He stepped back, turned to Camilla, then said quietly, "We’re here."
They were just about to step into the cave when the mountain shifted above them.
A massive glacier fragment sheared off the peak of the ice mountain overhead, thousands of tons of ice breaking free with a sound like the world cracking open. It plummeted toward them in a slow, terrible arc, its shadow racing across the snow ahead of it.
Stan reacted without thinking, storing it into his inventory...
The falling glacier dematerialized mid-descent, thousands of tons of ice vanishing from the sky above them in a heartbeat.
Then, as the polar wind settled back into stillness, Stan turned his gaze toward an open stretch of snow off to the side of the cave entrance.
He released the glacier.
The immense mass rematerialized in a single, deliberate placement, crashing down onto the frozen ground with a deep, rumbling boom that echoed across the mountains. Snow billowed outward from the impact as thousands of tons of ice settled into place, forming a towering frozen mound beside the cave.
Camilla, for the first time since he had met her, actually paused.
Her crimson eyes traced the bridge from one end to the other. Then she looked at Stan.
"You use your spatial treasure..." Her voice carried a small, genuine note of astonishment. "Like that."
Stan shrugged. "A tool is only limited by the imagination of its owner."
For half a second, her expression remained unchanged.
Then a smile slowly spread across her face.
It wasn’t the mocking smile she had worn earlier when he healed. It wasn’t the amused smile she had worn when he had first tried to negotiate. This smile carried something different, something warmer, touched by the faintest hint of respect.
[Camilla Dragomir: Favorability +10.]
[Camilla Dragomir: Favorability 45.]
Stan’s heart nearly stopped.
’Five more! Five more favorability points. Just five, and I can force her into the Harem before she can react!’
He kept his face perfectly composed, his expression as steady as he could manage. Every muscle in his body wanted to celebrate.
He allowed none of it to show.
Camilla, meanwhile, had never seen a spatial treasure used like that. Over her centuries of existence, she had watched countless cultivators wield inventory-type artifacts in countless ways, storing treasures, transporting supplies, concealing valuables from thieves, carrying weapons discreetly.
Never had she watched someone catch a falling glacier in mid-air, then turn it into a bridge.
His creativity did not merely surprise her. It interested her.
Stan was about to step into the ice cave when Camilla raised a hand.
The gesture was casual, but it was also absolute. He stopped instantly.
Meanwhile, she tilted her head slightly, looking upward. Her crimson eyes narrowed by the smallest fraction. When she spoke, her voice was cold enough to displace the polar air.
"I ignored you insects and let you do as you pleased," she said quietly. "But you actually dared come closer."
She smiled. "You wimpy dogs need to be taught a lesson."
The half-cold smile she wore was not directed at Stan. It was for whatever she had just sensed above them.
"Wait here." She said softly then vanished.
She didn’t walk away. She didn’t even turn to move. One moment she was standing beside him.
The next, she simply ceased to be there, moving faster than even Stan’s system-enhanced perception could follow.
Silence settled over the glacier. Then, faintly, from somewhere high above, came a howl.
A werewolf’s howl, long, pained and abruptly cut short. Then came a whimper. Then nothing.
A heartbeat later... Something came falling out of the sky.
It landed a few meters from Stan with a wet, heavy thud.
Stan looked at it.
It was a head.
A werewolf’s head, fully transformed, its lupine features frozen in a mid-strike snarl, the expression of a beast that had never seen the killing blow coming. The neck had been severed with a cleanliness Stan’s mind refused to process for the first several seconds. The cut was surgical. There was no ragged flesh. No splintered bone. The neck had simply been ended, the way a sheet of paper was ended by a pair of scissors.
The tongue lolled from the corner of its mouth.
Blood still dripped from the severed neck onto the ice, the crimson pool spreading slowly across the white.
Stan felt his stomach turn.
