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Septette Arcubielle      Dense though she may be, Septette is not blessed with a particularly advantageous center of gravity! She's caught in a narrow stance by Seft's spear-leveraging leap and bends back at the waist until her spine is parallel to the ground, bracing herself with one arm behind her back and both feet digging into the ground. "Your further options are what?" Her eyes gleam with a kind of avid intensity as she stares into Seft's visor, as if to devour every detail.

     "But if you think to defeat me without exhausting your options, you're- hah!" Septette raises one open hand in a magical gesture, conjuring a spinning yellow circle around her fingers in preparation for the apparent electrical attack.

     But Seft's hesitation wasn't something she could adequately account for: the insubstantial arcane defense crumbles as her drop-kick passes through it! She barely manages to deflect the kick away from her torso by steering it to the side with her right arm, but the force slams her into the ground regardless.

     The series of close stabs prove surprisingly difficult for her to defend against, despite their relative lack of force. With scant warning of each attack and little room to react, Septette's slower movements hinder her defensive efforts more than they would against sweeping blows. Each piercing strike draws a spray of sparks where it hits her spine or ribs, and a gout of black hydraulic fluid where it gouges her muscles.

     Most opponents might crumple back in pain at an assault like this, or dedicate all their energy to a panicked defense. Septette is not most opponents. Rather than defend herself directly, she bends her legs at unnatural angles to reach around and strike at Seft's back, trying to shove her forward while bringing up one arm-blade in a piercing strike at her chest!
Starbound Flotilla     "Reluctant. They are... Wrong to use..." Seft mutters softly, between one swipe, and a sweeping strike from the next. "Apologetic. I am sorry, Septette... I can't use more--!!" And then there's a sudden buzzing bleep of pain as she's slammed forward, barely evading a fully disabling strike with a sudden twist of her body. A heavy section of breastplate shears off of her armor, as well as a brutal spray of blood-like sparks. Her warbling tones of pain carry on for some time as she's forced to tumble and roll away from the impact, dislodging her from Septette fully.

    A few sputtering rocket boosters manage to fling her to her feet, and she skids back, holding that polearm in a defensive position. "Apologetic. Sept-Septette, I'm sorry. You're... Correct. I won't be able to defeat you like this. The only option I have that might is one I..." Her eye-visor flickers to a shy sort of ._. expression. "Ashamed. It is something I should not do."

    A series of sparks sputter out of the wound in her chest. "Pained. I... Have exhausted most other options. There is little left to learn from me in this fight. If you wish, you could call this one complete..." It looks like Seft's insecurities and anxieties about using psionics are preventing her progression to BOSS STAGE 2. If Septette wants to call it now and kept Seft's anxieties in a safe equilibrium, here's the time. But, if she tries to draw Seft into making a proper psionic display, it might have more strange long-term effects, for good or ill.
Septette Arcubielle      As Septette drags herself to her feet, she's faced with an unexpectedly complex decision. Her expression wavers, from her half-repressed manic glee at pitched combat to one more contemplative and unsure. Black fluids still seep from her wounds- her hydraulic systems seem mostly, though not completely nonfunctional at this point- but she takes a few steps forward after folding away her arm-blades to signify putting the battle on hold.

     "Seft," she says in a quiet and soothing voice, "you've done a good job here, okay? But..." A needle on some cognitive dial trembles, quavering on the razor-thin margin between choices. Pushing her here could lead to something wonderful... or it could damage her delicate psyche further. From a perspective of utility, there's insufficient information to value one choice over the other strongly, even though pushing her could lead to a small benefit in getting to see how she fights. But from a perspective of friendship...

     She can't do it. She can't be responsible for Seft getting hurt. A visible twinge of some indescribable emotion fires across Septette's face as she makes her choice. Feelings shouldn't come before utility. But just this once, maybe she can construe the information she has in a way that leads to justifying this as the correct choice.

     "But you should rest," she concludes, her voice a little warmer- perhaps a little more raw- than it was an instant before. "I think this is something we should talk about in private later, okay? But I want to make sure you're alright, before anything else." Septette glances down at her feet, looking as though she wants to say or do something else, but unsure what...
Starbound Flotilla     Seft almost seems relieved. Her robotic motions are just as artificial as Septette, but they are far more authentically expressive. There is no conscious effort involved in emitting that gentle tone of static that seems like a held breath exhaustedly released in relief. "Relieved. Thank you Septette. I hope it was at least..." Her visor flickers to a more cheerful ^_^ look. "Optimistic. I hope I helped you learn a little more! It was wonderful to get to see you in action like this."

    Septette had been the one to hug the others, and it's likely that Seft would receive the same, but she's far more inclined to go hug Septette of her own accord. There's not a lot of calculation involved in that, but rather, she just can tell there's a lot of conflictedness in herself, and maybe there'd be some in Septette, so no hug would be especially misplaced. "Impressed. I'm going to need to go over the data and make lots of improvements to our armor based on all this. My goodness, you are dangerous."

    She seems relieved and put much more at ease by the assurances. The grip she keeps on her weapon is less defensive now and more like she's clutching it to her in a relaxing way. When she heads back up to the little platform the Starbounders are watching from, she stumbles a little, needing to discard her armor and stow it; the whole thing seems to have been wrecked to the point of near-uselessness! Who knows how she would have managed a second form like that...?

    Moonfin, it seems, has been meditating for much of this. Sitting, legs crossed, on the "pier" of sorts that the Starbound Flotilla have made use of, he's kept two eyes closed and the third eye open, watching the fight. As his turn comes, all three go open. "Ms. Arcubielle." He says. "I trust you remain in sufficient health and functionality to perservere on this gauntlet? I must warn you, I shall not be holding back as Seft did; the ocean offers its harshest tides to even the most respectful sailors."

    "I shall warn you but once. This shall be a duel entirely unlike all others with the Flotilla. If you wish to learn, it shall need to be with utmost care and attention." His legs unfold dramatically, and he leaps, with a stylish flip, down to the base of the pier, before striding forward, one single sheathed katana poking out of his Matter Manipulator. "I am sure you understand."
Septette Arcubielle      She wasn't entirely certain that a hug would've helped soothe Seft's turmoil, but once it's offered to her, Septette eagerly accepts it and wraps her arms around her friend. "'Dangerous' requires a frame of reference," she replies gently, patting her friend on the head. "As far as you need be concerned, I am always perfectly safe." She walks just a little behind Seft on her back to the pier, trying to support the robot when she stumbles, before locking eyes with Moonfin.

     "Your warnings and prefaces hold little weight here," she says in a tone that flirts with being soft and demure, but comes off as more gently teasing. "As long as I am standing, I have strength enough. Show me how you are different- do not merely tell. And rest assured that there is never a moment that I do not study and dissect you." With that, she angles her body in a traditional Western fencing stance, and her eyes flash an ominously bright shade of purple for a split second.

     Far above, two of her drones agitate the branches of a tree and subtly manipulate the breeze with thermal disturbances. Pale pink blossoms drift down in elegant swooping patterns to swish between the two combatants dramatically, and the yggdroid's dark hair flutters and flows in the breeze. Is she... mocking him?!
Starbound Flotilla     Moonfin stares up, first with a sort of clear appreciation, totally enjoying the dramatics of the falling petals. Then, a moment of processing goes on, and his face turns to a frustrated frown. "While the superior aesthetic stylings of the Hylotl are something I am quite enjoying the sight of, I detect a certain aspect of sarcasm to them." He says, dryly. All his right hand's webbed fingers flex in sequence, readying for a motion. The other holds up a gesture dramatically.

    Three raised fingers. "Three." He says. "This match shall be ended in three strikes. No more. Phyiscal properties shall not be the only thing you learn from this. I expect education of technique as well." He takes a deep, calming breath before he says, "I am Haruto, Moonfin of the Hylotl, Starbound captain." His armor appears dramatically over his body, the diving-suit/samurai mix appearing in a bright cyan light. "May your defeat be beautiful." And then in one clean motion unsheathes his sword, holding it in a dramatic neutral stance, angled towards Septette, held at his center in both hands, feet wide and prepared to rush forward. "Begin."

    Approximately three hundred milliseconds after delivering his opening remarks and taking his stance, Moonfin's body begins a gradual forward lean. It's likely that he's going to make an attempt to close the distance in either a small number of steps of dashing, or in a single leap. His upper grip has tightened slightly, indicating that either a short-gripped thrust or a slice from a higher angle will occur. His blade is beginning to charge, though whether its payload will be pure kinetic energy or something more esoteric is not yet known. An unknown field is visibly building around him, though whether it's a shield or something more unusual is similarly yet unknown.

    This motion seems to be continuing as initiated; it'll be about two hundred milliseconds until his movements shift to something that gives Septette more data to work with. She has that time free to begin her initial defensive configurations.
Septette Arcubielle      The notes of formality and severity are not lost on Septette; her expression swiftly becomes uncharacteristically serious and intense. Before the battle is joined, she twists her blade slightly in some unfamiliar movement and adjusts her forward foot, pulling some weight off of it in a subtly defensive distribution.

     Her voice, too, slips into a tone he's never heard from her before: an imperious and harsh mien, with traces of some archaic dialect. It's a tone that feels exquisitely calculated to edge its way under one's skin and lodge itself in memory.

     "You stand before the Emissary of the Deep. You do not know my limits. No man living does."

     With that, she twists her arm-blade just a little further in the air. It reflects the concentrated light of the dozens of floating will-o'-wisps in a calculated convergence, then draws a diagonal line of focused glare across his face, catching two of his eyes in the dazzling brightness. If he lacks countermeasures, that should skew his depth perception- thrusts will be easier to avoid.

     Simultaneously, her right foot comes up- fifty milliseconds later, it slams into the ground, sending up a spray of obscuring dust and dirt between them now that the light has done its work. Then she brings up her arm-blades in a defensive posture, waiting for a blow to ward off, and watching his further movements closely through the drones' sensors...
Starbound Flotilla     One hundred and fifty milliseconds after the gleam hits Moonfin's eyes at three hundred milliseconds into the strike, his helmet goes slightly more opaque at a thought-command. That gives Septette a perfect understanding of his visual reaction time, seeming to be a little below double natural human reaction times. It's too late, of course, but it's informative. By that time, the dust has been up for a hundred miliseconds. Her motions are obscured, to a degree. His forward foot shifts forward, advancing, skidding to a firm stop within twenty five milliseconds using powerful smart-material grip. His spine shifts forward, bending, slipping down over the next fifty milliseconds. Either a heavy forward lunge or a high leap.

    Has full visual efficacy recovered? Will it, before the strike's time comes? Probably not. Full processing of the tactical situation will probably not happen until about five hundred more milliseconds by current estimations. His forward lean isn't stopping, his center of gravity progresses slowly past his forward foot's position... Accelerating. Six hundred milliseconds into the strike, Moonfin has committed to a leap, but only then does his tremendously slower thought process finally finish and relay further commands. An extension of the leg, earlier than the forward dash it might have become before, means he's going to go for a higher arc -- something to give his eyes more precious milliseconds to recover while also moving farther above Septette's traditional defense configurations -- but it'll mean he has to spend a short time with his back to her, in a flip. This also means a tremendous boost to a swing from above.

    On one hand, his effort to improve eyesight might mean he's hoping to land a thrust. On the other, his boost to a downward slash's force might mean a quick shift in tactics. Is the possibility of a slash a bluff? Or is he committed to the thrust? His attack's current trajectory should mean he reaches maximum melee combat range in approximately eight hundred milliseconds at most, so Septette will need to puzzle that out in that time. After the fifty milliseconds involved in his strength-assisted leap, it has now been six hundred and fifty milliseconds of the strike.
Septette Arcubielle      The primary flaw with leaping attacks: they follow clear trajectories that can be seen fractions of a second, or even seconds, in advance. Once one's feet leave the ground, further adjustments are difficult. The Captains have access to micro-thrusters that can alleviate the problem somewhat, but that fundamental error remains: being overly committal against an opponent who can read every tense of a tendon, every flow of motion from one blink to the next.

     "HAVE..."

     Knees bend and artificial muscles flex with what little strength is left in them. Hydraulics are laggy in their damaged state, but they'll have to carry her for now. She sinks to a low stance, then steps towards Moonfin with her left foot, darting forward in the stretched instants left to her as her right hand crackles with arcane energy.

     "AT..."

     The right foot swings in front of the left, translating her forward momentum into a whiplash-inducing pivot that leaves her skidding under the arc of Hoshiko's leap: her heavy frame can't get out of range of his attack in time, but by moving past him within the window of his reaction time, she can force him to strike at a retreating target and bleed momentum from his swing!

     "YOU!"

     Finally, she brings up her right hand, firing a bolt of electricity at his open back. It's not meant to seriously injure, just yet: it's a surface-level shock, designed to light up nociceptive nerves and test his ability to fight through pain!
Starbound Flotilla     Septette bends low. Seven hundred milliseconds. She sweeps ahead. eight hundred milliseconds. Moonfin's reaction means he can only react to her forward sweep at eight hundred and fifty milliseconds into the rush forward, and only gradually process the forward motion. Tiny course corrections try, desperately, to prevent her from bleeding relative velocity from his strike.

    His grip pulls in, as do his legs By nine hundred milliseconds he's committing fully to a particular strike, but the impact locks him in. After the stunning, heavy electrical strike, Septette finds that Moonfin can make no more changes to his attack plan; he can fight through pain, but he can't THINK through it. So all that's left to deal with is the field... It didn't activate! So it must not have been something for projectile defense.

    The blade, as well, has charged fully, emitting uncanny lights in varying wavelengths. It doesn't seem like a familiar element. Septette may not be able to identify precisely what it is... But if she can, she'll realize it's RADIATION! The brilliantly burning space-fire threatens to add an elemental effect, one that can't be drained by the retreat!

    But it seems like Moonfin managed to process Septette's forward momentum just barely before the impact of that electrical strike... When he reveals his hands after the flip, his grip has changed, only slightly foreshadowed by a shifting of the shoulders while he was faced away. It's a flipped grip, and one that leads into a heavy thrust! One meant to catch a limb, or the torso, and while it suffers half the bleed from the forward momentum as the slash might have suffered (on top of having less velocity to start with), the improvised, improved grip is meant to turn her own momentum into a shearing slash-of-sorts, extra damage against any section of her body that's unlucky enough to not be able to shift away from an inertia-powered impact against the lower horizontal velocity.

    The strike itself takes another two hundred milliseconds. One thousand and a hundred milliseconds into the strike, Moonfin's made his move. There might be time, albeit only barely, to strike him physically amid his landing from the leap; otherwise, he'll slam into the ground, tumble in a way that somehow manages to be elegant, rocket-boost back onto his feet, and skid to a stop in a dramatic post-swipe motion, facing Septette!
Septette Arcubielle      The moment that Hoshiko's sword blazes with strange colors, Septette's age-dimmed technological sensors light up with a slew of alerts. It doesn't make sense- Moonfin's intelligent, and doubtless has an unhealthy collection of katanas with other elements at his disposal. Why choose an element singularly ineffective against nonliving opponents? Unless...

     In the milliseconds before his strike hits, Septette's eyes blaze with her rapid analysis. Radioactive decay is easy for technological sensors to lock onto. Its emissions travel at the speed of light, and unlike thermal detection, Septette has demonstrated no means of magically manipulating it. Conclusion: the odds that Moonfin intends to use it to acquire a lasting target lock on her are exceedingly high.

