And yet none of them can match the abilities of the archangel Misery Nomaki. These poor creatures are tied to the feeble directions of their human pilots. Still bound by force and mass and acceleration, constrained by the shortcomings of human mind and flesh. Easy to block. Trivial to evade. When Diamond gives the signal to begin their assault, Misery bats them away like mosquitoes. When they come forward, swinging their blades, the archangel Misery blocks them with the aegis borne on hir legs. When they coordinate their attacks, the archangel Misery has more than enough limbs and more than enough speed to counter them. Zie dances between these puppets on strings, reveling in hir dexterity and strength. How can they hope to face hir when they are shackled by their mortal limitations?

One of the seraphs is different. The archangel Misery spies it on the edge of formations commanded by Diamond Sunyata, shunted into a support role: the mech piloted by the Lady Lee Alodia Lightning. She glows like a star at the heart of her assigned unit, and the archangel Misery knows they underestimate her potential. The princess of the Faithful plays her role with perfect fidelity, but her changed nature cannot escape Misery’s keen omnipotence. A little too much fluidity in her motion. A bit too much freedom. She, like Misery, has been freed from her limitations.

Fierce joy burns through the archangel Misery. Not the weak human filaments of biochemical signaling, but real joy, the purity of celebration, an abstract and universal concept. Zie loves this. It is what zie was born to do. Hir blades hunger for the destruction of battle, real battle. And hunger is thought of as a human thing, a mortal thing, a need driven by the myriad requirements of a soft organic body unable to power its own engines of existence. But it is also a universal want, a fundamental force. A free radical hungers for an electron pair. A negative hungers for a positive. The archangel Misery wants to fight. The archangel Misery hungers to destroy.

When Misery comes back in, when the archangel is returned to its spot in the middle of the Butchery and she detaches from it, when she is fully human again and beholden to gravity and the laws of physics, she stands on the pilot’s landing between the door and the command center and looks up. The lights of the Butchery, enormous bright-white strips of holy opal suspended from the ceiling, turn her vision purple and green when she shuts her eyes. This human body, which she has inhabited for some twenty years, seems so peculiar all of a sudden. You don’t notice the quirks until you’re shown something else. Something superior.

The other pilots shuffle behind her, silent, each cloaked in a mantle of private thoughts. Even with their inexperience they know the battles they fought were abnormal. Nothing like the simulations. They were absolutely outclassed.