Regardless of long term viability of going auged versus augless, I think it's important to look at Lily's current condition:
Lily. Health: 25 + 14 (Temp)/30 (Healthy). Sanity: 7/25 (To Love and to Cherish To Hate, and to Abhor).
And then look at Mao's:
Mao. Health: 23/35 (Lightly Injured). Sanity: 8/35 (To Love and to Cherish).
Like, it cannot be understated that talented, powerful, augmented to hell and back heavyweight 5th Rank Fixer Mao is
objectively closer to dead in the water than Lily is.
This is a fight based in things that augs don't
quite cover, and the ones that do are massively expensive investments to say the least, so we shouldn't be caught up with how we were inherently incapable of doing better with just the equipment we had on hand, since, we could've.
Now, all together? Victor dealt Lily 1 Health Damage and 7 Sanity Damage across 10 rounds (more like 7/6 honestly), Victor's Office dealt 5 Health Damage and 7 Sanity Damage (...What the fuck is up with all the 7s here) across 10 rounds (again, really 6), Moon factors for 3 Sanity Damage from death reprisal, and Lily hit for 49 Damage in 8 rounds, before the boost from consumables brought that up to 79 in the last two.
So what does that tell us?
The real cause for the 14 smackerals of avoidable SAN Loss Lily took was from the cascade effect of taking on two units at once for as long as we did, and the easiest way to have avoided that was to have targeted Victor first.
Like, not even with the Seven Pill or Gunlet, it took 6 rounds to do an even 30 Damage to the Fixer Crowd, Victor's entire health pool and a fourth of the Fixer Crowd's, and by Round 4 (one -1 Armor Resist in from For Richer or Poorer) Victor would've received the Injured dice malus from losing around half his health, since he's subject to that unlike the Fixer Crowd.
Now, Victor had better defenses than his 8th Grades (though, also lacked best out of 2 for Block), but that could easily be rectified by adding the Gunlet to the mix, +4 for every successful attack could've ended him without hitting For Richer, For Poorer first, maybe even with a bullet left over, but because we fell for the temptation of softening up the Fixer Crowd first...Well, we were really lucky Lily was able to switch targets and fortify herself when she did.
We just made a misplay that brought us to this position.
No, you could say having the right kind of augs could've given us better leeway, which is true, if we rolled to find them, and they were in our price range, but that comes from an unnecessarily despairing position regarding Lily's chances of surviving as she is now, because everyone should make note, between the two Fixers here, Lily would have a better chance of making it out alive if Mao just popped out of thin air from this point on than vice versa.
And I mean that in disclusion to Mao's five turn nap, Lily's five turn powerup, the question of if Mao will be subject to Pale or Red Damage once she wakes up, and EVEN
Twice-Beating-Heart in the mix.
Lily's Endurance (given +1 by her uniform) gives her +4 to Block, to go with the +4 Armor Resist (directly and indirectly ALSO boosted by her uniform equipment) that can negate most damage that even makes it over that high bar. Both those individual stats are 1 above Mao's.
This notable qualitative difference is further emphasized by the foiling of their weaponry/health modifying mechanics, because Lily has the Knockbar, the humble but very effective survivalist tool that gives a -1 to whatever an opponent struck by it rolls next, which typically means hobbling their next attack's chance to even land on her, let alone make it past her flat +4 damage reduction, and
Life Sap, the nifty little badge that feeds Lily 5 Temp HP for every enemy she's killed, which has
already spared her a scrap of true HP damage, and basically doubled the amount of time it'll take for Moon to push her to
Injured at that.
Mao, on the other hand, has only taken the 12 points of HP loss she has because of using
Amber Alert, a
phenomenally dangerous attack bonus, but one that negatively impacts her sustainability in the field; using it one, two more times could push her to
Injured and the -1 CR that comes with that, and that's no battle conditions more dire for that malus than this one.
That's the name of the game with their qualitative differences frankly, Lily handily edges out a Fixer four years her senior on a defensive front, but as an artillery piece Mao's offense blows everyone we've seen out of the water, especially once she gets to her favorite range on engagement.
Now, there's such a thing as acknowledging emergent specialization, but there are a lot of reasons we want to be proactive about adapting to strategies that'll raise our strength to what can deal with our problems, so what have we seen that does that?
Guntlet: Adds +4 Damage to your Attack, Costs 1 Bullet (1 Bullets Available).
Seven Seed (Consumed, In Effect): For the next 5 Turns, +7 to Mental Resist, Armor Resist, and Damage.
Oh right, the consumables we got for this mission, they've proven to be very useful for slotting into Lily's weakpoints in this trial run, definitely something to follow up on in the future.
Ribbing aside, nobody–Er, most of us, aren't adverse to augments as a matter of course, but there's no need to get up in arms about how Augs are the Only Thing that will save Lily's Fixer career whenever trouble comes up that augs, very specifically wouldn't turn around. Seriously, we can go into the topic of bionic rocket arms when we're in a fight that bionic rocket arms would solve, instead of like, tinfoil caps for brainwave protection.
