How long has she been doing this? The only way she has to keep track of the time in here is by counting the loops of the duel and, quite honestly? She lost the rhythm somewhere around six or so and now as far aware she's been doing this from autumn straight till spring. Or maybe an hour? It's somewhere between the two. 

The only thing she knows for sure is that she's not in a dream, or trapped in some sort of time loop or, or, um, y'know, one of those big... smartypants, uh... magical field-ish... things. You know the ones! A-anyway, this isn't one of those! She can tell by the way the way the burning is slowly creeping into her body. It starts with sore fe-- ok well, no. It [i]started[/i] with the bruises up and down her arms, but after she graduated from the Clubs course those stopped accumulating as much, except when that muck-covered blade has slapped her on the backside in place of actually defeating her. It's happened once or twice now, and it hurts about as much as you'd expect. 

But, y'know, anyway, it starts with sore feet. Which makes sense, bare as they are and on this hard flat stone with so many old bits of plastic to not quite avoid stepping on! Even if it was softer, all of this stomping and spinning and twirling and leaping and ducking and running would get even the toughest of feets to start complaining, just you see if it wouldn't! But of course, she's past that now. Now she's reached the spot where that creeping, burning sensation is spreading out across her calves and up into her thighs, like somebody lit a bunch of tiny candles underneath her skin and now they've started tipping over. 

She feels it in her arms too, at this point. Did you know? Blocking a sword hurts almost as much as being hit with a club. Yue twists her wrists and swings to deflect another blow, and the impact goes rattling down the length of the wood and all the way up into her elbows. They've started developing a permanent shake that makes her sword feel about three times as heavy as it did when Hyra first put her spell on it, which is really starting to make it hard to keep her first and most important promise. She squeezes it tighter anyway, as if that was going to do something other than give her blisters.

"I... I don't... I can't..."

Her lungs are shrinking too small to hold all the air she needs. Or is it that she needs more air now than they've ever been able to hold? It's hard to tell when they feel so tight even though she's found her voice again. Her eyes have gone dry even though she's just as scared as she was when this began and there's just as many if not more reasons to cry. 

But like this. And then like this. Finishing like this. It's not so much that she [i]can't[/i] stop as... no, it's exactly that, isn't it? Because if she does stop, if she begs for mercy or runs screaming or just falls over and gives up like those robots did before her, then nobody is getting the thing they wished for today. Not her, not Hyra, not Cyanis, not Kat, and certainly not this ghost. Yue slips a bit on a bit of algae gunk and narrowly avoids a straight thrust. She spins, a little bit like a dancer (a very very tired dancer) and lifts her sword again at the floating dress as it shakes off a tiny bit more of the slop that's been making it seem more like a monster than an outfit. 

"You're... a-actually, really... pretty," she gasps, "D-did anyone... ever tell you... that?"

Yue smiles. Just a teeny, tiny little itsy bitsy one. And then it's gone in a flash, because making her face do anything other than hang kinda slack and exhausted-like is really too much work to be doing right now, not when she needs all that energy for important stuff like sword holding and not dying and trying to wipe the bits of sweat that are starting to build up in every little place she'd really rather it didn't. Which is everywhere, for the record. It's not like she's out of shape, y'know? Just last week she spent all afternoon picking through a field of flowers, which required long hikes both to and from home and when she got back she [i]still[/i] found the energy to pick up a tangled ball of string and dangle it for Kat to chomp and tug her all over the place because she'd been so terribly bored sun farming that day and wouldn't stop whining for play time. So that's... y'know, really good! But there's a difference between normal people shape and hero people shape, and Ms. Ghost was looking for the second one and... aish. 

It's a lot, isn't it? How are you supposed to fix something for a person who's not really there anymore? Maybe if her house wasn't so covered in, uh, ick then this'd be fixable. But have you ever even [i]seen[/i] a more ickful place in your life? Of course you haven't! You're not some, like, really old thing from back when ickifiers ran free or whatever, are you? That's just silly. This is just. A lot. A lot a lot. A lot a lot a lot. Maybe even too a lot. Her sword arm starts to slump even though she's willing it not to with every bit of her heart that's not busy pounding to push blood to all the places that didn't know they needed so much of it at once.

"I'm, I'm, I'm n-not," she stammers, letting the tip of her sword hit the ground with a dull thwack, "I just, I just, I just... p-p-please. Help me. Help me..."

[Figure Out a Person: 2+3=[b]5[/b]. But since this is a physical conflict, she still gets to ask "What makes you feel loved?"]