     It's better to give him a crutch and take it away at a crucial moment than never to let him have it at all. It's likely that she could take the slice on a limb instead of her torso if she tried to block it, but instead, Septette subtly maneuvers her body around the blade to let it find a way between her 'ribs'! The katana strikes her glowing core, deflecting off of it with a 'ping' like a tuning fork without visible damage, but giving Moonfin a perfect center-of-mass lock-on.

     As he lands, she makes a nominal attempt at harming him, firing off a single sharp icicle at the small of his back during the tumble- unlikely to fully pierce his armor, but just enough to keep him from thinking too hard about what just happened. She seems uncharacteristically patient here compared to her aggressive tactics with the other Flotilla members.

     Hoshiko is forced into the role a 'zoning' fighter against her, she realizes: he'll get snapped like a twig if he comes within grappling distance, but he has no offensive options at a distance. Waiting for him to come to her is just as effective, and may teach her more about his tactics! So instead, she paces in a large circle around him, sizing up his stance while redirecting her core's energy for a moment.

     There are old systems in the Yggdroid's body that no longer see use, lying dormant in their nigh-irreparable states for years. But every so often, she finds a creative use for their dysfunctions. Her core begins to energize cylindrical capacitors set in her right shoulder, producing a subtle green glow, but no sensor distortions just yet. When overloaded, they'll coat the area in a thin layer of radioactive dust!

     "Three strikes," she intones with a vaguely smug expression. Better not to let him know she's caught on to his canny tactics! "You're off to an inauspicious start, Moonfin. Though I suppose you never claimed it'd end in your favor."
Starbound Flotilla     Moonfin points his sword dramatically at Septette, matching her pacing with his own. "Sixth Sea Hylotl Style: Blood Spilled Unto Waves." He says, with a haughty air. "The battle shall now be ended in two strikes. Blood draws sharks, Ms. Arcubielle. Such is the beauty of nature. Wounds beget wounds. While the Hylotl prize peace and balance above all else, we have learned to become sharks when it is necessary."

    His sword flicks from an impractical point to a dramatic offensive posture. "You will learn much of how we work. How we have done what we have done, even in absence of the strength such as yours. If you truly believe it inauspicious, then you have simply not understood the nuance of my first verses." Yes, he doesn't realize yet that she knows. "Perhaps, in a moment, you shall understand more. This shall be the second strike, Septette. Prepare yourself." His thrusters configure dramatically, running self-diagnostics with dramatic pulses of thrust.

    "Sixth Sea Hylotl Style: The Shiver and the Spine."

    Zero milliseconds. He's beginning a forward lean again. Fifty milliseconds. He's raising his forward food, but with higher velocity this time. A hundred milliseconds. By most standard models of motion, he's likely to dash rather than leap. A hundred and fifty milliseconds. His lower grip is tighter this time, and his primary hand is on the lower section of the hilt. A slash, but with far more force and flexibility of direction this time. His helm has gone opaque, preventing abuse of his vision this time, unless Septette can do something more strange.

    Two hundred milliseconds. Microthrusters at his waist and shoulders are aligning for a forward rush. The armor field is being maintained, but the sword's charging lacks that same psionic field; either he's trying to fake Septette out, or he won't be using anything but a purely powered kinetic slicing strike. It'll be another few hundred milliseconds before he shows his hand and gives off another tell.
Septette Arcubielle      Negative seventy-three hundred milliseconds. "Yet there are those who do not bleed and never fall. Etch your lessons in steel, not wind, if you wish them to be remembered." Septette's gaze narrows and sharpens, carving dramatic trails of purple light through the dust in the air.

     Fifty milliseconds. A strange, subtle shiver works its way through her body, accompanied by a few more droplets of black hydraulic fluid: motor systems check themselves, testing how much life is left in her leaden limbs. She seems to judge it enough. Septette's stance opens up, holding her arm-blades 'cocked back' in preparation for scything strikes instead of kept close for defense. Two more pink petals flutter between the combatants, a delicate slow-motion waltz.

     One hundred and fifty milliseconds. The visor turning opaque is all the confirmation she needs: he's running on sensors now, likely aided by the radiation tracer, instead of raw visuals. The capacitors in her shoulder glow more brightly as their arcane crystals charge up beyond their original safe limits, but still emit no radiation.

     Two hundred milliseconds. She pulls into a narrow stance, better suited for short-term mobility over stability, and leans onto her front foot. A small magical circle flickers to life around her left hand's fingertips- it can't stop him from following through with his plan, but perhaps it can keep him from improvising again once his sensor lock is taken away. All the rest will have to be done on reaction...
Starbound Flotilla     Two hundred and fifty milliseconds. Moonfin's back foot has left the ground. There is something very slightly off about the spacing of his gait. His footfalls are not going to land in a way that is precisely in line with an approach at this range. Microthrusters at his ankle force extra acceleration. At this rate, this strike will reach maximum melee combat range at nine hundred milliseconds. His spine angles down. A low strike? A strike sweeping up from below? A feint into a thrust? Anything's possible. The visible field charging up around him seems to be intensifying again, but the function remains unknown. His grip is beginning to shift the blade towards a backhand strike -- one from his left, sweeping to the right -- and it looks like he's fully committing to it.

    Four hundred milliseconds. His front foot impacts the ground. The ground seems to very slightly warp and shift under his feet, almost seeming like it's in motion, though that may be a visual warping. Is the field something visual? There's no clarity about whether it's designed to be triggered or designed to be activated, but some passive effects are leaking through. None on Moonfin himself, only a small amount on the environment around him.

    Five hundred milliseconds. He's going to begin his strike soon. If Septette has any preparations to make based on these tells, she'll need to make them now. Microthrusters at the shoulders are already reorienting to a configuration meant to boost the slashing acceleration. Here he comes...
Septette Arcubielle      Two hundred and fifty milliseconds. The strangely misaligned movements don't escape Septette's notice- Moonfin may be prideful, but he's also incredibly dedicated, and extremely unlikely to make such an elementary error. That field around him must be the key- it's not a mere affectation, certainly, and Moonfin is far too elegant and refined to display something like that and never use it. It's not for enhancing his melee attacks or for defense, or he'd have activated it on the first exchange. That likely leaves mobility, or an independent means of attack!

     Four hundred milliseconds. The warped ground around Moonfin's feet seem to confirm her suspicions- it's for granting a sudden burst of mobility. Almost certainly a blink teleport, if she understands his personal style! Its destination is unknown, but it's likely to be somewhere within melee range. Her spine tenses and twists, coiling clockwise like a spring. Sparks of actinic light coruscate from her shoulder, though she's still holding the defense in reserve for this instant...

     Five hundred milliseconds. Drones adjust their fields of view to allow for 360-degree awareness of an area around Septette roughly twenty feet in diameter. The magical effect on her left hand triggers, sending electricity up her left arm, across her shoulders, and into her right arm-blade before leaping towards Moonfin in an attempt at throwing his concentration.

     Then, as soon as she's too close to the dedicated strike for Moonfin's observed reaction time to compensate, three points of sickly, shifting light explode from her right shoulder. An instant later, a sound like a whip-crack echoes through the arena as plumes of choking orange dust erupt from the ruined capacitors, channeled by her electromagnetic manipulations into an evenly-distributed smokescreen. The dust is fine and thin as to not seriously obscure optical visibility, but it's radioactive enough to functionally obscure the trace left on her core!

     The moment that it goes off, she crouches to leap several feet into the air- sidestepping might carry her into his new post-teleport location, she reasons, and ducking might not carry her under a low swipe.
Starbound Flotilla     And there it is. Locking onto the radiological signature planted on Septette, Moonfin's intent was to perform a precision short-range teleport, sweeping in close from an angle she's not ready to strike from. Six hundred and fifty milliseconds into things, his posture becomes... Smug. At the moment he begins to commit to the strike, pulling it low and sweeping it towards the ground, the blast of scrambling EM interference goes off.

    His foot comes down. Septette has one hundred and fifty milliseconds remaining until he processes the shifted tactical situation and intuitively re-engages his visual systems. His teleportation goes off based on Septette's last known position, and he flickers in one millisecond to the next from in front of Septette to just behind her... Though at a lightly scattered, imperfect distance, his accuracy thrown off by the jamming. "The Shiver and the Spine", he'd said; it seems the latter part was more literal. His swing is halfway through when he processes the situation and adjusts his visor, and that sets the counter on his next processing. One hundred and fifty milliseconds again.

    Eight hundred milliseconds into the attack. Septette now has to deal with his slash. Can she evade or block the upper half of the rising left-to-right slice? The sword gleams with heavy kinetic charge. As the attack reaches nine hundred and fifty milliseconds, she might see the microthrusters in his heel orienting, see the other foot start coming down to push off... He's definitely intuitively going for a rising, jumping slash, with options for a mid-air interception.
Septette Arcubielle      Six hundred milliseconds. Septette's leap shatters the ground, sending spiderwebbing cracks coursing through the cobblestones in slow motion, and dramatically scatters the eddies of radioactive fog to create a small eye of clarity. Her spine ratchets to its point of maximum tension- click, click, click- until she looks over her own shoulder at Moonfin, like an owl staring down its prey, like a serpent writhing to bite the hand that holds it.

     Six hundred fifty milliseconds, one hundred milliseconds of blindness remaining. Eleven seconds into the duel. She makes her first attempt at seriously harming him: a jagged, razor-sharp shard of ice materializes in front of her unnaturally-contorted right arm, firing off at where she anticipates he'll be in a fifth of one second. If his trajectory proceeds as anticipated, and he doesn't react in time, it could pierce his visor!

     Eight hundred milliseconds. Sight again restored to the blind. He's committing to another leap mid-slash- another mistake. Too inflexible to abort the attack when it should've become clear he's walking into a trap. Septette's left foot stretches out to interpose itself between his blade and her spine, but her upper body bends at the waist to angle towards him and violently unwinds counter-clockwise as she snaps her blades into position.

     It's still possible for him to land that strike, if he commits to it- but without the benefits of surprise or range, he'll need to leap straight into that whirling blender to do so!
Starbound Flotilla     Something uncanny happens.

    The blade in Moonfin's hand moves almost as if of its own accord. The very moment that the ice is slipping his way, far before Moonfin's own reaction time of one hundred and fifty milliseconds could allow for action, the blade -- not Moonfin's hands -- shifts. The weapon's limited computational power reveals that it is entirely dedicated to one thing only: Dramatic blocking of projectiles using his blade! The grip with which he rises in that ascending cut suddenly shortens to force the blade between his visor and the incoming ice. So THAT'S how he blocks bullets! His swords are designed to detect incoming fire and automatically adjust to prevent damage!

    He can't go for the back this time, but he's still going to strike. Rather, he can't think tactically fast enough to NOT commit to it, only hope that his many and varied contingencies are going off as they are now. The blade swings up with a dramatic, strength-boosted, rocket-powered strike, intending to slam with unspeakable kinetic force into the leg, and shear ruthlessly along it, as well as any other parts of Septette that it can get dragged along in passing.

    His microthrusters accelerate his ascent constantly, as long as their capacitors can manage. It's likely to be a brutal hit, but so, in turn, will Septette's counterattack. He's slippery and fast enough that it's less likely that a grapple will work, but those blades aren't just for show.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette's eyes widen as his sword deflects the icicle, soaking up every detail of the parry and trying to reverse-engineer the algorithm it uses to determine what path to take! This defense itself gives her an 'in', even if Moonfin doesn't realize it- the contingency must be unthinking and uncontrolled, if it can trigger without his reaction or consent, and forcing it to respond to a minor threat could allow her to strike with a greater one unchallenged!

     Moonfin's katana slams into her leg, scraping along the exoskeletal plates like a butcher's knife scratching bone. It doesn't merely pierce her hydraulic tubing- the kinetically-boosted attack shears it off in a dramatic shower of sparks and black droplets as it slides up her shin. Despite the awful damage it steadily inflicts as it works her way up her leg in milliseconds, she seems in no particular hurry to block it- it's within anticipated damage for Moonfin's 'phase', and her hydraulic systems are half-dead anyway!

     Her upper body violently unwinds counter-clockwise, lending her sweeping strikes even greater strength than their momentum and acceleration would normally allow. As Moonfin's rising cut strikes her knee, she carves a clear vacuum trail through the orange air with her left arm-blade to lash out at his chest from left to right. A rattling implosion follows her blade's lethal arc, and a second pursues her right blade, coming down on his left shoulder in an overhead swing!

     Finally, Moonfin's katana shears over her hip, rattles along her bare spine in staccato pulses of sparks on each vertebra, and clangs against its first solid opposition in her ribcage. The enormous kinetic impact launches her a few inches higher into the air, yet even that isn't sufficient to crack the rib itself- not that it did her much good in shielding her more delicate components.

     A fraction of a second later, a diagonal splatter of sizzling black fluid strikes the back wall of the arena in a magnified trace of Moonfin's swing. Hydraulic systems are, finally, down.
Starbound Flotilla     The strike against Moonfin doesn't go without effect. The microthrusters in his armor immediately orient, trying to shove him a bit out of the way, but they can barely get accelerating when the blade comes around to slam into his shoulder.

    In Septette's slow-motion perception, she can see every inch of damage. It shears through the outer layer, damaging all sorts of esoteric emitters. It saws into the left shoulder microthruster, which explodes amid its thrusting with a small but painful pop. It gashes through a layer of outer armor, spreading a powerful payload of kinetic damage through Moonfin's flesh. It saws through at least three layers, and then the underarmor layer, and then into flesh, before catching on a lattice designed to keep wounds managably shallow even as it saws along his body.

    Dozens of milliseconds after the impact, medical systems are already flooding the heavy wound. The impact does a little more to stop any further attacks, though, by slamming into him hard enough to send him into a spin. As he passes past her, Septette will have no worries from a return attack. Remaining microthrusters try as much as they can to arrest the spin, and he slams into the ground, center of gravity low and down, spread out into a more defensive position.

    His blood, sprayed in an elegant spiral, crosses over Septette's spray of hydraulic fluid twice. He plants his sword in the stone of the arena long enough to clutch at the wound on his off-side. "Ghhhhh..." He says, in reflexive pain, unable to suppress the noise of it. He's definitely lost access to full strength at his left side, far too much to depend on it for the final strike.

    He pulls his sword out of the stone, charging it with wind elemental energy, then flicks it dramatically to clear any remaining radioactive dust, and points it dramatically at Septette. "You saw through it." He says, in a pleased tone. "Do you understand now, the artistry of the Hylotl on the battlefield?" No compliment to her attack, but she probably doesn't need one from the arrogant son of a bitch. The way his armor PAINFULLY floods the wound with medical care to keep him capable of delivering on that third strike is probably enough. VERY painful.
Septette Arcubielle      As she twists through the air, Septette's blades flare red to cook Moonfin's blood off in a spray of steam. She lands awkwardly on one foot and one hand, then shudders as her body subtly rearranges itself. As the hydraulics finally shut down, red crystals shine through slats in her armor near her core and in each limb, emitting a soft electric whine. ELECTROTHAUMIC SYSTEMS have been engaged- her next-to-last line of defense!

     Slowly, with an almost agonizing hesitation, Septette tests her limbs' functionality. It's clearly been too long since she's had to resort to this system! But despite her unsteadiness, she seems every bit as bellicose as before, pulling herself up into a shaky and slightly hunched posture and staring through Moonfin with her flickering eyes.

     "I understand enough," she says coolly. Discipline. Structure. Contingency. You think you know each stroke you'll make. You think you know how this ends. I know better. I will show you."

     For three-quarters of a second, she walks forward while speaking, limping on one foot as crystals sputter and strain to meet the demands of her bleeding body. Arcane energy subtly gathers in her hands, but she takes care to mask their azure glow. 760 milliseconds later, she reaches the maximum range she can cover in under 150 milliseconds.

