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Showing most liked content on 01/21/2023 in all areas

  1. 1 like
    This hardly seemed fair, Melissa thought. Time and time again, she found herself face-down in the mud. This wasn’t even specific to this fight with Rei, though it had happened at least twice -- the first time it happened with that one sand woman had been the inciting incident of the computers’ worry. It really only served to remind her of that. She’d tried to correct it since then. She’d slid through the air without protection a few times, sure, but those had explicitly been temporary measures. That just meant apparently it was her and Zadkiel eating dirt, and between those two, only one of them had to really experience the consequences of that. The impact of Rei’s strike had shattered that connection, too, so it was especially just her dealing with the taste of artificial earth. It wasn’t over yet, but her health was dwindling, and one of Rei’s ghostly hands on Melissa’s back meant she wasn’t moving anytime soon. At least, she thought, she didn’t need to move to fight back, though she did need to draw up the will. One last effort, then. She went with what worked. She still had the memory of where Rei had just been, and summoned Zadkiel right behind that spot, again, sword at the ready. The move wasn’t as quick this time, probably because this time it had to identify that Rei was still there. That split-second was all Rei needed. She launched herself upwards, dodging the attack completely. Melissa could see what was coming next. She couldn’t see the exact nature of Rei’s arms, but past experience -- all that playing of the information game -- told her there was certainly a riposte headed her way in the form of an ethereal fist. Of course, the gulf between realizing something invisible was going to hit you and actually being able to do something about it was a pretty wide one. The best she could do was obscure Rei’s line of sight to her, and hope that that messed things up. Zadkiel disappeared and Sandalphon took its place, now between Rei and her still-prone body. Sandalphon was larger, at least, even if it had holes in itself any ghost worth its salt could fit through. It also could fire at Rei. There weren’t any trees up in the air to hide behind, after all. Time seemed to slow. Melissa watched the beam get closer and closer to Rei, even as she, at the same time, braced herself to take whatever Rei could throw at her.I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all. -Ecclesiastes 9:11 (NIV)Melissa stumbled out of her pod. Waking up was a disorienting experience, though it was helped by the fact that she was slowly getting used to suddenly being shunted back into her body. She didn’t fall over after a few wretched half-steps, so that was good. The difference, probably, was that she frequently had control over when the angels put her back in her body, while this time, she’d barely expected it to happen. At least, she hadn’t expected the pod to kick her out for the reasons it had. She could still feel the impact point on her back from where Rei had delivered that final strike, burdened even further by her nascent awareness of the blinking red display behind her. Sandalphon’s laser had been fired too late. She had lost. The computers were still rather silent. She’d ask them for an assessment on the fight later, but first, there was a bit of ceremony and the rest of the denouement. Melissa made her way around to the other side, where Rei’s pod was in the process of ejecting her. Already, the pain was fading. It had been imaginary all along. “Thank you for the fight,” she told Rei as she helped the girl out of her pod. “I got something out of it, I think, so the effort I asked of you wasn’t in vain.”
  2. 1 like
    Is pretty good, not really my thing I don't think, maybe its cause was listening to hype music earlier but, 7.5/10
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