The guardian’s antlers caught Kohen in the back before he could recover his balance and sent him hurtling across the broken ground like a ragdoll. He hit the far wall of the pit with a crack that echoed off the stone, and for a mont, he didn’t move.
The beast didn’t wait to confirm the kill. It swung its massive head toward , those dim blue eyes burning cold in its crystal skull, and charged.
Twelve feet of living stone and glacial fury barreling toward with the subtlety of an avalanche.
I threw a wall of white flas directly into its path. The fire crashed against its body and rolled off the dark slate plates like water off a boulder. Not a scorch mark. Not even discoloration. The thing ran straight through my flas as if they were decoration.
’Are you kidding ?’
I dove to the side as its antlers raked the air where I had been standing. The ground behind didn’t just crack. It froze. A trail of jagged permafrost erupted in the beast’s wake, ice and stone fusing into a ridge of frozen wreckage that tore across the pit floor.
One of those spikes would have gone clean through my leg if I had been a half second slower.
I rolled to my feet and launched another volley of flas, this ti concentrating them into a narrow stream aid at the beast’s flank. The white fire bored into the stone hide for a solid three seconds before the creature even acknowledged it, and when it did, all it did was turn its head to look at like I was an annoyance.
The stone hide ate everything I threw at it.
"Stubborn bastard."
I pulled the flas back and repositioned, circling wide. The guardian tracked with patience that didn’t belong on sothing that size. It wasn’t rushing in. It was watching , cutting off the angles, herding toward the wall.
This thing was smart.
A blur of motion to my left. Kohen was off the wall and back in the fight, blood running from a gash on his temple but that sa cold, unreadable expression locked onto his face. He hit the guardian from the side with a flying knee, and the detonating impact rocked the beast sideways. Its hooves carved trenches in the stone as it slid, grinding a screech out of the rock that set my teeth on edge.
But it didn’t fall. It didn’t even stagger for long. The slate plates absorbed the shockwave and the beast swung its head in a vicious arc, antlers sweeping low, forcing Kohen to flip backward or lose his legs.
While it was distracted, I charged in and slashed Frostfang across its hind leg. The blade bit into a seam between two plates, frost crackling along the edge of the wound, but the cut was shallow. Barely an inch deep on a creature this size. The beast kicked back with force that would have caved in my ribs if I hadn’t already pulled away.
We fell into a rhythm after that. An ugly, brutal rhythm where neither Kohen nor I could commit fully to the other because the guardian kept cycling its attention between us.
Every ti I pressed Kohen, the beast lunged at .
Every ti Kohen tried to finish , the beast turned on him.
And every ti either of us focused on the beast, the other attacked from behind.
Three predators in a pit, and none of us could kill the other two fast enough.
But sothing was changing.
The crystal mane was glowing brighter. When the fight started, those white crystals had been pale and cold, like old bone.
Now they pulsed with a light that ca from sowhere deep inside the structure, a rhythmic flare that matched the cadence of the creature’s breathing. The dim blue eyes were brighter too. Sharper.
It was getting faster. Each charge ca with a little more speed, a little more force behind the antlers. Each recovery took a fraction less ti.
This thing wasn’t wearing down from the fight.
It was growing.
’Oh, you have got to be kidding .’
Kohen seed to notice it too, because his expression shifted for the first ti since this fight began. A crease ford between his brows. His eyes flicked from the beast to and back again, and I could read the calculation behind them clear as day.
If this fight dragged on much longer, neither of us was going to be strong enough to put this thing down.
I launched a wide sweep of white flas to push the beast back and buy a few seconds of space. The fire splashed across its body uselessly, the stone hide shrugging off the heat like it always did. But where a tongue of fla licked across the crystal mane, sothing happened.
A hairline fracture. Thin as a spider’s thread, running through one of the white crystals on the left side of its face. It hadn’t been there before.
The fire did nothing to the body. But the crystal...
I didn’t have ti to think about it because Kohen was already on . His fist ca in low, I caught it on the flat of my blade, and the detonating impact exploded through the steel and rattled my entire skeleton. I gritted my teeth and shoved him back, swinging Frostfang in a wide arc to create distance.
But my eyes kept going back to that crack.
The guardian circled, and I circled with it, keeping Kohen in my peripheral vision while I watched the crystal mane pulse.
The light was leaking through the fracture now, faint, barely visible, but there. Heat had done that. My flas couldn’t scratch the stone, but the crystal conducted heat differently. It beca brittle.
One crack from a few seconds of fire. I needed more. I needed sustained, concentrated heat on that crystal face.
Which ant I needed this thing to hold still.
Which ant I was out of luck, because the Staglord held still for absolutely nobody.
The beast reared back.
Its antlers began to resonate, a deep vibration I felt in my teeth before I heard it. The crystal mane flared white-blue, so bright it cast sharp shadows across the entire pit.
Then it roared.
The sound hit like a wall, concussive pressure that buckled my knees and drove the air from my lungs. But the sound was the least of it.
The ground beneath my feet just... broke.
The stone floor of the pit shattered into jagged slabs, so tilting upward at violent angles, others collapsing into shallow craters.
Ice erupted from the cracks, not clean ice but brutal permafrost spikes that shot up at random like the earth was growing teeth.
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