The follow-through didn't land.
The beast moved through the space where he was with its orientation broken, the targeting logic searching for a mana signature that had stopped being readable, the strike passing close enough that he felt the displaced air across his face. He was still there. The gap in his output was not.
He got back to his feet.
The beast was turning, the targeting logic reasserting itself, and he looked across the clearing to where Nyx was on the elevated rock. She was breathing with the careful precision of someone managing an expenditure that had been real — the Dreamscape at high output, the opal eyes doing something that cost more than their ambient reading. Two seconds. She had bought him two seconds by making the gap absent rather than making herself absent, and the price of it was visible in how she was holding herself on the rock.
He didn't have time to think about this.
