Those paying attention to the last fight and to Aoife’s sheet may have noticed a few things in the last fight. First and foremost is that she did not use many spells of any real magnitude. She primarily stuck to close range combat, and visibly beat up the criminals. It had been noted in her sheet that she paid attention to efficiency and the conservation of energy, that she would choose to take such long strides and use up so much energy on low-class thugs might seem surprising.

Why smash the thugs in hand to hand combat, especially with the difficulty presented by the likes of the giant and the duelist, when stone walls could be erected with a few words, blast furnaces of fire can be sent, and the enemy could generally be relied upon to flee under such sudden and overwhelming force? That Aoife could have also put her hand through Bonesaw’s chest from the very beginning, but chose a long and drawn out fight where she was at 30% of her capacity, might raise questions.

The assault on the thugs came with two objectives: that Ren be protected so she didn’t use ‘Option B’, and that the thugs be taught a lesson to relay to others in the city: That Ren has a powerful friend.

Aoife intentionally beat them slowly to drill intimidation into the enemy, to make sure that their bodies and minds would remember. She also did it as a token investment, that the thugs—should they survive incarceration—do not know the full extent of her power.

An assault with overwhelming and concise power utilizing Aoife’s level of expertise would have instantaneously taken out every thug with the exception of Bonesaw, who is apt at surviving, and Scottie, whose experiences with other Magestrava as well as Sepcarim would trigger his ridiculous reflexes. Even then, Aoife is at the level of masters.

Unfortunately, such overwhelming power would be too impersonal, the gap between her and the thugs would just make her a wall to overcome for the more determined thugs. She would become akin to an urban legend, a face to defeat. The slow victory where she won by the skin of the teeth, but still dominated for the majority of the battle—that felt more personal, more real, the thugs knew how they got every bruise and every broken bone.

They were defeated by a little witch girl, decimated by duplicity and tactics, rather than power overwhelming. For her, it was a trial by deception. If you want to see Aoife full power, look forward to the Lich fight~

Of course, they could always get pissed off later on that Aoife was essentially toying with them, even if she did use up more energy than she had to, and got scratches from Scottie and bruises from Bonesaw.

Edit: Oh right, I should probably say... Scottie did take a bit more power/effort than the others; by that point, Aoife was quite exhausted since most of her attacks were either energy consuming illusions or physically taxing running + punching.