Cullen's ice needed it. Every encasement started from a touch—the cold spreading outward from the contact point, building structural depth over sustained contact, producing the joint locks and the section freezes that had ended his previous fights. If Drex kept the field at full density and maintained distance, contact was difficult. If contact happened anyway—at close range, in an exchange where the field was briefly thinned or occupied with a clearing burst—the ice would start.
Cullen was thinking about the field.
The pressure field redirected force. The ice was force delivered through contact rather than through impact—the cold moving through physical touch rather than through a strike. The field had been designed against strikes, against bursts, against the kind of force that traveled through air. Whether it redirected the cold that moved through contact was a question neither of them had a clean answer to yet.
Cullen moved first.
