Quote:Ermm... Oh, yeah, she used it in Ep... Two, I think? Actually, I'm thinking that that was what it looks like when you manifest a slice of forcefield rather than just a disk.
Didn't Mai also have some kinda flame lash thing?
She could also leave sort of contrail things in the manga, but I think that that was just a visual effect.
I've already described how well the attempt went against the spike-throwing slug thing, but, unfortunately, the Flying Siamese Squid Monster had quicker reaction times. There was a parachute visible after the thing's tentacle had caught the plane as it went by, and since Mai interfered with the Orphan's attempt to finish him off the pilot even survived, but I don't think it was anything approaching a coincidence that the next time we went through this whole dance, the JASDF launched from a lot farther out, and used a lot bigger missile.
In the meantime, though, Mai's heroism had, as the practice, often does, cost her badly. Defending the pilot had forced her to slow down, almost hold still, and that gave the monster a chance to wrap a pair of tentacles around the outside of her shield and squeeze. There was a moment or two while she struggled to get free, jerking this way and that in its grasp but unable to drop the glowing spherical barrier it was holding onto for fear of its closing its grasp before she had a chance to slip through the gaps, and then it, well, swallowed her.
I had looked up in time to see that, and it just about gave me a heart attack.
The remaining jet came back around for another pass, and, evidently having learned a lesson from the earlier attempts' failure to make a serious impression, volleyed all of its remaining missiles pretty much at once. The catamaran Orphan shrieked and writhed under the onslaught, and several of its arms were actually blown completely free to tumble the hundreds of feet to the ground, where they landed with something somewhere between a slam, a splat, and a crash that knocked over nearly half a dozen fully grown trees. It made a couple of abortive attacks at the plane, then swung around towards the academy. It was looking pretty sorry by this point - between the craters in its flesh, the holes in its wing, and its missing limbs, the JASDF's attacks had obviously been far more effective than those old Toho films would have left you expecting against a giant monster - but at first there was no apparent cause for the way it aborted its attack run and started throwing what I could only describe as a major fit.
That mystery was resolved pretty firmly when one of its, er, 'heads' pretty much... well, exploded. Mai didn't have nearly as much control over her forcefields at that point as she'd develop later, but she was able to expand it pretty easily, pushing the thing's gullet apart from the inside out in the process.
At the time I thought that that would be pretty much the end of the matter, but the cloud of about an umpty-bazillion seagull-looking things that converged on the larger Orphan a moment later would thoroughly disabuse me of that notion.
Yes, this took a while. I've been a bit distracted. See various other threads around here for a large part of why.
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"