The first impact came from Aldric.
A right hook delivered with the velocity that two-point-nine-seven meters of amplified density could produce.
Not fast in the sense of imperceptible, but fast in the sense of a high-mass projectile striking the space where Captain Angola had been with enough force that the second floor of the palace registered the displacement of air before the impact itself.
Captain Angola was not there.
He was already three meters to the left, moving.
Not retreating.
Repositioning.
The distinction mattered.
Retreat was defensive.
Repositioning was the first move in a sequence.
The counterpunch struck Aldric on the left side of the torso.
With a force that, against another opponent, would have ended the fight immediately.
Aldric registered it.
He shifted one step to the right with the impact.
Not thrown.
Displaced.
Which was different, and which revealed information about what the amplification Don was doing with incoming force.
He looked at Captain Angola.
With brown eyes.
With an attentiveness that contrasted with his silhouette.
“Good,” he said.
No sarcasm.
The genuine acknowledgment of someone who had just received useful information.
Then he attacked again.
The destroyed archive chamber became the battlefield.
Then the corridor.
Then the staircase, which did not survive the second minute of combat, marble collapsing beneath impacts the palace’s original engineers had never accounted for because the original palace had not been built with this in mind.
Then the courtyard.
For the first seven minutes, the fight possessed a very specific quality: the quality of two systems measuring each other.
Not strategic measurement.
That was something else.
This was direct.
Physical.
The brutal honesty of two forces testing where the limits of the other began.
Captain Angola was faster.
Aldric Vorn was tougher.
Captain Angola’s speed compensated for Aldric’s durability in the sense that he could reach points Aldric’s defense did not fully cover.
Aldric’s durability compensated for Captain Angola’s speed in the sense that the blows that landed were absorbed in ways that should have caused more damage than they did.
A stalemate.
Not static.
Dynamic.
Constantly renegotiated, every exchange of attacks and counterattacks generating new data that each fighter processed and incorporated in real time.
But still a stalemate.
For seven minutes, a stalemate.