Gromweld said:
Correct. My intent was for Taylor to realize that Behemoth was challenging Taylor by targeting shelters, especially when he deliberately moved quickly against shelters she tried to warn. If this was not communicated by the writing, then I will try to be more clear in the future.
Good ways of communicating this in the future would be to use Taylor's thoughts, her incredible perception allowing her to intuit that the Endbringer is taunting her, its casual deliberateness saying, "These people you were trying to save? They're dead now, because of you. Try and stop me if you dare, coward."
Or something along similar lines but not handled so clumsily. But the thing is, Taylor still wouldn't have to try and
punch Behemoth. Virtues are not so narrow as to require specific responses in reaction to whatever situation triggered the virtue in the first place.
To extend upon my Invincible Sword Princess example, a swordsman challenging her to a duel does not mandate that she respond to the provocation with her daiklave. If she chooses to thrash her opponent with a pair of chopsticks that's a perfectly valid response ("I will not sully my blade with the blood of such an unworthy opponent..."), she may not even have to respond at all if she believes the opponent too far beneath her. Valor, among other things, represents a persons pride as a warrior. If a swordsman were to challenge the worlds greatest sniper ("stop hiding and face me you coward!"), do you think that the sniper will suddenly abandon his hiding place and face the swordsman with his knife? No, the sniper would just put a bullet through the idiots skull because the snipers Valor is a reflection of the snipers pride in his skills.
What's happening is that you're combining the components of Behemoth's challenge into a single issue and applying it to both virtues when you should be taking those components and having the virtues address them on a case by case basis.
Behemoth's challenge, in a nutshell, is, "Face me (valor, challenge) or these people will die (compassion, prevent suffering of innocents)."
-Valor requires that she respond to the first half. Since Taylor has already resigned herself to not being able to damage Behemoth, an acceptable if bare minimum response would be for her to pop up at the edge of Behemoths range and convey via body language or verbal taunt, "Here I am, monster. Come and get me."
-Compassion requires that she respond to the second half. She must make an attempt to save those people's lives. If Taylor thought that the aforementioned taunting would work, then Compassion would be satisfied as well. However, if Taylor thought that taunts wouldn't work then she would probably want to escalate her response. Don't go overboard on this though - Taylor is only Compassion 3, she is nowhere near the extremes that would be required by Compassion 5 so martyrdom is out.
Like I've been saying, if you want to really rack up the Clarity during this fight using conflicting imperatives from Taylor's virtues Compassion vs Conviction is the way to do it. Although if you're going to be abusing the fact that Alchemicals can accrue Clarity much faster than Solars can gain limit (because Solars only gain limit for suppressing their primary virtue or when their limit condition pops up) you should probably go back to the RAW for how Alchemicals are able to reduce it.
