Isabelle
“You know you might be throwing the match this way, right? Yeah, good. It would be stupid if you did it without knowing. But doing it while knowing…that’s good.”
She sends a signal for videoscreen, so you can see her directly. The image comes on, a very tall Zaldarian woman with drab grayish coloring that wouldn’t stand out in contrast to her personality. She’s smiling, and her head is tilted just a little.
“This is the kind of move that changes matches, and it’s not a dumb one. Sometimes you press your advantage and it’s exactly what your opponent expects and they’ve got an ion cannon lying in wait for it all along.”
“That’s how Solarel thinks because she fought in war, she was deployed to carry out the Empress’s will, win at all costs. There’s no trick or trap that’s beyond her and no reason to hold back from using them. Raiders are different.”
She flexes her shoulders up and rolls her neck, a motion lightly reflected in her mecha as it withdraws to a safe distance while she talks. This particular match has been a match of terrain and closing, and promises to remain as such as she recuperates.
“You have to think of us as playing a bigger game. We had holds with non-combatants at fixed locations, constantly being skirmished over in the border space. If I showed up and raised an entire colony to the ground because it made a good distraction to intercept a shipment I cared about, you Terenians would have escalated wildly in response to that. Every mecha for three jumps would have converged on me, maybe blown up my entire hold in response. So even if I got away personally, what would I get away to? It changes what’s possible when you’ve got something you’re protecting.”
She chuckles. “I’m pretty sure this translates, but tactics serve strategy. You know that sort of expression, right? You Terenians teach the same thing in your military schools that we Zaldarians teach from our graying elders in the wilderness. Our goal as raiders was to grow our holds: get enough resources for everyone, enough willing artisans and crafters and even farmers and builders to support the pilots, who protected them. Expand territory, eventually build up enough good people to go found a new hold in new territory. It’s how we leapt so quickly from Zaldaria to your borders, and the cats borders all at once. That’s not how the empress herself fights though, nor her great knights. And especially not a knight like Solarel, deployed so far ahead of everyone, all by herself in a newly manufactured machine of war. No constraints, no limits, no repercussions for her. Well…no repercussions until she lost the favor of the new empress and the old empress alike. Call it long-term repercussions. I wonder if she planned for that, planned for how her reputation would affect her life. I kind of doubt it, doesn’t seem like her style.”
“Do you know what she’s seeking now, though? I can tell you that. She wants Mirror, the Hybrasilian pilot. Wants to beat her, wants to capture her I think. You could tell from her big match with Mirror already, the one she lost. She hasn’t put anything near the resources she did for that match into anything else since. And there are stories about them among the Zaldarians, though they’re just rumors since she got banished and nobody ever got a proper account.”
She offers you a shrug. “I guess I didn’t really tell you how to beat her. But that’s what you have to consider. She’s not aiming at you or at me. She’s looking for the fastest, most efficient, tactically best way to get past us and get at her real target. If you want to beat her, use that against her.”
***
Solarel
She goes full burn chasing you, crashing through the smoke screens and doing her best to keep you in range, or just full burst after you. You race ahead of the fire, and stray lasers scorch the Aeteline, sending energy shuddering up your limbs.
[Take frightened]
Seconds pass as the chase continues, roaring past the edges of the fire and through the forest, laser blasts withering sections of trees and baking the earth. She does not explode in a massive core overload, but something is happening.
The Aeteline is shielding you, but whatever Maelia is doing, as she lowers her flight to chase you, it’s harming the arena. This was all built by nanobots, and where the supernova flies, it seems like they are breaking down in surprising ways. Parts of the terrain waver and shimmer. Animating geists within the system are being melted away and the laws of physics aren’t behaving properly, solids acting like liquids under forces that shouldn’t exist. There aren’t a lot of details because you’re both moving too fast, but she’s leaving a wake behind her and it’s tearing things up.
This is a little bit beyond you. The Zaldarians are much less known for their technological experimentation than the Hybrasilians or Terenians. But you understand that this is an effect of the drive. Of multiple drives. This, something like this, is the reason that multiple drives are not combined. It’s the reason that no manufacturing center, no god of any template is supposed to come out with multiple drives. The Aeteline was, as far as you were aware, the closest one could get, with as strong and direct an energy drive as could safely exist (and that arguable as to the safety).
By all rights, this ought to be happening to Maelia herself: she’s at the center of this energy, after all. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case, as she and the Supernova are maintaining the chase. She’s found some way to offload or counteract this problem, creating a zone of safety for herself. While that does mean that she is not experiencing core overload, there’s no way to know if this is simply a permanent state of her mecha, whether it has a time limit, or whether there’s some ongoing randomness to what she’s doing that could eventually catch up with her.
This does present a host of new tactical options. But even the sniper of the Kathresis who missed Akaithon’s head in the heat of battle by scant inches may want to have some care with this. If you manage to breach whatever protections she’s set for herself without stopping the drives, there’s a very real chance that Maelia could be killed.
***
Mirror, Jade, and Dolly
Your match is one of two getting major viewership at the moment, though you have no way of knowing this. Marcina has already won, and Isabelle has disengaged while the combatants speak. Solarel and Maelia are in a chaotic battlefield, and the two of you have engaged at close quarters, offering the most exciting moment to moment fight action. Everything is at high speeds and split seconds as you continue to press in melee and with point blank explosives.
Jackals are careening forward, ready to close the gap and assist their master as fast as they are able. Mines surround the position, and the whip, for all its power, is relatively locked in place, its range of safe movement limited to only a handful of vectors. There’s an opening to try and counter its assault with the jackals in play.
But those jackals are not as fast as the whip’s tails. Tail 2 is inoperable, but tails 1, 5, and 7 are active. And with this frenzied assault, tails 3 and 8 are ready to come online.