[The woman who has come is stubborn enough for one rebuff... but Hayame has more. Luckily enough for the new member of the Pleroma ranks... what Hayame doesn't have is much strength left to fight. If she did, there is no doubt she wouldn't have let herself be touched, judging by how much she manages to flinch away and snarl even half-collapsed as she is.

Something flares up bright beside her, she can somewhat see it, and though her lip curls back in a self-destructive sneer, ready to warn the woman what will happen to her hand if she keeps it on her and tries to force her foreign, invasive magics into her body...

She says she needs her. That they need her, the Pleroma, and-]

Then all the better to leave me be, I am no use to anyone anymore-

[Something that feels like despair has found its way into her hearts second she looked up to the Innocent beast in the sky and then felt the pain of fingers slipping past her eyelid. What little of the pleroma spirit that her body possessed... has begun to shrivel and darken, slowly dying in the face of helplessness, further failures, and loss.]

If you think to rely on me-

[Hayame has kept her left side guarded as best she can, her face partly turned away... but now she turns it sharply in a whip of long, ebon mane, revealing that her face is covered in half-smeared blood... and only a bleeding socket remains where an eye once had been.]

You are only set to fail as I have!

[What use was there for a broken mare with only one eye? For an archer who could not hit a target? Even knowing that practice would return her skills, that it was more than possible to overcome that sort of handicap... the weeks it would require are an eternity.

The hour since they've begun this raid, doomed to fail from the beginning, have been an eternity. So why, why can she still not die-]