"What th-OOUUGF!"

"How, GYAAAH!"

"Would y-ERGH!"

"I j-AAAAAAAAAAAAAH"

It's a war of attrition: not between Katherine and the goddess, but between the damage she is taking and the stubborn refusal of Fox Magic to suffer a wound. But I'm sorry to say that even with Kat's divine winds blunting the impact of that hammer, and with her parrying skills, and even when she catches an attack well enough to start rolling out of it, these are still the attacks of a very old-timey God. And what I mean is that they hurt.

This is fighting like you don't tend to see in Princess duels. Those are very dangerous, but they are in the main a consensual affair between two (or more!) skilled opponents who each agree to a set of expectations and are basically working toward the same sort of outcome. This is... not that. This ticks the 'skilled opponents' box but leaves every other assumption blank. That means that bones break. It means that joints get dislocated. It means a host of other nasty stuff I don't want to imagine, and then it means magic rushing into the wound to kiss it better, but Kat has to feel it going both ways.

She takes a shot in the back that bounces her off the surface of the moon; as she twists and tries to recover in mid-air another swing has already gone straight for her ribs that sends her spiraling between the rings of former suns. She's chased down and knocked around the bodies of those glittering rings like a ball through the fanciest miniature golf course of all time. Around and over and through that loop, smashed first up and then down, to the left and then down again, to the right and now diagonally to smack into a bit of old satellite, and when she opens her mouth to protest all of the words are driven out of her by a hammer right to the stomach, which also costs her any desire to indulge in a cup of tea when she gets home.

It costs her a great many things, being honest with you. In the first place it costs her a whole heaping help of mana. Foxgirls are first and foremost pampered little sweeties, remember? They're not made to suffer the pain of battle so especially with so many of these tails not even properly belonging to her there's no way to shut off the magic that's constantly healing her. Call it a passive effect I guess, those tails simply will [i]not[/i] let her grit her teeth and struggle through. And every bit that goes into healing is something she can't use to turn the tables. 

But it costs her a lot of other things too. Little things, mostly desires. Wishes, you might call them. The wish to have all of her friends see her like she is right now. The wish for me to take her out for celebratory ice cream. And bigger ones, like the wish for somebody to call her a hero, or the wish to please NOT get sent to Cutie Fox Island as a response to almost destroying the world. One by one they vanish as the costs for keeping her spotless until all that's left is the biggest wish she's got: to make it home again at all.

And then that gets knocked out of her, too. No more, then. This really is it, isn't it? She's going to get juggled forever until she runs out of meter, and then until she runs out of hp. She doesn't get another turn. She offered up her favorite kind of fun, her favorite kind of story, to someone who should be her worst enemy and what that monster did was spit right in her dream. She's being made fun of, all the way to death. Her [i]home[/i] and everyone who believes in the kinds of things that she does, they're all being mocked and hurt right along with her. Chen, Rose, Hyra, Qiu, Jessic, Xiu, and... y'know, me. Yue. All of us gone. Not gone from her heart, but dead from her perspective, in all the ways that matter. Because she's never going to see us ever again. 

What an incredibly stupid thing to have gone and done. Honestly, you'd think a goddess who's so concerned about ecosystems and natural orders would know better. When you think of a fox, what comes to mind? A sweet little flooferdoodle? Granted. A sillyhead, perhaps. Or a con artist. All fair and valid, but at the end of the day, a fox is a creature with teeth and claws. I was [i]just[/i] saying this, wasn't I? If she'd just let up a [i]little[/i], just given Kat the tiniest bit of room to breathe and try out her own attacks in the middle of all of this, we might never have gotten here. This really could have gone on forever and it would have ended with the hammer-jerk's inevitable victory. But she didn't do that. She put an animal in a corner and kept beating her until there was no choice left.

You are, like, [i]stupid[/i] stupid, lady. You really went in like this because you thought you couldn't get bit? Have you never had a pet before? Honestly. I'd be embarrassed for you, but you deserve this.

The most forceful swing of the hammer comes. The one meant to be the deathblow, to render Katherine into her constituent parts so the goddess could weave them into some new shape that fit her purposes, or whatever it is that goes on in the mind of a god. But it doesn't land. Kat grips the head of the weapon in her bare palm and snarls, so angry that she's almost spitting. Her whole body trembles. And more than that, it glows. If there's no going home, there's no need to save power for the trip back, you see.

"That's," she hisses (and I do mean hisses), "[i]It.[/i]"

After that she's too angry to say anymore. All attempts at language just come out as awful growling and snarling. Servants come to the people who call to them, you see. And whether you or they or anyone likes to admit it that means they tend to be very similar to their Masters at the end of the day. Kat wrenches the hammer toward her and spins around at the same time so she can kick the goddess full on in the face. She holds the hammer in a deathgrip and pulls it free from her opponent's grip, rushing after her so she can smash the horrible woman over the head with it again and again and again. 

Then she throws it, not caring that it might get used against her again. As long as it hurts that woman first, she doesn't care. Her tails unfurl behind her once again in a glorious halo of fine fur and radiant light. The aura extends down into her blade. Sure its wood, but do you know what else that blade is? An S-tier spirit medium. Blue light and power thrums around it, creating a very real and very terrible edge. The kind that cuts more than just your dress or even your skin. 

She doesn't return with an infinite combo of her own. There's plenty of opportunities for a riposte or a giant, slugging hit that knocks her into a new celestial body, and it happens with fair frequency as she goes on the assault. She just doesn't care anymore. All of the energy that had been going into trying to block or get out of the way instead get channeled into making sure that she gets hers, too. When her knee gets shattered it's only because she leaned so hard into her charge that it left her so open you could drive a truck through her stance. The trailing, blue slash she leaves behind as payment burns far worse than anything her fox magic is so stubbornly continuing to heal, anyway.

And the longer she goes the more vicious she gets. The less she trades and the more she overwhelms. And the more she overwhelms, even in her anger, the more beautiful her attack becomes. That's the response carved into her heart at the end of the day, y'know? So the bright, trailing energy in her slashes spills out more and more and more fox magic until the very void itself is full of wishing magic, so strong and so fierce and so furious that just to be near it crushes and burns and batters anything that's not fit to touch it. Colors follow her like paint, and like a painter she weaves them into a story. 

And that story is home. She connects with a rising thrust under the goddess' chin and she flies up right after her with cut after cut after cut, lifting the pair of them higher on a gorgeous scene of raging waters and the rocks and the trees and the sky that call that water home. Since Kat can't do it, I'll even name every slash for you. That's how you'll know that this is a secret sword.

The Golden Falls. The Dragon's Breath. The Silver Mirror. The Devil's Finger. Lover's Lookout. Old Misty. Black Beauty. The Tomb of the Demon Swordswoman. This is nothing more or less than home, the cry of her heart for something that's being taken away from her. The desire to make it hurt this divinity as much as it hurts her to let it go. It's so beautiful that I think I'm going to cry whenever I remember this, for the rest of my life. I never knew how much any of it meant to her, but now that love is painted in the sky, and anyone who's looking up right now and wondering what's going to happen (even in Australia), can see it for themselves.

This is the first and final secret sword of the Crying Foxgirl style: A Tour of Waterfalls in the Terraced Lake.

If this is not the end, then it's at the beginning of it. From here there will not be another blade held under a chin. You can flee into the far dark corners of the galaxy, you stupid silly god, or you can drown in the waters we call home. At the end of the day, the only real way to deal with bullies is to beat them so senseless that nobody will ever think that maybe they had a point after all. And there are so, so many waterfalls left to paint, aren't there? Do you have time to watch them all?