Tyra felt it.
Not dramatically—subtly, the specific awareness of a fighter whose ability was her primary instrument and who had developed sensitivity to how that instrument was performing. The chain on Cullen's right arm was moving at ninety-seven percent of what it should have been moving at. The difference between full performance and ninety-seven percent was not visible from the stands. It was visible to Tyra.
She retracted the chain—pulling it free of the ice-coated arm, breaking the contact before the cold could develop further. The chain returned to her wrist and she assessed it. The links were unchanged—spectral, indestructible, visually identical to what they had been before the contact. But the temperature on those links was lower than it had been.
She redeployed toward Cullen's left arm instead—the uncoated arm, the arm that didn't have the ice coating that was conducting cold into her chain.
Cullen extended the ice coating to the left arm immediately.
