Aegle didn't so much as slow down when her fist connected with the upturned edge of Max's board, nor did she show the slightest hint of pain or shock at striking something considerably softer than the face she'd been aiming at. Instead of coming to a halt, or shaking her hand for comical effect, she just kept right on running. She couldn't outrun Max's jump, least of all after the boost she'd given it, but she kept pace with him as the taller boy flipped in the air and stuck the landing. If she was at all impressed by his acrobatics, she didn't show it. In fact, she didn't show much of anything as she rushed towards her foe, save for a grin so sharp you could cut diamonds on it. She ran him down in the same direct fashion as before, only this time she'd gotten well up to speed and there was even less of a window for Max to make good his escape. There was no opportunity for Max to race towards her, as there might have been if she'd stopped to gawk at his acrobatics, or even hesitated when her first punch failed to connect. She was already right on top of him when he found his feet, and it was only the virtue of ranged weapons and a pair of quick trigger fingers that saved him from the punch his prior acrobatics had avoided. 

Taking the first shot in the ankle, Aegle's step faltered momentarily as the ice swarmed up her boot and around and through her leggings. Yet she failed to go down, and rallied valiantly even as the second shot connected with her other foot. This time she did slow, for the ice swarmed not only about her boot, but the ground beneath it as well. It wasn't enough to completely arrest her momentum, but it was more than enough to break her stride, a state which became quite terminal as she tried to catch herself with her other ice-sheathed foot. Tearing her rooted foot free and skating wildly on the other, what had been a perfectly executed jawbreaker suddenly became a very sloppy shoulder tackle. Desperate to make something out of the momentum she'd gathered, and unable to catch herself in the couple of feet still remaining between Max and herself, Aegle dropped her head, hunched her shoulders, and put every bit of traction she could muster into a headlong leap at her foe. 

It was not graceful, and she felt yet another icy shot slam into her side as she left the ground, but there was nothing she could do about that now. All she could hope for was that she'd been quicker to attack than Max would be to relocate, and that the inevitable collision shook off some of the ice that now covered just under a quarter of her body. 

Max Chromium

Aegle connected hard, first with Max and then with the ground a few feet beside him. The first impact was enough to make her teeth click, while the second shook through her like running straight into a wall. Her body cracked loudly, once when her upraised arms collided with the floor, and again when the icy encasement surrounding one and a half of her legs connected a moment later. Still, despite the force of her collision, and the jarring impact which accompanied it, Aegle's reaction was immediate. Grunting with the effort, she immediately got her hands beneath her body, which had fallen prone when she connected with Max, and tried to wrestle her way back to her feet. Finding one leg immobile from the hip down, and the other encased in ice all the way up to her shin, her immediate efforts to stand were promptly thwarted. Instead, Aegle threw herself side ways and flopped roughly onto her back, to get a better look at the damage. She glimpsed Max, already back on his feet, and sprinting for his board, as she pulled herself into a sitting position and regarded her ice covered leg. Her hands found the icy coating on her hip and quickly traced it down to the joint in her knee. It was no wonder she couldn't move it; It was covered in a layer of ice nearly an inch thick.
"You're a heck of a fighter but you shouldn't rush head first into an opponent you nothing about!" She heard Max call out to her, only a few steps from his board, some fifteen feet from where she sat. She tried her best to ignore him, and traced carefully along the icy shell that enclosed her knee, the cold digging into her fingers as they examined the irregular surface. Then she found it, what she had been looking for. A tiny crack, caused either by the fall or by some fractional movement after the ice's creation, had begun to form beneath the outside of her knee. Twisting her leg as best she could, Aegle punched the spot as hard as she could. The crack lengthened minutely, so she struck again. And again. And again. 

