Kara had been consumed by the rhythm.
Each day she woke and waited, each day she shuffled to the cafeteria, all the while thinking of nothing but her next run on the simulator.
When it came she no longer had to think about her movements to cover the first three stages, they were just another beat in the rhythm.
Each day she swiftly dispatched them, having committed their attacks and counters to memory.
Today like all days she gritted her teeth as the scene faded into the fourth stage.
She squeezed her control stalks and began to move to the enemy spawn point.
Metropolitan streets were like narrow hallways to her massive form, her shoulder plates taking the occasional corner off a large building.
She stopped at a familiar intersection and waited behind a tall building.
Kara stuck a hand out into the intersection, and waved it slightly.
She closed her eyes and counted the beats
one - two…
She yanked her hand away and at the very same moment saw a flash light up the street in front of her.
just a fraction of a second after that, a bullet ripped through the air next to her, exactly where her hand had been.
This strategy seemed risky at first glance, but it was much less so than sticking one's whole body into the line of fire, and it gave Kara just enough time to make her next move… in theory.
While the enemy robot was chambering a new round into its giant gun, Kara darted out into the cross street and sprinted directly towards it with everything she had.
She had just barely closed half the distance when the enemy started to raise its gun for another shot.
This was the hard part, she'd been here before, several times, but never managed to dodge a shot in the direct line of fire.
she would have loved to try something else, but this was by far the closest she'd been to taking out the sniper.
Just as the sniper was about to get a bead on her lower half, she took a large telegraphed step to her left side.
By now she'd found out that the sniper tended to lead its shots on moving targets, it would read her movement and try to shoot where she would be instead of where she was.
With some brainstorming, her and her mentor had decided to use this behavior against it.
Make a feint in one direction, then step off in another just as it shot.
Her mentor tended to refer to this by its sports term, a juke.
half a beat after making her feint step off, naval cannon pointed directly at her chest, Kara made the input for the juke.
The ground cracked under her momentum and the air cracked around her as the giant cannon fired, and missed.
Kara and the robot stood there for a moment, her in disbelief, the robot lowering its weapon to reload again.
Just as it started to bring out another shell for reloading, Kara broke through her surprise and pulled out her knife from her thigh.
The knife roared to life in her hand as she closed the last three steps to her enemy just before it could fire again.
With fire in her eyes, she rammed the knife into the enemy robot's neck.
Kara pulled the knife down through the robot's body, nearly splitting it down the middle, all that rage from dying to it over and over finally released.
Stage four was finally complete, the screens faded to black and she looked around.
Her mentor was elsewhere, so there was nobody nearby except the big looking girl she'd paid in commissary snacks to keep watch for her run, and she wasn't even looking.
Kara smirked, everyone had finally gotten bored enough of the simulators to leave her alone.