Sorry Preeti, thought Shahim as his hands powered toward her head. Time slowed as he focused on the attack, his systems readied and braced. He had been here before, he thought, but before he had been the one caught off guard. His systems blithely factored in every mistake he had made into his tactical options, and also John’s errors. John had waited a fraction of a second too long, allowing his hope that he might avoid the fight to delay his attack for the millisecond it had taken Shahim to register that there was, in fact, something wrong.

Shahim displayed no such hesitance.

He let Preeti turn into the blow, but no more. It began the instant his systems said it was time. His left hand came up hard and fast at her face, his first and index fingers pointed, his right hand coming up on the other side to grasp the back of her head and hold it in place. By the time she registered an attack, his fingers were microseconds from impact. Her view flashed an alarmist red as tactical came online, but already his thumb was driving into her eye, stabbing with vital force and precision.

Her hands came up to grab at his forearm as his thumb penetrated her eye socket. Shahim pushed inward with all his strength, focusing all his might on crushing the weapons array and grinding it backward, fighting to crack the lobe behind it and get at the substrate and neural cortices that lay in her skull.

As her hands focused on pushing outward against his left arm, Preeti’s right foot came up and over at lightning speed, gathering centrifugal momentum as it went, her high kick connecting with his head like a cannonball. He flinched away, tucking his head down as he saw the blow coming, then felt it resonate through his skull like a struck bell.

He could feel her eye orb breaking, as could she. She bent, shifting her weight and bringing both legs up, hoping to get one between them for leverage. He saw it coming and mirrored the action. For a nanosecond they seemed to hang in midair as their legs all lifted as one, then they were falling, exquisitely slowly, their tactical systems darting and twisting in response to each other as minute, seemingly inconsequential twitches rippled across their bodies. All the while Shahim continued to drive his fingers into her brain, and she fought to gain some purchase against him.

When they hit the ground, they became a writhing mass that seemed to leap this way and that as one limb or another fired outward in their battle, hers ever more frantic, his focused beyond measure. An attempt to lock her foot in between his arms, a parried blow from his sonic punch to deflect her; each sent them skittering in the dust or thumped them both upward to spin and twist in midair.