The time had finally come For Aegle to throw herself back into the fray, to once again test her mettle against another huntress, and it would not have been overstating things to say she was close to crazy with excitement. Her match against Mizumi hadn't gone quite as she'd hoped it would, with her eventual victory feeling more like a fluke than something she'd earned, so she was quite looking forward to cleansing her palate. She had wanted and expected a challenge from Mizumi,  and what she had gotten had felt anything but. Had felt, in fact, like she'd been handed her victory without needing to work for it. And Aegle didn't like that, not one bit. There was nothing worth having that wasn't worth working for, and for Aegle, half the fun was the work you had to put in. She didn't begrudge Mizumi, of course; The big woman had seemed just as surprised as Aegle, and losing to the smaller girl had clearly not been her intention. Still, to be handed a victory the way she had... It had been utterly unsatisfying for Aegle, and she was incredibly eager to give it all another go.

What was more, she knew her opponent this time as well, after a fashion anyway. Guinevere, Lily's friend, the girl with the uncontrollable aura and the pretty green eyes. Aegle knew little and less about her than she'd known about Mizumi, she didn't even know what her weapon was, but that didn't discourage her. If anything, it made her more excited to face her in combat. Her's was not a flashy fighting style, nor was her semblance anything particularly special to look upon, whereas most Huntsman were remarkably diverse. Most were capable of some really magnificent feats that boggled the mind and excited the spirit, with semblances awe inspiring and terrifying to behold. If Guinevere's infamy was anything to go by, her abilities fell on the latter side of that spectrum. Aegle didn't know precisely what Guin did,, except that it involved Grimm and had given the older girl a pretty evil reputation, but she could guess that, by comparison, she herself was a relatively boring fighter. All she could do was hit things and, on the occasion where she grew desperate, blow things up. 

This was gonna be awesome.

Squared off across from Guinevere, Aegle was literally jumpy with anticipation. It was a pretty strange sight to behold. A girl barely larger than a child, weighed down by at least thrice her body weight in steel, bouncing restively on the balls of her heavily armored feet, each movement accompanied by an ear piercing shriek from the frame of metal that surrounded her tiny body. Her hands, each tipped with a devastating looking spike, hung limp at her sides, shaking as she danced in place, while her vibrant verdant green eyes stared eagerly across the arena at her opponent. Then Guinevere did something truly remarkable, that Aegle had not been expecting at all. She started to fly. The platform hadn't even finished rising and, yet, she rose quickly above it, as if something had yanked her up by the shoulders. Aegle's mouth dropped open, her impressed gaze following the taller girl to her new spot above the arena.
"Woaaaah..." She breathed out, eyes twinkling, "That is so cool."
She couldn't do anything even half so impressive as float. 
"So Aegle," Guinevere called down from her new perch. Aegle opened her mouth to greet her back, that honest smile forming on her lips at the same time. She was cut off by Guin, however. "Does that run on aura?"
Aegle blinked, nonplussed, though her smile didn't diminish one bit. 
"What?" She asked back, looking down at herself, "Y'mean the Oupis?" She raised her hands and gave a couple of small test jabs, causing the infernal machine to shriek each time, like a boiler under immense pressure. It was common sense to not provide one's opponents with details on the inner workings of one's weapon, especially not just before fighting them, but Aegle didn't even hesitate to answer.
"On aura? I reckon not." Sure, the electroactive muscle fibers that gave it it's immense strength were powered by lightning dust power cells, dust cells that, like any other form of dust, could react to aura, but that wasn't how she operated it. 
"My brother developed this myomer stuff." Aegle called back up to Guinevere, her open face and beaming smile conveying just how proud and appreciative she was of Vulcan's contribution to her arsenal. "S'powered on electricity, just like my brace."
She was completely candid and honest with her answer, as if lying to Guin to preserve some kind of advantage hadn't even occurred to her, and her smile, brought on by the simple delight of a fight soon to come, was broad and unaffected. 
"I've been lookin' forward to this all week, ya know?" Aegle shouted happily, going back to bouncing in place, eyes twinkling to match the diamond sharpness of her voice, "S'not every day I get to fight a friend; Not since Lily got hurt. Ya better not hold back, right?"

