Cohost writing prompt: @Making-up-Mech-Pilots — Mech Pilot who can always resort to boxing
The mech stumbles and stutters to a halt, every screen and readout suddenly blank; and Barya, adrenaline-hyped, punches the side of the cockpit and howls.
She can hear the pneumatic actuators click as the positive air pressure from the life support air recirculation halts. The tiny clatters of mechanical pins trying to drop through matching holes in the external environmental monitor's rotating punched metal disc, which forms part of the mech's failsafe system crash response; everything dutifully interlocking at the "human-survivable" position, and consequently starting the all-mechanical clockwork countdown to cockpit release.
She reaches for the manual cockpit release lever. She could pull it backward, and lock the cockpit shut despite the failsafe; the air inside will stay breathable for some time. She slams it forward instead, tears open the seat restraints as the cockpit opens on velocity-damped hinges, scrambles out before it even finishes.
The hull sparks under her feet, systems heavily damaged by the stray EMP burst. The only, thrilling, consolation is that before her, the Goldenrod Brigand is likewise posture-locked and crackling. Barya doesn't pause to think about it; launches herself from a running start off her machine's pectoral hull to slam down on the other mech, sliding a little on the differently textured panels, nose practically rubbed into the enemy ace's stencilled tally of downed machines.
Goldenrod's cockpit likewise cracks, with a hiss and a boil of noxious smoke; wracked with coughing, its pilot starts to heave herself out of the widening gap. Her machine must have taken the EMP hard, something going up in toxic plastic-sheathed flames.
Barya twists, grabs a handhold below her waist level, and swings down toward her opponent, arriving fist-first to the side of her face, a vicious impact with her whole gravity-driven weight behind it. The moment is marred only by the jarring impact knocking her sole handhold loose, both pilots tumbling all the way to the ground.
Face-down in some kind of thorn-covered plant, ribs probably cracked, Barya finally, dizzily starts to reconsider her knee-jerk punch her fucking face off plan.