My footing vanished, causing me to stumble but I caught my shin on a jutting slab of frozen rock, and went down hard on one knee. A spike of ice punched through the ground inches from my hand.
When the tremors stopped, the pit was unrecognizable. The flat arena was gone. In its place was a jagged frozen hellscape of broken stone and ice, uneven ground that would make it impossible to move fast on two legs.
But not on four.
The Staglord stood at the center of the destruction, untouched by its own devastation, its four massive legs planted firmly on the broken terrain. It was staring at me with those burning blue eyes, and the cold radiating off its body hit me from thirty feet away like opening a furnace door in reverse.
Kohen had recovered faster than I had. Of course he had. The acrobat was already perched on a tilted slab twenty feet away, crouched low, watching. It seemed like he had decided not to attack anymore and just let the beast finish me.
’Smart, I would have done the same thing.’
The guardian began to walk toward me. Taking each step on the cracked frozen ground like a champion moving on a conquered field. The sound of its weight grinding stone was the only thing in the pit.
It knew I couldn’t run. The terrain it had created was its home now, and I was caught in it like a fly in a web. My left leg was pinned between two slabs that had shifted during the roar, and every time I tried to wrench free, the ice around my ankle tightened like a fist closing.
The beast was taking its time.
And as it got closer, I saw them.
The cracks.
Not just the one hairline fracture from before, but a network of them, spreading across the left side of its crystal face from where my flames had hit. Pale light bled through each one like veins of cold fire.
Three of those, maybe four. That was what it would take to shatter that mask and expose whatever was underneath.
I didn’t have time for three more hits.
But I had Frostfang. And I had one shot.
The guardian was thirty feet away now... Twenty-five. Each step deliberate, patient, savoring the kill it knew was ing.
I stopped struggling against the ice pinning my leg. Instead, I gripped Frostfang with both hands and let white flames pour down the blade in a slow, sustained burn, pouring every ounce of heat I could muster into the steel until the sword was wreathed in fire so bright it hurt to look at.
The Staglord paused. Its blue eyes narrowed within the cracked crystal, studying the flame.
Then it lowered its antlers and charged.
The ground froze in its wake. Permafrost spikes erupted behind it. Twelve feet of living stone launched toward me like a siege engine, and everything in its path shattered.
I waited.
Twenty feet...
Fifteen...
The antlers filled my vision, blackened iron-stone scarred from centuries of killing things exactly like me.
Ten feet...
I wrenched my leg free with everything I had. Something in my ankle tore, a wet pop I felt more than heard, and I didn’t care.
I threw myself sideways at the last heartbeat, and the beast’s antlers carved through the space where my chest had been and split the stone slab behind me clean in half.
But the Staglord’s momentum carried it past me, and for one single breath, the cracked side of its crystal face was right there.
I didn’t swing, I drove. Both hands on the hilt, white flames screaming along the blade, and I buried Frostfang into the cracked crystal mane with everything I had left.
Fire made it brittle. And frost made it shatter.
The crystal didn’t just crack. It exploded.
A spiderweb of fractures raced across the entire left side of the Staglord’s face and then the mask came apart in a cascade of white shards that scattered across the frozen ground like broken glass. Pale light erupted from beneath, blinding, and the beast let out a scream. One so raw, animalistic and shocked, the sound of something that had never known pain learning what it felt like.
Beneath the shattered crystal was flesh. Dark, pulsing, vulnerable flesh that had never seen the outside of that mask.
I twisted the blade.
Frostfang sank deeper, frost spreading from the wound in branches of white ice that burrowed into exposed muscle and froze it from the inside.
The beast convulsed. Its legs buckled. One of its antlers snapped off and tumbled across the ground as the massive body listed sideways and crashed into the broken terrain with an impact that shook the entire pit.
It twitched several times then the dim blue light in its remaining eye went dark.
[You have slain a Primal (level 9) Beast, Ironmane Staglord]
[You have received Permafrost Antler Shard]
[You have received Staglord Iron Plate]
I stood over it, both hands still locked on the hilt of a sword buried in a dead god’s skull, my chest heaving, my ankle screaming, my essence reserves somewhere in the vicinity of absolute zero.
The pit was quiet.
And from somewhere behind me, I heard Kohen’s boots crunch against the frozen stone as he landed on the ground.
His footsteps were calm, measured. The footsteps of a man who had just watched his opponent spend everything he had killing something else.
I couldn’t move. Couldn’t turn. Couldn’t pull the sword free because my fingers were locked around the hilt and my body had decided it was done listening to me.
He stood there and for a moment there was nothing written on his face. Then he raised his hand and scratched his head.
"This is bad... I didn’t actually think you’d be able to kill it." He glanced at the body of the beast with visible regret spreading across his face, and for a moment I wondered, did it really matter that much who killed the beast.
But looking back at him... although he was wearing a smile that did not quite reach his eyes.
"Oh well... now I can’t avoid killing you."
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