Sacrifices
The successive blows to the Gauss Baron's layered defenses were so abrupt that Venerable Leiva hardly paid any attention to what had happened to the Dark Zephyr.
That was a mistake.
Much to her surprise, the intact and still combat-capable Dark Zephyr had reached the upper surface of the bunker and swiped its knives to tear through the gap in order to widen its opening.
It looked as if it had evaded the explosive trap that had engulfed many of its illusionary copies!
Venerable Tusa smirked. In fact, that was indeed the case. When he leveraged the prime mech properties of his expert mech and channeled the power of Arnold, he sent out every single iteration of the Dark Zephyr around the enemy mech blockade in different directions.
What no one noticed was that there was one Dark Zephyr copy that had slowed down and reversed course! Instead of going forward, it had stalled and even flew backwards to an extent.