The scent of vanilla and steel reached her nose, accompanied by the hair raising feeling that betrayed a channeled aura, but Aegle ignored it. Without pause, she slugged her leg again and again, till the crack had nearly spread across her whole knee. Then, with the grinding squeal of tortured ice, Aegle bent her leg. Not letting her sudden success stop her, Aegle fell onto her back and brought the heels of both boots down as hard as she could on the concrete floor. Rather than shattering outright, the icy shell around both feet and ankles chipped and flaked. So Aegle did it again, and again, looking for the whole world like a small girl throwing an especially energetic tantrum.
"It's been fun, but this fight is over!" Her foe gloated to her from half way across the room, the source alarming spike in aura that had made gooseflesh of Aegle's arms. With one last, desperate swing of her feet, Aegle felt some give in the ice surrounding her ankles.
"Taste my aura cannons!"
In one smooth motion, Aegle swung her legs upward and somersaulted backward from the spot where she lay. It was this quick movement, resulting more from muscle memory than anything else, that saved her, narrowly rolling her clear of a blast of energy far larger than she cared to think about. The taste of ozone on her tongue, Aegle completed a second, head over heels revolution before she swung unsteadily back to her feet. Her ankles both creaked in protest as the movements ground and strained the minute cracks she'd managed to make in the ice, and she found she had less mobility than she was accustomed to, but she was at least mobile. Reorienting herself, Aegle found her foe, couched behind two outrageously large cannons she was sure he hadn't carried in with him. Without waiting to see if they had a second shot in them, she half turned and sprinted towards the far wall, perpendicular to where Max had set up. Her feet were less than cooperative, and her leg even less so, but she didn't let a little thing like being covered in ice slow her down. What was more, the sudden haste of her moments was serving to bend and crack the brittle ice that surrounded her more and more with each step. Leaving flakes of melting ice in her wake, Aegle turned sharply at just under halfway to the wall, and threw herself towards Max with all the speed she had to offer. If he had been leading her to try and line up a second shot, he was in for quite a surprise when, just as before, she ran straight at him, flicking chips of ice in all directions as she ran. 

The cold was really getting to be quite the problem. While it had all begun as a momentary shock to her system, like being suddenly immersed in a half frozen lake, it had graduated into a dull burning throb as the direct contact with her skin drove the blood from the surface. Now, in the few short seconds since she'd been encased, Aegle could feel her right leg starting to go numb. She was in the unique position where injury and debilitation did not need to go hand in hand, and she could usually power through just about anything provided it didn't absolutely destroy her muscles or break her bones. But numbness was not something she was well equipped to deal with. Sure, she could force her leg to keep on working well past the point where it would normally have given out, she could keep blood flowing through it even as the ice constricted her veins, but that was all next to pointless without the tactile feedback to let her know what that limb was doing. Pain was something she could do without, but feeling was something she needed. 

Forced to trust wholly in her muscle memory, Aegle hurled herself forward, clobbering the ice on leg and ankle with each pounding step she took. It was her only recourse, after all. If she didn't finish things off soon, even her remarkable tenacity wouldn't be able to do much about the creeping numbness making its way up her leg. And without any way to attack Max at range, her only option was to close the distance between them. Had she actually been thinking, instead of reacting to the situation with a combination of instinct and muscle memory, she might have been puzzled by the fact that Max did not attempt another shot at her as she approached. She knew how to react to that, of course; She'd seen the destructive capability of his semblance attack already, and knew that getting clear would be the best course of action. What she did not have an immediate response, conscious or otherwise, to was what to do when Max aimed his gargantuan canons at his feet. Thus, confident only in that she was not about to be shot, Aegle stuck to her original plan of rushing her opponent down and punching him so that he couldn't escape. Then, just before Aegle was close enough to swing and with another hair raising burst of energy, Max shot upward like a mortar. It was fortunate for him that the training cells, as well as being capacious in their dimensions, were generous in their height to allow for exactly these sorts of tactics. Less fortunate for Aegle, who had already committed a great deal of momentum to her head long charge and was now forced to completely reverse direction. She did so nearly immediately, of course. Without any intervening thoughts to let the surprisingly display of acrobatics actually surprise her, her body responded to Max's rapid relocation with marked alacrity. The only problem was the ice. Trying to come to a dead stop after a full on sprint, only to sprint in the exact opposite direction, even under ideal conditions, would have have proved a bit challenging. Doing so with one leg encased in ice to the knee and the other all the way to the hip, was nigh on impossible. Slipping, Aegle's feet went out from under her before she could bring her momentum fully under control. She tried to catch herself with her hands, but she had been half turned as she tried to stop, and her fall had been onto her side and not her face. She struck first with her shoulder, then bounced her forehead off the concrete as the rest of her body flopped flat to the floor. It was a nasty fall, the sort that could be felt just by watching it and that even a trained huntress would have winced at. Bright pops of white light sprang across Aegle's vision, snowy flowers on a field of black, as all sense of the world around her was compressed to a single, aching dot just above her right eye. Yet she pushed herself upright before the stars had even cleared from her vision. She didn't just stagger to her feet either, but instead threw herself forward like a sprinter of the blocks in Max's direction, as if neither the graceless fall, nor the sickening crack of skull on concrete, had ever happened. It was a feat made impressive when she revealed that she was bleeding from a gash that had opened across her right eyebrow. The only way that could have happened is if she hadn't used her aura to absorb the impact, which, indeed, she had not. She'd taken it on the chin instead. In fact, she hadn't used any aura to defend herself at any point throughout the entire fight. Not when Max had landed his initial icy shots, not when she'd fallen to the ground following her ill-fated shoulder tackle, and not when she'd hit the ground hard enough to drive most regular people into unconsciousness. Nor did she raise any defenses as she rushed towards Max, even as he charged his third shot.

