Noel changed his approach immediately.
There was no point chasing a body that could blur itself across the basin and bend the mist around every movement. The chimera had built the fight around uncertainty from the moment it opened its eyes. Fine. Then he would stop fighting the body first and start dismantling the structure holding the battlefield together.
He exhaled once, grounded his footing against the black stone, and raised one hand. "Cooling Veil." A thin wave of frost spread outward from him and rolled low across the basin, slipping through the pale mist and dragging the temperature down with unnatural speed. The white fog reacted at once. Instead of drifting freely around the chimera, it thickened, condensed, and clung in heavier sheets to the true body while the false positions lost cohesion and began to peel apart in ragged fragments. For the first time since the fight had started, the blurred outlines around the beast lagged instead of flowing naturally with it.
