<strong>Day 17</strong><br/><br/>Jillian stood in the Reaver, ready as she ever would be to get this battle started. Her opponent was supposedly the dreaded 'phantom warrior', the mute fighter who intimidated so many of his opponents by never showing his face, and never speaking. True to his MO, the Phantom Warrior was already in the cockpit of Specter when Jillian laid eyes on it, absolutely nothing at all coming from netcom. Jillian snapped out the Reaver's scythe, pointing it at him from the other side of the battleground. The two of them were on what appeared to be a tropical island, with a sun bright overhead, trees in the middle, a sandy beach surrounding the middle forest, and the entire setting of the battle surrounded by water. As the trees appeared and blocked the view between her and her opponent, Jillian spoke through netcom, just for the sake of talking.<br/>"Alright Mr. Ghosty, I hope you're ready to be taken down a peg or two."<br/><br/>Of course, there was no response.<br/>"Creepy..."<br/><br/>The buzzer went off for the battle to begin, and Reaver immediately charged on the beaches to flank around and run across the Specter as quickly as possible. She doubted that he'd remain in a place of high visibility for very long, considering what she learned from their last two battles in the previous season, but she had to try and catch him off guard anyway. When she turned a sharp corner, she saw the silver mech standing out on the beach, pointing it's rifle at her. She swung her scythe out of natural reflex, but it simply passed through the machine, which seemed to phase in and out of existence as it simply stood there.<br/>"Damn Holograms."<br/><br/>A massive blast ripped through the forest, almost swallowing the Reaver in it if Jillian wasn't so quick on the draw. The phantom warrior loved to use his holograms to set up ambushes, Jillian knew that as well as anybody. She pointed her arm mounted Gatling gun into the forest and opened fire, only to find that she had little success in damaging the Specter, which seemed to specialize in hit & run tactics. Jillian charged into the forest after Specter, she pulled out one of her sabers as she gave pursuit, since the scythe was too cumbersome to fight with when in the cluster of trees. She zipped quickly through the trees, making her difficult to target with all the natural cover. Eventually, she came to a dead stop after she realized that she was making no progress by simply charging around through the forest. She stood dead still, not moving for several seconds while she took in her surroundings. Specter was always one of her least favorite opponents to fight in areas where there was a lot of natural cover, whoever the pilot was, he was an absolute master at guerrilla warfare.<br/><br/>She shut her eyes and instead focused on her audio sensors, as she tried to pick up if the giant mech was making any amount of noise maneuvering around the forest. As if having to fight the phantom warrior in such a location wasn't bad enough, it was made even more haunting when Jillian came to realize that she didn't hear anything at all in the forest, with the knowledge that the Phantom Warrior could attack at any point. After a few quick seconds of dead silence, an EMP grenade dropped from the forest right under Jillian's feet. Her eyes widened in dismay as she tracked the grenade, and she tried to react, only to have the grenade blow up right in her face and ruin her systems for a few seconds. Even more haunting, the instant after the grenade blew up, Reaver was rocked by a plasma cannon blast and shot backwards, demolishing any trees unlucky enough to get in the way. Her systems came back online, and Reaver started to recover as Jillian let out a bit of a groan. "Reaver took some pretty heavy damage from that one."<br/><br/>Jillian realized that she was utterly outclassed when the Phantom Warrior was in his element, so she had to force him into a setting that he wasn't as dangerous in. She had to drag him out into the open if she wanted to stand the slightest chance of winning. With this realization in mind, Jillian began a full retreat from the woods, and found herself standing in the wide open terrain of the beach only a few moments later. She took a deep breath to calm her nerves and watched the woods carefully for any signs of movement. She started to promptly walk in laps around the woods, looking for any movement that could tip her off about an upcoming attack. She kept her movements slow, as she realized that a loud and brutish target was the best kind of prey for somebody lie the Phantom Warrior. And it turned out that her being quiet for a change would actually pay off for her, as she came across a rather interesting scene for her troubles. As she kept her eyes forward in front of her, she saw Specter appear out of nowhere around the border of the woods where Jillian had wrecked some of the trees. It's cannon was drawn, and it was pointed out towards the beach, it's left side facing the slowly advancing Reaver. After glancing down to make sure that netcom was off, she muttered under her breath.<br/>"Hologram, huh... Let's spring this trap and see where it takes us."<br/><br/>Jillian suddenly picked up speed, pretending to miss the well concealed hologram until she was right by it, where she snapped around and lunged in to stab it with her sword.<br/>"Now then..."<br/><br/>As expected, the real Specter burst out from the side, demolishing more trees as it had both hands secured on it's claymore. It struck out in an attempt to liberate Reaver of it's gatling gun wielding arm, but Jillian was fully expecting an ambush of some kind, so she had little trouble snapping to the side and blocking the attack with her sword. Dealing with a clearly surprised opponent, she put her gatling gun right up to the stomach of Specter and opened fire, causing bullets to rip right through it and deal immense damage to the Silver mech before it retreated back into the woods. Apparently it was still able to fight, but Jillian had done a considerable amount of damage to it, and she was proud of her mental victory over the Phantom Warrior, even if it was through a stroke of luck.