The beast was vibrating. It was straining.
The thick muscles beneath its oily carapace were bulging, twitching, desperately trying to complete the downward motion of its strike.
But it couldn't.
It was as if the creature had been suddenly encased in a solid block of invisible, unbreakable diamond.
Kaelus stepped back, slowly lowering Requiem, his violet eyes wide with shock.
He looked at the beast, then looked at the surrounding terrain.
He felt... nothing.
There was no magical signature, no holy light descending from the heavens, no intricate, glowing runic array binding the monster to the earth.
But as Kaelus focused his incredibly sensitive, highly trained aura-perception, he realized that there was nothing.
There was a heavy absence of something.
The space immediately surrounding the beast felt incredibly dense. It felt like the gravity in a thirty-foot radius had been suddenly amplified by a factor of ten thousand.