She was just about halfway to him, grinning wildly with half her face coated in the blood, when Max's final blast took her directly in the chest. The result was an immediate one. A blast of disorientating pressure, like that from a small explosion, whipped her off her feet and hurled her a dozen feet back. She might have flown farther still, but her flight came to a abrupt and jarring halt when her light body impacted about halfway up the intervening wall. The blast held her there for only a moment before its colossal kinetic energies dissipated, before it finally let Aegle drop unceremoniously onto the ground below. She landed on her feet, but without any strength in her legs, and fell bonelessly onto her face without even the mildest effort to brace herself. Her hoodie had been reduced to tatters by the blast, most of the electrical tape and adhoc repairs torn straight out of the moorings by the immeasurable force of the impact, while her mohawk had been pushed nearly flat across her scalp. The ice around her leg and ankle had similarly been shattered by the unbelievable impact, taking shreds of her cargo pants with it in the process. Even Aegle's bandage wraps had been blasted to pieces, leaving behind hands that looked remarkably small for the deadly punishment they had promised a few moments prior. 

For a moment, save the few shreds of orange and camouflage cloth drifted down to the ground beside her, all was still. Then, with a quiet grunt of effort, that sounded suspiciously like a sob, Aegle's hand slid slowly across the concrete. It was a hand criss crossed so thickly with the shadows of old wounds that it was impossible to tell where the scars stopped and the callouses began. It clawed the concrete as it curled into a fist, before bracing on the floor just beside Aegle's crumpled body. Like a broken toy whose joints had been turned the wrong way, the orange haired pushed herself uneasily off the floor. Then, with another quiet grunt of effort, she brought her knees under her trembling body and worked her way into an unsteady sitting position. It was then that the damage that Max's last shot had caused became apparent. Blood streamed from Aegle's nose and out one corner of her mouth, while the skin around both eyes had taken on the unhealthy pallor of flesh soon to bruise. A hole had been blown through the front of her hoodie, as though she'd stood directly behind a jet turbine, and exposed the grungy, grayish black tank top she wore beneath, which had also been torn by the force of the blast. Coughing softly, Aegle looked down at the hole and ran one hand across it, seemingly in wonder or disbelief. Then, reaching shakily into the obliterated remains of her hoodie, she pulled out a strap, similar to the kind used in cars for seat belts. With care, she pulled out another, and another, and finally a fourth strap, before fixing all four together so that they crossed her chest in an 'X' pattern, the center of which was nearly exactly where Max's shot had struck her. The whole display, from the moment she struck the floor, to when she finally got the four straps connected together again, took about eight seconds. Coughing again, Aegle wiped the blood from her lip, though there was so much of it on her face by that point that there hardly seemed any point, and then carefully moved to stand. A belabored whirring whine, at the exact pitch a motor makes right before evaporating in a cloud of smoke, accompanied her movements.

When she was upright again, only then did she look up to find Max. The intervening seconds had turned the skin around her eyes from a sickly, pungent yellow to a prunish violet color, but those eyes still danced with a wild sort of vitality. Coughing again, she grinned at her opponent, revealing a smile reddened hideously by all the blood in her mouth. 
"Guess y'won that round..." She observed in a voice only slightly less shaky than her trembling knees, yet one still filled with a guileless, childish sort of mirth and enthusiasm. Rolling her shoulders, both with evident difficulty and more of the pitched, belabored whining, she cracked her neck from side to side before curling both her hands into fists. Then something strange happened. Well, something stranger, at least. Starting at her feet and working its way up her legs and through her torso, then finally across her arms and shoulders, all sign of injury vanished. Which is not to say the injuries disappeared. Aegle's face remained coated in blood, and the gash in her eyebrow and bloodied nose bother continued to bleed, while the skin around her eyes remained livid and dangerously plum colored. Rather, it was all concession to injury, all physical signs that she had been hurt in the first place, which seemed to flow right out of her. She stopped shaking, stopped coughing, stood up straighter(though not quite so straight as when the fight had begun), while her expression visibly relaxed to look less aggrieved with pain and discomfort. 
"Right." Aegle said, her voice strong, powerful and piercing once more, as her emerald eyes regarded Max with lambent fixation. "Ready for round two?"

