"Don't -"

Composure breaks like glass. The block comes too hard, too fast - she's out of position for the tail slam. She hits the ground with bone-crushing force, ruined mana exiting her body like breath from struck lungs. 

Then she's back up.

She isn't even appealing as a duelist. It's like fighting a Berserker - pure numbers to make up for the fact that there's nothing going on beneath the surface. She whirls and strikes as predictably as a novice and with enough speed and force that a grandmaster would struggle to keep up with. 

"Don't!" she hisses through grit teeth. "Talk about! This [i]stupid!!!![/i] Lance!!"

A nerve has been touched.

The ugly, stifling mutter has gone. She doesn't have the focus to maintain it. Those vines extending down from her flowering wreath are growing around her arms, gripping the lance firmly in place, wrapping around her chest in a weave part bondage and part armour. As she fights, she's becoming less and less of a hero - in a way that Elizabeth Bathory, Best Dragon Idol, actually knows something about.

See, Elizabeth knows something about vampirism - about absorbing the power of others to reach beyond your limits. It's a powerful technique, but there's only so much blood you can drink at a time before you start risking your girlish figure. Those calories all add up! Put another way, you can get very, very intoxicated by power like that. And that's what you're seeing here - there's so much power pouring into that Spiriton frame that it's starting to displace the original identity to make room. Give it enough time and this won't be a heroic spirit at all, but simply a monster - a puppet to be operated by whatever is pouring all that power in.

The lance, though? That feels like something with some [i]real [/i]emotional investment. It'll be the last thing to go.