The moment it moved again, everything shifted.
Not just physically. Mentally. The weight of the confrontation changed, the way pressure changes when you stop holding your breath and start making decisions instead.
Lan Yue felt it first. That small but critical difference between reacting and anticipating. They had spent the first half of this fight responding, adjusting, catching up. That was over now. She could feel it in the way her feet had stopped moving backward.
The figure surged forward, faster than before, its movements no longer carrying that unsettling stiffness. Whatever it had been learning during the first exchange, it had applied. The hesitation was gone. The testing was done.
It chose a target. Lan Yue. She saw it in the way its head aligned a fraction of a second before the rest of its body committed, the slight angle of its shoulders, the direction of its weight. It had learned to telegraph less. But not quite enough.
