The creature moved the moment Aren's chains sang.
It moved sideways along the crater wall, quickly gliding across the smooth stone. Its body stayed low to the surface, as if it knew that open space was an advantage for Aren and wanted to take that away.
The red light from its eyes swept across the crater as it moved, and for a moment, everything was crimson. Aren tracked it, then he threw the chain.
The creature dropped flat against the crater wall, and the chain passed over it and struck stone, and the impact sent fragments skipping across the glazed floor.
Aren quickly pulled it back and adjusted his position. He watched the creature's movements closely, just as he had learned to do in the Primal World. There, accurately reading movement was critical because a wrong interpretation could be deadly.
It pushed off the wall and came at him quickly from below. He jumped sideways and felt the air move across the back of his neck as it passed by. His chains reacted before he did, wrapping around his forearm and pulling him into the roll instead of letting him stumble.
He came up on one knee as the creature had already turned – only then, Elias moved.
The circular structure appeared between Aren and the creature mid turn, expanding outward with the particular sharp clarity of Elias working at full focus rather than partial.
The creature hit it at speed, and the structure held, just barely, the runes along its edge flaring bright before dimming, and the creature rebounded off it with a sound like a bell being struck.
It stumbled. One step, maybe two, the red eyes were briefly disoriented.
That was all Aren needed.
He was already moving when Soryn appeared on the creature's left side, pink flames running along his hands without a weapon to carry them, using the crater wall as a surface to push off from and coming down at an angle that forced the creature's attention to split.
It turned toward Soryn instinctively, and Aren hit it from behind, the chain wrapped twice around his forearm, and the blow landed across the back of its neck with a force that drove it forward into the glazed stone hard enough to crack it.
The crack ran outward from the point of impact in a clean line across the crater floor.
The creature lay still for one second, then it pushed itself upright like the impact had been a minor inconvenience.
Elias landed beside Aren. "That should have done considerably more," he said, slightly breathless.
"I noticed," Aren said.
Soryn came around to their side without looking away from the creature, which was shaking the last of the impact out of its neck with the unhurried manner of something recalibrating rather than recovering.
"Its body absorbs force," he said. "Direct strikes distribute across it rather than concentrating."
"So hitting it harder won't work," Elias said.
"Hitting it harder will work eventually," Soryn said. "It will simply take longer than we have."
The creature finished recalibrating and looked at them.
The red eyes moved across Soryn, across Elias, and settled on Aren with that specific weight that had been following him since the moment they arrived in Torshavn, that quality of attention that felt less like being watched and more like being read.
'What are you looking for?' Aren thought at it. 'What do you keep finding?'
It charged. This time it came straight, just direct, fast, and enormous, and the three of them split without discussing it.
Elias left, Soryn right, Aren straight back, each of them pulling a different thread of its attention at the same moment.
The creature slowed fractionally, the way anything slowed when it had to choose, and in that fraction Elias put a barrier directly in its path at ground level, low and flat, and the creature's front legs hit it and its momentum carried the rest of it forward and over and it went down across the crater floor in a crash that shook the walls and sent steam billowing outward in a ring.
Snow fell into the disruption and evaporated instantly.
Aren was on it before it finished sliding, chain extended, looking for the angle Soryn had identified, trying to find the point where force would concentrate rather than distribute.
The creature's dark, dense hide revealed nothing, but the crack in the glazed stone from his first blow pointed straight to its current position. Aren reflected on the significance of the crack remaining while the creature itself had not.
The stone cracked because the force had to go somewhere.
He looked at the crater walls. At the glazed surface and the specific geometry of a perfectly circular space.
'If the force distributes,' he thought, 'then give it nowhere to distribute to.'
He pulled the chain back and looked at Elias. "Can you close the space?"
Elias understood immediately what Aren was grudgingly starting to appreciate about him. "How small?"
"Small enough that it can't spread the impact."
Elias looked at the creature, at the crater, at the distance between the walls.
His eyes moved with the quick calculation of someone who had been doing this long enough that the math happened in his body rather than his head.
"I need ten seconds."
"You have five," Aren said and threw himself at the creature again.
Not to land a blow, only to keep its attention, to give it something immediate and close to focus on while Elias worked.
He moved quickly around it, staying close enough for it to track him. He let the chain snap out in quick strikes that didn't hit properly but made enough noise and chaos to keep it busy.
The creature turned and turned and turned, red eyes following him, and Aren kept moving and didn't let himself think about how close the claws were getting on each turn.
Soryn moved to the creature's right side and copied Aren's actions from the other side.
For a moment, the three of them worked together. Aren and Soryn kept the creature's attention while Elias, positioned behind them, built something. The creature was fast and strong, taking in everything they threw at it, but it could not focus on two things at once.
Suddenly, the crater walls finally moved, Soryn and Aren noticing quickly.
Elias's barriers expanded inward from all sides simultaneously, the runes bright and sharp, reducing the available space in a ring that contracted steadily toward the center.
The creature sensed something before it saw it. It turned toward the nearest wall, which was closer than it expected. It turned again and found the same thing. For the first time since arriving in Torshavn, its expression finally changed.
For the first time, it looked… cornered.
Aren's grip intensified as he pulled his chain back and swung it overhead, and brought it down with everything he had into the back of the creature's neck at the exact moment the contracting walls removed the space the force needed to go anywhere except straight through.
However, the sound it made was different this time.
The creature went down, and the crater floor cracked in three directions from the point of impact, and the red light in its eyes dimmed briefly, genuinely dimmed, and Aren stood over it breathing hard and watched it and waited.
The red light steadied. Then, it began to brighten again. And then the crater floor opened beneath Aren's feet.
It opened like a door, like something beneath the glazed stone had been waiting for exactly this moment to make itself known.
Aren had one second of falling through darkness before the cold hit him, and the cold was a specific cold he recognized in his body before his mind caught up with it, the cold of coal smoke and fear and curtains drawn over windows while a seven-year-old stood in a courtroom and was told he wasn't human enough to stay!
He hit the ground and quickly looked up. Aren's eyes widened – he was in Helmond City.
The trial room and the same pale buildings and warm windows and children running between market stalls.
Aren furrowed his brows, his teeth subconsciously gritting.
But now, the warmth felt wrong. The light looked like the creature's deep red eyes, spreading through the familiar streets as if something had followed him from the crater and was changing everything it touched. And the creature was there.
Standing in the middle of the street that should have been clean and safe and impossible, looking at him with its red eyes.
Above him through the gap in the false sky, he could hear the muffled sounds of Elias and Soryn still in the crater, still fighting something, separated from him by whatever this was.
He realized he was by himself again, meaning the creature was one step ahead of him. Following, the creature moved toward him.
Aren pulled his chain and settled into his stance, and looked at it standing in the middle of everything the mountain had shown him he was afraid of losing.
'Fine,' he thought. 'I'll show you the consequences.'