What changed was Aldric Vorn’s anger problem.
It was not one specific trigger, or not only one.
It was the accumulation: the destroyed archives, the damaged palace, the fact that a man who had entered uninvited and destroyed three hundred years of history was still resisting with the serenity of someone who was not being pushed to his limits, but who was, possibly, merely observing.
And there was something about that serenity that made Aldric Vorn’s limit recede faster than any physical force ever could.
The physical amplification Don had levels.
The level Aldric used in everyday life, the level that made him the two-meter-ninety-seven hero the world knew, was the functional level.
Enough for the job.
Enough for the fights that fights normally were.
The next level existed.
CORG knew it existed.
The British government knew it existed.
There was a clause in Aldric Vorn’s hero contract, negotiated over months with legal teams from three countries involved, that defined the terms under which the next level could be used and the terms under which it could not.
Anger was not one of the authorized terms.
Anger was what happened anyway.
Aldric Vorn’s next strike was not calculated.
It was released.
The difference was audible, a different sound, deeper, fuller, the specific frequency of force that had shifted from controlled into something else, and it was visible in what the strike did to the courtyard floor where it landed after Captain Angola dodged.
The courtyard split open.
Not a crack.
A crater, two meters wide, half a meter deep, limestone pulverized within a five-meter radius.
Captain Angola had dodged.
By half a meter.
The half meter that had been enough before stopped being enough because the speed of the strike had changed, and the speed of the dodge that had suited the previous level no longer suited this one.
The pressure wave from the impact against the ground hit Captain Angola from the side, not the strike, the wave, with enough force to send him through the courtyard wall and out of the palace grounds.
He tore through the perimeter wall.
Landed on the outer pavement.
Aldric Vorn stepped through the hole in the wall.
With the anger active, not visible on his face, because decades of discipline still controlled the face, but visible in the Don, in the additional density that the physical amplification projected into the space around him in a way that measuring instruments could detect and that any sensitivity-type Don bearer felt as pressure.
Captain Angola was standing.
With the coat damaged, the first time the suit had shown visible damage.
Blood at the corner of his mouth.
The posture of someone who had received information and was processing the information.
Aldric attacked.
The three minutes that followed were different from the first seven.
There was no stalemate anymore.
There was Aldric Vorn with the Don beyond its usual ceiling, with the strength that ceiling normally contained now available all at once, and there was Captain Angola taking it.
Not losing, not immediately, not completely.
But taking it.
The second strike hit the energy shield Captain Angola raised, and the shield gave way.
It did not collapse, but it yielded enough for the transferred impact to become something of a completely different order from anything before it.
Captain Angola was sent thirty meters backward, through two parked vehicles the evacuation had not removed in time, and slammed into the building across the street with enough force for the facade to register the silhouette of the impact.
The third strike came as a sequence.
Aldric’s left hand caught Captain Angola before he could leave the building, and the right hand closed into a fist and struck twice with the specific precision of someone who, when anger has direction, becomes more precise than when it does not.
Captain Angola hit the ground.
On one knee.
With blood now extending beyond the corner of his mouth.
With structural damage across three points of the suit.
With his eyes on the ground, not lowered in defeat, but with the quality of something recalibrating.
Aldric stood over him.
With his breathing altered, not by physical exertion, because physical exertion did not alter Aldric Vorn’s breathing.
By anger.
By the crossed limit.
“Stay down,” he said.
His voice had dropped another tone lower.
“Or I continue.” Captain Angola remained on one knee.
For three seconds.
With his eyes on the ground.