Natalia's ice spread across the volcanic platform like a living thing, frost climbing in fractals and geometric patterns that would make mathematicians weep with joy. The sudden temperature drop made the crowd's collective gasp visible, twenty thousand plumes of white breath rising into the afternoon air.
Reyna moved immediately, her body blurring with the kind of speed that came from Olympic-level training since childhood. Lightning crackled around her hands as she summoned two marionettes on either side of Natalia, eight-foot-tall constructs of pure electricity that hummed with enough voltage to fry a grown man.
But Natalia had spent seventeen matches worth of footage learning Reyna's patterns, cataloging every micro-expression and tactical preference. She knew Reyna defaulted to a defensive double-marionette formation when pressured from the left because it allowed her to reposition right while maintaining offensive capability.
