Austin moved.
The warmth never left his face. Not once through any of this, not through the fight, not through the measurements, not through the forty minutes of taking apart everything I built with the calm patience of someone who had already finished and was simply letting the clock run down.
It didn't leave now either.
That was somehow the most irritating thing about all of this.
The construct formed without warning.
No incantation. No geometry I could track, no structure my mana sight could find a grip on before it was already moving. It simply existed — threading through the air toward the centre of my chest with the quiet, unhurried certainty of something that had already decided where it was going and found the concept of being stopped faintly irrelevant.
A homing type.
'No signature,' I thought. 'No casting window. Nothing to intercept.'
I had a quarter-second. Maybe less.