Aegle didn't try to hide her disappointment when Max declined to go another round with her, but she also didn't call him out on it. Knowing your limits was important, and it had been rather optimistic of her to expect anyone to pick up the fight after such exertion. Rubbing her side distractedly, Aegle made for her dufflebag in the continuous rolling limp that was her wont. Without answering Max's question, she dug around for a few moments before coming up with a couple of half crushed protein bars. One read 'Nuclear Citrus' while the other sported the promising title of 'Caramel Carnage', though both were written in a font so angular and spiky as to be next to unreadable. She also grabbed a grubby jar of vaseline and a small hand towel, stuffing the former into one of her blasted pockets and pressing the latter to the gash above her eye.
"So that was your semblance, huh?" Aegle asked as she approached the kneeling boy. Closer up, the damage he'd done her was more readily apparent. Her face was pallid and sickly beneath the faint sheen of sweat and opaque crimson mask of blood that covered it, while her nose and eyes were evidently bruised in only the way a concentrated pressure wave could cause. Her lower lip was beginning to swell and both had evidently been split. Then there was the sound coming from beneath her clothes. It was an angry, grating, unhappy sound, like an electric motor set to work on a task it was woefully underpowered to fulfill. Handing the energy bars over to Max, she retrieved the vaseline from her pocket and squatted down before him.
"S'pretty neat, bein' able to fire your aura at people. I've never heard of someone usin' their aura to attack before."
She could do something like it, of course, it was a technique which most hunters learned eventually, but it didn't even compare to the raw stopping power of Max's chrome cannons. It also didn't change the way her weapons looked when she did it. 
"You powered up your guns first though? S'that how it works?" 
Aegle liked learning about other people's semblances. As an extension of one's aura, one's semblance was a reflection of one's soul, at least so far as she was concerned, and she liked to try and figure out what a person's semblance said about who they were. She didn't usually come up with anything worth sharing; She was neither imaginative nor philosophical enough to even guess at the implications some semblances raised, but it was fun to try. 

As she spoke, Aegle opened the jar of vaseline by holding it in the crook of her elbow and twisting off the lid with her free hand. It was a strange method for opening a jar of anything, but she performed it with the swift efficiency of practiced familiarity. Then, placing the open jar and its lid on the floor, she scooped a generous gob out with her middle and forefinger, which she rubbed into her eyebrow after peeling the towel away. The towel came away bloody but, from the amount of rust colored stains it already supported, it did not appear it was unused to such treatment. Once she'd vaselined her cut, she used the towel to run away the blood on her face, with mixed results. A lot of it was drying, while the steady stream from her bloodied nose had yet to stop flowing. Aegle didn't seem to mind, however, and her efforts to clean herself up were perfunctory at best. She looked to her hands next. More specifically, the wraps covering them. The tape she'd slapped on before they started their sparring match was nowhere to be seen, while the tight linen bindings had been shaken loose and hung unevenly from her wrists and the backs of her hands. Wrists and hands which were both, upon such close inspection very thin and delicate. Aegle began with pulling up the cuffs of her sleeves and, in so doing, exposed another oddity which the sleeves had been hiding. A padded metal cuff encircled each wrist, and connected to a metallic rod which disappeared up her sleeve towards her elbow. Her bindings had been wrapped around and over it, and she began unwrapping them. Every movement carried with it an air of familiarity and long practice. Removal of the bindings revealed Aegle's wrists to be scarcely large than a couple inches around, and might easily have been encircled by Max's thumb and forefinger. Their removal also revealed her knuckles and the backs of her hands, both of which were so thickly calloused and scarred as to look more like leather than skin. Clenching a fist with either hand, Aegle made sure nothing was broken, then pulled her sleeves back down over the mechanical cuffs that surrounded her wrists. 
"Should probably redo my bindings before we go again, anyway..."


Max Chromium