remain secret, and will be obvious when she moves, having to fight through the substance. He has to force her to expose herself in the dense fog!

    A combination of unguided shots and a forcible effort to make Septette guide them should be enough... Unless she has a plan that lets her stay in place, in which case it may be far less effective.
Septette Arcubielle      The fogbank remains almost sullenly quiet as the foam grenades cover more and more of its area... until, suddenly, one grenade comes a little too close for comfort! Before it can expand, Septette's forced to sprint away, letting Albert narrow down his search! Each subsequent shot is more accurate and harder to avoid, with less and less room to maneuver... which bothers her not one bit.

     Her goal isn't to stay mobile at all, but rather to give him something to do while keeping him in one spot. Far below, amid the hollow caverns that wind through the magma chamber of a long-simmering volcano, the blue drone plugs minor vents by cooling and hardening specific chunks of rock, and the red drone stirs the cauldron by introducing new thermal flows. The Molten Caves undergo dozens of tiny eruptions every month- what's one more?

     The enormous pressure builds slowly, but predictably. A full second before eruption, the yellow drone darts out of the fog to Albert's left and fires a small electrical shock at the open hatch in an attempt to momentarily distract him from the way the ground rumbles.

     Then, a violent eruption of pyroclastic rock bursts through the ground near the tank- and another, and another, until a geyser of lava explodes forth directly underneath! It's tiny, as far as volcanic eruptions go, but it's still enough to fling obsidian shrapnel across the entire battlefield and cover an entire quadrant of the boss room in knee-deep lava! The very air roils and quavers from convection as thick black smoke chokes the air, lit by flickering red from underneath. For a few moments, the battlefield looks like some Renaissance painter's conception of Hell. "You can't form a strategy if you don't know the land, Albert! Even in a place like this- there are still things that can blindside you!"

     And right on cue, the demon appears from the smoke and fire. Septette appears scarcely impeded by the flames that engulf her or the viscous lava underfoot as she closes to melee range again: her talons are woven with freezing enchantments that force the molten rock to solidify beneath her, allowing her to move across it as if she were walking on dry land!

     Thermal readings are right out the window in this smoldering caldera; visual confirmation is scarcely more reliable in the wreathe of choking smog. She's counting on those factors diminishing the accuracy of those monstrously huge fists as she leaps towards the tank, her body glimmering a dull red from the heat, trying to scale it and pry the hatch open!
Starbound Flotilla     Albert's been electrocuted before. It's not that he has any sort of racial resistance to it, you know, or anything like that. But what he has is a sort of grim ability to endure through its pain. "GRRRRRRH!!" His whole body tenses with barely suppressed convulsions when the shock slams through his armor, burning him inside it and distracting him as Septette's scheme finally gets put into play fully. He's stunned, for a moment... And then the ground errupts. Lava pours into the arena in erruptions from below.

    "God /damn/ it! I had it /closed/!" Albert's voice breaks the pilot-like calm again, giving in to some anger. "Ground's killzone, treads bent--!" He can only move the tank back so much before that rush from below slams into his machine, ripping off and slagging one of the front treadpods, leaving the thing crippled and slanted to one side. "God /damn/ it, get OFF! GET OFF!!" He shouts, frantically trying to skid to one side, with his tank screeching over the melting rocks as it does. One of those big hands is occupied with helping shove his machine out of the lava, and can't block her from leaping onto the machine. Though he's shut the hatch since that electrical bolt, it's not fast enough to keep Septette from slipping her fingers under there.
Starbound Flotilla     But when the hatch tears off in a wrenching, metalic screech, he's not going to wait on this. "RRRRRAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!" He SCREAMS, and the pod launches forward, ditching its slagged mess of a front left tread and the shattered, stabbed wreck of the right, leaving just the two rear ones. Even with the open hatch, he intends to counterattack, not by forcing Septette back, but by fighting her in the fresh melee engagement. In his usual anger, he attempts to essentially tackle her! The articulated rear treads are used to sort of jump into her, and those heavy robot hands try to pin her down and begin striking her repeatedly while dumping ordinance into her body. His core's gone out of Exa Mode and into Yotta Mode! But he's not in any place to call it out right now, only to keep his seat in the exposed, ripped-up central pod and keep fighting.