<br/><br/>Jillian had gotten an engineer buddy of hers to sit the redhead down and teach her about the basic fundamentals about how an MW's inner workings operated. While she was far from an expert on the subject, she had learned enough to know that, even though Specter was still moving, several of it's critical components had to be pretty messed up from the attack, and it wouldn't have long before it's systems shut down. Unfortunately, the strain of blocking such a forceful attack from the claymore didn't do Jillian's already damaged Reaver a whole lot of good either. She got the impression that if she were to try and block another move like that, something was going to break. She retreated backwards away from the woods and decided to be a bit more patient, she would wait him out, he'd need to go on the offensive if he wanted to have a chance at prevailing before his mech shut down.<br/><br/>True to Jillian's thoughts, it didn't take long before Specter charged out of the woods close to Reaver again and swung with it's claymore. Jillian wasn't overly sure that this was the real Specter, so she dodged the attack instead and looked out towards the woods, where she saw a glimmer of chrome, which she took to be the real Specter getting ready to open fire. Before giving it the chance, she blasted the woods with Reaver's gatling gun, but she was stunned to see that, just as the gatling began to hum to life, a claymore sliced through it and cut off one of Jillian's arms. Jillian turned to the side in dismay, at the sudden realization that the one that had burst from the woods with the melee weapon held high was indeed the real Specter, the Phantom Warrior having pulled off a rather dangerous gambit in order to get the upper hand on Jillian again. With one arm missing, Jillian retreated, dropped it's standard sword in it's remaining hand, and pulled tip of an axe out from behind Reaver. With the flick of a switch, a handle snapped from the axe and she wielded a full sized halberd in her hands.<br/><br/>Instead of pushing the attack, Specter retreated and switched to it's cannon, letting out another heavy burst of plasma. This time, Jillian was able to avoid it and charge towards Specter, who was lining up for another shot. However, it seemed that the rate of fire for the cannon was rather unforgiving, so as Jillian got close, Specter dropped the cannon to the ground and instead pulled a pair of boomerangs from either hip and hurled them at Reaver. It was apparent that there was some kind of heat tracking system in the boomerangs, as they quickly locked on to the Reaver and flew towards it. Jillian was able to swat down one of them with the pole of the halberd, but the other one made it through and clipped her shoulder, slicing through it before it made it's way back to it's master. Blessedly, it was the shoulder of the arm that was already messed up, instead of hitting the Reaver's good arm and making the red mech entirely useless. However, Jillian continued her assault regardless of the attack, she got in close enough for a melee attack, and was able to stab the halberd into one of Specter's knees before it had time to pull out it's claymore.<br/><br/>Jillian saw this as a colossal victory for her, as she had immobilized Specter. However, when she tried to pull away, she came to the startling realization that Specter was holding on tightly to Reaver's arm with both hands while the missile pods on it's back spikes opened up, launching missiles out from either side of the chrome mech. The missiles gave both machines a wide berth as they tried to locate their targets, and Jillian realized what Phantom Warrior was trying to do. He was going to use his good leg to force himself backwards just in time to throw Jillian into a barrage of missiles while he came out safe from the explosion. Damage of that magnitude would certainly declare him to be the winner, while Jillian was left with a rather nasty defeat on her record. She launched a hard knee at his stomach, in an attempt to completely disable the chrome mech before the missiles landed. However, Specter's good leg dug slightly down into the dirt right in front of his feet, and Jillian saw a green light blinking, it was the indication of an EMP grenade that had been provoked into detonation.<br/>"No way!!!"<br/><br/>The grenade exploded, causing a cloud of sand to cover both mechs while the missiles dove into the cloud and picked their targets. Explosion after explosion rang out through the cloud, making it impossible to see what was happening due to a chaotic mix of sand and smoke.<br/><br/>When the cloud finally dissipated about thirty seconds later, both Mechs were down. Both of them were missing several appendages, as Specter was left with only it's right arm completely in tact, and Reaver was left with only it's left leg. Neither machine was in any remote condition to fight any longer. The final verdict on the battle was<em>undecided</em>.<br/><br/>In the cockpit of the Reaver, Jillian was still very conscious, and she could only laugh to herself as she realized what had happened.<br/>"He knew he lost when I hit him with my gatling gun, so instead of trying to turn around and win, he instead forced me to settle for an undecided."<br/><br/>She leaned back and sighed.<br/>"What a frustrating guy."<br/><br/><strong>Day 31</strong><br/><br/>It had been little over three weeks since Mira suffered her defeat at the hands of Jareth, and almost all of her time went into Einenlancer. She didn't get out almost at all over the two weeks since the commercial shoot, so day in and day out went to trying to rig together whatever pieces she could get to work, as well as ordering new pieces for what couldn't be repaired and put back in service. It had taken her a long time, but Einenlancer was actually starting to look like an MW again, though it was far, far from perfect. She had done a trial run a few days ago, and she had actually managed to power on the machine, as well as take two steps forward before it shut down again due to a catastrophic leak in the power generator. Still, having it being able to at least walk again was miles away from where it was two weeks ago, where she was just sorting through salvageable pieces and throwing all the slag in a bin for disposal. As she woke up in the morning, she prepared herself for another long day in the hanger, trying to fix up her beloved mech.<br/>"Maybe I'll take a look at that generator today..."