     Just within his reaction window, the act drops. Crystalline motors spring to vibrant life as she raises her hands, firing off a pair of icicles simultaneously- one at his face, the second at his thigh at a slightly slower velocity, goading the parrying algorithm into bringing his katana low. Then she breaks across the open ground at a blinding sprint, bringing up one arm-blade in a reverse 'grip'. Milliseconds after the second icicle enters his low parry range, she twists to convert her forward momentum into a concussing strike aimed at his head!
Starbound Flotilla     "There is one thing you have missed." Moonfin replies as Septette walks and talks. He shifts into a defensive posture, more for the dramatics than it is for the real practicality, but it's a good decision either way. As she suddenly takes advantage of his pre-programmed defensive systems, she's going to run into something unusual. Something dangerous. The ice is blocked -- one shard at the face, one at the thigh -- and the strike slings towards his head.

    It's 149 milliseconds as the blade closes in on a vicious, brutal melee concussion, promising to shatter his helm cleanly and stun the man, taking him out amid his speech. But something changes the moment Septette's reverse-blade strike reaches the space inches beyond the helm. A wavering in the air, like a mirage. But no, it's a wavering... In the space itself, she can see it in her blade

    "Elegance."

    The problem with this tactic is that Septette has banked on having fully solved things -- as often she is wont to do -- without having fully resolved every tactical aspect. And so, by pushing her luck to precisely Moonfin's reaction time, she takes a tremendous risk. It pays off, but at what price?

    The helm begins to shatter. By that time Moonfin's keenly tuned instincts already devised a counterattack, but it would be too late to deploy. The operative word being "would", though. The flat of the blade streaks through the helm, beginning to create a disorienting concussing effect...

    And then suddenly, Moonfin's gone. Another flicker. He manually activated that field before, certainly, but his projectile counter implied a similar contingency for melee... And THAT was his melee counter! Before the trauma of the strike can impart more than half of its acceleration he's gone. And THIS time, he has a clean fix on her radiological tag! And a full one hundred and fifty seconds to calculate his strike!

    He is behind her again. Swinging low and from the side with enough rocket-powered force to shatter his own sword on her torso. But at this scale, trauma of the strike spreads through his body on neurological pathways at the speed of reflex itself. His single strike is, in that sense, queued; it's a contingency devised by an un-concussed brain and set in motion before the damage could be properly applied.

    At that level of kinetic impact, he's going to fall over dazed after landing -- perhaps failing -- the strike. But he is a samurai. When he does, it'll be after an elegant, dramatic moment of post-strike mystery to his state.
Septette Arcubielle      The same millisecond that the teleport activates, Septette is already reacting to it.

     It's not fast enough.

     Insufficient time to duck, to parry, to pre-emptively attack. Her mind is quicksilver now, racing through every possibility, but her body is still agonizingly leaden. The milliseconds stretch out into painful minutes as she considers her options, yet no matter how quickly her thoughts move, that blade still whistles through the air imperceptibly closer with every new possibility she considers, like a vise that grows tighter the longer one tries to writhe out.

     Fine. There's no clean solution. 'Good enough' will have to do.

     Ten milliseconds. Her spine starts to bend to the right, away from the incoming blade- not enough to pull her under its horizontal arc, but enough to ensure it strikes a slanted surface instead of a flat one. The katana's edge strikes one of her dark metal vertebrae, emitting a spray of sparks as it grinds up the inclined cylinder. Minute movements and twitches in Septette's body ensure that it 'skips' over the gaps instead of ever forcing its way between them.

     Fifty milliseconds. Septette starts to twist her upper body counter-clockwise, turning it around to face Moonfin even as she continues her sideways lean. Her left hand braces against the ground as she goes almost parallel, as if trying to limbo under a bar. The blade skims along her spine faster now, meeting less resistance on the shallower incline, and shearing off crystalline assemblages close to her core...

     Ninety milliseconds. She's fully facing towards Moonfin, upper body parallel to the ground. Her ribs open like a blossoming flower, like the jaws of a flytrap, to allow the blade to slip through her open midline. The blade carves a gruesome path through the open 'organs' of her chest, splitting cables and cracking crystals... and then it hits her core and simply shatters, silvery shards of shrapnel tearing through her open ribcage and embedding in any soft targets they find.

     One hundred and thirty milliseconds. Her left hand and left foot bear the majority of her weight, holding her in a strange arc over the ground as if she were in the middle of a cartwheel. Her right hand comes up as her spine continues to twist, balled into a fist... and slams into Moonfin's chestplate directly over his open wound, imparting enough kinetic energy to launch him off his feet if the blow to the head didn't finish the job.
Starbound Flotilla     CRONCH.

    Is the sort of sound that a Durasteel chestplate makes when you punch through it. The stress distributes over the whole structure, preventing severe damage to Moonfin within, but the weakened, damaged shoulder section forces stress to concentrate in certain areas, where the armor splits and shatters. Moonfin's well and truly off his feet. He pokes his head up briefly, brandishing the shattered chunk of sword. "Nnnnnnhhhhh..." He groans. "Sixth Sea... Sixth... Ah, confound it." He mutters, then drops his head limply.

    "The inelegance of your style is..." He speaks only with the absolute most grudging tone. "...Beyond my ability to defeat, in just this arena. Your swiftness of thought breeds a chaos of motion. One far beyond the rate of even my reflexes. Hhhhhh..."

    "An educational duel, I am sure. Has the rate of your thought allowed for a lesson to be learned from this duel, Ms. Arcubielle? Most would learn little, but you seemed to see through much of it." He says. George has recovered enough to hop down from that little pier and recover Moonfin, helping prop him up on one shoulder.

    It's not even Biteblade's turn just yet and she's already running down from the pier. She's probably going to give Septette pre-fight hugs.
Septette Arcubielle      It takes a surprisingly long time, compared to the frenetic pace of the duel seconds earlier, for Septette to stand up straight again. Angry red crystals sputter and hum as she scrapes her hands along her frame, miming dusting herself off while covertly re-checking motor functions for additional damage. The electrothaumic motors seem starved of power by the damage to her thoracic components, but just manage to keep her moving anyway.

     "I learned everything you were willing to teach me," she replies, her voice slowly losing the last tinges of that peculiarly memorable affect and slipping into a more comfortable tone. "Thank you for the demonstration, Moonfin Hoshiko. As the saying goes, lessons carved in iron are rarely forgotten." She inclines her head to him respectfully, and a swirling breeze stirs the fallen pink petals one more time, spiraling dramatically around her leg before falling to the floor once more.

     Then... Biteblade. Septette affects not noticing the approaching Floran until she's practically upon her, making an expression of gleeful surprise as she closes in and opening her arms for the hug! But even as she does, a piece of dislodged armor in her left forearm subtly smolders with heat, and she holds it in such a way that it could be fired as a projectile if Bitey tries anything funny during the pre-fight embrace!

     "C'mere, stabby friend," she enthuses warmly. Septette isn't going to try anything funny if the floran doesn't- but it's hard to tell exactly where affection ends and violence starts with Biteblade, and she fully intends to reciprocate with whichever she's met with.
Starbound Flotilla     "Ssskeleton friiiieeeeend!" Biteblade calls out, going into a tackle-hug! In spite of the radiation-tagging. Her durasteel armor must help here! Doing that against such a dense target is so strange. She really was just here to hug, it looks like! "Ssstill wanna fight? Keep going?" Moonfin groans, on his way out, but it's easy enough for he and George to get him up the ladder to the observation platform. But Biteblade -- in her pristine scrap-armor -- seems to want to make sure Septette feels ready.

    "Be ready! Yeah yeah! Floran isss greatesst of Flotilla! Ssstrongest hunter! Biggessst ssstab! Ssskeleton friend, really ready?" Biteblade seems... Actually quite hopeful and eager about this. "Floran can wait, but wanna fight! Wanna fight! Ssskeleton friend, fight movesss ssso cool!! Floran wantsss to try fight!" She pulls out of the hug and makes eager motions with her arms tucked up at her sides.

    Seemingly hoping it'll all work out, she's already deploying some kind of vehicle out of her Matter Manipulator to start this all out. It looks like a human-design industrial control cockpit welded into place between some kind of Apex tank -- similar to Albert's design, but far more menacing in its colors and angles -- and a heavy Avian flight vehicle apparatus, with a half-dozen Hylotl shield emitters slapped on for good measure, and a dozen knight's worth of "medieval"-looking plate armor slammed over gaps.

    There's a subtle hint already: This is gonna be one of /those/ bossfights. A final exam of sorts, though Septette might not quite see all of that fact just yet. Biteblade's specialty is scavenging, but her more hidden function among the Flotilla is something that has an unspoken acknowledgement among all of them: She is the one who can connect every specialty they have into a seamless whole, in both design and in practice. Fighting her will be like fighting every other Flotilla-member at once. She's their jack of all trades, their red mage, their war hybrid, their renaissance plant.

    "Yooo, Bonesy?" George calls out from the observation platform. "This one, uh. Just, no shame if you gotta back off during this one, 'kay?" The other beaten Starbounders look sheepish. "Five outta six is still good, y'know, so if you gotta call this one, call it." The other members of the Flotilla seem to well-recall their sparring with each other that determined Biteblade was far and away the strongest of them.
Septette Arcubielle      The flechette-like piece of shrapnel in Septette's arm cools back down as she eagerly accepts the hug, tousling Biteblade's hair a bit in the embrace before pulling back and grinning. "Well, I can't promise that I'll win- but I'm certainly ready to put up a good fight, Biteblade. I'm looking forward to seeing you in action, too!" Her body tells a different story- stuttering, shaky, still bleeding a slow trickle of hydraulic fluid that leaves a black handprint on the floran's shoulderblade. Geez.

     Her attention drifts up to George on the pier, though she keeps one eye on that strange craft Biteblade's deploying, assessing it for any obvious-seeming weak points or weapon ports. "Squishy, you ought to know by now- these fights, they're not about parity or even footing. They're about feeling each other out, right? Determining limits. And, hey, everybody's got their limits. It's just..." A terrible, mischievous look crosses her face as she raises one hand into the air. "Nobody's found mine."

     With that, the curved blade unfolds from her forearm and glows along its back edge. She nods to Biteblade, signaling 'ready'- but instead of attacking, she manifests a white-hot explosion of plasma behind the blade, accelerating its overhead swing to even greater velocities than she could manage on physical strength alone. It slams into the earth at the center of the arena with a jarring seismic impact...

          And the earth yields.

     The entire floor of the arena caves in around that focal point, crumbling into chunks of cobblestone and dirt that freefall into a yawning stone abyss. Reddish-orange light pours up from below, silhouetting the freefalling arena in a hellish glow. Within milliseconds, Septette hooks her blade into the central chunk of stone, using the piton to flip onto its underside and shield herself from Biteblade's retaliation!

     But if the shadow flitting through the underglow is any indication, she isn't staying still- instead, she's leaping off the undersides of the falling pieces of earth, trying to beat terminal velocity to make it to the bottom first! Whatever waits down there, she's in a hurry to reach it before Biteblade does...
Starbound Flotilla     A few weapon hardpoints. A heavy railgun mounted at the top. A couple turrets on the sides. A big human-made rocket launcher welded to the back. Plenty of densewood spikes and scavenged Glitch pikes stuck to it. But no convenient weakpoints in the traditional sense, or at the very least the weakpoints aren't immediately obvious.

    Biteblade puffs up a cheek with a bit of worry. "Floran wanna help fix later. You let." She says, in a tone that manages to be almost /pouty/. She took off while Septette talked to George, readying up, strapping into the cockpit and closing up. Lights hum and spark to life on the scrapcraft, and soon enough exhaust ports are blazing with the fires of excess power. The thing moves like a monster truck as it maneuvers into a starting position...

    And then the whole thing gives out from under them. The observation pier's hoverpoints mean that it can descend safely and keep watching, but Biteblade has no such luck as it gives out! That flight apparatus isn't online yet, but Biteblade doesn't mind. What few thrusters she has for maneuvering will be enough. It's time for a DRAMATIC DESCENT! "Woah woah woaaaaahhhh!! Floor isss going?!" She calls out. "Hahaha, woah! Ssskeleton friend hasss good trap! Yesssss! GO!!"

    Her heavy railguin whips around hard, pointing... Straight up? And begins to chanrge. The turrets at the side spray and spray and spray, saturating the descent path with another bullet-hell-like array of energy shots. They can't out-accelerate Septette, at least not just at the start, but they can try to make it hellish to dodge around the projectiles and escape the range of those big guns! Maneuvering thrusters fire hard, bracing against some kind of upcoming force, and then...

    The railgun fires, and the MASSIVE recoil shocks through the tank. And Biteblade's tank accelerates down, crashing hard through debris. "Wheeeeeeee!" Biteblade calls out. "Ssskeleton friend, not going to get away from Floraaaaaan!" She's trying to just ram through the debris and crash straight into Septette while firing those turrets at point-blank!!

    TACTIC MIX: ALBERT AND PAVO
Septette Arcubielle      By the time Biteblade's horrid amalgamation of a tank crashes through the falling debris, Septette has already outrun the most aerodynamic shards and begun sprinting straight down along the dark granite walls. This isn't just a random sinkhole- this is a volcanic vent! The initial bullet-hell turret shots seem mostly ineffective against her, and some are even turned back on Biteblade with clever bladework or magical reflectors- but when Biteblade closes in, the turrets' fire becomes too dense!

     The concentrated turret fire rakes her sides, drawing a shower of magical actinic sparks as she struggles to parry it all. She sees each incoming bullet in excruciating clarity, but that doesn't help her move quickly enough to defend herself! But rather than allowing the heavy craft to slam her into a wall, Septette breaks away into freefall fractions of a second before impact, twisting upside-down to kick off of the ship itself and steal some of its downward momentum for her own!

     As she takes the lead in the race to the bottom, their destination rapidly comes into view: an 'island' of dark stone floating in a sea of magma, engraved with geometric circles on its surface and carrying some kind of red boulder in the very center, bound with taut chains that radiate to the island's edges. Septette falls right past the edge of the island, plunging into the sea of magma and disappearing from view- but as she does so, she severs one of the heavy chains' links, forcing the whole assemblage to unravel like the ribbon on a birthday present.

     A second later, the twenty-foot-tall 'boulder' shifts and writhes- then lets out a horrid, bone-shaking shriek of inarticulate rage. It uncurls into some kind of bipedal drake, solid red eyes filled with rabid fury despite the deep, fresh gashes on its body- it seems like this thing took quite a thrashing to restrain in the first place! But even with those gaping wounds, its hide- its skin- looks entrancing, each scale like a glossy jewel. It must be some kind of natural adaptation against the heat of this place, but that doesn't make it any less gorgeous.

     The drake lunges towards Biteblade's tank- more because it's the closest moving thing, and less out of any specific animosity- and seizes it in its heavy forelimbs, trying to drag the vehicle towards the center of the island. As it does so, its beak-like jaws open wide, and an ominous white-hot glow shines up from the back of its throat... this thing won't be easy to ignore, though it seems to already be on its last legs!
Starbound Flotilla     Perfect Parry on those bullets does work wonders, though they ping hard off of that armor, flaking plates away like falling stars and bumping Biteblade's tank around. When Septette slips through the opening at the top of the chamber, Biteblade pursues with far more of a slam, firing the booted-up Avian flight apparatus enough to avoid crushing her tank against the ground. "Yaaaaaaaahhhhh!"

