SMASH - First Wager - Part Two

Breathe in... breathe out... GO!

Arin's self-countdown started almost exactly one minute after Paragon X's footsteps faded out of her hearing. The moment she committed, she gave herself two minutes to take the zyr Paragon down.

She'd waited for just the right moment when the zyr Paragon's back was turned to open fire, a stream of lead rattling into his chassis as she strafed through the artificial jungle.

Shit! I forgot I need armor piercing! There goes my anti-personnel rounds...

She quickly ceased fire to rip the magazine out of its socket and grab the appropriate one - with armor-piercing delayed-response EM rounds - and jammed the magazine back into its slot.

It was a good thing they printed the gun out of diasteel, because Arin was in too much of a hurry to control her Jupiter-cat strength...

Just as she was about to slide back the hammer, something landed in front of her.

"Shit!" Arin leaped into the air as her cat instincts took over.

The alien grenade flashed down the rainbow spectrum before hitting white... and then a half second after it turned black, it exploded. An incandescent orange flame burned out a new circle in the jungle, sending Arin flying on the concussion as she reached out magnetically for any source of stabilization that she could pull herself toward.

Unfortunately, the nearest source happened to be the zyr Paragon.

"Oh fuck-fuck-fuck!" Arin panicked, screamed, and launched her vogels at him, simultaneously lifting her AK into a one-handed firing position as she pulled the trigger.

Even if she was a Jupiter cat and the recoil meant nothing to her, her aim from midair was atrocious. The AK spluttered its load at the zyr, with more electrical sparks going off in the ground around them than on - much less in - their armor.

Without proper aiming, Arin's shrike vogels flew past the zyr. Mostly harmless except for one that scratched along its sensor unit - its head. They buried themselves in the ground just past the Paragon, out of reach to her magnetic powers unless she put up a surge.

Still, she must have hit something vital, because the moment it tried to lift its massive crushing arm, it went crashing down into the ground behind it.

"Take that Spam Can!"

A brief mental image of Cherry wincing at all the nicknames Arin gave her opponents popped into her head, but she wasn't about to say 'Take that, Combat Unit Champion 0831 White Black Red'"

Or wait... C.U.C.... 'Cuc' would have been an awesome nickname I could have gotten away with! Why do I always get my best ideas mid-fight? No changing it now...

Just like there was no changing her trajectory.

The massive arm coming down turned out to be a feint as Spam Can braced against it, leveling its firing arm where Arin was about to land.

Light began to gather in the tip.

Oh fuck.

It was as clean a shot as algorithmically possible...

And a moment later the massive ball of light burst against Arin's shield, the backblast charring a cone back toward Spam Can.

Arin was briefly blinded until she shut her eyes, and her HUD nanites started rapid repairs.

It took two seconds for her to see again, and during that time she rolled away.

The first thing she saw was the interface with her shield indicating it had zero projection - in other words it was down. A gauge near it was spooling up, but the unfortunate thing about the interface was that it was not programmable. Meaning she had to rely on what the Ainaxian's considered a proper recharge time.

She'd been unwilling to test it much in case it was single-use only, but she had been able to confirm it did have some recharge capability. She'd just never seen it hit zero until just now... After one shot and one blast.

At the rate it was recharging, she'd be waiting a while.

A printer-chirrup came out of Spam Can, which started to translate on Arin's HUD.

"Unexpected. An Ainaxian portable shield generator..."

Looking up, she saw that Span Can's front was now mostly charred, and their loosest bit, the sensors that made up their head, was partially melted.

That didn't stop them from looking at her as their firing arm cycled, its barrel shortening for what was obviously a close-combat fire mode.

Knowing she wouldn't have time to reload her final, hi-explosive magazine, Arin dropped her AK and went with the first plan that came to mind:

Get close and fuck him up!

Having magnetic powers was a finicky thing in a world of metal and electronics. That was part of why Arin wanted to get into arena sports; because she could use her psionics freely.

Her basic moves were binding - where she connected her magnetic field to another -, pushing, and pulling. If she pushed on a mass greater than her own, she was repelled, and the opposite was true for smaller masses. The same deal with pulling but in reverse. A larger mass would pull her, and she would pull a smaller one. Equal masses were a bit of a crapshoot.

After binding to the magnetic field of Spam Can, Arin pulled herself toward them, dodging a hail of small disruptor fire as she used her magnetic leverage and the ground to alter her trajectory. At the last possible moment, she leaped into a dropkick with both feet aimed at Spam Can's sensor package-

SLAM

Arin went down hard as Spam Can's crushing arm suddenly jackknifed out of the ground, traveling in a circular arc that intercepted Arin with perfect algorithmic timing, and leaving a crater in the glassed dirt.

Though she was only impressed into the dirt for a few centimeters, it was enough to make Arin think she'd left a cait-sith-shaped hole in the crater. When she wasn't wondering if her organs were okay. Supposedly the Paragon suits were designed with repairing its host in mind, but Arin had never wanted to test that capability.

The zyr took one step toward her, before stomping heavily onto her solar plexus, and her suit's running lights - already green from its previous damage - stepped down into red-orange, meaning one heavy blow was all it would take to send her flying as the suit multiplied the kinetic effects against it.

Another printer rattle sounded from them.

"Unexpected. You were overestimated. I was right to use a heavy configuration against you."

It was probably as close to grandstanding as unit separated from its cybernetic singularity was going to get...

There was another rattling screech.

"Time to eliminate you."