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.