    BOSS STAGE TWO!! It's not a mecha, not quite, but it has some aspects evoked; the "legs" are the rear two treadpods, the big hands are like arms, but the way they're all arranged forces the machine into an gorilla-like four-limbed gait, with the front hands used like the front legs.
Septette Arcubielle      Exultation at her plan coming to fruition swiftly changes to grim concentration: Albert's too persistent for his own good! The tank's panicked swerve throws her off of the hull, and she sticks a three-point landing just in time for the hands to come down! Septette raises an arm to block the lunging strike, but badly underestimates the sheer force that the tank can bring to bear- the first blow staggers her, knocking her off-balance; each subsequent blow drives her a step back as she tries and fails to regain the momentum.

     Blind rage; brute force; conditioned patterns. Yomi level one. An assault like this ought to be easy to counter... but every time an opportunity to gain tempo presents itself, her body falters. Her eyes track an overhead swing, slow as molasses in dilated time, and her mind dictates the series of motions that will perfectly deflect it and execute a crippling riposte- but the servomotors in her arm hitch and yowl in mechanical pain, the parry comes a beat late, and yet more damage is sustained. The next parry will be slower still.

     Arcubielle knows this feeling too well. This is what failure feels like for a yggdroid: not a single mistake, but a thousand cuts. The body betraying the mind by degrees until the mind is all that's left, howling orders to a puppet that can no longer obey.

     Her body goes slack under the assault, collapsing back into the knee-deep lava and sinking in as the tackle hits her. Flames lick at the residual carbon on her surface, and her eyes go dim.

     Hydraulic systems engaged.

     Under the lava, Septette's body abruptly thrashes and writhes against the tank's hands with unprecedented strength, as if her corpse were suddenly possessed by some new and terrible ghost. She aims a skewering strike at the palm of one hand, trying to impale it as if in crucifixion; the other hand gets a deep slash aimed at the first joints of its fingers. Then the lava bubbles and roils, and she's... gone.

     Knee-deep. Plenty of room for her to claw and scrabble her way along the ground, quick as thought, without breaking the surface. The molten rock is completely opaque to all her sensors, too- but she can navigate by memory for a few fractions of a second, before Albert can move too much!

     Septette bursts up from the liquid behind Albert, launching her twenty feet into the air in a spray of lava and giving her a temporary vantage point down into the open hatch. Cold, solid obsidian condenses around her hands as she magically 'freezes' the rock, then fires it like a spray of razor-sharp bullets aimed at the captain's shoulders! If he can't move his arms, he can't work the controls!

     The little robot lands a moment later, brandishing her armblades with renewed vigor and carefully assessing how much of a threat Albert still poses- she could conceivably press the assault here, but she doesn't want to push him too far past his limits. "Give it up, Captain," she bellows! "There's no win condition for you here. It's only a matter of how badly I thrash you before you stop moving."
Starbound Flotilla     Heat warnings flash and pop up all around the cockpit, flickering as the top hatch's holo-emitters are missing. Albert ignores them, howling a frustrated shout. Of course, this is sparring, and on some deeper level he knows that, but until Septette calls his attacks too harsh, he's going to keep going. Lava swirls around his machine's limbs, bringing sparks and slagged armor to them, but he keeps going.

    The benefit of intuitive anger is that it expects damage; rage is an engine that is founded on the principle of sustaining damage, and the deeper neurological roots of it are built on how to best respond to being damaged, where Septette's construction was once built on how to best cause the greatest amount of damage to a dangerous target. Albert's rage in particular is rooted in that pain; his traumatic stresses in the rebellion have left him with a mind as stripped and skeletonized as Septette's body. His success emerges only from a deeper psychological optimization of this. Giving up on what he could be to simply make due, in a way.