A sudden uproar from the crowd drew Aegle's attention then, and she realized their platform had been raised completely and that their names had just been announced. Eyes flashing, the orange haired girl flicked her eyes back to Guinevere, and her smile became decidedly broader, as if to show off every tooth in her mouth. In a single powerful motion, with a banshee wail fit to shatter the sky, Aegle leaped skyward, directly towards Guinevere. Flying though she may be, there was nowhere in the entire stadium that she would be out of Aegle's reach. Winding back, the point on the end of her fist flashing in the lights of the arena, she prepared a leaping punch with enough force behind it to smash a boulder to dust.
"LET'S DO THIS!"

Aegle shrieked as she rose into the air some ludicrous orange mortar, not that it could be heard above the accompanying shriek of the Oupis. Her fist clove the air, its devastating spike whistling as she swing, barely missing Guinevere, who seemed to yank herself away on some invisible thread at the very last moment. Aegle, however, did not stop rising. Uncertain how far she needed to rise, Aegle had simply leaped with as much strength as she possessed and hoped for the best. Now, without something to punch, there was nothing to stop her rapid ascent. That is, aside from the lighting and audio projection platform that lay at the apex of the arena's protective dome. And that was rising to meet her at an alarmingly rapid rate. 
"Woohoo-hoo~" Aegle bellowed, her train whistle of a voice somehow reaching every corner of the stadium, just ahead of the colossal crash that heralded her impact with the highest height of the stadium. A shower of frame and board, all powderized by the force of her impact, rained down on the arena below, as an irritated pulse quaked through the arena's translucent dome. Giggling madly, her face flushed with excitement, Aegle squirmed blindly for a moment before her whole world lurched. Gravity, though briefly astounded by her impertinence, was finally calling her back to earth. Aegle swung dangerously, cleaving even more debris from the stadium's lighting platform, before the scant framing she'd become entangled on gave out.  

Scarcely recognizing what was happening, Aegle acted without thinking as was her wont. Her hand snatched out, the spike at the end of her arm splitting into a three pointed claw, made up of three lobstered digits. She caught a hold of a piece of frame just before the whole platform rose out of reach, and was jerked to a sudden halt that rattled all the lights and garbled the speakers collected above her head. In fact, Aegle noted as her eyes found her opponent, it even rattled Guinevere a tiny bit. Odd that. 
"You better go all out!" She shouted down at the older girl, her voice somehow magnified by her perilous position at the stadium's peak. "Cause I ain't goin' easy on you!"
Swinging forward suddenly, Aegle lobbed herself low beneath the roof of the platform, grabbed it again just as she started to fall, then rapidly swung her feet up and kicked off of the platform. If her previous leap had all the personality of a mortar shot, this one was comparable to a cannon. Aegle, and the nearly four hundred pounds of steel she wore, fell like some ludicrous orange meteor, trailing debris and shattered glass as she fell. The arena's shield pulsed again, and half the lights flashed off and on, and again, Guinevere seemed to tremble where she hovered. Not that Aegle paid any of that any mind, except maybe that last point, and then only because it affected her aim. Aegle brought her hands up over her head, twin spikes once more, and employed the pair of them as hammers to pound in the nail that was Guinevere's dangling body.

Again, she squawked with joy, her eyes flashing with excitement as she fell, unafraid, towards a ground about as happy to meet her as Guin herself. 

To say that Guin's tactic surprised Aegle would have been a colossal understatement. She'd met with any number of tactics to deal with the horrible power packed behind her punches. She'd dealt with shields and explosions and fleet footed foes. She'd dealt with thick armor and she'd dealt with great range. She'd dealt with thunder and lightning. Yet never, in all the tournaments she'd participated in, had anyone welcomed one of her punches with open arms. It was a ludicrous idea. Sure, she couldn't utterly shatter an aura with a single punch, not even she was that strong, but she could do a lot of damage with one. It wasn't the sort of hit one just accepted. Yet that seemed to be exactly what Guin was doing. She seemed to be welcoming the punch, quite literally, with open arms. Not that such a reception caused Aegle any amount of hesitation. There was a time and place for things like hesitation, and in the middle of a fight, be it against a grim or another huntress, alone in the woods or before thousands of watchful eyes, was not one of them. 

Yet something strange happened as Aegle swung. What should have been a double hammer-blow with truly catastrophic repercussions for the girl waiting to receive it, became a swing and a miss at thin air. That should not have happened. Though her ability to judge range and distance was limited when it came to jumping, there was nothing Aegle knew better than punching, and every single bit of instinct and experience told her she should have swatted Guin like a fly. That was why she was even more surprised, bordering on shocked, to see Guinevere flying towards the ground like she had been hit. Yet even then, her expectations were subverted, this time to such a degree that even Aegle's unflappable martial focus came close to faltering. 

