Steel met steel with a sound that didn't belong on a battlefield already full of screaming metal—cleaner, somehow, like the world had briefly agreed to hold its breath for this one exchange before letting the rest of the noise back in.
I'd expected, somewhere in the back of my mind, that two years of waiting would make this fight feel inevitable once it finally arrived—a debt called in, tidy and overdue. It didn't feel that way from the wall. It felt like watching two people who'd both already decided how the story ended discover, blow by blow, that neither of them actually knew.