    Not that he's thinking that strategically on matters. Electronics sputter and die, though, when those blades skewer and slice. Though it may not fully sever the fingers, overloading electronics blast back into the cockpit and the fists slow and slam into the ground, while Albert roars. He charges forward, his tank "running" in a dramatic apelike gait. "RRRRRRRAAAAAAHHHHHH!" And slams his machine's fists down through the lava into the ground, but Septette's alreayd gone!
Starbound Flotilla     And then right back again. She launches up and SLAMS his shoulders with a spray of shrapnel. The Apex's machine stumbles in a perfect reflection of the man himself, and he grabs at his shoulder, staunching a spray of blood until automatic medical tech in his suit can stop the bleeding. His left side is weakened badly, his machine's limbs are faltering, sparking and slagging, and he's losing power even with his core in Yotta Mode, but he continues. One more final rush.

    Not going to take up Septette's offer. He howls a challenge back to her, slamming both fists onto the ground -- though the left a little less heavily. Charging forward, he engages her in an elaborate, heavy melee dance mixed with attempts to aggressively dump ordinance from what few remaining guns he has functoining on that central pod at her. This is a final series of heavy strikes, even with that weak and slow left, intended to take this battle right to the end for Albert. Just need to finish off that broken-down tank's final stages, or injure Albert out of the cockpit.
Septette Arcubielle      INTERNAL DAMAGE REPORT:
         MECHANICAL SYSTEMS: NONFUNCTIONAL
         TENSION SYSTEMS: NONFUNCTIONAL
         ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS: NONFUNCTIONAL
         HYDRAULIC SYSTEMS: BASELINE
         ALL OTHER SYSTEMS: BASELINE
         DRONE CONTROLLER STATUS: 3/3, BASELINE
     CONCLUDE INTERNAL DAMAGE REPORT

     No more probing; no more play. Albert's had his pound of flesh, so to speak, and if he takes any more, she might not even make it to Biteblade! This needs to end quickly, and ideally without further damage.

     The fists are large and heavy enough that they could bowl her over on a direct hit- so she moves with them, darting left and right with the hooks to rob them of their relative velocity! She practically glides over the frozen lava with delicate ease, skimming over its magically solidified surface as easily as if it were asphalt. Every dodged or blocked punch brings with it a light slicing or stabbing blow against one of the fists- the most she can safely commit to, while simultaneously guarding against the raking hail of gunfire.

     It's bait, of course- hoping to provoke him into a more committal reverse or overhead swing. She's in too much of a hurry here to actually go for attrition tactics! The second that Albert gives her an opening, black stone platforms condense themselves ahead of her as she sprints in for the kill, leaving herself open to retaliatory gunfire for the sake of expediency...

     The fists, of course, will come in momentarily to pry her off again- so instead of going for the core as she scurries up the tank's hull, she lunges for Albert's throat, abruptly changing paradigms from vehicular to personal combat! If he allows her any purchase at all, she'll try to haul him straight out of the cockpit- in a vulnerable position like this, it won't do to leave him any access to the controls!
Starbound Flotilla     The arms are damaged to the point that they're unlikely to make further progress. Layers of armor are either sliced or slagged and the core systems are beginning to fail, multiple redundancies not standing in the way of comprehensive damage the way Septette's do. The left one in particular falters and fails, almost completely collapsing, leaving Albert only able to go for a full-commit strike now! With a heaving strike, he leaps up and tries to hammer Septette into the ground, giving her that chance to come in around the left among the gunfire.

