Forrest wrote:
Rakshasa wrote:
As I wrote during the fighting, IMO Sarine's expression wasn't one of total shock at the Ensigerum using weird magic... But shock as in: "OMG, they're actually using _time_-magic... Are they insane???"
Looking back over that whole encounter again, Sarine didn't really get her ass kicked that badly. Warrel got one hit on her by surprise (for whatever reason, she wasn't expecting him to use time magic, at least not just then); she tried to counterattack but, having been hit off guard, wasn't incredibly successful and got hit again. Then Jon distracted Warrel long enough for Sarine to kick his ass.
Warrel's hits were nasty, sure (and could have been a lot worse if he wasn't toying with her), but getting hit twice by your opponent when they pull something highly unexpected on you, and then still winning when something unexpected happens to them in turn, isn't really such a horrible failure. Considering how well mere-mortal Jon was able to do against both Warrel and then Sara when his plans accounted for time magic, I imagine 3000-year-old martial badass Sarine could do quite well against young Sara here, even without explicitly negating her time-magic abilities.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong -- and I'm sure someone will -- but my impression is that the Ensigerum (or whatever the elf-trained humans were called back then) weren't using Time Magic the last time the elves had any contact/conflict with them. Without the Time Magic Surprise, the Chronomonkeys wouldn't stand a chance, so it's not as if Sarine was unrealistically confident given what she knew at the time.
Something else for people to keep in mind is that it was probably only Sara's warning that kept Warrel from dying before he ever even saw Sarine, when Sarine unleashed an
extra jumbo large grande magic blast on his position while she was still up in the scafolding. Even with that, he barely managed to get out of the way -- see the next non-filler panel for where he's getting up from his landing from the dodge. (One of my favorite Sarine-geek moments in the comic, actually, comes at that point, when she's able to
get down from the scafolding without using any magic (Warrel) and without hurting herself (Jon), but instead on pure skill.)
It's also
possible that Warrel wasn't toying with Sarine on the
second strike so much as getting in the hit he could while dodging the magic blast.
Anyway, overall, I guess I'm still a bit baffled by how unbeatable some people (not you, Forrest) think the clock ninjas are.
Sarine isn't
stupid, whatever else one thinks of her. I'd be stunned if she didn't actually have some kind of counter to time magic whipped up and ready at this point.