Ryu didn't wait for him to get ready.
Jin had barely stepped out onto the training ground when Ryu threw his right arm back over his shoulder. A line of dark iron shot out of his palm and hit the top of the school's back wall, thirty meters behind them, and stuck there. Ryu leaned forward until the line went tight as a bowstring, and then he let go of the ground.
The line yanked him backward toward the wall, and at the last second, he planted both feet against it and the line snapped back into his arm, and he came off the wall like a stone out of a slingshot, straight at Jin.
Jin's Battle Instinct went off a half second too late.
There was no sword in his hand. He hadn't called one. He reached for the shield the way he'd reached for it on the river road, and for one bad moment, it wasn't there. His hand closed on nothing. Ryu was three meters away, then two, his fist already drawn back and going grey and heavy.
