[Hayame doesn’t have to recognize the pronunciation or the intonation of what Sebastian says. She knows the word, and she knows what it means. She had been called it once before and demanded to know what slur was being thrown at her hooves.

“Foreigner” and “slave”. That is what n’wah means.

Her own sharp teeth are bared in a snarl and as quickly as the words leave his lips Hayame’s powerful physique bunches, shifts, only a second of indication before she suddenly slams the demon in her grip into the wall of roots and dirt, hard and heedless of bruising or breaking that could result from how she flings his body around as if it were nothing. Her upper half might look human, but beneath her skin the musculature of a jinba was knit together far differently.

From the pouch at her waist she suddenly pulls something sharp and fragile- a broken spearhead near rusted away, the only “weapon” she’d been able to find scrounging among the ruins of Springstar. One that finds its tip now uncomfortably close to Sebastian’s left eye.]

I heard you can heal even a lost eye as if it were nothing.

[The rusted spear tip doesn’t waver a single millimeter. The hole where her own left eye used to be burns with shame- with lonely rage and misery.]

But you can’t now, can you, demon? You’re as mortal as anything.

[If there are people gawking, staring, moving away around them… she does not care. But this time, she won’t let it be like it was with that Chimer scum, where he made it seem as if she had assaulted him for nothing. No, she is well within her rights, because-]

Beg forgiveness for taking my eye, for insulting my honor and calling me slave, and I might just take what I’m owed and not shatter your shard beneath my hoof.

[Here beneath the roots, when they’d all been reduced only to what the biology of their bodies allowed… It wasn’t an empty threat.]