    Yanking him out of the cockpit won't be hard, with her strength and his relatively average (plus armor) density. Though that's not the end of it, it's at least mostly the end; she'll just need to subdue him of that pistol fire, as immediately after being hoisted, he draws his sidearm and starts firing, perhaps rather ineffectually considering the weapon's low power, into Septette's central torso unit, though he's not focusing on the core in any meaningful way. He remains in his howling and angry state, but it should be easy to declare him out now, if Septette can maneuver a hold on him.
Septette Arcubielle      One gunshot goes clean between her ribs, but the others bounce and rattle around inside her ribcage, deflecting off the inside of the armor until they lodge in something important. Despite the handgun's relatively low power, one of them glances a weak point on her hydraulic tubing, releasing a dramatic spray of black fluid before the mechanism can seal itself!

     The pistol is ripped out of his hand and tossed into the lava a moment later, but once she's got Albert in a secure hold, she becomes considerably more careful: ice magic shrouds him in a protective bubble of room-temperature air and cools her arms to a temperature that won't sear his skin, and she totes him in a kind of awkward headlock-princess-carry over of the pool of lava.

     Finally, once she's well past the edge of the molten pool, she sets him down on his feet and gives him a pointed look. "No more shenanigans, or I chuck you back in there until you cool off. Good work, though, Albert!"

     With that, she glances at the three remaining captains and nods. "Ready when you are. Let's go."
Starbound Flotilla     Albert seems to calm down in the headlock, after a great deal of enraged flailing. By the time he's back over at the other captains -- they've made some kind of supermetal pier reaching over the pit. The others are sort of recovering, not enough to fight but at least enough to build. In fact, they're watching raptly from a sort of set of bleachers! He can get up there on his own.

    When he's finally deposited, he makes a grumpy noise as he's left on the ground. "Hmph." He says, then mutters. "Your combat effectiveness is high." He almost sounds a little sour himself when he says that, but at least it's a respectful kind of sour. He glances up to Seft, who looks a little uneasy with her battleaxe at the ready, then delivers a nod. "Unlikely Seft will show her full power." He says, in a frank voice. "Don't expect too much escalation. Still a strong one." She shifts anxiously, staring down at her battle-dress with a "._." face on her visor.

    Then she perks up a little "Eager. I am sure I can show you enough to learn from, Septette!" The others help Albert up, while Seft takes a running start, and then leaps off the pier, slamming into the ground heavily. Something on her armor shimmers; she's enabled a heat-protection EPP to protect her from that lava! "Challenging. My armor is configured to protect against this hazard. Do you need any time to prepare?" She gestures dramatically with her heavy battleaxe. "Eager. Well you won't have it, I can't wait to show you what I can do!"

    Her axe begins to hum, and she breaks into a forward dash, dragging it along the ground. ScraaaaaaaapeWHOOSH! With a dramatic swing, she swings it... But unexpectedly, there's a heavy ELECTRICAL CHARGE built into it! It crackles like a tesla coil all of a sudden, trying to catch Septette in the instantly larger range of electrical damage as a way of getting around her probable evasion. Seft's erchius-elemental abilities are going to be on display here!
Septette Arcubielle      "My combat effectiveness had better be high, Albert," she replies with a guttering wink and a small pat on the back. "It's all I'm good for, after all." Then, with a surreptitious glance towards Seft: "Wouldn't do for her to hold anything back. I'll try to coax something out of her... thanks for the heads-up."

     When the Glitch comes down and challenges her, Septette shifts to an unfamiliar stance: legs bent at the knees, with her feet one shoulder-width apart and the back foot turned at a 90-degree angle. Her upper body is turned to minimize her profile, her right arm is held in front of her ribcage, and her arm-blades are retracted: it looks almost like a fencer's posture, sans sword! This is the closest matchup she's had to a proper duel yet, and she's acting the part!

     "I'm looking forward to showing off for you too, little one," she says proudly! "Come at me, then, and don't you dare go soft!" By the time Seft starts dragging that axe along the ground, she's already performing a careful assessment of her ideal ranges and engagement methods here: Seft is likely to be a powerful ranged spellcaster, likely outside her ability to reflect or counterspell effectively, but her melee attacks are liable to be more survivable. Better to get in close and stay there, preventing her from using a staff!

