The duel between two Sixth Realm warriors was a conversation conducted in iron and speed, and the conversation had been going on for four minutes when Garrok realized that the tusked chieftain was not trying to kill him quickly.
The realization came between the eleventh and twelfth exchange, in the fraction of a second where Garrok's war axe completed its swing arc and began its return and Khao'khen's sword was already positioned at the angle that would meet the return rather than chase the departure. The positioning was not reactive. It was anticipatory. The orcish chieftain was reading the axe's trajectory before the trajectory completed, moving to the destination rather than toward the weapon, treating the duel not as a sequence of individual exchanges but as a continuous flow whose next movement was predictable because the flow itself had a pattern and the pattern was what the orcish chieftain was studying.
Garrok was being read.
