Chapter 3 - The Changing Angle
The sun climbed higher, casting short, hard-edged shadows directly under their boots. The dust had settled slightly on their uniforms, leaving light gray patches on Olivia’s sleeves and across the front of Marcus’s combat trousers.
Marcus decided to disrupt her rhythm. He changed his tempo deliberately, lowering his guard by two inches to bait an opening before instantly surging into an unpredictable vector. Instead of driving straight as he had before, he dropped his center of gravity, faked a low level-change toward her hips, and exploded upward on a forty-five-degree inside angle. His left arm hooked around in a tight, arced strike aimed at her right temple.
It was faster than his previous attack—a sudden, violent burst of acceleration that made the watching soldiers tense their shoulders.
Olivia didn't drop for the fake takedown. Her eyes remained locked on his collarbone, allowing her peripheral vision to register the true path of the arc. As the strike ripped toward her head, she did not raise a static block; static blocks against a man with Marcus’s shoulder mass resulted in bruised bones and lost balance.
Instead, she rolled with the movement. Olivia dipped her head three inches to the left, turned her hips sharply into the blow, and raised her right elbow high while pressing her forearm against the crown of her head in a protective helmet frame. Marcus’s forearm glanced off the angled slope of her arm, shedding seventy percent of its kinetic force.
Using the deflection’s momentum, Olivia turned on her axis like a gate on a hinge. She slipped directly into Marcus’s pocket, her body brushing past his chest as the air cracked from his missed strike. For a heartbeat, she held his blind spot. But instead of throwing a blind elbow, she recognized Marcus's immediate recovery; he snapped his elbow down to protect his ribs.
Seeing the path closed, Olivia slipped backward, sliding two paces into the open dirt and recovering her tight, balanced guard without once breaking eye contact.
May you like
Two junior corporals standing in the front row of the surrounding circle unconsciously leaned forward, their hands clenching into fists at their sides. The exchange had been clean, brutal, and executed within a window of less than two seconds.
Marcus stood with his chest heaving once, deeply, before regaining composure. A thin sheen of perspiration covered his forehead, catching the harsh glare of the midday sun. Across from him, Olivia’s dark eyes were flat, analytical, and completely unreadable.
