"Well, isn't that what you're supposed to do with shit? Scrape it up with a little shovel?"

- Arnie Cunningham, Christine

Devil Gundam annihilated everything in its path. Armies of Mobile Fighters were tossed aside like weightless cans as the out-of-control ecology experiment slowly consumed the Earth under its thousands of mechanical roots. Nothing was fast enough to stay out of its way. Nothing except for Salsa Gundam, the nimble fighter piloted by Neo Monaco's Mirai Kamiki.

"Who's she supposed to be?" Chibodee said.

Conceived by her country as a 16-meter-tall flamenco dancer with a jet pack, Salsa Gundam sported a pearlescent white and light blue paint job on her compact armor panels. Decorative rubber frills insulated the joints underneath her pauldrons and skirt armor while offering maximum mobility. The thrusters on her lower back were built in an arrangement that hanged down to her knee joints, giving her skirt armor the appearance of layered fabric that flared out in the back.

While she didn't always pack the same wallop in her punches as some of bulkier Mobile Fighters built by the other countries, Salsa Gundam was quick. For each frantic attempt Devil Gundam made to strike her down with one of its tentacles, she'd do an energetic dance move that bounced her hydraulics into a parry or strafed her little fenders just out of range.

"No, seriously. I have no idea who that is," Sai said.

Salsa Gundam landed on her heel stabilizers and sprinted up Devil Gundam's grotesque semi-living fuselage. She came directly in range with the monster's exposed core, where Rain was looking a bit coated in liquid chrome and frozen in biological stasis. Salsa wound back her fist and started to reach forward.

"Will somebody please put a cap on that goose's feathers?" Wullube said.

And at that exact moment, the sabotaged components of Mirai's Mobile Trace system began to malfunction. Her motion capture rings spun out of control and descended downwards around her, turning the upper parts of her fighting suit back into liquid rubber as it caught in the spinning gears. She was left half tangled in synthetic webbing and half in a state of undress.

Salsa Gundam continued her fight despite becoming slower and more cumbersome. Mirai may have been at a disadvantage, but she wasn't about to give up.

It would prove to be the sassy senorita's final dance.

One of Devil Gundam's flailing metallic limbs came close to slicing Salsa Gundam in half, but Salsa Gundam dodged by doing the limbo. She attacked with a left punch, a right punch, a double palm strike, and a twirling high kick. Devil Gundam countered by knotting several of its tentacles into a roughly fist shape and delivering a massive uppercut just as Salsa Gundam spun around in her kick and revealed her Core Lander backpack for a split second. The vicious pinpoint move scored Devil Gundam an Instant KO and crushed Salsa Gundam's cockpit block as easily as tinfoil under a sledgehammer.

A woman's bloodcurdling scream echoed across the entire battlefield. Blood seeped from the wrecked cracks of Salsa Gundam's cockpit like strawberry filling oozing from a crushed cupcake. The tiny feminine machine convulsed in its last throes of broken mechanical signals and dangled limply in Devil Gundam's tentacles.

Devil Gundam reeled Salsa Gundam's metal carcass closer toward its visual sensors and flipped her over so she was dangling face-down on a hammock of metal weeds. The ends of several of Devil Gundam's limbs transformed into a frightening array of surgical tools/welding machinery and immediately went to work salvaging the woeful remains of Salsa Gundam's piloting systems from her back fuselage. Massive beam scalpels and motorized carpentry saws carved around the mangled components that were saturated with pulverized Mirai material. A sphere-shaped mineral analyzer lifted the wreckage out from Salsa Gundam's spine panels like a scoop of Gundarium and gore flavored ice cream.

"You know Monaco isn't Spanish, right?" said Argo.

The analyzer quickly retracted back into the gnarled mass of power cables forming Devil Gundam's base. Devil Gundam discarded the rest of Salsa Gundam's lifeless shell by letting it flop a hundred meters down to the ground. Tentacles hammering relentlessly like giant hydraulic presses made sure she lived up to her name by reducing her to a crushed paste of oil and metal chunks.

As Salsa Gundam's carcass was being dismantled into oblivion, Devil Gundam's roots began to glow. Its haywire ecology replicator had finished its task on Mirai.

"She's not even in the right show," George said.

The black metal weeds parted open and released Devil Gundam's newest creation. With darker color markings and a new hideous demonic maw filled with jagged fangs, Salsa Gundam was reincarnated in a form that didn't look like she was in the mood to dance to "Reincarnation" from Tekkaman Blade anymore. She was still nimble, she was still quick, and she was still deadly, but now she had been replicated purely from DG cells.

The smaller machine landed in front of Devil Gundam with her left manipulator tucked against the side of her skirt armor. Her bright red eye cameras stared coldly toward the rest of the Mobile Fighters as she glowed in the flaming wreckage of her weaker previous form. Salsa Gundam (and her biomechanically cloned pilot) had gone from Mild to Extra Zesty.

"I guess we're supposed to kill it?" Domon said halfheartedly.

Too bad Mirai was going to kill all of them first.

Author's note: That was pretty based.

Author's note 2: I picture Salsa Gundam as a 90s mech fusion of Mirai's blue and white star outfit, Lili Rochefort's fight choreography (hence Monaco), and that flamenco dancer redesign of Kohaku Hearts that mightykombat was trying to get me into the other day.