Because, instead of smashing into the ground with redoubled alacrity the way she should have, Guinevere somehow didn't. Somehow, the seemingly inevitable impact never came. Somehow, despite being throw downward at twice Aegle's already profoundly lethal speed, Guinevere did not leave a crater several inches deep in the concrete.

Somehow, and by no means that any rational world could explain, she was utterly unscathed, and Aegle watched her run away from the point of impact as if she hadn't just been falling faster than most bullets fly.

Aegle was not so lucky. She'd known it inevitable when she first kicked off of the lighting platform, and it had seemed worth it get a hit on Guin, even if it meant an inevitable and messy congress with the ground. Now, having failed to so much as hit her target, she was having some second thoughts. Still, she didn't let something like hitting the ground take the smile off her face.

It was not until actually making contact with the arena's raised platform, that the true force of Aegle's propelled leap became apparent. The resulting crack resounded in every distant corner of the stadium, then reverberated back in numerous diminished echoes, while at its epicenter, it had been loud as a thunderclap. The whole platform shifted softly under the brutal force of the blow, and cracks several feet long and more than a few inches deep immediately spidered out from the point of impact. At the very center, where Aegle had connected, a fine dust of powdered concrete danced suspended in the air like a swarm of agitated grey bees. This cloud briefly obscured the cause of it all, such that only her kneeling silhouette was visible for moments after. As the dust began to settle, however, Aegle's crumpled body came into focus. She had managed to land on her feet, it seemed, but the massive force of impact had driven her to one knee, which was half buried in an half foot of rubble. Both of her spiked fists had also been driven into the concrete, such that their six inch long points were utterly sheathed in the stone. It was a truly awesome display, but nobody was clapping. Many were, instead, looking up to the fighter cards that were projected onto the arena's protective dome. What most had doubtlessly been expecting was to see the bar that represented Aegle's aura with a huge chunk taken out of it. In this, they were wholly frustrated. There had been a drop, but it was a small one, comparable to using one's aura to absorb a strong, but not overwhelming blow. Certainly it was not enough aura, even for a fully trained huntsman, to have utterly mitigated such a destructive landing.

When the dust finally settled, it revealed why. Aegle, despite bracing her landing with hands and feet, had not weathered the landing quite so well as the suit she wore. Her nose was bleeding, despite never having come into contact with the ground, and that was, by a far, the least oblique of her apparent injuries. A quiet cough rattled out of her chest, expelling whatever air had not already escaped in the penultimate moment of impact, and it misted the air red with her blood. Also bloody, somehow, were her eyes, which looked around energetically even as their whites were replaced by a vibrant crimson. Sniffing, Aegle raised her head and found where Guinevere had gotten herself to, an openly puzzled expression on her dust covered face. That was it though, just puzzlement and the same irreverent good humor that had characterized most of her interactions with Guin.  With her head raised, even more damage became apparent. Her face was a road map of burst capillaries and dotted with burst blood vessels, giving it an uneven and faintly flushed appearance. Her eyes had turned nearly entirely red at this point, save for the vibrant green at the very center, and Aegle seemed thoroughly untroubled by the change, despite now seeing everything with a pinkish tinge. She regarded Guinevere, motionless nearby, with interest and hardly acting like she'd just fallen out of the sky with only a pittance of aura to preserve her body. Evidently taking her opponent's words as invitation, she chose to speak.
"Half way's s'no way to fight. If ya don't try ya hardest on me, then ya don't know how hard ya can try, do ya?" Aegle told her, voice as strong and loud as it ever was, even as blood trickled from her mouth with each word. "There's all these people watchin' us. Don'tcha wanna show 'em whatcha can do? Show 'em y'aint some weird Grimm girl, but a fighter they oughta respect?" 
Then she tried to stand, and didn't. Brows beetling in the mildest sort of concern, Aegle tried to stand again. It should have been easy, as close to effortless as it could be, yet it wasn't. It took more than a little perturbation to arrest Aegle's mouth, however, though her voice became distant and distracted as she continued to speak.
"S'not fair, them fearin' ya if they don't even know ya... Maybe if we give each other a good fight, we can show 'em otherwise, yeah?"
She couldn't move. Or, rather, she could move but neither the Oupis nor her brace seemed to be responding. She could move her shoulders well enough, and could wiggle her fingers in the capacious fingers of her gauntlets. She even wiggled her toes, just to make sure, but nothing else seemed to move. 
"Hands Free," She said softly, and was immediately answered by a quiet chime from the battery pack between her shoulders.
"Diagnostics." 
Three more chimes, each slightly higher than the one before, answered Aegle, and her confusion redoubled on her blood pocked face. Though her gaze remained on Guin, her eyes became unfocused. 
"Power?" She asked, and was again answered by three quiet chimes ascending in pitch. 
"Why aintcha movin' then?" Aegle asked, her smile suddenly gone, with a hint of sharpness in her tone that hadn't been there before. A brief pause, followed by a dolorous pair of chimes, was her only answer. She wasn't stuck, she knew that much. The Oupis didn't get stuck on concrete; In her experience, it was one of the easiest things for it to break. Spitting out a glob of blood with nearly perfunctory attention, Aegle lifted her shoulders as high as the rigging of her suit would allow. She flexed her fingers, tried to open her fists or straighten her legs, but the only answer she got was the quiet grinding of concrete dust beneath her feet. 