    The heated air would be a problem for Biteblade, but the cockpit's environmentally sealed, and her armor is highly resistant to environmental effects to boot! With a shout of joy, she calls out, "PREEEEEEEEEEEEEEYYYYYYYYYYY!!!" And surges forward as the creature grips her tank. Exploiting the creature's grasp and tug, she builds some speed, 'going with the flow' in a dramatic way, exploiting the tank's layers of hull to survive the crushing impact. But as she draws in, her rockets boost, and she leaps high!

    It's a bipedal creature, and one based on reptile structure to boot, so it shoult have a tougher time attacking a target above, and be far less stable against impulses that force it back rotationally! Biteblade intends to slam it into its back! When she lands, she whirls the railgun around, and fires a heavy slug straight for the base of the creature's spine, a true hunter's maneuver designed to take the prey out hard and fast. The way she might grapple a monster and jam a knife into its neck, and every bit as swift and ruthless.

    TACTIC MIX: ALBERT AND GEORGE
Septette Arcubielle      Biteblade's tank slams into the dragon's chest on its initial grapple, catching the beast off-guard and 'winding' it- instead of a plume of armor-cutting plasma, it manages a weaker flamethrower-like cough that sprays along the exterior of the chimeric vehicle without concentrating on a specific point. Her upwards acceleration tears the craft out of its grasp, and it looks up just in time for the vehicle to slam into it from above, pinning it on its back in the center of the island with an unpleasant crunch of bones.

     It does still have some fight left in it even then- this is an Etrian monster, after all!- and lets out another bloodcurdling shriek, one that's only cut short by the railgun slug tearing through its spinal cord. The sound abruptly dies as flecks of blood paint Biteblade's hull, in a dramatic display of her triumphant power. But as the beast begins to dissolve into what resembles liquid light, she might recall Septette's careless remarks, scattered across weeks or months...

          "Dragons are just condensed magical pollution."

          "Zodiac spells are typically prepared ahead of time."

          "They're efficient because they draw on power outside the user."

     The geometric patterns on the island's surface light up with arcane energy as the beast dissolves- a sacrificial lion she's been ever so kind to slay directly on its appointed altar. In the coming milliseconds, the slain monster's magical energy flows into the magical circle, which crackles and coruscates with building power before erupting into a searing column of white-hot fire that blackens the roof of the original arena far above. There's just enough warning for Biteblade to make it- at least mostly- out of the way, if she can connect the dots!

     Seconds after the eruption, the lava in the chamber begins to drain into some kind of viscous whirlpool, and the island breaks apart into shards that circle the eye. Far below, Septette is visible through the falling lava, heading still deeper into the caverns- she looks back up to give a wave to Biteblade before condensing a piece of obsidian from a falling stream and riding it down.

     It was calculated like this from the start, wasn't it? A grand, wounded beast she'd find it almost impossible not to hunt, right in its own little boss arena. The intended message is unmistakable- Biteblade may be the pursuer here, but she is no less the hunted.
Starbound Flotilla     "JESUS SHIT!" George cries out as a blinding colum of light shears off a segment of the descending observation platform that has eagerly followed the pair on their dramatic, heated descent. It rocks away and keeps a little more of a distance.

    The rush of lava slams through the cracks in the island, slagging segments of armor, and overheating treats dramatically. It's seventy -- SEVENTY -- milliseconds of reflex before Biteblade has launched the maneuver, twisting into a leap. The flight apparatus kicks into gear and launches up hard. "Aaaaaaaahhhh!!" Biteblade calls out. "Hot hot hot! Prey explodesss!" She yanks hard on controls and shoves away from the massive pillar but not fast enough to pull away from the explosion just under her. Whirling into a dramatic barrel roll, her reflexes shine through as fast as possibl. With a heavy shout, she stabilizes her machine as best she can and surges down hard. As the whole lake begins to drain... She'll pursue Septette! With a brash lack of caution!!

    Rushing hard through or around the falling mass of stone, obsidian, and molten rock, she follows Septette down, re-engaging her descent! This time, though, she doesn't let Septette do that perfect parrying. This time, she begins to fire rapid, less charged slugs out of that heavy railgun, and barrage her with swift, agile missiles, focusing on high-reflex dodging and aerial maneuvering to pursue Septette, as well as blast apart the rocks that fall near her, to deny her maneuverability! This time, Biteblade's sure, she won't have the walls to work with, right...?

    TACTIC MIX: PAVO AND MOONFIN
Septette Arcubielle      There are no solid platforms here for Septette to leap off of, and she can't quite reach the walls- they funnel outwards into a vast craggy abyss lit only by the streams of falling magma. This feels less like part of cave system and more like a yawning undersea chasm without the water! Her mobility is, ironically, considerably restricted in such an open space, without any kind of reliable maneuvering thrusters.

     So when the homing missiles close in and railgun slugs pockmark her armor, she improvises- or perhaps this is still according to script?- and freezes a chunk of a nearby magma-fall into a solid piece of obsidian, kicking off of it in a manner vaguely reminiscent of how she maneuvered through Pavo's forest! They chase after her deftly, a couple of the proximity explosions even clipping her heels, but she leads them straight through another falling column of magma to detonate them harmlessly in the red-hot molten rock.

     The phase-shifting molten rock provides her with even greater flexibility of movement than Pavo's forest did: she can alternately plunge through the magma and freeze it solid, letting her pass through the magma-falls with impunity and use them as shields a moment later! She even turns the shards of obsidian into a form of surprisingly potent offense, grabbing person-sized frozen shards from the floes and kicking them hard in the tank's direction, trying to damage its weapons systems with the spalling shards!

     If Biteblade isn't too laser-focused on Septette to take notice of her surroundings, she'll notice a gradual transformation in the walls: they start to change from dark stone to something lighter, marble and serpentinite. In places they're dotted with indistinct frescoes of pink and green, or even carved into unnameable yet ominous shapes...
Starbound Flotilla     Spreading waves of molten droplets formed by the detonation of missiles in huge volumes of lava make rings that the flying tank has to dive and roll through. The damage sustained during the detonation of that Zodiac trap has already set her maneuvering abilities on the lower end, but she tears through regardless. Fragments and chunks of obsidian are a little easier to focus on though. "Woah, woah, woah!! Isss all hot and cold! Whaaaaa!!" She cries out.

    "Where isss going? Thisss, deep! Very extra deep!! How far doesss go?! Will be able to get back up?!" She calls out in concern, then cries out a sort of "wah!" When her cockpit gets slammed with a heavy chunk of obsidian, slamming her back in it and dazing her. With a moment to pant and catch her breath, and to dazedly watch the walls turn to marble with a sort of strained fascination, another thudding impact jars her into grabbing ahold of her control units.

    "Ssskeleton friend, tricky! But not tricky enough! Gonna go down, then gonna go down FAAAAAAASSST!!!" She clenches the handles hard, slams them back to charge her thrusters, then rushes them forward. The pair of gems atop her machine BLAZE to life, and the thruster's energy "exhaust" fills more of the tunnel than it ever ought to. Her machine twists into a spin, a sort of a diving strike designed to DRILL through anything she might throw at it. The bullets lance out anew, but... They're meant to split the floes, blast them into sprays of molten material. It may saturate the area with more heat than she can handle, but she'll just have to deal with those shield emitters slowly overloading, until...

    The spikes mounted on her machine charge, humming to life. The medieval plates, too. Their heavy esoteric construction glows with a frosty blue light, cooling the machine rapidly, in a mirror of Septette's own habitual cooling mechanisms. But so, too, do the spikes. Especially the ones just ahead, as she screams down, shouting joyously and trying to -- in a moment of Septette's hopefully lesser maneuverability -- slam the sharper ends square into Septette and pin her on the grille, so to speak, of the tank, to blast her with point-blank strikes instead of working at a distance.

    TACTIC MIX: SEFT AND PAVO
Septette Arcubielle      Finally, Biteblade is catching back up to Septette in earnest- there are no convenient walls to run down, no easy ways to boost herself too far past terminal velocity! "It goes deep enough to run you ragged," she calls out in that cheerfully bloodthirsty voice of hers over the echoing roar of falling magma. "Or at the very least- when I'm cornered, you'll have bled more than I have!" That's right, Bitey. Keep chasing...

     Using bullets to disrupt the magma floes- now that's something she hadn't planned around! For a brief and vulnerable instant, Septette is caught out in the open with nothing to kick off of- and that's when Biteblade closes in, slamming hard into her torso with the tank's pronged grill! She twists her body in the milliseconds before impact to minimize damage, most of the sharp spikes passing through the empty spaces in her skeletal body- but even in the optimal damage-mitigating scenario, one of the spike slams into a red power crystal in her shoulder, detonating it in a fierce eruption of purple-green magical energy as her arm goes limp.

     Of course, Septette isn't idle during the momentary tangle: she slams her viciously sharp blades and talons into the tank's forward armor, heating them in an attempt to embrittle the futuristic materials through thermal shock! "ALWAYS tricky enough," she yells with a manic grin as she launches her counterattack. "Never strong enough, or quick enough, or tough enough- not anymore, not here, not after everything that's happened to me. But always clever enough! Because the harder my back's against the wall..."

     Something looms in the distance beneath her. Something weird. In the distance, it looked like a natural extension of the inky blackness of the chasm- but now that she's within a thousand feet or so, Biteblade can tell that it's more like some kind of abrupt event horizon, blocking all scans with a pitch-black immaterial shell! Even lava pours into it without a trace. But it doesn't seem dangerous, if only for the fact that Septette kicks off of the vehicle again and plummets into the inky void, completely disappearing from view!

     The yggdroid falls through the event horizon and lands hard on a tough, polished stone floor in a bare square room, just thirty feet below where the sensor-jamming shell originated, and sprints for the corner of the room before Biteblade can plummet through! If she's right in her estimate of the floran's psychology, Biteblade might pursue at top speed and crash right into the unyielding, heavy floor...
Starbound Flotilla     Yep. Septette guessed right. Biteblade just kept accelerating, with all her aggression and force, even despite the heavy damage that Septette rakes over the front end of her tank. There's even a breach or two in that main cockpit...!! Biteblade is nothing if not incredibly confident, or at the very least prideful enough to not be able to stomach the idea of slowing down or being cautious about this.

    But soon she hits the sphere, and processes what's below (that is to say, the ground) and what isn't below (that is to say, the tunnel). It takes about seventy milliseconds for her to understand it, at which point the avian thrusters fire hard, granting her an acceleration of about 7 Gs hard, rocking her whole body with over eight hundred /thousand/ kilometers per square hour of raw accelerating force. She screams and swears in pain as her vehicle slows to a more salvagable speed of termination, but as she does, power systems detonate and explode in a sudden blast of overload, and the treads on the underside slam HARD into the solid ground. Brutal experience, no matter the technological and biological advantages she has against it.

    Too stunned to deliver any interruption to Septette's verbal buildup, the best Biteblade can manage is an attempt to saturate the entire area -- before she's even processed it all -- in a rush of shining bullets, to buy time against any form of counterattack and a moment to reboot her motor systems.
Septette Arcubielle          THE ABYSSAL SHRINE
          Fortified Execution Grounds

     The new arena is made entirely of polished stone, with eroded statues of inhuman figures carved directly into the walls between pastel frescoes of unspeakable violence. The floor is comprised of solid blocks of stone in varying shades of green and faded pink, shaded with the rusty patina of countless layers of ancient blood; it seems mundane, but the fact that it didn't shatter instantly at Biteblade's impact hints at some kind of magical reinforcement.

     There are four doorways leading out of the room, each set in the midpoint of one of the square arena's four walls- there are no doors, but rather vertical bars of some shining wrought metal, set too far apart to prevent a human from slipping through. A look at the floor hints at just what they were intended to contain: skeletal corpses of destroyed yggdroids are scattered among smooth-skinned, hideously deformed, chalky humanoids that look as if they were slain yesterday despite a fine coating of dust.

     That's the first thing Biteblade would notice when trying to get her bearings- Septette's characteristic presence is masked, not by the sensor-baffling shell above, but by a half-dozen other nearly-identical signatures in the form of the dead yggdroids' still-active cores! She counts on that to buy her a few more fractions of a second as she prepares her next move...

     Zero milliseconds after Biteblade's landing. Her right arm comes up, rearranging its tan plates in an unfamiliar configuration. A trio of yellow magical circles appear around her lower arm like bracelets, setting up a powerful magnetic field. Twenty milliseconds after landing. She adjusts her aim to account for the holes in the craft's cockpit, aiming for one that gives her a clear line of sight on Biteblade's shoulder. The bolt in her forearm begins to heat up...

     Forty milliseconds. The tan armor-flechette reaches a red-hot pitch, and she angles her body to the side to minimize damage from Biteblade's wild, raking fire. A stray bullet hits her left eye's lens, cracking it, but it's too late to skew her aim here. Sixty milliseconds. The flechette accelerates, using the long bones of her forearm like the rails of a railgun as the electrical magic induces a charge and propels it forward. Seventy milliseconds. The five-inch-long dart fires over the back of her hand, reaching supersonic velocities as it leaves her magical field.

     Eighty milliseconds. Assuming no defensive actions have been taken to prevent it, the dart will enter the cockpit through one of the open holes, and explode on impact under the thermal strain into dozens of pieces of serrated shrapnel. "... The sharper my fangs become," she concludes, a look of dark satisfaction smoldering in her eyes.
Starbound Flotilla     Septette can see the sensors automatically shift to contingencies as they fail to acquire their lock. Both Moonfin and Albert's strategies shine through hard here. The moment that she realizes -- or rather, her machine with no reaction time realizes -- she's in a graveyard, her sensors are sweeping hard on laser lines, dramatically whooshing around. By the time their data hits Biteblade, it'll have been seventy milliseconds at least.

    TACTIC MIX: MOONFIN AND ALBERT

    At sixty seconds, the flechette is already angled hard through the cockpit's opening. Biteblade's just beginning to process the data, and the laser sensors are starting to concentrate on Septette herself, when the shrapnel launches in and slips between gaps in the densiglass plating of the cockpit. It slams hard into Biteblade's shoulder, slipping through blunting armor, then splits into damaging shrapnel, gushing a spray of saplike blood through the cockpit, with a short cry of pain from Biteblade.

    For a moment, it goes somewhat motionless. Inside, the high-tech scrap-armor administers a mixture of medical treatments quickly and aggressively to stabilize the wound and preserve function. That stillness doesn't last long. Biteblade, hidden by the blood inside, crams one hand back into the control handle, and with the other... She does something that's actually quite disturbing. In the spray of blood-sap in her cockpit, she draws on her side, smearing out a gap in the thickening blood, as if she were making nose art. Two wide eyes, at first. And then...

    A dramatically teeth-baring sharkish Floran grin.

    "Fangsss, ssso sharp now. Keep giving ground, you sharpen edge to breaking. Floran'sss gonna put you through wall, Ssskeleton friend." Biteblade says, joyously bantering. "Hoped nobody elssse would get to beat. Floran can be only one who can." The cockpit fills with shining HUDs, giving an ominous, jack-o-lantern style backlight to her disturbing blood art. Perfect mood for a graveyard, one decorated with too many mementos of horrifying foes.

    That railgun swivels HARD, whirling like mad to fix on the source of that. It's Biteblade manually operating it on potent instinct, to pick one signature out of the crowd, and lock in ruthlessly on it, then another, then another. Slug after slug sears the battlefield between the tank and Septette. With a ground to brace against, Biteblade can let loose with her main armament!! Her single-shot ranged tactics synchronize terrifyingly well with Albert's artillery-scale weapons focus.

