The wounds told a story.
Lukas read them the way the afternoon had taught him to read things — quickly, practically, extracting the useful information and discarding the rest. The antelope's thick hide, which had looked impenetrable when the creature first filled the cave mouth, was no longer impenetrable. Across its flanks and stomach, the accumulated record of the fight had been written in red — each wound a product of the same crude, improvised method repeated with the patient, deliberate consistency of someone who has identified what works and has declined to complicate the approach.....
No talents. No star energy expenditure. Just movement and ice and the specific, quiet intelligence of a fighter who has learned that a technique does not need to be elegant to be effective.
