The engagement stretched far beyond the brief, brutal massacre of the twelve fighters. What had been a demonstration of dominance had transformed into a grinding, intimate war of attrition.
Minute after agonizing minute, Iris circled Rex like a wolf assessing a mountain, probing his defenses with strikes that carried the venom of experience. She tested angles that no trained unit fighter would ever conceive, angles born not from textbooks but from the desperate necessity of finding a gap when the only alternative was a corpse in the dirt.
She lunged.
It was a low, compressed entry that Rex had never seen from the twelve. She didn't just move; she seemed to collapse toward the floor, her body becoming a projectile that skimmed the hardwood.
The movement was grotesquely efficient, designed to exploit the blind spot beneath a fighter's peripheral vision. Rex had to burn through his reserves to intercept it.