    TACTIC MIX: BITEBLADE AND ALBERT
Septette Arcubielle      The first railgun slug comes fast- too fast, by Septette's estimations; she'd banked on the sensor distortions confusing Biteblade's weapon systems a little longer! Even without her tank's automatic targeting systems, the Floran's reaction times and precision are formidable. Her torso's armor plates angle themselves against the incoming shot in the milliseconds before it leaves the barrel... and then the gun quirks upwards, just a bit, with the lethally chaotic saccades of an organic hand on the controls.

     Insufficient information to predict. Insufficient time to respond.

     The bullet strikes her on the cheekbone, just under the orbit of her left eye, and shatters on impact. Dozens of razor-sharp shards of metal spall from the point of impact, deflecting upwards and piercing the lens before ricocheting in the confined socket and shredding the precision thaumic machinery inside. Even as her neck snaps backwards from the kinetic impact, Septette angles her head slightly to influence the shards' ricochet trajectories- none of them breach the back wall of her eye, though the damage to her sight is done.

     Her head slumps forward again, lolling from her neck for a moment as power is adaptively redistributed. Her gaze drifts upwards, locking with Biteblade's. Then a beam of diffuse red light erupts from the ruined socket, shining through her disheveled bangs as red-hot slag drips from her orbit like blood. It carves a dramatic trail of light through the dusty air as it locks onto Biteblade's cockpit, as if it sought to pierce her soul.

     "Pattern acquired," she murmurs near-inaudibly, and takes a single step forward. Then, more boldly: "Already broken. A hundred times. What's a hundred one?"
Septette Arcubielle      The railgun charges up for its next shot. Septette is ready for it. Before it leaves the barrel, she's already analyzing the minute twitches of Biteblade's hands on the controls through the bloodstained windshield, scouring the minute twitches of her muscles for patterns. As it carves a vacuum trail through the air, her one functioning arm is already swinging to intercept its future location. There's a noise like a thunderclap as her armblade shatters the brittle slug, and every shard of silvery shrapnel skims her exoskeleton harmlessly in a calculated spread.

     Another step forward- heavy, leaden. Her eyes don't waver. Another shot. Closer distance- incrementally less time to react. Parry, shattered. Shrapnel dodged. Repeat.

     It's uncharacteristically methodical, Biteblade might realize- she could probably dash into melee range between those shots, and yet she deliberately prolongs her stalking advance. What's she waiting for?

     Far overhead, outside the sensor-blocking bubble, her drones are answering that question. The flow of lava from overhead didn't just magically stop when they fell into the Abyssal Shrine- they've been carefully shaping and condensing the lava falls into an enormous plummeting shard of obsidian, chipping its perfect shear planes into a monomolecular edge even as it builds speed. Impact in five, four...

     "Win or lose, you are going to show me how you fight in extremis. You're going to show me your fangs. I won't allow you to get away with less than that!"

     At some invisible signal, Septette dashes forward between shots, covering the remaining distance. She throws her weight into a heavy back-handed blow to the tank's heavy frontal armor- not intended to cause damage on its own, but to shift Biteblade backwards into the shard's impact point! A fraction of a second later, the tip of that enormous guillotine-like shard slices through the black barrier above, plummeting at terminal velocity. Hopefully it'll at least clip that tank, now that its mobility is impaired!
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade keeps launching and launching. That shining, terrifying red eye is intimidating, but Biteblade's pride urges them on, making their own cockpit shine all the brighter with more and more HUD light to compensate. The methodical charge makes even more. Biteblade brings missiles, turret fire, everything she has to bear, because nobody can be more intimidating than her, nobody! Or so her insecurities would scream in the subconscious.

    All of that far too late though. "Floran will show you every tooth! Every claw! Floran isss ssstrongest, and hold nothing back! Floran will show you /everything/!!" Septette comes in hard and fast, and Biteblade rushes forward to meet them just as they do... But not with enough force. The impact of the denser body slams into the tank with enough force to shove the pair back, as well as stun Biteblade gently, knocking them around the cockpit.

    The monomolecular shard comes down from above. Biteblade's reactions are keen, but not that keen; the insanely sharp fragment menaces her machine far too much by the time she's comprehended it. About a hundred milliseconds into its descent and she knows she won't be able to dodge it. But... With a twenty-millisecond microadjustment of her turrets, they lock into an emergency anti-air configuration, and saturate the air around the chamber with a rush of energy bolts, which soon come to a stop and hang in the air. But before they do, two manage to clip the monomolecular edge, which soon becomes far less monomolecular in a few spots. It can't totally blunt it, but it can at least blunt segments of it, and prevent it from basically bisecting the machine, and releasing Biteblade right out of it.

    Instead, it slices clean through the flight apparatus and the railgun, finishing off the Stage 1 arsenal completely. Something in the power systems dies a dangerous, sparking death, surging enough electricity over the surface of the machine to launch Septette back a bit purely from the explosive force of air superheated by electrical discharge. But the tank is still in one piece, in a sense.

    Coolant tubes and a spent, burnt, sliced power core are ejected, each smoking and steaming from overuse. Something else slots into place. Tubes link. Pistols settle. Latches connect. Plugs spark. Inside that cockpit, Biteblade, obfuscated by blood and HUDs each with crimson hue, yanks the recoil starter on something hard. And the massive tank, baring its fangs... Growls. ROARS a reply of sorts to Septette, like a predator, as a combustion engine of all things activates, fully exploiting the peak material properties of Starbound technology to make the best analogue threat possible.

    The spikes light up again, each with a mix of varying elemental force, but that's not all that's active elementally. Ports on the tank begin emitting alternating, chaotic, dangerous streams of elemental energy -- gushes of radioactive fire, blasts of frosty cryogenic energies, brutally striking magnetic forces, scything wind-like energies, and the like -- on a mix of random and structured patterns rooted in mechanical inputs from Biteblade, meant to mirror George's "robust" chaotic pattern-defiance with Seft's elemental technologies.

    Biteblade roars in time with the sound of the throttle opening, and the chaotic mess of conflicting elemental bursts, spikes, and physical kinetic trauma, burst forward at insane speed, intent on running Septette down like a monster hunting prey.

    TACTIC MIX: GEORGE AND SEFT
Septette Arcubielle      Septette shields herself from the brunt of the explosion with the flat of her armblade, but skids back from the intense shockwave. The yggdroid skates along the seemingly unbreakable stone floor with the sharp tips of her talons in a spray of dramatic sparks before coming to a halt in a tense three-point stance. She bends her knees, preparing to dash in and close the distance again- but that swiftly proves unnecessary as Biteblade charges her instead!

     Rather than trying to evade the charge altogether, Septette straightens up, holds her palm out in a 'halt' gesture, and takes a single leisurely step to the side. Very easy for Biteblade to adjust her course to still ram into her- but that's not the point. The point is that it interposes her on a direct line between Biteblade and one of the room's grated doors! "Good," Septette replies, with a genuinely warm smile crossing her face despite her damaged visage. "The more I know, the better we can work together, right? Show me everything."

     A trio of overlapping magical circles appear at her fingertips as Biteblade closes in, flickering and cycling through various colors, with a complex ethereal circuit in the center of their Venn-diagram-like overlap. The circuit seems to change shape perfectly in time with the changing elemental properties of Biteblade's craft, morphing and redesigning itself adaptively whenever a new element becomes more prevalent than the others. She calls out an incantation, more as dramatic affect than necessity:

          "Prophecy: Option Select."

     It can't protect her from the entirety of that terrible assault as Biteblade encroaches- nothing could. But whenever an attack with an element that her magic can influence strikes her, the complex sigil absorbs its energy, straining her flickering core, and channels it back into a machine-gun-like series of raking elemental bolts that scour the tank's frontal armor!

     The complex sigil shatters and dissolves when Biteblade's tank slams through it, though- and her right arm bends at unnatural angles as she struggles to deploy her arm-blade in time, failing to adequately parry that enormous impact. It crunches and twists, crushing the glowing red gemstone motor in its own mechanisms. Milliseconds later, the tank slams into her torso, launching her backwards with surprisingly little resistance- straight through the grated doorway!

     Septette twists midair to slip between the vertical bars, then bounces and rolls across the corridor's floor before standing back up shakily, both arms hanging limply by her sides, head bowed and bloody. It's a deliberate show of vulnerability, trying to game Biteblade into gunning through the grating- but if she does, she'll find the thin wrought-metal bars to be as sturdy and lethally sharp as a cheese grater!
Starbound Flotilla     "Yessss! Floran, greatessst for cooperation! Mossst team player!" Biteblade calls out, clenching her fists around the control handles in a white-knuckled grip. "And Floran hasss greatessst fighting to show! Yeah yeah yeah!" She floors it straight into the barrage of bolts, which cause layers of forward armor to explode and blast over and over, ripping off in dramatic layers and spraying mechanical fluids like a massive monster taking huge wounds.

    And yet, she keeps going. When she slams into Septette, it's on the path Septette set, and when she pursues, it's just as Septette had hoped she would, pursuing into the seemingly indestructible bars. When she slams into them, expecting them to give, the immovable object meets the decidedly quite stoppable force in the form of the front motor segments the tank crumpling, totally disabling the thing's ability to continue moving. The ports continue to gush essentially flamethrowers of elemental energy through the doorway, one just about as wide as the tank.

    With the tank entirely crumpled, Biteblade growls and roars, gunning the damaged back half of the machine, provoking a beastial scream from the tank. "RrrrRRRRRH! Isss clever! Build like Ancient temple! Like ssskeleton friend!" She shifts some kind of internal gear. "But Floran, clever too! Floran, build ssstrong machine! Floran SHOW!" And with that, some strange and dangerous analogue process initiates within. With the power out, Biteblade can't do her more high-tech maneuvering abilities, right? Even if she can gush dangerous elemental attacks down the narrow gate, try to keep Septette suppressed in that doorway, she's still limited and held back by the bars, right?

    ...But...

    Septette will notice something amid all that. Firing with one arm, Biteblade's left arm is busy... Writing. On the blood. And smearing enough holes in the cockpit to look out and examine the surroundings. A message to Septette? No, it's backwards, relative to her, it's something for Biteblade to read. What is she writing? Something for herself? It's symbols, unrecognizable ones. Septette, of all people, may actually need a bit of time to understand what exactly is being written, despite her incredibly dilated time perception. By the time she recognizes the symbols for what they are -- highly stylized symbols derived from visual cues of Floran claws in various arrangements -- she may also be able to understand what Biteblade is doing and why it very distantly looks like something vaguely like various complicated calculus processes over shifting-over-time non-euclidian space.

    She's /calculating/.

    She circles some numerical value dramatically, and less than five milliseconds after, the wrecked tank, still gushing dangerous attacks, flickers. Instantly, it's past them and shoving its way through the doorway. Flickering repeats of this single relative-in-space teleportation force the disabled machine further through the door, still spewing dangerous gushes of energy chaotically and wildly.

    "FLORAN! ISSS!! MOSSST!!! CLEVER!!!" Septette will find that Biteblade's bragging about intelligence is not for show. She just managed to estimate -- well enough to work with -- a calculation that would take some skilled people lengthy minutes even with calculation equipment or help, that usually takes milliseconds for an advanced future computer, in the span of an agonizing dozen or maybe two dozen seconds.

    As a machine herself, with functionally infinite processor speed, Septette could have done it in a single instant, of course. So maybe not /that/ impressive.

    TACTIC MIX: MOONFIN AND BITEBLADE
Septette Arcubielle      The expression of gleeful awe on Septette's face reveals two things: she wasn't expecting that at all, but neither is she completely unprepared for it! She's nearly at the point of having to switch over to her final health bar, now that she's down two limbs and an eye- but there's still a bit of fight left in this system yet.

     "There are a lot of wonderful things about you, Biteblade. Your mind is one of them. But more clever than me...? I'll make you earn that title." She takes a half-step back, then stomps hard on the edge of a loose segment of the stone flooring, bringing the near-impenetrable corridor-filling slab up in a vertical position!

     The massive slab soaks up the elemental properties of her flamethrower-like attacks with surprisingly little weathering, even once it's blackened with heat and dripping with noxious acid. A second later, Septette kicks the rectangular slab forward, sending it sliding across the smooth floor towards Biteblade's mech.

     Just before it'd reach her, Septette herself runs up behind and slams into the other side of the slab with her shoulder, giving it terrifying compactor-like momentum. She's trying to force Biteblade's mech back through the glittering cheese-grater gate, while simultaneously using the enchanted rock as a shield against Bitey's vicious guns! "Everyone's got a plan 'til they get punched in the face. I've got a new one before I hit the floor! You're doing great so far- but prove to me that you can keep up!"
Starbound Flotilla     The slab comes up, but this works in two directions. With the constant flow of fire, Biteblade can suppress the enemy machine behind the cover. With the arrangement of the cockpit, she can prevent any drones that remain farther back in the corridor from seeing her. So, since her railgun's down and her mobility limited, she comes up with another plan to punch through the wall and break into Septette's cover space. Her cockpit splits enough for her to draw... A large MAGNETIC BOW!

    She loads a concussion arrow, and pulls it back, back... And then suddenly the slab's incoming! It crunches and crushes through the battered front of the tank, forcing the machine back. But something very strange has happened when it goes sliding back towards the grate. A half-second into the attach, the slab experiences a moment of lessened resistance, like the tank just accelerated... AWAY? Backwards towards the grating?! But the milliseconds of less resistance are followed by something heavier. The concussive impact meant to break open the slab has still gone off! And as the huge slab splits apart, the source of the weirdness is clear: Biteblade, braced hard against the rim of her own cockpit, was pushed back by the sheer recoil of her concussion blast! Her mind is racing. How to take advantage of the situation... She can't close the cockpit again fast enough, they're heading right for that deadly grate, and the tank's mobility is shot!

    The tank's... Mobility...

    "NO PLAN!" She shouts. "JUSSST SSSMART!!" She kicks an emergency system. The combustion engine inside the machine screams as fuel injections max out. The elemental gushes of energy reack peak. The entire tank is overheating and rattling. Biteblade leaps out of the cockpit with a jet-assisted leap, slams onto her back on the overheating wreck, and quickly fires a concussive shot, drawn to maximum power but minimum accuracy... Right towards the grate. Her concussive blast shoves her back in a full-body rush of recoil.

    And then her armor shoves that force straight through the whole tank. Which halts dramatically. This is the only hint about what's just about to happen. The next shot fires off in a fraction of a second. And the entire overheating, overcharged, overpowered tank gets sent, screaming and tumbling and gushing masses of elemental energy, straight down the full width of the corridor, while Biteblade desperately attempts to leap off and away from the upcoming detonation. Which, when it happens, sends a fireball (and an iceball, and a lightning-ball, and other suchlike) straight down the hallway towards Septette! ...And Biteblade, but hey, you have to spend money to make money.

    TACTIC MIX: BITEBLADE AND GEORGE
Septette Arcubielle      The moment that the resistance to the slab dips, Septette is already performing assessments of what Biteblade might be getting up to sight unseen. An instant later, she's turning on her heel to run back the other way in anticipation of the tank's suicidal rush, seeking cover from the inevitable detonation!

     This spot, this fortified execution grounds, is one of hundreds of potential endpoints their duel could've led to. There's no special terrain control here, no pre-arranged gimmicks left- she couldn't have known beforehand that they'd end up in this place at all; there's no sense in preparing tricks in dozens of places where a fight might lead.

