She is a slippery and clever thing, and all it takes is one imperfectly timed blow for her to get away, to evade the hammer-fall battery of his fists and slip away. He snarls, slightly off-balance from a blow he expected to connect hitting only empty air, and by the time he registers that she has moved directly behind him, it's too late for him to react.

The strike would have been agony to his vessel if he bothered to allow pain signals through Nick's nerves; it would have been lethal to a human, strong enough to snap the spine like brittle wood and rupture the delicate organs underneath. Lucifer stumbles forward and nearly loses his footing entirely, catching himself with one hand against the rough bark of a tree.

He will not be brought to his knees by some Lovecraft reject.

"You realize," he says as the bark around his hand goes white with frost, "that we can't actually do any actual damage to each other here, don't you? It's a dream. As amusing as it is, it's ultimately just vanity."

He pushes himsellf upright, and the only sign that he even took a devastating blow to the spine is that his back cracks.