And before she can even blink, one of the shadow figures lurches out from the snow bank and Anna does her best to turn on her heel so she can react as quickly and fluidly and perfectly as possible. Her arms finally provide her with precision strikes, robotic and mechanical and flawless in execution if she wants them to be (she imagines), but the bigger boon here is that she has someone to keep safe. Frey would kill her if she let Pen get hurt here, and Anna already knows that she'd beat herself up for it basically forever—haha, what's up, A2?—so she knows what she has to do.

Her body lunges forward, the sword almost an extension of her arm, and before the creature can even get close to Pen she's on it, slicing at it, leaving what she hopes are long gashes along the length of its body. She's got it's attention now, and the fight isn't as long as Anna expected it would be. It turns out that she's pretty fucking good with this sword in combat scenarios after all, and after trading blows and dodging claws and avoiding getting dragged into whatever hell these fuckers came from, Anna stands over the formless body that used to be a shadow.

But her heart rate is still elevated. She's keeping a very, very careful eye on it, because she only has one left. This isn't adrenaline. Anna knows that just because something's dead doesn't mean it can't hurt her down here.