He moved.
The punch was enormous.
Not in size — in 'weight', in the accumulated pressure of forty-eight hours of unprocessed bloodline output finding a direction. It came from his right shoulder, full rotation, the kind of strike that had removed walls from buildings in the last two days and had done so without apparent effort.
Astasia moved.
She moved the way people with Angel Archetype bloodlines moved — not faster than the strike, not stronger than the strike, but 'perpendicular' to it, outside its logic, her body finding the angle that the attack had not considered because attacks like this didn't consider angles, they considered only the target.
The strike passed her.
The cobblestones behind her stopped existing in any structural sense.
She was already moving — inside his guard now, close enough to see the quality of his eyes through the helmet's visor, the vacancy in them, the thing that was not anger behind the anger—
"Wake up," she said. "What happened to you?"