     And yet the indelible battles of the Abyssal War have sealed every corner of this detested shrine into her memory. From that fertile soil, a plan begins to grow, even as multi-elemental gouts of energy nip and sear at her heels as she sprints down the corridor. There should be a corner up ahead where she can shelter from the inevitable shockwave. She steals a glance over her shoulder. Five, maybe six seconds until the mech blows. Plenty of time to...

     Shit. She comes to a dead stop. The corridor's caved in just around the blind corner. Nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. It might not be enough to put her out of commission directly, but taking the brunt of that mech explosion would put her at a severe disadvantage- almost certain loss- in the upcoming hand-to-hand duel.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette glances over her shoulder- the bulk of the mecha would prevent Biteblade from seeing what she's doing. But she can't defend against that kind of elemental onslaught anyway. Perhaps nothing living can.

     She glances down at her feet, at the butchered corpse of a Deep Prelate. At the magic that still suffuses its flesh. At its hide, smooth and silky and chalk-white but nigh-impervious to mortal weaponry. Four seconds left.

     Well. It's certainly nothing living.

     When the mecha explodes, pulverizing rock with its horrifying shockwave and scouring the hallway with flames and roiling bursts of chaotic energy, there's a terrible quiet that follows, and not just from the hearing damage it might inflict. Everything is silent and still, save the quiet crackling as its multi-hued flames lick at the stone floor in sparse, guttering tongues. Even when the smoke clears, there's no sign of Septette... That wasn't too over-the-top, was it? She's still fine, isn't she?

     The little android holds deathly still, hiding under the gutted corpse of the large Deep One at the end of the corridor. Its hide absorbed the elemental attacks; the concussive shockwave inflicted moderate damage, but without moving, she can't adequately assess its severity. She waits, wearing the skin of her own former prey, like a trapdoor spider. Waiting for Biteblade to approach, to confirm her kill.

     TACTIC MIX: BITEBLADE AND SEPTETTE
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade, thankfully, is a little closer to the grate than Septette to the opposite end of her own side of the hall. She manages to evade much of the damage by dashing, through the human-sized gaps and diving to one side, though the convection brutalizes her armor as well as the blast gushes back into the original arena. Though she's tossed off her feet, she's not knocked out in the least. It's only a moment before her hand is searching for her dropped bow, and then a moment more before she's on her feet, bow drawn dramatically, and she carefully steps down the scorched hall.

    Tap... Tap...

    "Floran knowsss ssskeleton friend isss okay..." She says, confidently. "Floran knowsss, ssskeleton friend sssmart enough for deadman ssswitch, death contingenciesss, all sssort. Floran knowsss, if didn't sssee body, ssskeleton friend livesss. Alssso, knowsss ssskeleton friend ssstrong enough for sssurvive anything." Her armor's flashlights flicker to life, sweeping beams of light around the slabbed, and soon corpse-littered corridor. "Ssskeleton friend taking defeat now...?" She draws a heavy energized bolt back in her magnetic bow, keeping a power dagger in a reverse grip on her drawhand just in case, and sweeping her aim about. She's closing in, as she comes down the corridor, knowing she can't outlast Septette in terms of patience and hunger. Closing. Closing... There she is, in melee range!
Septette Arcubielle      Knowing how keen Biteblade's senses are, Septette doesn't dare to move an inch during the Floran's excruciatingly slow approach. But with her self-diagnostics systems out of commission, a movement test would be the only accurate way to determine just how much strength she still has in her legs after that concussive blast. Changing over to the puppeteer system would cause an unacceptable sensor spike as well- better not to do that until her cover is blown!

     In the milliseconds before the trap is sprung, Septette's toes curl slightly as each joint is tested for remaining functionality. The test paints a grim picture, but it's enough for one last burst of movement: she kicks against the tattered beast above her, launching it into the air as she rolls forward under it! It's a cheap jump-scare to fling the mangled Deep One at Biteblade like that, but with the Floran's high-strung nerves, it just might be enough to get her to waste that charged arrow.
Septette Arcubielle      In the fractions of a second that follow, the gemstones in Septette's legs finally burn out just as she dramatically stands up, transitioning to her final 'health bar': PUPPETEER MODE. The silhouette of an aura around her body roils like the horizon above a hot highway, crinkled and distorted by some unseen force. Though she's dangerously close to shutting down, even at a brief glance Septette's unnatural form now seems viscerally alive: her movements are possessed of an uncanny fluidity that her mechanical systems could never muster, her core pulses with the beat of a silent heart, and her empty eye socket glares with laser-like focus. This is the end, denouement and climax in one.

     For a handful of milliseconds, Septette bores into Biteblade's eyes with her mismatched gaze, anointed in the cerulean blood of her antediluvian foes and standing unbowed in blatant defiance of physical law. Then she explodes in a flurry of motion that would be breakneck even by her usual standards. Her right hand reaches up to seize Biteblade's wrist in an attempt to ward off the inevitable stab or loosed arrow even as she brings her left foot up to stomp on Bitey's toes with crushing weight.

     Regardless of whether she's successful in her initial blows, she carries the momentum of her step forward in a raking blow at Biteblade's torso, slicing from left to right diagonally across her personal armor. When she speaks, her tone is rasping, unnatural in tenor- flickering like a dying flame, like a monitor starved for power... yet not entirely devoid of her playful good humor.

     "DO YOU SEE THE BODY NOW?"
Starbound Flotilla     OH SHIT, GAMEPLAY STYLE TURNAROUND.

    The rush of ambush violence catches Biteblade entirely off-guard; her instincts and keen perception may be effective, but they can't detect something that's effectively completely silence and motionless and also absent of any detectable scent-producting chemical processes besides the occasional generation of ozone in her dangerous magics. This means her usual twentieth of a second reaction time is in full effect here, giving her little time to react.

    By the time the signal's come to aim and fire though, Septette has already grabbed Biteblade's wrist and redirected the arrow. The loosed bolt fires off inches from an earfin with enough force and energy that it provokes startling and dangerous reactions in the air in its wake. Some kind of automated hazard management system adjusts Biteblade's foot just slightly enough to avoid the overwhelming crush that would disable her agility when that force comes down, but it glances hard off of the foot armor, smashing through one of the microthrusters that are responsible for her boosting.

    Then comes the blade. The heavy, dense slash takes enough time to wind up the momentum that she can at least come up with some possible reactions to it, but the reactions she can devise on such short cognitive notice are far too limited by the wrist grab. She screams out in pain as the blade slices along her armor, tearing a gushing spray of sparks as systems overload and go down. The force of the strike slams her hard, and the shock of pain causes her to drop her dagger.

    Fifty milliseconds into the fall, by the time it's fallen no more than two centimeters, Biteblade's in motion. She swings her free arm in a sudden, screaming rush, taking the magnetic bow and attempting to just strike Septette, who should still be in the wind-down on her free-hand's strike, square on the head with her bow, with enough force to shatter it. Her back foot kicks off, and she's surging down and low, swinging and sliding between Septette's legs; if she keeps that wrist grip, she'll likely go completely off-balance! She catches the dagger in that free hand as she does and attempts a heavy swing, moving from Septette's front to her back, on the yggdroid's right leg! She wants to kick her feet off grip and force her to prioritize balance over grappling for a moment.
Starbound Flotilla     She has realized, in a clever moment, that Septette's current state is one where grappling is a far more dangerous prospect than it ever was before. Since she seemingly does not require a motor mechanism to close a grip on Biteblade, the only realistic way to disengage from a grapple without utterly destroying Septette's hands -- already a really tough prospect -- is to force Septette to prioritize a different combat efficacy aspect over the grappling. If she had a constrictor build, this could possibly be a zero-to-death situation. For now, though, Biteblade still has a small fighting chance, and the small Floran loves fighting chances that come in her size.

    She skids away, to a stop, dramatically flaring her dagger as she slides and turns into a three-point-stance battle-ready position, freezing long enough to have some back and forth. "Hhhhhh... There! Floran knew would be fine! Took Floran ssstyle!! Ghhh... Ssskeleton friend movesss like real ssskeleton now. No mussscle. No motor." She grits her teeth in a worried way. "Tough puzzle for sssolve." Her black-and-green eyes shine and gleam brightly for a moment as she adjusts her grip on her dagger, bringing it into a much less reversed grip with an odd mechanical click. "Gonna sssolve the hard way." What comes next is a volley of strikes, meant to overwhelm the limited number of limbs and the limited amount of acceleration for them; Biteblade suddenly adopts a tactic best suited to a crowd, or perhaps to an especially dangerous spider. Her arm lashes out with speeds likely almost difficult for even Septette's frame-advanced perception to believe. The dagger just got thrown at her! Biteblade would never expect something so simple and straightforward to successfully strike her, which is why this is a little bit deeper than it looks.

    She darts hard, circling around... Not towards Septette's blinded side, oddly. But towards the side with vision. Another blade as she fires off a grappling hook to the ceiling at a point above Septette, to swing things around in the limited corridor. Then a shot from a higher up angle! Then she bounces off the wall, continuing her counterclockwise rush to slam hard into the ground below, rushing to further flank and fire another throwing weapon... It keeps going like this, until she's interrupted. She's not trying to get herself into Septette's blindspot. She's trying to queue up thrown attacks that Septette will be forced to turn her blindspot towards; the point isn't to make it hard for her to see the incoming attacks, but rather to overwhelm her limited perception, the way a crowd's eyes could be drawn and its defenses overwhelmed! Even if she could queue up all data about incoming projectiles, no defense will be perfect, and Biteblade just needs to use her savage hunting methods to puzzle out a gap in these defenses.

    TACTIC MIX: PAVO AND BITEBLADE
Septette Arcubielle      Septette's hair swooshes dramatically in the concussive wave produced by the charged arrow, clipping her ear-fin with the kinetic shock and warping the delicate sensor's contours. She leans forward to headbutt the bow, angling her skull at a favorable tilt to dissipate its kinetic energy through her spine, but its unusual properties still concuss her! Septette can't be stunned in the same fashion as an ordinary person, but the blow jars her optics, fuzzing her vision just enough to delay her reaction time for what comes next.

     It takes her a moment to disengage her claws from Biteblade's forearm, and in that time the floran's strange movements have pulled her off-balance. The yggdroid reacts by moving with the lurch of momentum and rolling forward, away from Biteblade's swipe, though it still scrapes the back of her calf! The knife doesn't catch on any critical-looking components, and yet it draws a gout of purple-green flame like blood as it carves through the shimmering field beneath the armor plates of her lower leg.

     This is the puppeteer system's first weakness, then: it may not rely on destructible components, but that just means Biteblade can stab the magic out of her!

     Over the course of the next second, that actinic fire-oozing wound seals and fades to a dull, ethereal scar, like the trails of phantom light left behind after staring at the sun. Septette seems remarkably disinclined to giving a repeat performance, however: the barrage of knives is easily turned aside, metallic pings sounding out with each midair parry as the flechettes are batted down and clatter to the floor. The fundamental problem of momentum hasn't been completely solved, and her defenses are still far from perfect, but her motions are swifter, more violent: it's not as though she has to worry about damaging her inner workings now!
Septette Arcubielle      "THERE'S THE TRICK," she rasps in that dreadful groaning voice, backing up towards the dead end of the tunnel again- out of melee range, strangely. "YOU COULD SOLVE ME. BUT I'LL SOLVE YOU FIRST." There's a quiet swishing sound at the opposite end of the hallway, behind the grate: the trio of drones re-materialize, forming an ominously large magical circle between them and charging up! They're deliberately spaced around the outside of the doorframe so as not to be visible from inside the tunnel, but the roiling white energy that coalesces at the center of the triangle couldn't be more obvious.

     There's nowhere to run or hide inside the tunnel, no easy detours or convenient piles of rubble to hide behind. Biteblade's sandwiched between the charging beam and Septette herself! It'd be natural for her attention to be fixed on that menacing magical beam, but if she glances back at Septette, she'd notice something peculiar: the distorted field that animates her has dimmed considerably, as if she's diverting energy from her motions, and her movements as she positions her blade to deflect the incoming beam are slowed and deliberate.

     Second flaw of the puppeteer system: spellcasting and movement compete for the same resource!

     Barely a second after they first materialized, the drones will fire a searing beam of white light down the hallway- directly towards Septette herself! It fills almost half the hallway's diameter, but given Biteblade's incredible reaction times, that might still be avoidable...
Starbound Flotilla     The screaming rush of energy that is the incoming beam is something that Biteblade doesn't realize is coming until it's far too late to avoid all of the damage; even with all her keen, powerful reflexes, the Floran would not be escaping the sheer overwhelming width of the strike entirely. But she's been building the analytical model of Septette just the same way that Septette has been building the keen analytical model of her. She sees those weaknesses. She knows what's going on, and she's planting those aspects of Septette deep into her own savage tribal combat instincts.

    That's why, when the beam comes in, she doesn't dodge. Rather, she slams into the ground, skids to a stop, and plants a heavy gauntlet straight into the gap in the slabs to grip. The beam impacts her in a near-prone state, and amid all her armor and all its projected protection fields, the experience is rather like suddenly finding herself in a wind tunnel. The limited surface area exposure is a half-dodge and a half-defense, but what it especially is is an opportunity.

    From too close for Septette's slowed state to stop, she slings her dagger straight towards... The carefully arranged deflection! Though Biteblade may be suffering a great and awful rush of damage as a result of this blast, she can do one thing to make sure that it's worth it: She can make Septette suffer even just a little bit more. A calculated maximization of pain and suffering in others. Or, perhaps, in other words...

    TACTIC MIX: BITEBLADE AND SEPTETTE?!

    But she knows what Septette is like. After carefully watching her use those drones before, she knows that the minute the damage to Septette from the attack exceeds the damage to Biteblade herself, she'll math that out into a sudden cutoff of the attack. Biteblade's having to depend on the fact that it's /probable/ that safely terminating a process like that beam is going to be a slower thing to begin with. And the very moment that happens, Septette's strength and dexterity will boost again with very nearly no lag time.

    Her own obsessive self-confidence may be completely unaware, but she knows Septette's own; she quietly uses her remaining armor's psi-control systems to queue up a proximity blink-teleport! Drawing a fresh pair of daggers, she leaps forward with an obvious intent to ssstab the very moment -- or, at least, fifty milliseconds after -- Septette finishes that massive beam, trying her hardest to goad her into a swing. Septette can detect a great deal, but she can't read minds, and Biteblade's plan is to bank on the idea that the her mechanical foe will be confident enough to want to full-on show off the fact that she's not one of those classic dumb bosses that make themselves horribly vulnerable after huge attacks.

    And the moment she gets into melee range of Septette's huge sensor signature power core, the very moment Septette would be at the absolute height of physical and nonmagical power configuration, is the precise moment her body flickers and fluctuates right out of that space. OH NO!! Is she planning another Moonfin attack, where she'll appear right behind Septette?

    But if she whirls around to find that, Septette will see nothing at all. It's her drone perception she'll need to worry about; Biteblade's teleported down the corridor and is trying to break up at least one part of the power trio down there of Lavoisier, Midgley, and Tesla, before Septette can reach to counterattack! Either Septette can power their magic for counterattacks, or she can power her own mobility to come after Biteblade... But not both!
Septette Arcubielle      The thrown knife is deflected as swiftly and violently as one might expect, silvery shards of metal exploding out as she catches it with the edge of her arm-blade. The sudden movement pulls energy away from the beam attack, which flickers and sputters as if it were being starved for power- giving Biteblade enough of an opening to pull her fake-out pounce and warp back out of the dead-end corridor!

     And yet, there are hints that the intent of that beam isn't precisely what she's assumed it to be. It's not shut off when it strikes Septette directly in the core, narrowing to a sharper focus; rather, as Biteblade teleports out to the larger arena, she'd notice that the drones are intensifying their energy output again, pouring still more roiling arcane energy down the corridor and into Septette.

