The tendril hit her in the side.
The impact was not what she had been training for. The Phalanx trained for being hit by things - they trained for it constantly, because being hit was the cost of the job and the cost had to be survivable. But the Phalanx trained against weights and against impacts calibrated to human scale. The thing that hit her was more than a building.
Blood came out of her mouth before her brain had finished processing that she was hit.
She was still in the air. The impact had not knocked her down - it had knocked her sideways. Her trajectory broke. The arc she had been travelling on disappeared, replaced by a new arc, this one moving across the sky in the direction the tendril had been swinging. The Anathema's appendage continued past her. The hit had been a side-strike, a glancing connection between a moving tendril and a stationary midair body. If it had connected fully, she would have already been part of the air.
