Bella's smile is red. Her groan is wet. Her fingers tremble as she pulls them free from around Jil's wrist to hold them up to her face. She pushes with one thumb and wrenches with the other wrist, and with a pair of sickening crunches sets her nose and jaw again. Five minutes with a power gap like this means there's plenty of time for little indulgences like this. 

"You, greedy. Piece, of, [i]shit![/i]"

Her claws are not strong enough to pierce Jil's invincible skin. They are not. They are not, and yet. Twisting, tearing, scratching, rending even as they crack, even as they shatter in painful spurts of blood, even as her gauntlet breaks and crumbles and leaves only a messy and useless stump of a hand where XIII's proud strength had gleamed just minutes ago. Even so, the rivulets of blood appear. Even so, Jil's grip loosens. 

When her biomantic gauntlet connects, it merely bounces Bella like a stone across the throne room. Merely smashes her into a wall and turns two ribs to powder in her chest. Bella wheezes, but that means she is drawing breath. She bleeds from a dozen spots, but that means her heart is beating. Her body screams in agony, but that means she can still feel. 

Good. Good. [i]Good.[/i]

That is good enough. On trembling limbs, she rises. On unstable feet, she stands. Her vision is tinted red and more than half stained with shadows. But she howls her battle cry, and tears a dagger made of bone out of the center of her own palm. 

"Do you think after everything I've been through that I don't know the difference between your voice and hers?! Yeah, good job, you made her me. Right down to the fucking puppet strings."

It is good that she is so worn down, she thinks. Through the cut over her eye she has to squint to see, and that keeps it from registering the shock she wants to wear there. Her mouth won't stay shut and she can't keep her tongue in there, so all she can do is project insane predatory savagery instead of sadness and hurt. 

Because it [i]does[/i] hurt. There's a thousand arguments with Dyssia flashing through her mind in an instant and under every single one of them is the guilt that she can't even stay focused enough on Jil or on Nero to make her case to them directly instead of fighting the shadow of a much more recent friend. It hurts to have her own inadequacy waved in front of her face again, it hurts to have to conjure arguments in her own defense, all these hollow sounding words about freedom and the beauty of expression weighed against [i]four billion Lanterns[/i] when all it took to save them is the will to act, and the acceptance that it had to be done with the invincible chains of Empire. 

Her tail lashes before she can follow the thought beyond the space it's allowed to inhabit. Space twists in front of her, and she flies without wings or magic to aid her. She holds the sharp, warped knife in front of her, but before she can swing it she is forced to flip on the spot in mid air and slam her foot onto Jil's shoulder. She feels her boot shatter in the counterblow and is sent hurtling backwards to smash into the ground again.

Bella stands. Falls back down again. And drags herself up onto her quaking legs a second time. Again she flies, even more fiercely than before. Again she abandons her cut to defend herself from the new Praetor's wrath. Again she loses, again she pulls herself back up, and again she hunches over to do it all again. The damage has begun to show on Jil, too. She bleeds, she is obligated to rearrange her fist into new terrors, she is burned and bruised despite being in every way Bella's superior. 

It's nothing new. And it's not enough. Bella wretches uncontrollably. This time she has to pull herself up by the arm of Nero's throne. She looks at Hermes through her own eye, and says nothing at all.

"yYyOu, missssserable. FUcK. You can't, hide, behind, impossible. Not from, me. I won't. LeT you. Hurt them. Anymore... won't let you, Use them, anymore. Won't, nnNNNNnngh! Won't let you, call this... Love. Anymore. I'm gonna, make you bleed, if iT's the, last thing I do."

And she flies. Not on wings or magic, these things she's never had. Not even the raw animal strength of the Diodekoi, though she wraps her ruined body in hastily grown and poorly shaped armor just to keep the shape. No, what carries her aloft is the same thing that pulled her through the Rift, let her fly across the vast galaxy and all of its wonders and its terrors without ever giving up. 

You may call it her nascent Secret Sword, if you like: Tenacity Incarnate. 

Artemis, even though you don't believe in her, she swears it to you here and now: she will not stop, not for anything and no matter how badly she breaks, she will never stop for anything until she buries this knife inside this smug, sneering prick who calls himself Aphrodite.

Again. Again. Again. A little closer, each time.