Nishida's face is stone cold. She stands up, her posture straight as a soldier's, nothing like the usual casual and relaxed posture she'd had since escaping the cave.
"You don't even know, little girl. I could care less about your whippings. Do you understand the toll death takes on the mind? How it effects your day-to-day life? Do you see faces of people you've killed? Hear the last gasping breaths of the people you've laid low? Hear the anguished screams of the mortally wounded as they watch the carrion birds circle overhead? Have you been baptised in blood and bone, ashes and fire, for the sake of a country that abandoned you once you were no longer useful, once you posed a threat to them? Were you bathed in fire, soaked in darkness, run through with despair, brutalized by light all in the name of a glory that had been promised but was never attainable? Were you ever the last one standing in the middle of a sea of carnage that you yourself had unleashed? Did you ever have to learn to enjoy it slightly? Would you have the courage to do what I did?" she snaps, her voice as barren as an arctic plain. "I highly doubt you would, if the way you've reacted to the bare minimum of trauma is to kill yourself slowly and do your best to cause others to abandon you."
With that, she turns sharply and walks away to the guest room.
If Aphrodite were to try and call her back, were to try and argue, were to start crying, Nishida would not turn back. She would not.
Aphrodite had made it clear enough that it wasn't her job and never wanted it to be. Had made it clear that she never wanted to find her.
That was fine.
She was used to betrayal and abandonment.
She closes the door to the guest room and locks it.
