The toe-kick to his jaw threw Loki off enough that anyone would have called him briefly stunned. Stunned and weirdly fascinated by the taste of blood in his mouth; he’d bitten the inside of one cheek, no doubt.The punch caused more pain to explode on his face - how fortunate that he wasn’t as attached to his face as some, or the possibility of a mark, however temporary, would have been very upsetting. The knee to the stomach and his back slamming into a tree happened in quick enough succession after the first blows that his first outward reaction was the expulsion of air forced out of his lungs by Valkyrie’s knee,.

It almost sounded like a laugh. “I’ll take that as a compliment.” Rather than re-enter melee range, he flipped the knife in his left and and threw it. His aim was good, but judging by his new pains she was fast enough to block it or catch it. Burying the knife in her wasn’t the point.

The point was misdirection, a brief instant where Valkyrie’s attention was on the knife rather than on Loki, which he used to cloak himself in layers of illusion, moving invisibly while a perfect but illusory duplicate puppet stayed behind, back to the tree. He even included the pine needles that had caught in his hair as they fell.