The fight moved.
That was the nature of Champion-level engagement at a contained scale — it didn't stay in one place, because staying in one place meant committing to an environmental context that your opponent had time to rewrite. The Author was constantly revising the space around him, the ink a secondary language through which reality received annotations, corrections, marginal notes that changed the meaning of the main text. Dimitri was constantly moving inside that revision, using the biological signal that couldn't be revised to maintain targeting when everything else in his perception was being edited.
The courtyard civilians remained untouched. Neither of them went near the civilians. This was not coincidence.
