[Realm: Álfheimr]
[Location: The Great Forest]
Grimm stared at the devastation he had wrought.
There was no pride or regret in his posture. Not even the faint satisfaction of a job done cleanly.
The ice structures he had summoned were still embedded into the ground. They rose at uneven angles, their surfaces scattered in shards. Frost crawled along the crater edges where the earth had buckled, and toppled trees lay half-buried beneath debris, their brittle limbs snapped and splayed.
And beneath the pillars were the Deseruit Beasts.
Flattened or split. Pressed into the mud so thoroughly that some of them barely looked like bodies anymore—just dark smears, tufts of fur, cracked plates of bone, and half-severed limbs sticking out from under the ice at wrong angles. A paw here. A jaw there. A tail still twitching in the last stubborn refusal to die.
Grimm's sword hung in his hand, angled downward, the edge wet with blood.
He hadn't gotten all of them.