Less than an hour ago, he had been at the mercy of these creatures. He had felt the terror of being handled by a being operating at only a fraction of its true power, a fraction that made his own strength seem childish. He had watched his blood paint the snow while a werewolf calmly opened him with nothing more than a fingernail.
Camilla had beheaded a fully transformed werewolf in less than two seconds.
The realization settled over him with the weight of a truth that would shape every decision he made for the rest of the day.
Whatever gap existed between an ordinary human and a werewolf, an equivalent gap existed between a werewolf and a Royal Blood vampire.
Camilla was not simply another supernatural being in the same category as Elder Fang.
She was several categories above him.
... Ten seconds after she had disappeared, she reappeared beside him.
From the multiple dog-like yelps and dying whimpers he had heard, it was clear she hadn’t dealt with just one werewolf.
She had dealt with all four. Yet she looked exactly as she had before.
Not a hair was out of place. Not a single spot of blood stained her clothing. The polar wind drifted gently through her crimson hair. Her expression was composed, faintly amused, as though she had stepped away to answer a phone call rather than to behead four fully transformed apex predators.
She looked at him. "Are you afraid of me?"
Stan said nothing. The answer was obvious enough that any denial would have insulted them both.
She held his gaze for a long moment. Then she let out a quiet, elegant laugh.
The sound was almost musical, an old, cultured laugh that belonged to someone who had once laughed in royal courts that no longer existed.
"...You’re an amusing human," she said, licking her lips. "Whether you admit it or not, you’re afraid of me. Prey can only fear a predator when it is powerless to do anything about it."
She said it without cruelty.
Simply as a statement of fact.
Stan filed the observation away with the cold discipline of a man who knew he could not react to the truth of it right now.
He needed to reach fifty. He needed five more favorability points before the situation escalated further and she decided he was no longer entertaining.
He looked at her, then toward the cave entrance.
"We can head in now, right?"
Camilla nodded. Her gaze briefly flickered to the severed werewolf head resting beside the cave entrance, blood still spreading slowly across the ice. Her expression tightened by the faintest fraction.
’The leader of that pack sent on mission managed to escape,’ she thought. ’That annoying dog should know his place after this. I am Camilla Dragomir. There are lines he shouldn’t cross.’
She said nothing aloud.
Anyways upon seeing her nod in response, Stan turned and stepped into the cave.
The interior of the cave was cold and blue, the walls of the glacier glowing softly with the strange, deep light that only very old ice produced. The passage stretched ahead of them into darkness.
Camilla followed. Stan had taken perhaps five paces into the cave when the growl echoed from somewhere ahead of him.
It was not a werewolf.
The sound was lower, wetter, more purely animal, the deep chest-rumble of a massive creature warning intruders away from something it valued more than its own survival. The growl echoed off the ice walls of the cave, reflecting back on itself in ways that made it impossible to pinpoint the source.
Stan drew up short. Then, from the shadow of the cave ahead, the source of the growl emerged.
A polar bear.
It was enormous. Well over a thousand kilograms by his rough estimate, its shoulders standing higher than his head, its bulk almost filling the cave passage. Its fur was cream-white and streaked with the yellowish undertone of an old animal that had lived hard. Its eyes were small, black, and fixed with the direct, unambiguous focus of a mother whose territory had just been invaded.
Stan had never seen a polar bear in person before.
He had seen documentaries. He had read articles. He had, at various points, absorbed the fact that a polar bear could kill a fully-grown man with a single swipe of a paw.
His new physiology, his tempered bones, his martial mastery, none of that changed the fact that a chill still traveled down his spine at the sight of the creature emerging from the cave shadow. It was his first time seeing one in real life after all...
He glanced instinctively at Camilla.
She was standing behind him. Her red eyes were on the bear. Her expression was completely neutral. She did not step forward. She did not raise a hand. She did not indicate, in any way, that she intended to help.
She met his glance with a scoff.
"What?" Her voice was dry. "Don’t tell me you need help dealing with a non-mutant beast."