The training ring had become mine in the way that things become yours when someone keeps giving them to you.
Petra cleared it before I arrived. Roan checked the perimeter without being asked. The pack gave it the specific wide berth that meant they understood the space was claimed, not by authority but by the accumulated weight of it being used consistently, which was its own kind of authority.
I had been working on a technique Petra called the redirect — using an opponent's force rather than opposing it, the specific judo logic that made smaller bodies capable against larger ones. My form was improving. The instinct was still the best part of what I had, but Petra was systematically building the conscious technique around it, the way you build a frame around something that works so it c
