Zara fired from her left palm—the burst traveling toward Varen, the trajectory clear in his fully-recovered vision, nothing about the incoming strike carrying the complexity that the four-point chain had carried.
He moved—reading the burst cleanly, evading without exposure, the single-source fire giving him everything he needed to make the correct movement without the spread covering his evasion path.
He was closing distance.
Zara fired from her right foot—a different limb, a different angle, trying to recreate the spread effect that had worked in the chain technique with the reduced sources she still had. Two limbs from different positions created more angles than one limb alone.
Varen read it.
Evaded.
The distance between them was shrinking with each exchange—each burst a single trajectory, each evasion buying him ground, the dynamic that had been balanced during the chain phase now tilted fully toward him.
