Joan had counted on that.
She began deliberately building the pattern.
She had done this in training—against different partners, different abilities, different styles—but the core of it was always the same. Establish a rhythm. Make the opponent trust the rhythm. Then break it at the moment that cost them the most. Her old instructor from before the academy, a retired fighter who had worked out of a cramped gym near the transit district, had called it threading. You ran the same stitch over and over until the cloth knew the needle, and then you went somewhere the cloth wasn't expecting.
She threw combinations.
Consistent ones. Predictable by design—jab, cross, jab, cross, small variations on the same structure. Riven redirected them. Every time. The efficiency of her deflections actually improved as the sequence continued, her hands settling into the pattern of Joan's rhythm, the timing becoming more automatic.
That was exactly what Joan wanted.
