All-Chemical Spider #110.
Block.
Floored self-yank to dodge.
Power leap.
He cannonballed into her with his knees drawn and his weight leading. She moved around it, her arms rising in a slow outward wheel that caught his momentum at both shoulders and redirected it through a spiral.
Her feet shuffled in a quarter circle as he came through, and the force that had been going to break her open instead turned against itself and sent him through the arc in a controlled deceleration.
Jake spun out of his own attack like water finding a drain, and when it was done he was standing on the canal path in a wide stance with nothing in front of him.
She stood in the space she'd never quite left, her hands returning to rest at her sides.
He reset.
His sense read her and returned the same result: she attacked with a set of commitments without a commited one.
Her weight distributed to move in any direction with equal credibility, and the read changed each time he ran it. Each shift in her balance offered a different set of lines and then withdrawing them before his body could answer.
He went at her with a web line, firing at her feet. She went over it and turned in the air and brought her foot around in a tight arc aimed at his jaw.
He went under it and she landed and brought her other foot sweeping at his ankle and he yanked himself off the ground before the sweep completed and fired two lines at the gantry and swung out wide and came back at a lower angle.
She grabbed the web line on the swing.
He felt the resistance change through his palm, and her weight came onto the strand and his momentum folded forward a step in a forced lean.
He let the line go and drove his foot at her midsection, and she went under the kick and came up along the inside of his thigh. Her fist cycled upward in a rapid sequence from knee to hip.
He left the ground on his other leg, the spin horizontal, gaining height mid-rotation, and fired a strand at the canal path below and used it to drive himself into her from the swing, his body angled low and fast.
She rode with it.
She went over his back as he came through and landed behind him. He fired at her before he hit the ground, a web catching her at the shoulder, and he pulled and she went down and he came in with his knees aimed at the space her head occupied.
The space was empty by the time he landed.
He drove into the canal path on both knees, and she was up from her roll with her blade clear of its sheath, the edge coming level at his throat, and his right hand came up and the dagger was in it. The blades met at the midline with a ring that moved through the gantry frames overhead.
She looked at the dagger.
"Versatile," she said.
He drove her back with the push -- one arm, the mechanical one, the weight of the frame behind it -- and came to his feet. "You're testing my patience."
She adjusted her grip.
The sword came at him in a horizontal line and he caught it on the dagger's flat and redirected it. It came back as a vertical and he rotated the blade and redirected it again, and then she was in the strokes, one following the next, the spacing between them closing until the collisions were happening faster than his eye tracked them -- a sound like a series of wheels collapsing into each other, each ring bleeding into the next before it finished.
He worked the blade in a single hand and read the pattern by feel and kept the other arm behind his back.
She shifted her grip mid-stroke and the angle changed and the next three came from positions that hadn't been telegraphed by the three before them. He read the new lines and shifted with them, and she changed again, her feet repositioning, her off-hand rising to change her center of rotation, and the attacks came from a new geometry.
He absorbed them and moved the dagger in the same single-handed arc and didn't open his stance.
She changed again.
He stayed with it, and then he let the blade's force start coming back through the redirections, loading each contact with his arm's weight, not full, and then more full, and then fully committed.
Her blade started losing fractions of its arc to the resistance and her feet moved back a step and then another, and he let the height of his frame arrive in it. The blade kept returning more than she sent, and she braced against it.
He sent the next one back with everything the arm had.
She absorbed the force and let her feet find new ground a meter back, and the engagement broke. She went to the wall behind her in a backward leap, one foot finding the stone, and used it to push herself up and over his head.
He fired at her before she reached the apex and she sliced through the strand and landed behind him, her blade held at her side, its edge still reading the air.
"Impressive," she said.
She sheathed it.
He turned. "We're not done until you're not breathing."
"If I'm not breathing," she said, "who is going to deliver your package."
He held the dagger level. "The League can find someone else."
She looked at him with the calm behind her eyes fully present and nothing performing in front of it. "You assume a lot."
"I don't assume anything." He let his eyes move to her sash, the green of it catching the light from the canal, and back to her face. "You're wearing the same green sash as the others."
The corner of her mouth moved. "Mh." A breath, and then: "If you know that, you know the Demon's Head punishes defiance." Her voice had lost nothing from the fight -- measured, each word placed, a woman who did not need volume to carry weight. "I'm here to make a bargain."
"You will receive the supplies you requested," she said. "Under the condition that you continue acquiring more quantities until directed otherwise."
The silence that followed had mass.
He moved.
Went at her with the full read of the fight behind the decision, and she responded to the first move and the second and moved clear of the third, her feet finding new ground ahead of his angle.
He changed the angle and she changed with it, and he drove a web line into the foundation at her feet and the surface cracked outward in a wide radius. She was already clear, moving east toward the roof edge and up.
He drove two more lines into the bay's roof and the material gave and the sections dropped, and the debris was in the air around them both.
He used it.
A section of corrugated metal caught his web and became a pivot, spinning him low over the roof, and a second piece gave him a transit point, and he came through the falling debris in a series of three arcs that ended at her altitude, at her speed, at her side.
She caught it in her sense a fraction before he arrived and switched directions. The debris was in her line. She had to move through it. But the ground under her feet was no longer stable, and he was already there.
The web line that left his hand didn't go where it aimed.
It curved, mid-air, cheating its own trajectory, and found her throat.
He pulled.
They went up together, her feet leaving the stone, and he swung them both in a wide arc that gained height above the roofline. He came back through the peak and launched them higher a second time with the mechanical arm absorbing her attempts to break the grip, the pressure points she found in the join between his shoulder and neck finding metal instead of nerve.
He brought them to the face of the building at the apex and drove her into it with his weight behind the arm, his feet finding the wall, and held her there above the street.
Her hands came up and found the arm and her body worked the mechanics of the position with the focus of someone cataloguing escape options and finding the count coming back short.
He let her work.
"That's for giving me an order," he said.
Her breath was controlled through it -- not the absence of difficulty, the management of it. Her hands stayed on his arm and her feet found the wall and pushed.
He held the weight steady and let her push.
"Ra's al Ghul--" she started.
"Save your breath." His voice came out level and cold above the street. "The Demon's Head already failed to tame me."
He opened the arm and let her go.
She fell with control, her body rotating toward the wall, hands and feet reading the surface for purchase, and she was managing it until she wasn't -- the distance too far and the building face too smooth.
He dropped the web line and it caught her and set her down instead of letting her arrive at the street on her own terms.
He dropped after her and landed close, the stone under his feet pressing down and cracking outward from the impact. She was already standing with one hand at her throat and her breathing even, her eyes on him with the fury in them controlled to a single point and not dispersed.
He rose to his full height from the crouch. "The League of Shadows has been up to something since Gotham." He measured the words, each one set before the next. "I don't know what it is." A beat. "I don't care. As long as I get what I want."
Something moved behind her eyes, a tightening at the corner, her jaw settling into a new position. Her hand came away from her throat.
"You must be out of your mind." Her voice was steady, and the steadiness was the control, not the feeling beneath it. "Throwing me like that and assuming ignorance." She let her eyes meet his and held them. "You think I'm someone you can disrespect."
"I was making a statement," he said.
The fury was in her eyes. Her jaw opened slightly, and then she closed it, and then she stood, and she straightened her sash with two fingers, and she looked at him.
"Repeat if you can." She settled into a stance, her weight forward, her hands open. The green sash sat over the lean frame of her and the sword handle rose above her shoulder and her eyes held his without urgency, without display.