Three streaks of movement flashed across the ice.
The other three werewolves converged on his position in the span of a single heartbeat, arriving at three points around him with the coordinated speed of a pack that had learned each other’s rhythms over centuries. They came to a stop in perfect formation, their heads all turning in the same direction as they arrived.
Their expressions were not the amused, casual expressions they had worn during the fight.
Their expressions were tight. Alert and faintly afraid.
They were all looking in the same direction. They spoke in near-unison, their voices low and clipped.
"Elder Fang."
The lead werewolf, Elder Fang, did not look up immediately. He was still staring at the empty blood-soaked patch of ice, still processing the disappearance of his prey.
It took him a fraction of a second longer than his pack to register what they had already registered.
Then he lifted his head. He turned toward the direction the other three were staring. His face changed.
His nostrils flared. His pupils narrowed. The dark fur that had covered his right hand began to ripple, the transformation shifting fractionally further, deepening as his body responded to the incoming threat.
The wind shifted. A scent traveled across the polar plain. Elder Fang recognized it instantly.
His voice, when he spoke, was low and hard.
"That aura."
The other three stayed silent.
"The vampires actually sent a Royal Blood."
The words settled into the polar air with the specific weight of a piece of information that changed the entire tactical picture. A Royal Blood was not an ordinary vampire. A Royal Blood was aristocracy, a member of one of the vanished vampire dynasties whose bloodlines had once ruled entire continents, whose power was measured in the depth of the blood they carried rather than the individual strength of their bodies.
The presence of a Royal Blood on the Antarctic ice meant that the vampires had escalated the Spirit Pool contest and Ambient Qi emergence to a level the werewolves had not anticipated.
Elder Fang’s face darkened. "That’s an unexpected move on their part."
The other three shifted their weight fractionally, glancing at him for direction.
He didn’t waste time. He waved his transformed hand once, sharply. "Scatter."
The word cracked through the polar air. The four of them vanished.
Four streaks of motion, four directions, four blurs against the endless white, the werewolves peeled apart in an instant, each of them shooting outward at speeds that no ordinary eye could track. The scattering technique was old. It was a pack tactic. It broke up a concentrated scent trail and forced any incoming threat to choose which of the four to pursue first. Against a Royal Blood, splitting the group was the only sensible response.
Within two seconds, the polar landscape was empty again.
The only trace of what had happened was the crimson-stained patch of ice where Stan Harrison had been dying a moment earlier.
From the opposite horizon, a single streak of motion approached.
It moved at speeds that made the werewolves’ movements look measured by comparison.
The figure resolving out of the horizon was female.
Her hair was red, long, flowing, the deep saturated crimson of arterial blood catching the polar light. She was tall.
She was beautiful in a way that did not belong to any modern era, her features carrying the specific, unearthly precision that the ’Introduction to Earth’ had implied belonged to the higher-tier vampiric bloodlines. Her clothing was dark and fitted, cut in a style that predated any modern fashion Stan would have recognized. Her eyes, even from a distance, glowed a soft, focused crimson.
She moved across the ice with the fluid, imperious economy of a creature that had never, in its entire existence, been required to hurry for anything.
She was tracking a specific signature.
The signature had led her, over the past ten minutes, across several hundred kilometers of Antarctic surface, first the anomalous energy release of the Spirit Pool, then the sudden emergence of a strange, unfamiliar aura she had not been able to categorize but had sensed as inexplicably interesting, then the arrival of multiple werewolf presences converging on the same coordinates.
She had accelerated when she had realized the werewolves were engaging the unknown aura.
She had accelerated further when the unknown aura had suddenly vanished from her senses.
She had assumed, at that moment, that the werewolves had killed the being she had been tracking, and she had continued forward anyway, both to confirm the kill and to challenge the werewolves for whatever treasure was at stake.
Then, seconds before she reached the coordinates, the werewolves themselves had scattered.
Which had left the polar plain in front of her empty.
Empty except for a large pool of blood staining the snow.
She slowed as she approached. Her red eyes narrowed. She stopped at the edge of the bloodstain.
She stood in the polar wind, her hair drifting sideways in the breeze, her aura pulsing gently around her like a slow heartbeat, and looked down at the fresh red patch on the ice.
’The werewolves had a prey. The prey vanished. And now they’ve scattered.’
She was assessing all three facts simultaneously when her ears caught the faintest whisper of displaced air directly in front of her.
She did not have time to react.
Inside the inventory, Stan had reached his limit.
His mind was already beginning to fray at the edges. His body had processed the last of its oxygen. His consciousness was still functional but had entered the specific narrow-band clarity that came just before oxygen deprivation caused genuine failure. He had perhaps another five seconds of coherent awareness left.
He willed himself out. The inventory released him.
He materialized in the exact spot he had left from.
The polar wind hit him. The freezing air rushed into his oxygen-starved lungs. The pain of his wounds, which had been suspended for the duration of his time inside the inventory, resumed with sudden brutal completeness. He gasped, a huge, sucking, desperate inhalation.
He opened his eyes.
He was looking directly at a red-haired woman standing less than a meter in front of him.