Selthia looked at him across the space between them.
The blue in the floor was still losing ground to the purple at the margins, and she had the field, and she was faster, and the gap in raw power was real.
But she had stopped anyway.
Because Ren had been retreating for several exchanges and hadn't gone anywhere in particular, and the space he kept moving toward was the same general area, which wasn't what someone did when they were simply buying time. It was what someone did when there was something specific in that area that made it worth being in.
She looked at Ren with the frustration of being managed without seeing toward where, that gap in understanding bothered her more than the managing itself.
But Ren had stopped too.
Selthia spoke after a short, visibly anxious pause. "You need to fight me now!"
Ren smiled.
First time in the entire exchange. The kind that came from finding confirmation of something one had been looking for, not performance.
