CHAPTER 222: APEX PREDATOR

The box canyon appeared suddenly, a natural dead end where rock walls rose vertical and impassable on three sides, the only exit the passage Soren had just followed.

And there, at the far end, massive and magnificent and absolutely furious, stood the Glacier Elk.

Gods, it was beautiful.

The creature was easily the size of a small house, its body covered in fur so white it seemed to generate its own luminescence, muscles rippling beneath its hide with the kind of raw power that suggested it could charge through castle walls without slowing.

Its antlers were architectural impossibilities, spreading wider than its body, each tine sharp as forged steel, decorated with ice formations that looked almost deliberate, almost artistic.

Its eyes were the blue of deep glaciers, ancient and intelligent and absolutely certain it could kill this presumptuous human who’d dared chase it into a corner.

For a moment, they simply regarded each other. Emperor and beast. Ice mage and ice-touched creature. Two apex predators sharing space too small for both.

The Elk’s breath came in clouds that froze the air, creating temporary fog banks with each exhalation. Its hooves, each one capable of crushing bone with casual ease, pawed at frozen ground, scoring gouges in ice that had probably been there since the world’s first winter.

Then it lowered its head, antlers angling forward like a forest of spears, and charged.

The sound was like an avalanche given purpose, tons of muscle and bone and furious magic accelerating to speeds that shouldn’t be possible for something that massive, closing the distance between them with horrifying swiftness, antlers aimed to impale and gore and reduce flesh to memory.

Soren didn’t run.

Didn’t even flinch.

He waited, counting heartbeats, calculating speed and trajectory and the exact moment when,

Now.

He moved like liquid matter, his body sliding to the side with inhuman precision, ice forming under his feet in sheets so smooth they had no friction, turning his dodge into something closer to teleportation.

The Elk’s charge carried it past him, momentum too great to stop, and in the half-second when they were aligned, when its flank was exposed and its attention was forward, Soren’s magic erupted.

Ice lances formed from the ground, dozens of them, hundreds, a forest of frozen spears growing with speed that made them blurs.

They didn’t hit the Elk directly, that would have been too crude, too uncontrolled. Instead, they formed a lattice, a three-dimensional cage that appeared around and over the creature so fast it was inside before it realized the trap existed.

The Elk slammed into the barriers, antlers cracking ice, body throwing its weight against confinement, roaring with fury that shook snow from the canyon walls.

Soren used the distraction to do something absolutely insane.

He ran toward the trapped creature, each step creating platforms that lifted him higher, building a staircase in real-time as he ascended, his path taking him up and over the thrashing Elk’s defensive perimeter.

The ice cage was already fracturing, the creature’s strength was immense, its magic considerable, and Soren’s trap wouldn’t hold more than seconds.

He didn’t need more than seconds.

At the apex of his leap, suspended in mid-air above the Elk’s back, Soren’s expression shifted into something that would have made his father proud and everyone who cared about him terrified. His eyes went flat and cold, calculation replacing emotion, the part of him that was weapon rather than man taking control.

The consecrated blade left its sheath in a draw so fast it whistled, ice magic flooding into the metal, coating it in frost so cold it burned, turning sanctified steel into something closer to divine judgment.

He fell.

Precision was everything. The Elk’s spine, specifically the gap between vertebrae at the base of its skull, where bone met brain, where severing meant instant death rather than prolonged suffering, required perfect placement, perfect angle, perfect force.

Soren had learned anatomy from his Vetra and his father’s torturers, who’d needed to understand bodies to break them most efficiently. The knowledge had other applications.

The blade punched through hide and muscle and between bone with the sound of winter itself shattering. Soren’s magic pulsed through the steel, flash-freezing nerve tissue, creating ice crystals in brain matter, killing with speed that mercy demanded even if cruelty had taught him how.

The Glacier Elk’s roar cut off mid-sound. Its massive body staggered, legs losing coordination, the light in those ancient eyes dimming as consciousness fled before pain could register.

It fell like a mountain deciding to lie down, slowly at first, then all at once, the impact when it hit the ground sending shockwaves through the canyon floor, cracking ice, dislodging snow from walls that had held it for centuries.

Soren rode the fall, feet planted on the creature’s back, blade still embedded in its spine, his balance perfect even as the world tilted and crashed. When motion stopped, when the echoes faded, when silence returned to the canyon broken only by his own breathing, he straightened slowly.

His heart was pounding. Adrenaline sang in his veins. Every nerve ending was alive with the specific euphoria that came from surviving something that should have killed him... if he were a mere human that is... from victory over worthy prey, from proving, once again, that he was the apex predator in these mountains regardless of what else lived here.

He was covered in blood and snow. His ceremonial hunting attire was in perfect condition with only a few scratches, barely ruined by any standard of imperial dignity.

He’d never felt better in his life.

Soren extracted the blade with care, wiping it clean on fur before returning it to its sheath. Then he circled to the Elk’s head, kneeling in blood-stained snow, his hand coming to rest on its massive skull.

"Thank you for the hunt," he said quietly, sincerely, because prey this magnificent deserved acknowledgment. "You were everything I hoped you’d be."

No prayer, he’d never been particularly devout, had seen too much cruelty justified by divine will to trust gods with anything important. But respect, he could offer.

Recognition that this creature had lived for centuries, had ruled these mountains long before Soren was born, had died because he’d needed to prove something to himself and to an empire that watched from safe distances.