She rises. Though her body lies shattered, she rises. She pushes strength into her legs and ignores the pops of protest as she forces them to straighten. She feels her back shear like glass but the most she allows herself to acknowledge it is a hiss like escaping steam. And she rises. 

Bella spares a glance at her mangled wreck of an arm and laughs with some horrible mockery of mirth to see how badly it twisted in the clash. She tries to flex her fingers; the true horror of the moment, if indeed there was horror to be felt, lay in how gentle her hand seemed to be. There is no heroic straining, no quiver of effort, no valiant trembling of digits that long to test themselves against that trickle of red. There is simply no movement whatsoever: a part of her body so far past the fight that it won't even pretend anymore. She shrugs, and lets the whole arm grow over with a thick branch of claw exoskeleton. 

Standing there it is easy to see why Artemis called her outdated. The unicorn stands there in its armor, the same idea but pristine and purposed. Nothing wasted, every impervious line clean and smooth and so close to flawless that she genuinely hadn't been able to perceive it until a second ago. Bella's arm, by comparison, is hideous. The wicked tangles and thick almost bark-like spirals jut out into strange spines here and there. It isn't armor so much as a horrible spear made from the corpse of a sea serpent, or something equally disgusting. It's a difference in philosophy visible to the naked eye. Once upon a time they might have thought that monsters were the best way to kill something, but what had killed the monsters?

Knights, of course. Only instead of shining plovers this one wore its suit directly on its own body. Bella heaves with fresh, disgusting laughter.

And she vanishes. When she reappears she is in the air over top of Sanalessa aiming a downward strike. The unicorn vanishes in turn to appear behind her, but the counterstrike turns into another teleport, and another, and another, and another. They flash across the room in a strange slideshow of combat poses, all potential and promised death without any of the payoff. Only the air screams as if it's dying. But this dance cannot last forever. Eventually, at the fifteenth or so turn, Bella falls behind the pace. When she appears, she is not in an advantaged position but staring down the face of a mighty swing already in progress. She twists her body to at least draw in a counter attack but there's no time to achieve anything approaching the same kind of leverage her opponent has, and even if she could match them exactly she simply isn't as strong. The universe, the gods themselves, have spoken. Two blows connect, but only Bella hurtles backwards. Only she dents the floor and bounces out of the hole she made without moving.

And again, she rises. With even more difficulty than before, she rises. Her Auspex flutters shut, and her mortal eye beholds a suit of perfect armor that is somehow even redder and more stained than before. She cackles until she is interrupted by a wet, hacking cough. What she feels inside her throat is best not described. 

This time she rushes headlong under the power of her own trembling legs. The echoes of her stomping sound through large chunks of the ship beyond her battlefield. She comes in a wide arc, using stored momentum and a high angle to compensate for the fatigue of her body. Her spear arm impales the floor and tears out a mountainous section of it that gives her a makeshift shield to call her own. She smashes Sanalessa in the face with it before it can get punched through, which does nothing to stop her ribs from turning to powder under the force of the counter uppercut. The grapple doesn't work. A headbutt only makes the room spin around her own orbit. When she vanishes into the dark she is hunted down, and when she manipulates the trigger of several traps at once, having anticipated the arc of at least a few of Vesper's preparations, the distractions prove useless and unwilling to bend to her advantage. 

No matter her approach, Bella is outmatched. That is in the truest sense what it means to fight against a God. All her brute force, all her clever tricks are simply turned aside or reflected at her in a perfected form. She plates over more and more of her body to compensate, all jagged angles and pieces that don't entirely fit together, until she looks as though she is in the middle of being devoured by XIII. But there is no pull on her mind. There is no slowness to her movement. She falls again. She falls again. She falls again.

And she rises. 

This is not a question of superiority. This is not a question of overcoming a trial because she deserves to. She hasn't earned this. Fuck, she never worked a day in her life for it. If she'd even known she needed to she would've curled up in her little slave bed back on Tellus and not even Empress Nero could have dragged her out of it to face the universe. This is simply that she has not given up. This is just that without all that heavy blood weighing her down she finds it easier to move a little bit faster. Hit a little bit harder.

Bella never wins a single exchange. But the rate of her deterioration begins to slow in comparison to Sanalessa. She watches the unicorn'ss armor develop cracks and even a torn out chunk at the lower left portion of their abdomen. She watches sets of instructions fizzle out. She watches that white armor turn red. And she laughs, and she rises. 

It is not a pretty fight from any perspective anymore. Not the call and not the response. A tight choreography of ultraviolence becomes a ugly exchange of punches and rending stabs that aren't aimed at anything but the broadest of targets. Again, this is not a question of superiority. This is simply the moment where 'im' crumbles off of 'possible'. In that sense one might call it a punishment: calling it a possible labor robs this weary Servitor of her victory and promises a new and worse challenge on the horizon. Which one of these will finally count? 

But it is still true that she no longer conceives of this as something that cannot be done. The shift to something that must be done is all she needs to keep standing, to keep lunging, to keep clawing whole sections of ship atmosphere to ribbons to traverse the sudden rift and try one more time to land the attack that Diomedes would smile at. The only real advantage she has is better motivation. That's really all it is. Her opponent had already given up, after all. Whereas she? She had a family that needed her to not only win, but return home after.

Impossible begins to turn. Though her muscles are shredded into uselessness, though the armor she wears around her legs cannot bend, she clambors back off of her knees. Though every breath brings with it a cough, and every cough turns her lips pinker, she plants her feet and smashes her fist against her breast. Though her spine should be shattered and her mind turned to mist she curls to see the ceiling and howls a battlecry that shakes stones loose from several mural reliefs. A gem encrusted skeleton, vines still creeping through its eyesockets, tumbles out of the embrace of a former lover and scatters across the ground. 

Bella's boot stomps clean through it. She slumps forward, but more wicked laughter pulls her head straight again.

"Is that... all? You've got?"

Again, she lunges. This time, though she gets suplexed almost through the floor, her spear tears a proper hole in that stupid fucking armor. It's just. Hard to see that. With all the black spots crowding out her vision.