     Rather than evading the axe-swing, Septette rushes inside its range, blocking the axe's haft with her left forearm before the head can connect! The electrical shock seems to catch her off-guard, though: it scorches and blackens the components of her left arm, causing it to momentarily convulse in something resembling pain.

     Even as her arm's fried, Septette seamlessly flows into an offensive stance with a rapid flurry of attacks: her right arm lashes out to sock Seft in the visor, then her right foot stomps where her opponent's lead foot should be! The arm-blade in her right arm unfolds and tries to draw across a chink in Seft's collarbone in a sawing, slashing motion, and then she pivots on her right heel to try and finish off with an inaccurate but staggeringly powerful roundhouse kick to the torso! "When you come at the Queen, Rook-ie, you'd best not miss!"
Starbound Flotilla     Seft doesn't want to use her spellcasting; as always, she's terribly insecure about displaying her more overt magical abilities, and there's a conspicuous lack of attempting to pull out more magically-inclined gear. That doesn't mean she doesn't pull out some new gear, though. A quick draw from her Matter Manipulator yanks out a small hand-axe, which she tries to shove between herself and that scything blade, but the blade crashes through, shattering it; Seft can only blunt and slow the strike into a "bruising" heavy denting attack as her armor shifts to interpose.

    "Humorous. Just because you have a material and time advantage doesn't mean this won't change by the endgame, Septette." She says, flickering her eye-visor to a furrowed brow that mixes with a little smile. Something like "C:<". Then comes that heavy kick, slamming her backwards with a heavy strike, and she makes an "OOF!" sort of beeping noise. But as she does, she yanks her axe down to rake along Septette's back as she's forced back... or possibly even hook her!

    She'll make due with slamming the axehead into the ground if she can't hook, letting her skid to a stop, and then surge forward with another "shout"! This time with no swing, she's striking with a series of heavy THRUSTS, using the piercing head of the axehead in a series of elegant strikes meant to force Septette into a melee midrange, and if Seft can forcibly zone her into that area, she'll go for heavy overhead swings!

    Amid all this, though, comes a fresh use of SUPERHEATING! Seft must have recovered a bit of the old Spellsword Project equipment! She's swapping the axe between elemental modes with a damaging swiftness, and it looks like the mental control of that means she'll likely be able to swap between them very abruptly, possibly quickly enough to be a tactical advantage against Septette's reaction times.
Septette Arcubielle      Thrusting strikes with an axe are rather ungainly, even with Seft's practiced martial speed. Each hit is driven aside by the minimum distance needed to make sure it misses Septette's slender profile, nudged an inch this way or that by a hand or blade on the side of its head even as it's driven in. Even so, she backs off a bit, right into Seft's sweet spot- partly to avoid risking being impaled, and partly to explore just what she does in her advantage state!

     The latter question is answered handily a moment later, as the searing blade comes down on a hastily-blocking arm that blackens and shrieks under the heat and pressure! A viscous black substance drips from her hydraulic 'muscles' as the substance inside expands, forcing its way through microscopic cracks in the tubing. "Come on, Seft! Black can't win by playing a mirror match..."

     The assault is answered an instant later as Septette's hand twists around at an impossible angle to seize the axe's haft and her arm-blades jackknife out to prevent its head from being pulled back! Her right arm's blade crackles and coruscates with electrical energy for a moment before it's thrust at Seft's shoulder, trying to impale and fry the joint in an imitation of Seft's electrocuting tactics from just a few seconds earlier. "Hah! I've got two hundred years of close-quarters experience on you- don't challenge vertically; show me something new!"
Starbound Flotilla     Seft's eyes flick to a confident smile of sorts. "Excited. It's not a mirror, Septette." She says, and seems to somehow have her confidence bolstered by the fact that Septette's grip has that jackhammer hold on the battleaxe. With all her strength, she wrenches the hilt of the weapon between the pair, interposing it between the crackling right blade and her shoulder. It slows as it passes through the hilt, and gets thrown just barely off of any weakpoints. The thrust rams through layers and layers of armor, shearing a heavy gash through them but glancing off of the core systems of her shoulder, evoking a blood-like spray of sparks as Seft's armor systems are damaged, but her body stays safe. Seft is the Flotilla's armor expert, and so she's the one who has armored up more than any others, and she has the melee techniques to deliver on that, as she backs off, summoning up a shield and hand-axe from her Matter Manipulator.

