Jason hit Denton with a mean kick to his flank
Denton took it and came back.
That was the first thing the hall understood — that this was not going to be short. Denton was thirty years of war and governance made physical, every scar on his body a lesson absorbed and filed, and he fought with the brutal efficiency of a wolf who had never once been able to afford losing. He went low, going for Jason's legs, trying to bring the larger wolf down to the ground where size mattered less and technique mattered more.
Jason didn't go down.
He absorbed the hit across his shoulder and turned with it, using the momentum rather than fighting it, and the counterattack that followed drove Denton back four steps across the stone floor. His claws left marks in the stone. Four deep parallel gouges that the pack would look at for years afterward and remember this night.
Denton reset.