     The drones respond sluggishly to her sudden assault; their small directional thrusters aren't designed for high-speed evasion! The yellow drone is neatly skewered by her knives, detonating in a harmless spray of crackling light and liquid fire. The other two drones dart back towards the center of the arena, trying to stay out of her reach in a cagey dance- and their monolithic beam unravels into a pair of flexible energy tethers that lead back into the dark corridor behind her, trailing through the gloom and smoke to latch onto the glowing core visible at the hallway's end.

     This was never just an attack. It was a power transfer.
Septette Arcubielle      A thunderclap echoes in the confined space as Septette tears across the stone tiles, her agility briefly boosted to supersonic levels with the stored arcane energy. The shockwave catches back up and passes her as she digs her heels into the stone, decelerating just enough to keep herself from slamming into the far wall, and giving Biteblade a fraction of a second's warning...

     As the yggdroid skates across the floor at hundreds of miles per hour, she skims past her opponent with the blunt edge of her blade held out at chest level, twisting her entire body in a mighty swing at Biteblade's chest that rends the air with a second thunderclap and a plume of water vapor. Unable to come to a complete stop, she skids across the rest of the room and slams into the far wall feet-first, bending her knees to cushion the impact before dropping to the floor in a three-point stance. The two remaining drones fly to her sides, their energy-tethers noticeably dimmed with the discharge of power.

     "TELL ME WHEN YOU'VE FOUND THAT ANSWER," she intones in the same uncharacteristically rough and gravelly voice. If Biteblade looks closely, she'd notice the shimmering field around Septette's bones intensifying again- she's buying time with banter, gathering strength for her next attack. "NOBODY'S GIVEN A CLEAN ONE YET. WOULDN'T YOU LOVE TO BE THE CLEVEREST?"

     Regardless of what Biteblade does, it seems that the temporary "buff" from absorbing her own attack has a limited duration. She can try to mitigate its impact by playing defensively, or dispel it outright by destroying the remaining drones!
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade has just enough presence of mind to interpose her daggers between her body and Septette's blade. They hold, halting the rush, for only a fraction of a second, before they overload from the strain and snap into shards, shattering brilliantly and violently. She has enough presence of mind to try to instinctually turn the strike towards something less debilitating, but the moment she puts her bracers against the blade, they're battered aside by the momentum. She's taking this hit, and the most she can do is mitigate small fractions of the momentum. The impact comes with a sickening crack hard enough to sound like the snapping of a bone, though Floran physiology is not nearly so human. The single heavy swipe at her chest takes Biteblade off her feet. It shatters torso armor entirely into a messy wreck, leaving her only with bracers, greaves, and part of a visor, and spraying a gush of sap-like blood as the small Floran slams into the ground, tumbles, and eventually, comes to a desperate and unsteady halt.

    She manages a three-point landing, but cannot stand. She'd interrupt the banter, if she could. An attempt to get to her feet and pounce on Septette during her is interrupted by a sudden rush of pain, forcing her to one knee, where she slumps nearly limply. Unlike Septette, Biteblade is forced to wear her exhaustion on her sleeve. "Hehehehehe... Now pack remainsss." She pants heavily. "Thermodynamic alpha, thermodynamic beta, and thermodynamic gamma." That one's a little bit of a stretch, but Biteblade's proud of the thermodynamic beta witticism about the remaining blue drone, at least. But she's focusing hard. How can she make sense of this? How can she exploit this? How can she focus hard to use the final stage against Septette...? "Sssolve. Sssolve. Sssolve sssolve sssolve sssolve sssolve..."

    Focus. Focus. Focus. There's a gap.

    There it is.

    TACTIC MIX: SEFT AND BITEBLADE

    Biteblade's pupils widen hard like a shark's. "RRRRAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!" Her bracers alight with a brilliant light. Erchius systems begin overcharging. Her bracers begin to flicker with red light, blue light, yellow light, green light... A wide assortment of elemental energies. They flow into the daggers. They burn along the length like a terrible fire. And then she rushes forward. She knows what to do now. It's heat damage-over-time. It's cold damage-over-time. It's radiation. It's magnetic scrambling. It's electrical. It's all manner of strange and dangerous elemental power forced into the puppeteer field, even when blocked. But it's all more than just that. What Biteblade is after is something specific. She could destroy the drones. Or she could play defensively and wait it out. But there's another path she could take too, one that will last long after the buff is completed, and give her a chance to counter if she goes for that buff again.

    Septette uses magic to counter thermal effects. If Biteblade can stack enough damage-over-time elemental effects, she can create a debilitating drain on Septette's mana to offset the buff, and one that she can sustain long after the buff has expired, and then work to counter the buff if she tries to re-apply. Her greaves activate their thrusters and she closes in hard, with a sudden rush of confidence, well willing to get in range of those blades despite her lessened armor, swinging in broad, sweeping hit-and-run slashes, with a guttural, tribal scream. Her pride is in full effect. She can't let Septette take control of this. She can't let her be the one who shows off and overwhelms this much. She wants to take control of this like the command of the battle's flow is already a trophy itself.
Septette Arcubielle      Even in her "recharging" state, there's plenty of warning before those flashing knives come down for Septette to interpose her right forearm between the blades and her chest. It scarcely seems to matter: they embed in the hydraulic tubing between the two lengthwise armor plates, skewering her arm and leeching the magical field with dramatic twin trickles of white liquid fire. Smoldering flames and corrosive fluids and creeping frost splatter across her forearm, chewing away at the field as quickly as it can spread back over her limb and forcing her to struggle to reassert control!

     Septette doesn't scream. But in that moment, the metal screams for her.

     An instant later, her remaining eye flares with something approaching rage, and she twists her right hand backwards in a display of inhuman flexibility to seize Biteblade's right wrist in a viselike grip. With the ragged sluggishness of a hunted beast, she swings her left armblade in a wide, deliberate stroke aimed to pierce the fragmented armor over Biteblade's chest! At the same instant, well within Biteblade's capacity to react, a nasty cracking sound comes from Septette's right elbow: the mechanisms of the joint itself are starting to fall apart along dehiscent lines. If she can sever it, or even rip it off, she can escape the grapple and still make it outside the range of that heavy sweep...

     It'd barely take any effort to rip her right arm off at this point, but of course, that's Septette's plan. Give Biteblade her pound of flesh, give her something clever to do, while simultaneously removing the localized DoT effects and leaving the Floran with a nasty surprise. Because, as Seft discovered some time ago, when a damaged component is abruptly removed from a yggdroid's magical field...
Starbound Flotilla     A tree-like structure grows beneath her, giving her an elevated position, while the spread of flora beneath her provide concentric rings of fire, freezing, and corrosive threats from engineered plant matter. How exactly this is supposed to be sustained isn't clear, though it likely has something to do with what looks like the combination of an ancient flip phone, a hypodermic needle, and a gas pump, with a vial full of shining liquid erchius, which she's jamming into the nest of branches beneath her, and which seems to be the source of dramatic flares in the elemental dangers. She's running out of options, though. Her tank's dead, much of her armor's busted... She's so CLOSE to a victory she can almost taste it, though. Her eyes seem full of a desperate hunger for validation of her confidence.
Starbound Flotilla     Floran psychology is easy to exploit. Their obsession over trophies. Their pride. Biteblade's easy to goad into the strike, even screaming in pain as she is from the piercing strike square against her chest. Her damage-over-time attack is working. It's working. It's working it's working it's working it's working... Her eyes flare with tribal bloodlust and she can't resist the opportunity. She wasn't there when Seft learned all about what happens, so when she lets out a shout, swings a foot up, and KICKS off of Septette's chest, it's with total obliviousness of what's about to happen to her.

    The hand remains gripped. Later, Biteblade, upon reviewing the fight in her mind, will identify that as the key turning point and the part where she needed to improve her own observation. The fact that Septette's dismembered limb could and would remain gripped -- both during the severing and shortly after -- was a key factor. It indicates that there is an active tactical advantage, and further indicates that whatever advantage it is won't be easily escaped. In the present, she has no understanding of this fact. That will come later.

    As the Floran flips backwards, stylishly, she starts calling out something dramatic, something assertive, something confident. "Floran--" She starts. That's when the conflicting physical properties and processes in the limb overwhelm what residual physical resistance could keep the limb in the shape of a limb. The mass of supermaterial detonates, skewering Biteblade's right arm with shrapnel and knocking her out of her leap, sending her into a spin that ends in a hard slam on the ground, and then she tumbles to a halt yet again.

    "..." She remains motionless for a moment, as if knocked out, before her left hand suddenly slams palm-down to the floor. "Floran... Floran sssolve..." She strains to speak, as she pushes herself up off the ground. "Floran will beat. Floran sssolve ssskeleton friend, can... CAN BEAT!!" Her torso armor is so damaged it's actually falling apart, and finally releases entirely as she rises, leaving only the hunting skins. She can't use her own opposite arm, at least for the most part, giving her a rather matching wound. As she gets to one knee, she pounds her gauntlet into the ground and manages to rise on almost pure gusto and confidence. Where Moonfin's arrogance was about perfection and having already attained it, Biteblade's pride is about victory and growing to achieve it. And she will insist upon her own growth beyond this challenge.

    Shuddering from the pain and strain, she reaches down into her matter manipulator and retrieves something... A seed! Of some sort. Like Pavo before her, she's making use of her ENVIRONMENT SHAPING, but in a rather different way. While she has none of the natural skills of a Greenfinger to shape plants at will... The Flotilla has enough genetic savvy to pre-program them into a basic hazard. And this seed, engineered with enough erchius to fuel the growth of a half-dozen trees, slams hard into a bleak and dirtless arena panel. And spreads, with all speed. Wood, vines, and hostile flora rush, spreading and spewing corrosive chemicals, generating proximity self-destructing combustion fruit and chillingly explosive cryogenic berries. A pre-programmed and pre-fabricated elemental environmental hazard generator! Must be expensive as all heck to deploy, but it's something they've worked hard on since that battle with the Golden Bull.
Septette Arcubielle      Septette staggers back from the force of her own arm's explosion, shielding her remaining eye with her left forearm and grimacing. She takes another step backwards, nearly touching her back to the wall, as the floran covers the arena with strange engineered plant life! But as the roots and stems sprawl and grow through the room, a peculiar revitalization washes over her- despite, or perhaps because of, the loss of her arm.

     Her eye glows with a soft, warm light. The plates of her ribcage ripple and bend like skin as she emulates ragged breaths. It's as if, with the loss of a substantial chunk of her mass, she's suddenly able to dedicate more of her meager energy to everything else. Damage to her mana supply is interchangeable with damage to her physical form, yet it seems that she can partially recoup her losses by redistributing that energy!

     And then the drones' white tethers flare again, and dangerous arcane energy crackles and lashes from her fingertips. A blue circle forms over her palm as she extends her hand towards a clump of those cryogenic berries, heedless of how the other elemental hazards lash out and scour her legs. "You've done so well, Biteblade," she says in an almost painfully quiet voice- if not for the floran's keen senses, she might miss the murmur over the clamor of battle. Has the revitalization affected her voice synthesizer, too? "If this were a fair fight on neutral ground, you'd have me cornered right here. I admire that. And I'm proud to have you as an ally... and a friend."
Septette Arcubielle      She closes her fingers over the berries, crushing them, and the elemental energy twists into a line as it escapes from her hand- a line that condenses into a javelin-like spike of ice, shaped by the pre-emptive magical circle! She draws it back, as if to throw it directly for the strange device in Biteblade's hand- a clever move in itself, as it'd force Biteblade to withdraw the control mechanism or suffer the consequences! "But this," she concludes gently, "was never fair. It was always designed to push you to your limits. And I'm afraid that you have forgotten that. Allow me to remind you."

     The black barrier above their heads prevents any information from getting in or out. But Septette's senses and memory are so keen that she can reconstruct the shape of the canals and tunnels above from the bare freefalling glimpses she gathered earlier. She shuts off her eye, tilts her head back, and throws the javelin almost straight up. "Checkmate, Biteblade. Well played."

     For a long second, there is total silence. Then, from somewhere in the rocky vault above them, there is a crackling explosion as the icy projectile hits its recollected mark. A momentary rushing sound is all the warning that Biteblade gets before tons of magma cascade into the room in the form of multiple 'falls', rapidly filling the room to waist height! Septette freezes the magma under herself, standing on a rocky platform that rises with the flow... but if Bitey doesn't do something quickly, her tree won't be so lucky!
Starbound Flotilla     The mechanism yanks out for a moment, the chemoreceptor manipulator forced into a protective stance as Biteblade tries to interpose a protective gauntlet between her control device and the lance. The elemental hazards enter a holding pattern, a subtly static approach to their attacks against Septette. The Floran listens keenly to Septette, even while she musters defenses and counterattacks against an incoming javelin. And then it goes up...? Biteblade knows a distressingly little amount of what's about to happen, but at the very least, she can recognize a situation where she's about to get something very unexpected. The javelin went up, that means a threat from above. She couldn't intercept the javelin because Septette forced her injector out of the tree, but she can force the injector back in in time to set up defenses.

    "Ghhhrrrrh... Ssskeleton friend, ssstrong like Floran. Floran earn ally! Earn friend, becaussse ssstrong hunter!" She calls out, urgently working dials and buttons on the injector. Defenses rise up above, boughs of the tree suddenly churning and shoving themselves up as if articulated by some awful wooden skeleton within. They offer little reprieve, though, from what comes next, the dangerous rush of lava that surges into the room and menaces from the ground.

    So many environmental hazards coming into contact and into conflict all at once. The terrible construction lets out a noise that must be dynamic airflow handlers releasing their contents, but it sounds far, far more like a scream. "But... Checkmate? Fair? NO. Floran not greatesst at /fair/ fight. Floran not greatessst at fight where Floran sssay, 'that counted', and then bad for fight where Floran sssay, 'unfair, dissshonorable'." The great branches of the segments of this vast and awful floral engineering arrangement split. A whirling rush of roots emerges near Biteblade, and they take their hand off the manipulator long enough to plunge something large and quite mechanical square into the roots themselves.

    "Floran isss /greatessst hunter/!! In fair fight or unfair fight! Push to limit or easssy hunt! If unfair terrain, Floran dig! If unfair footing, Floran ride! If broken arena, Floran fly! Because Floran!!" She twists valves on the device. "IS!!" She slams a clawed thumb straight through protective glass kept over a button reserved for urgent moments only. "GREEEAAAATEEEESSST!!!" And she pulls the trigger. Her remaining armor systems light up like christmas as they bleed energy. "HUUUUUNTEEEEEEERRRRRRR!!!!" And every branch blossoms with a dozen different colorful flowers. They shine in a way that is almost inappropriately beautiful for this battlefield. What they emit, too, is just as unexpectedly beautiful. It's mining beams, whirling and scything as the tree sways, groans, and screams. The brilliant, rainbow-like multicolored display lances through waves of magma, "mining" it away into safer forms. More inert forms. And as they do, the swinging, patterned lances menace Septette just as much, trying to devour the ground she freezes beneath her.