    And then her eye-plate displays something odd. Her eyes flick off and it displays... Some kind of counter? It's measuring something going up to several tens of thousands, rapidly spiking. The speed it reaches that is disturbingly high, and it's likely that Seft only automated it for dramatic effect, not that she reacted to it live. And then, once it hits that critical mark, she emits a soft "ping!"

    "Excited. Or if it' is a mirror, it's a coffeehouse mirror!" Septette will shortly realize: That battleaxe got white-hot, and then DIDN'T STOP. The head of the axe detonates in a sudden rush of plasma explosive. Seft hides behind her shield from the brunt of the blast, but not without charging right for it, intending to lash out with several swift strikes the moment Septette is thrown off by the heavy high-heat blast, wielding a CRYO-MODE axe-head to exacerbate the effects of high heat expansions against supercooled contractions in materials where she finds purchase against Septette.
Septette Arcubielle          "If it's a funhouse mirror, I think that makes you the pretty one and me the warped copy," Septette replies with a playful wink! But that playful attitude doesn't last long- she realizes, too late, what's happening with the axe-head! If her reflexes were any slower, it'd detonate right next to her face, but she manages to at least get it at arm's length before it spontaneously changes to plasma.

     The superheated shockwave tears through the active hydraulics of her left arm, painting that entire side of her body in a thin layer of black, boiling fluid! Automated valves seal off the open breaches before they can bleed her dry, but they can't restore full functionality to a limb that's half-ruptured. Her left hand flexes for an instant, testing its remaining functionality- still some movement, but it doesn't look good!

     "Thrown off" would, however, be a distinct overstatement. She shifts her center of balance to gracefully compensate for the vicious explosion, moving one foot in practiced and delicate motion, before aggressively beating back the freezing hand-axe with her right arm! The attack still leaves her bleeding from shallow gashes on her forearm, but not nearly as badly as if it had struck her maimed left side. "Castling up will smother you someday," she taunts- "walls of metal won't protect you from me. Better not to surrender the tempo."

     Over the course of a couple of seconds, the ground under their feet crystallizes and freezes into a preternaturally-smooth icy surface. Septette digs in her talons to keep from losing her own balance on the near-frictionless surface, then lashes out with a vicious blunt strike near the top of Seft's tower shield, designed to knock her off-balance! At the same time, the yellow drone re-emerges from the shadows and takes an electrifying pot-shot at the Glitch's exposed legs from behind. "Some kind of alchemy? Never make equivalent exchanges when you're down material!"

     If Seft goes down, she'll try to leap and stomp on her with both feet, even through the shield! "Haa! Check, partner!"
Starbound Flotilla     "Alert. Goodness!" Seft says, surprised by the dangerous and beautiful ice. Then she makes a noise that's sort of like an electronic "uwah!!" sound, taken off her feet and unbalanced by the combination of stun impact and the strike to her shield! She slams onto her back, thudding heavily into the ice with a wave of cracks spiderwebbing their way through the ice. She's not as dense as Septette, but she is, at least, pretty heavy metal, and wearing heavier armor.

