Len didn’t wait for the creature’s fingers to close around his flesh.
He struck first.
Throwing all the weight of his upper torso forward, he drove the heavy brass handle knob of his sheath knife straight at the creature’s face. It was a fast, brutal strike born of eight days of desperate survival. A blow aimed not to cut, but to shatter the nasal joint padding and drive bone fragments into the skull. He had learned the strike from a veteran border wagon driver who had spent thirty years fighting off timber wolves in the high northern passes. It was delivered with the full downward leverage of his right shoulder, putting all sixty pounds of his mortal frame behind four inches of solid brass.
An ordinary man would have had his jaw broken. An ordinary courier would have been thrown backward across the iron grating.
The double didn’t flinch. Its reflexes were governed by baseline Level 5 agility unburdened by fatigue, torn muscles, or the painful drag of a sprained ankle. Its left hand rose in an easy, fluid bending, the palm striking the brass handle knob at the exact center of its path. It knocked the blow harmlessly into the empty air above its shoulder. The impact made a flat, dull slap of skin against brass, but the double’s wrist didn’t yield a fraction of an inch.
