This should be impossible. Even accounting for the differences in their mana supplies and the relative quality of their Masters, what is happening is nonsense beyond her ability to calculate. His noble phantasm was a known quantity. His legend spoke of skill at siegecraft and a zeal for advancement and territory expansion. Even if he truly possessed a relic of such potency he should not be able to wield it to full effect.

Retreat should always have been an option. But there was nowhere left to run. For that matter she should not have been outmaneuvered so definitively by the fox. But she is here, holding nothing. This is a loss. An even more unsatisfying end to her campaign than the first time. There was no one around to bury her properly. If they only could, then...

Her spiritual core burns with a need for vengeance. It seeps into the ground beneath her and rots the grass she kneels on. Where her blood drips from cuts over her eyes and down the length of her arms it seers black burn patterns into the very earth. Even now she cannot help but paint with runes, though she has no mind to. Revenge, revenge, revenge! She must have it! She cannot die without visiting this pain on the one who caused it!

But there are no more reserves of mana to stitch her wounds back closed. Her noble phantasm lacks the magical energy required to even activate it, let alone empower it enough to turn the tide against such a famous relic in the hands of a warrior using the fullness of their true name. Her sword has shattered three quarters of the way down the blade; useless. She keeps a death grip on it anyway, despite her disgust. Better to die with a broken sword than empty handed.

"You are not the first to lecture me about the supposed weakness of my soul, little crusader. They are all of them vanished into dust. I remain."

All the blue has melted from her eyes, replaced by dirty gold. There is only one ring on a finger on her left hand. Not a prize of war, but the first one she was ever given. Her legs are empty of power but she forces them to lift her anyway. Her braid whips behind her in the winds caused by the release of the great spear as she rises to her full, absurd height to face it.

"When I kill you," she snarls, "I want you to remember every word you said to me. I will show you the difference between a prince and a king."

Empty words. Empty promises. Hate burns inside her, wrapped around the twin fire of shame. It doesn't matter. Every weapon in a warrior's arsenal is to be used. So she howls. Death before anything less is the height of shame.