    These brilliant lasers are conducted by the internal structures of the plant in a way that seems exactly like fibre optics, and so the regular, programmed movements and swaying join with the elemental hazards in a whirling pattern of energized violence. Berries detonating. Fruits exploding in gushes of fire or ice or electricity. Flowers blossoming into laserbeams. The tree is burning, certainly, the lava that gets through the mining beams is lethal, and the countermeasure can only devour so much of the falls, and only reduce so much of the damage. But it can buy Biteblade enough time for a few final exchanges to settle this once and for all.
Septette Arcubielle      Even the relatively-safe corner that Septette is backed into is swiftly menaced by those whirling beams and chaotic explosions- and rather than be hemmed in, she presses forward in a peculiarly elegant dance, leaping from frozen platform to platform as each is mined out from under her. Two steps forward, one step back; her eye flits from cluster to cluster, and her careful calculations always seem to keep her where the fire is thinnest even as she wades towards the blitz's epicenter.

     Here and there, the beams still clip her limbs or hair, and the explosions char and blacken her emaining arm as she uses it to shield her chest's components: miscalculations, perhaps, or more likely deliberate sacrifices, trading material for a positional advantage. She's remarkably sparse on the arcane offense now, drawing in her strength to mitigate her magic-bleeding wounds: the horrible stump where her right arm used to be is dimmed now, its damage-over-time effect mostly compartmentalized and quarantined.

     Still, as she approaches the tree's trunk, her steps forward become more hesitant, her steps backward more frequent, her grazing wounds deeper- the denser field of fire seems effective at keeping her out of melee range! For a moment, it seems like Biteblade's bullet-hell tactics are effectively preventing a counterattack. "You don't earn a friend, Biteblade," she replies in a soft voice that cuts through the din of battle. "You have nothing to lose here. Not my respect. Not my admiration. You already have that. Just..."

     And then the two remaining drones implode, crackling and crushing inwards like soda cans as their tethers flare one last time before dropping into the lava and sputtering out. Septette's wounds spark with light as well, visibly draining the power she'd receive from their expenditure- but enough of it remains for a terrifying result.

     For a brief and shining moment, enough animating magic suffuses her damaged and battered form that she looks viscerally alive. Her dreadful exoskeletal plates shift and shimmer like skin in the heat-warped air; her hair streams and billows as if it weren't made of dense metal strands.
Septette Arcubielle      And then she's gone. Or, more accurately, she plunges headlong through the hail of bullets so quickly that she's nearly invisible save for the trail carved through the wall of projectiles by her body. A spray of frozen lava kicks up behind her icy feet, each clawprint a deep charcoal mark in a see of glowing red. She runs up the trunk of the tree, digging her claws in to stand nearly parallel to the ground, and twists her entire body into a whirlwind strike at the branch Biteblade stands on!

     Then she kicks off, freezing a small platform of rock out of the lava below to catch her and Biteblade's falls. It's barely fifteen feet across, and surrounded by tongues of flame and lethal projectiles from the dying flora- and if Biteblade doesn't catch herself, it'll be their final phase's arena!

     Septette's blade folds away, and she flexes her claws menacingly before tilting back her head and roaring an inhuman challenge. When she locks gazes with Biteblade once more, there's a look of dogged determination in her eye- and a manic grin plastered on her face. "Check. Your move, Bitey."
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade's tree curls, concentrating itself more and more on Septette, as she trades material for space and gains advantage through advancement. She's not like Septette. When Septette loses material, she simply redistributes power, losing options. When Biteblade loses material, she loses options, and she loses /power/. And the tree's gradually encroaching fire means she's losing a lot of both. And all of this means that going right for a "decapitation" of sorts is quite effective.

    The branch stays connected to the chemical injector, or rather vise-versa. Biteblade keeps her grip on the injector, as the whole mass of the tree's limb slams hard into the frozen lava, splintering and impacting harshly as she strains to call out, "Floran hasss nothing to lossse, but won't lossse!" She grunts, reconfiguring her injector, even disconnected. With a dramatic pull of the trigger, the remaining biomass burns itself away in a rush of rapid reorganization, pulling in towards the chemical manipulator and using it as a hilt, transforming the heavy mass of remaining floral matter into...

    A /distressingly/ beautiful thorn-style knife, made of multi-colored woods, and baring a thorny, jagged edge that twists its shining, multi-colored body up towards the tip. It looks almost ceremonial, and it hums with a terrifying energy as Biteblade moves it, leaving a trail of elemental energies. She pulls down into a half-crouched stance, drawing ragged breaths; her remaining gauntlets, bracers, and greaves shine with a surge of crimson light.

    Then they flicker down to nothing. "...Floran learn. Learnsss, how ssskeleton friend, ssso ssstrong." She says, taking a moment to pause. With a free hand, she jabs a thumb into her right bracer, popping out a power cell. She slides it into the body of the bio-knife, which seems to devour it greedily. "Gonna have only one more chance for thisss." She jabs another thumb into the left bracer, and does the same with the power cell therein. Both arms are darkened now. Stomping both feet dramatically, a pair of power cells are launched up, grabbed, and shoved into the body of the knife. All four remaining pieces of armor are now powered down. "And Floran wantsss to sssee... How isss like, to have ssstrength like ssskeleton friend."

    She pulls the knife back into a knife-fighter's stance, and pulls the trigger on the chemical manipulator one final time, cracking her jaw wide into a huge roar of her own. "RRRRRRRHHHHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!" She points the dagger backwards, and the gush of elemental energies coming out of it is strong enough to propel Biteblade forward like holding onto a rocket. This burst lasts long enough to close the distance at an insanely quick speed, and to give her some momentum to brace against when she brings that knife down in a huge overhead slash; the energized edge is so heavily overcharged that even the wake of the stroke is undergoing terrifying atomic processes. She's going right for the heaviest possible full-body overhead stab.

    TACTIC MIX: SEPTETTE AND BITEBLADE!
Septette Arcubielle      There's no time for Septette to move out of the path of that fearsome strike. There isn't even enough time before the blade comes down for her to block- only by reacting predictively does she manage a hasty defense.

     Her hand comes up, palm open and facing out, to catch the blade in her grasp as it descends. It strikes between her middle and ring fingers, clashing for a moment with the shimmering arcane field of the puppeteer system as it sinks between the tan bones of her hand. Then there's a flash of light, a crack like a thunderclap, and the supercharged blade violently forces its way down through the palm of her hand until it strikes her wrist, prying the exoskeletal plates apart.

     A fraction of a second later, there's another crack and another flash of light as it rips through her wrist and sinks between her radius and ulna, shearing apart the complex machinery between the bones as it descends, splitting her arm in half laterally. Another crack and pop, and it splits her elbow as well, sliding between the bones of her upper arm. Finally, with a sound like a thunderclap, the murderous blow halts at her shoulder; her scapula cracks and splinters, but the socket holds the energized blade fast even as it bleeds her energy.

     And the two halves of her limb, split from palm to shoulder, clamp Biteblade's arm like the elongated jaws of a terrible beast.

     With a twist of her shoulders, Septette yanks her opponent forward as her twitching, sparking fingers dig into the plates of her armored bicep. The yggdroid's knee comes up simultaneously in an abrupt and powerful motion as the blade in her leg extends upwards in a novel configuration, as if it were protruding from the kneecap instead of unfolding from the ankle. She's trying to gut the Floran through her weakened armor!
Starbound Flotilla     There remains little torso armor to speak of on Biteblade after the sacrifice of the first arm. Biteblade has learned a great deal about how Septette fights, but there is only so much she can learn at once, and how Septette sacrificed material to gain advantage in a more comprehensive sense is something that Biteblade can't integrate into her strategies at this late stage in the game. And so the clamping "jaws" wrap to her arm, provoking a snarling sound of pain. The use of the blade jutting out from the /knee/ is entirely new, and it's a motion that Biteblade can neither predict nor react to.

    With the loss of the outer layers of armor, now protected only by thick hunting skins, she can't withstand the wound. These are the skins of strange, obscure, and powerful creatures, with their tanned leathers oriented to shove a stab away from vital organs, but in the end, they are simply animal skins, and no more capable of withstanding Septette's blade than the fauna of Etria.

    Biteblade emits a howl of pain as the blade pierces her torso, provoking an uninterrupted spray of sap-like blood, and making a visible shock of pain reflex motions through Biteblade's body. She strains in debilitating pain, before going limp, gasping and struggling to move. One trembling free hand is trying to reach into her Matter Manipulator, to bring out yet another knife, but she can't manage to reach through the pain, despite still continuing to try, even "impaled" in a way on Septette's blade. She mutters something, under her breath, over and over, about being strong...

    Septette would be the one who needs to call this one. But it seems the sacrifice of another arm has settled this business at last.
Septette Arcubielle      There are a lot of things, in that moment, that Septette wants to do. Hug Biteblade. Cauterize the wound. Congratulate her. None of those are things she has the energy, or the arms, to do. She slowly, carefully extracts the blade before stepping back, putting her foot on the ground again, and then sinks to her knees. Purple-green magical energy flows off of her in gaping wounds, but in an inactive state, she can at least regain energy faster than it's lost. Though they won't finish for hours, the ethereal scars begin to knit their edges back together as the invisible weave of enchantments restores itself.

     As the last vestiges of the rush of power cook off of her, Septette looks- for once- her proper size. Small, and tired, and broken, and almost translucent around the edges like a thin porcelain teacup. If she were in better shape, she might imitate ragged breaths or a humanlike slump to accentuate her affect. But right now, her body is stiff, her ribcage still. She lifts her face to look at Biteblade and smiles tiredly, as if the effort of smiling itself took something heavy out of her.

     "I think we should stop here. The cost of continuing is greater than the benefit," she says, her voice crackling and tinny. Her eye half-closes, and her hair slips over her empty socket to conceal the ugly hole from view. "Thank you for the lesson. Strong friend."
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade stumbles to one knee, one hand pressed against her side, gesturing with that beautiful dagger, panting heavily. If she could continue at all is very, very much in question at this point. Her armor's auto-medical systems aren't able to kick in because, for the most part, she /does not have armor/. She has to hold herself up and keep herself steady by plunging the blade into the ground. "Hhhh... Call it now? No more fight?" She mutters, almost as if the very idea is nearly alien to her. She tries to struggle to her feet through the pain, visibly shaking as she does.

    "Floran will..." She starts. Somewhere off in the distance, the heat from the magma causes a scattered chunk of the tank to explode. A ways nearer, Biteblade's tree finally burns down, falling over in the magma in a blackened, screaming, multi-colored mass. Pieces of her armor spark and fizzle dramatically. "...Let ssskeleton friend off easssy." She says, finally slumping over and seeming to give in on the situation. She's doing her best to rationalize it was a draw, but she's clearly hardly believing that herself, much less expecting for it to be thought of that way.

    "Hhhhhh... Ssskeleton friend, very ssstrong. Need to..." She's already trying to patch up with nano-bandages, but seems to stop in the middle of it. All of her insecurities absolutely drop their relevance, albeit not their presence. "Oh. Oh! Ssskeleton friend, isss okay? Need any help? Floran can help!" Caught up in her own mental troubles though Biteblade may often be, when she realizes the state this battle gauntlet has left Septette in, she immediately puts that on the top of the priority list. Seemingly ignoring the sea of lava and death around them, of course. One hopes the other Starbounders will finally go inside the arena zone soon.
Septette Arcubielle      It takes a moment or two, but Septette eventually pulls herself back up to her feet and casts a subtle ice enchantment. The air around her steams as she cools down her metal body, making even her most heat-conducting parts safe to touch. Her shaky smile widens as she haphazardly glues her bifurcated arm back together with ice crystals, and pats Biteblade gingerly on the shoulder. For a moment, her gaze sharpens as she scrutinizes her friend's micro-expressions.

     "Let's call it a draw, then," she says. From someone else, it might sound condescending, or perhaps even mocking. From Septette... her tone of voice makes it very hard to imagine she doesn't mean it. Then, without further warning, she scoops Biteblade up and sets her down on her shoulders, as if the yggdroid were about to give her a piggy-back ride. "They can't know what's going on down here, so let's not wait for a rescue, huh?"

     Despite her injuries, it takes surprisingly little time for Septette to scale the sheer walls of the Abyssal Shrine and clamber back up through the hole. Passing through the black barrier is a surreal experience- there's no tangible sensation to go with passing through the thin incorporeal membrane, but as soon as Biteblade's eyes pass through and not a moment sooner, she can see to the other side. A moment later might come a striking realization: nobody on the observation platform could've seen what occurred down there in the last phase of the fight, and with her armor essentially destroyed, it's unlikely any recording equipment survived either- certainly not from after she dismounted her tank!

     Septette sets Biteblade down on her feet gingerly, and her one eye sputters in its socket. Was that a wink? She turns to the rest of the Flotilla, and curtsies as best she's able. "I deeply appreciate the opportunity to see you in action firsthand," she says. "The results against Biteblade were inconclusive- we decided that, while we were both capable of continuing to fight, the risk of costly injury had become too great. Nonetheless, I feel that this has been a superb learning experience- certainly for me, and hopefully for everyone else involved as well."
Starbound Flotilla     Biteblade's weird emotional conflicts seem to wash away, at least for the moment, when Septette scoops her up. Despite her wounding, the nanobandage stays strongly attached and she's even giggling, amid her wincing, as she curls her legs over Septette's shoulders and clings tightly to her. "Yeah, yeah! Floran ready to goooo!" She calls out, and holds on tight when Septette launches up. At the very least, her Floran attention span gives Septette a good advantage in keeping a lot of this situation from getting to an emotionally negative state.

    The sudden shift in lighting is hard to adjust to, but thankfully Biteblade's eyes are shielded a bit by the observation platform coming to a resting hover just over where Septette and Biteblade just emerged. The others are quite eager to see what happened, though seeing Septette so harshly mangled immediately throws them all off.

"Jesus, Bones, Biteblade really put on a clinic for you."
"Aye, ye look like ye have one foot in the grave, or at least one arm. Looks like you just about gave as good as ye got, if Bitey's armor is anything to go by."
"Hmh. Good to hear it was informative."
"We all learned much from you as well, though I hope her lack of civility did not spoil the experience for you."
"Panicked. Septette! Biteblade! Are you okay?! Do you need any help? Oh my goodness, you both look so damaged!"
"Yeah, good point, let's get you somewhere you can fix up."
"And /help/ with repairs."

    Yes, it seems the whole Flotilla are crowding around to get to work on assistance. Seft and George are the ones who focus on administering medical care and offering Septette any comfort she might benefit from, while the others focus on operating the observation platform's ad-hoc engines, and sending the platform back up where it came from. And as they so often do, they fill it with a family-like stream of interpersonal bickering, friendliness, and commentary about what just happened, seemingly content to have Septette be just as much a part of the group when it comes to things like that.
Septette Arcubielle      "Everybody's got their limits," Septette muses good-humoredly, wrapping what's left of her arm around Biteblade's shoulders. She imitates leaning on the Floran like a drunken friend, but ever-so-carefully avoids putting any of her actual weight on her friend. Gutted as she is, it'd still probably send both of them sprawling in a heap! "I guess I needed a reminder of where mine are."

     Repairing her will be the work of long hours, even with the mechanically-inclined members of the Flotilla pitching in. For now, though, she seems characteristically unfazed by her own injuries, pitching in with the gentle susurrus of the captains' conversations, fussing gently over her friends' injuries and showing off the failure points of her own design.

     That, too, is its own kind of trust. When Septette spars with most people, she does so with the understanding that she will learn more about them than they learn of her- a beneficial trade, even if they become true enemies down the line. But here, she actively points out details they may not have noticed, flaws in her own defenses.

     They will fight again someday, of course, and perhaps in earnest. Perhaps these lessons will be used against her. But this group of prisoners has an understanding. Their clashing strategies have, for now, reached a stable equilibrium. And even when circumstances place them on different sides, Septette's commitment is clear.

     With the Captains, at least, she collaborates.