Then her eyes refocused. She'd never quite looked away from Guinevere, but she was looking at her now, and there was suspicion on her face.
"Ya've done somthin', aintcha?" She asked, sounding both accusing and impressed in one breath. A smile suddenly swept across her lips, and her hideously reddened eyes seemed to sparkle. Those eyes had come to settle on Guinevere's hand, clawed around something she couldn't quite see, flashing redly in lights of the arena and seemingly connected to her embedded fist.
"Y'stoppin' me from movin'." Aegle all but sighed, and her smile redoubled in size.
"Well alright!" She giggled happily, showing off a mouth of grizzly, blood stained teeth. "Way to go!" 
She beamed up at Guinevere, unabashed and, seemingly, utterly unconcerned, as if she were just genuinely pleased and proud of the older girl. 
"Now whatcha gonna do?"

Aegle had to admit, she was impressed. Very impressed, in fact. She'd fought a lot of different huntsman, from those who specialized at range to those who fought up close like she did. She'd seen hunters who turned the whole battlefield into a minefield of traps and pitfalls, and hunters who could call down lightning. Her sparring partner was a huntress capable of moving faster than the speed of sound. Yet this abundance of experience, one of the few fields Aegle could be counted as experienced in, never diminished the wonder she felt when she saw something new. And Guinevere was certainly something new; Something that had managed to paralyze the Oupis. If she could do that, there was really no telling what else she might be capable of. Furthermore, if this was her semblance, Aegle couldn't figure out how she'd seemed to fly moments before. It was so wonderfully enigmatic and incredibly incongruous, and Aegle couldn't wait to learn more. 

"What am I going to do next?" Guinevere repeated, and Aegle was confused to see that she wasn't smiling. In fact, she was frowning. Before she could ask why, all the resistance holding her to the ground abruptly vanished, allowing Aegle to finally regain her feet. Wondering if she'd somehow overcome Guin's semblance, Aegle regarded the older girl curiously, only to see no hint of misgiving on Guinevere's face. Was she letting Aegle fight back? Maybe it was very tiring to hold onto her the way she had been. Again, Aegle saw flashes of red sparkling in the air around her opponent's fingers, and she followed them back as far as she could. Her confusion redoubled when she realized that some of those red threads seemed to be connected to her. Or rather, that they were connected to her Oupis. Something like an idea was forming in the back of Aegle's mind...
"This." Guin's words, as well as a flicker of movement from her clawed hand, the one from which the red threads were streaming, arrested all further consideration from Aegle, who immediately returned her emerald attention to the older girl. A stab of excitement, as cold as ice and hot as molten steel, lanced through her heart, her smile suddenly returning to her lips. She wasn't sure what she was expecting, but she was hoping for something as impressive as the paralysis that Guinevere had affected upon her moments prior. In this hope, she was sadly disappointed. The two of them stared at one another, one confused, one expectant, with red threads twinkling between them, and nothing else happened.

Smile faltering, Aegle looked around the arena for any sign of what Guinevere was doing, only to see that nothing had changed. There was no ultimate weapon forming on the periphery, no gathering storm, not even more red threads. It was still just her and Guinevere. Concern slowly replaced her expectant good humor, and Aegle returned her attention to her opponent. Had she made a mistake, the orange haired girl wondered. The crowd was evidently wondering the same thing, their disappointment and confusion a roaring murmur at the edge of hearing, and were growing restless in their seats.
"S'okay," Aegle said suddenly, cracking a reassuring smile as if she sensed the crowd's unrest, "Just take your time. S'no rush." 

@hematos