    "Bantering. I'm not castling. I'm fortressing! You have ignored my countergambit!" She calls out, as Septette slams through the shield, piercing it. She can only just maneuver to let her core torso armor protect her, but the armor sheared through at her shoulder doesn't let her get away unscathed. With a buzzing cry of pain, and a brighter red sparking flow that's rather like blood, her shoulder sustains an awful strike to its joint. Then, with a heavy motion, she shoves the shield up, wrenching it around those legs in an effort to limit or skew Septette's ability to maneuver. With such a densely-crafted shield, surely it'll take more than a little effort to maneuver on that ice.

    To that end, she fires her pulse maneuvering rockets -- normally not enough to maneuver over the surface of the ground -- and slides out from between Septette's feet, performing a solid swipe with that hand-axe as she goes. Now it's been charged with a magnetic element, the scientific equivalent of an "earth"-aligned strike, meant to impart more force and to knock Septette, superdense or otherwise, around on the ice, with those legs stuck in the shield!
Septette Arcubielle      As the shield is wrenched around her feet, Septette kicks off of what little purchase on Seft's torso she has, doing another of those uncanny stationary flips to buy her a few fractions of a second before she needs to use her legs again. The vertical spinning motion allows her to lash out with an inaccurate, flailing strike at Seft's lower body now that the shield is gone, and she lands on her right hand a moment later...

     Only for the hand-axe to slam into her wrist, knocking her off balance! A spray of black fluid erupts from her hand as it's subjected to more shear force than it's designed to tolerate, further disrupting her attempts to regain balance, and she crumples to the icy floor on her side with a thunderous crash. Her legs only barely manage to tear themselves free of the shield before impact, but it's not soon enough to catch herself- only to scramble to her feet again, battered and bleeding. "I can't tell if you're planning two moves ahead or just thinking on your feet, but I'm impressed!"

     A gout of diffuse red fire erupts from her left hand, melting the ice on contact and threatening to engulf Seft in flames... but in truth, Septette fully expects her wily adversary to defend against such a plain attack. It's the follow-up an instant later that's more dangerous: she slams her armblade into the ground, electrifying the water, and then vaults off of the embedded sword into a leaping downward strike with her other armblade that attempts to exploit its potential stunning effect!

     "- But all the strategy in the world won't save you if you don't have an endgame! How do you convert your advantages to a win? Even a cornered opponent can force a stalemate if you don't have a plan to close it out!"
Starbound Flotilla     LIGHTNING IN THE WATER! That beautiful ice rink is suddenly gone once again, and Seft is planning this through. Septette will get an answer to her question of whether Seft is analytical or reactive all of a sudden. She's been building a model of Septette's elemental capacities in her head, from the look of it. As that armblade goes down, Seft's brain is RACING.

    Septette has performed ice magic using her legs, and electrical magic using her arms. Fire magic has been performed at all areas of her body. Those three elements match with the three drones. Her body has control systems for these elemental effects. And if she could use electrical magic in her legs, Seft thinks, she would have. Rather, she'd be doing it right now. But she's not done it yet. Maybe something is damaged? Maybe it's a better line of conducting energy directly out of the core? Seft doesn't know, but her quick thinking changes her model fast: Her best electrical magic options come from the armblades. So she can't let that hit the water, at least not without some punishment! She readies a throw with her hand-axe, looking like she's about to attack Septette, and then all of a sudden, when the blade is already moving down too fast for Septette to cancel out of her attack, she lobs it... At the point where the armblade is about to impact the water!

    "Bantering. The point of either is always to ensure the opponent doesn't know... Until it's too late!"

    Once more, it lights up with freezing energies. If Septette doesn't cut her electrical flow, or if the charge is already too built up, it's going to overload into a massive ICE BOMB as the weapon detonates when pierced, just as her battle-axe did before! Even if she manages not to pierce it, the freezing effect is intended to brace the attack in ice, not water!

    But if -- likely when -- Septette takes advantage of a different state, one of being disarmed rather than being stunned, and leaps up into the air, Seft looks for a moment like she's calculating an effort to intercept her, a way to strike back with a heavy ranged assault. She reaches her hand to her matter manipulator, begins to draw out something wooden and gnarled, humming with magical energy... "Reluctant. And...!" She says, starting to try to deliver a witty follow-up.

