*
It flew higher and faster, it's metallic gleaming skin begun to glow. Despite having an appearance resembling a crane affixed with drills, it had no feathers. It's body and wings were one smooth cold metallic surface, hinting the usual monotone of a fighter jet, a bringer of death and war.
Avatar of war, an A rank Trace said to be a vestige of the spirits cultivated by ancient wars. War brings death, disaster and suffering, the emotion of their mana heightened by the lost zeitgeist gave birth to this miniature spiritual embodiment that represented conflict. Usually it was too dangerous for local magical girls, requiring the strict intervention of Sentinels. If this was an anime featuring the average magical girl in a school setting, it wouldn't be a e exaggeration to call it the final boss or the season finale.
{Execution}
A soldier only carries orders, and a wailing spectre only carries grudges. It accelerates double the speed and begun to gather altitude, easily exceeding the previous speed at which it was attacking with. Lastia and Arin were still waiting on the ground, this was a chance for Sariel to prove her strength.
Only she can maintain altitude for this long. While the Trace is still within her range, she teleported upwards successively, bringing with her an entire cube of air. Oxygen gets thin up top, and while it wouldn't kill her directly, substituting oxygen with magic still costed the magic energy itself and slowed her reaction speed.
If she could ordinarily breathe in oxygen for just a second longer, she would. Air superiority, it doesn't only represent control over the air space that guarantees victory. Every condition to victory is pried from destiny, seizure of the very air that everyone breathes. Oxygen is supplied to the mind to allow higher function, emotion... Through controlling the very air around them, the Trace subtly but gradually grasps control over the emotions of its enemies. It not only thins the air, but also sends hypnotic suggestions through the vacuum to induce certain emotions.
The most efficient way to kill prey... Is to convince it that all its own efforts are futile, that exerting anymore would be pointless and even hurt herself trying... A flood of despair seeps into her body as she gains altitude, her rate of teleportation has a certain cool down, a cool down dictated by the gaps of her mind, her reaction speed. Instead of slowing down, it only increases and in the next moment she caught up with the Trace.
For a single instance that stretched to eternity, it watched. Despite the constant acceleration, the unending desire for dominance and power... The law of capital accumulation bends under {Swap}. {Swap} did not respect laws, it is the inherent act of substitution only limited by Sariel's imagination. She predicted the Traces' approximate location and instantly closed the gap... Rather she went even high in altitude and had it fly into her.
It should be C grade but it had blasted through that classification and went into A. She reached her grasp over its metallic flesh, her fingers were cool and calculated. They grip tightly, puncturing through its skin. Through skin contact, she sent out waves of magical energy that tore through its defences in one spot. Her new ability not only sent out radio waves and subsequently sound waves...
It could produce magic waves that crash and tore through the inherent magical resistance that all living things possess. Coupled with her slight aptitude of overpowering a living being's sentience to {Swap} them as she pleased... The single possibility that allowed her to contain that gaseous Trace they once encountered...
{Swap}.
She inverted it and place it nearer towards the ground, causing a catastrophic crash. A large cloud of smoke swallowed the theme park after expanding from the point of impact, further dousing this monotonous world in more grey.
Emotions, they've been assaulting her ever since the start. What's so different after adding a little more upon encountering this Trace? What would have made an average person cry and attempt to take their life... Whether it's because her magic defences were high enough to partially ward off psychological attacks, or because she's been steeped so deep in a similar level of despair before... The level of hypnotic suggestion was insufficient. It was physically induced through the air or lack thereof, so her magic resistance didn't do anything, then...
It was all down to her own mental resilience. Despair, it was nothing new. Of course it hurt, it was suffocating. It crushed her lungs, spat our her ribs and made her wish she could drag her own skull down a road pavement. However she wouldn't lose sight of her goal. She was willing to lay down her life in that fight with Lastia before the conflict with the super satellite calamity. What was so different about now?
The lack of oxygen was already crushing her lungs. Anaerobic respiration, aerobic arcane substitution, her body was never in proper condition. Towards the induced despair potent enough to make magical girls take their own life, she kept her eyes towards her prey and acted first before her emotions had room to proliferate. The ground wasn't indestructible, the Trace rushed so far into the ground that it got stuck deep into the earth.
The solution was simple. She used {Swap} once more to bring it back to the surface. Now that its motion has stopped, it couldn't move. Ever war has to eventually stop, when supply lines run dry, when politicians are in the after life and cannot move the machine of ruthless rationality called the army. Space is opened up for peace talks, hands are more willing to sign reparations instead of shedding lives.
She punched it while outputting sound waves into the insides of its body. Its limp neck cracked and belly flopped as its wings rolled over the ground. It could have killed her if it simply crammed into her with all that accumulated speed, it was a minor embodiment of war... No it was lesser than that, a mere shadow born from war's vestiges, like the super thin carbon dioxide exhaled from a person's breath. It was never substantial, yet it was this powerful.
To put it aptly, the match up was horrible. To Sariel whose {Swap} easily defies physical laws, if she fought well like just now it would be no danger at all. There was no point thinking further about it, if we were to explore the actual embodiment of war instead of this tiny shadow or an imitation of one, we would be diving into the ancient past when gods might have once stood among humanity.
Such a being couldn't manifest in the age of abundance, it was too safe. If gods are the earth's or humanity's defence system, then sentinels and magical girls are just low calibre versions of this defence system. The law of magical girls wouldn't use excessive force.