I was looking for the pattern in the formation. Natalia's briefing had been precise and thorough, seventeen matches annotated and time-stamped, and somewhere in the data she'd noted that Reyna's constructs clustered inward on the left when she was genuinely concerned about a threat getting through. The tells were subtle, a half-degree shift in the nearest marionette's shoulder angle, a fractional delay in the adjustment timing.
I feinted hard left.
The two leftmost marionettes moved inward. A gap opened on the right for exactly three quarters of a second.
I was already going right.
The bat came through the gap with everything the absorbed kinetic buffer had built up behind it, Dragon Witch's Ring burning the metal white-hot, and it caught the nearest marionette dead centre and detonated it in a shower of electrical sparks. The formation wavered, a cascade disruption as the spatial geometry collapsed, and I was inside it before Reyna could close the gap.
She was right there.