    Her eyes falter, flickering to an uncertain expression. She shoves the wand back into the Matter Manipulator. Her maneuvering thrusters fire on her armor, blasting her back, but not quickly enough to avoid a shearing, brutal strike down the breastplate, taking advantage of the opening in her shoulder. She makes a buzzing cry of pain as she does, and tumbles off her feet into a roll backwards, then back onto them, skidding. She draws a kite shield and a longer weapon now, a heavy pollaxe, and looks like she's trying to regain her momentum, taking a defensive posture that seems like she'll make defensive thrusting strikes if Septette gets close. Nearly using her "magic" by instinct has thrown her off for a moment.
Septette Arcubielle      Even as she electrifies the water, Septette's eyes lock on that flying hatchet before it even leaves Seft's hand. She's committed the gravest error that anyone can make against the veteran killbot. She's adopted a pattern.

     Every decent Zodiac starts a major boss fight with a full kit rotation: lightning, fire, ice, in no particular order. See which bounces off its defenses, and which affects it most severely. Seft has already used lightning on her initial attack and fire on the embedded axe-head, which only leaves...

     Something peculiar happens to the hatchet mid-flight. The ice magic ought to be working, by all measurements available to Seft- and yet its temperature remains perfectly constant. Septette can't directly unweave or dispel Seft's foreign magic, but she can precisely counter its effects from millisecond to millisecond by heating it with a fire enchantment of her own! To the Glitch's eyes, it might appear as though her spell simply isn't working quickly enough- hopefully baiting her into pouring more and more energy into it!

     She twists her blade in the ground just in time to avoid the axe's impact, and catches it with one prehensile foot instead before it can strike her in the chest- a heavy, crunching impact that draws sparks and black fluid from her talons, but she manages to hold it in an uncannily hand-like fashion with her clawed foot. When she springs towards Seft, her arms bat the noblewoman's defenses down before she brings her foot up as if for a drop-kick and slashes across her chest, embedding the axe in the wound!

     At that precise moment, she changes from a fire enchantment on the axe to a freezing spell- one that, if Seft continues to pour her own freezing magic into the hatchet, should cause a more devastating effect than either of them could have managed on their own! "I see you, Seft. I know you. Show me something new."

     Regardless of whether her spell gambit manages to go off, she'll immediately dash in, trying to deliberately 'impale' the polearm between her hollow ribs to keep Seft from stabbing with it, and attempting to grapple the shield away!
Starbound Flotilla     It wasn't Seft that Septette had to worry about feeding power into that spell of sorts. The hatchet was self-contained! It was handling its own power, and so its rapid overcompensation builds up a tremendous intensity to its cryofield! When it slams into Seft's chest, the vast overcompensation causes it to swiftly burst into a massive frosty impact, slowing and damaging her badly and forcing her to stumble back.

    "Distressed. I'm sorry, Septette. My further options are...!" She starts, before faltering into a strained, distressed series of anxious beeps. She's taken right off her feet by the attempt to grapple her shield away from her, but works now instead to take advantage of Septette's odd choice of positioning. Sure, she can't stab her, but she can abuse PHYSICS! This is a position of tremendous leverage! She lets the shield yank out of her hand, but boosts swiftly on her armor's rockets, launching up with a longer grip on the haft of her weapon. Dense though Septette may be, those thrusters and this leverage just might be able to take her off her feet as Septette performs her twisting leap!

    Another flicker. For a moment, she looks, during that arcing leap, like she's about to draw something from her Matter Manipulator... Lightning crackles around her body, spurting up between the gaps in her armor... And then she decides against it, reluctantly. Instead, she slides down her weapon's shaft into a rocket-boosted drop-kick, trying to pin Septette down, before trying to yank her polearm out into a short grip and assail Septette from a more pinning position.