[BL] I Didn't Sign Up For This-Chapter 69: In Which Something Hungry Finds Us

"Thirty-one minutes," Azryth said quietly.

It felt like we’d been walking for days.

The compass needle held steady, pointing into the thickening gray, whatever we were approaching, we were getting close.

Then I felt it.

A presence.

Something tells me arbiters would feel ancient and cold and inhuman, but this felt different, hungry, and aware.

Watching.

"Azryth," I said quietly.

"I feel it." His power started manifesting, flames flickering at his shoulders. "Something’s following us."

I looked back, but there was nothing, just gray void and distant debris.

The presence grew stronger, closer.

Not following anymore.

Hunting.

"What is it?" I whispered.

"I don’t..."

The gray behind us exploded.

Something burst through. Not a creature exactly, more like a living absence, a shape that wasn’t a shape, darkness that moved wrong, occupied space that shouldn’t be occupiable. It had no eyes, no mouth, no features at all, just a formless void that was somehow more solid than the gray around it.

It lunged.

Azryth threw power at it instinctively. Flames, raw infernal energy, enough to incinerate most threats.

The thing absorbed it, drank it down and got bigger.

"Wrong approach!" Azryth yelled, pulling me backward.

The creature shifted direction, flowing toward us with horrible speed.

I felt what it wanted, not flesh, not blood.

The binding.

It wanted to feed on the connection between us.

"It’s after the bond," I said.

"I noticed!"

The thing lunged again, I didn’t think, just reacted.

The spectral blade materialized in my hand.

I slashed.

The blade cut through the creature’s form, and it screamed. Not a sound, a sensation, pain transmitted directly into my mind, my bones, my teeth.

The creature recoiled, its shape distorting.

"It worked," I gasped.

"Don’t stop!" Azryth was channeling power differently now, not attacking the creature directly, but creating barrier walls of force to slow it down.

The thing recovered fast, it flowed around Azryth’s barriers like water, reforming on our side.

Closer now.

I slashed again, the blade carved through its impossible form, leaving channels of light in the darkness.

It screamed again, louder.

But it didn’t retreat.

Instead, it surged forward, pressing between us, forcing us apart. I felt the binding stretch, strain under the assault.

"Don’t let it separate us!" Azryth shouted.

I tried to hold on, but the creature was strong, it pushed between us like a wedge, growing thicker, more solid. More real.

The pendant around my neck went ice cold, fighting to maintain the connection.

I slashed frantically. The blade cut deep, over and over, carving the creature apart.

But for every piece I destroyed, more darkness flowed in to replace it, the thing was feeding on something, growing stronger even as I wounded it.

Feeding on the binding itself.

"Riven!" Azryth’s hand reached through the creature’s form, trying to find mine.

I grabbed for him, but the thing was in the way, solid one moment, incorporeal the next, my hand passed through empty space.

The binding strained harder, and I felt it starting to fray.

"No!" I channeled power into the blade, made it burn brighter and cut deeper.

The creature screamed and pressed harder.

We were losing.

My arms were getting tired. Each slash took more effort. The creature was relentless, endless, always reforming no matter how much I cut away.

And the binding was weakening.

I could feel it, the connection between us growing thinner, colder, the creature was draining it, drinking down the energy that tied us together.

"Azryth, I can’t..."

"Keep fighting!" His voice was strained. "Don’t let go!"

I slashed again. Again. Again.

The blade was getting heavier, or I was getting weaker. Hard to tell.

The creature surged, and suddenly Azryth was ten feet away, then fifteen, the binding stretched between us like a rope about to snap.

The pendant burned ice-cold against my chest.

I felt the connection fraying thread by thread, moment by moment.

We were going to lose it.

We were going to lose each other.

"No," I said through gritted teeth. "Not happening."

I stopped slashing, stopped trying to destroy the creature.

Instead, I did something probably stupid.

I grabbed the binding itself. Not physically, you couldn’t touch it physically. But through the pendant, through the seal, through every connection we’d built.

And I pulled.

Pulled Azryth toward me, pulled the binding taut, forced energy down the connection with everything I had.

The creature was in the way, the binding had to go through it.

So I made the binding burn.

Power flooded down the connection, Warden magic mixed with infernal energy, amplified by desperation and absolute refusal to be separated.

The binding blazed white-hot between us.

The creature, caught in the middle of that surge, screamed its soundless scream.

It tried to absorb the energy like it had absorbed everything else.

But this was different, this wasn’t an attack. This was a connection, a bond, something it couldn’t drain because it wasn’t being thrown at it, it was flowing through it.

"Azryth!" I shouted. "Push back! Make it stronger!"

He understood immediately. Power flooded back toward me from his side, his infernal energy meeting my warden magic, merging, creating a circuit of power that ran through the creature whether it wanted to or not.

The binding blazed brighter.

The creature writhed.

"More!" I yelled.

We both pushed harder, the binding between us became a conduit of pure energy, burning with combined power.

The creature started breaking apart. Not because we were attacking it, but because it couldn’t exist in the middle of something that strong, that connected.

It screamed one final time.

Then it fled.

Tore itself away from the binding and vanished into the gray, leaving only ripples in the void.

I collapsed.

I would have hit the ground, if there was ground, but Azryth caught me. He was there suddenly, the distance between us gone, his arms around me.

"Are you hurt?" he asked, his voice shaking.

"No, you?"

"Fine, I’m fine." But his hands were trembling as they checked me over. "That was too close, if you hadn’t...if the binding had..."

"It didn’t." I grabbed his hand. "We drove it off."

"Barely." He pulled me against him. "We barely drove it off, and it was just one. If there are more..."

"We’ll handle them the same way."

"Riven.."

"We’ll make the binding too strong to feed on, and make ourselves too connected to separate." I looked up at him. "It worked."

"It shouldn’t have worked but I’m glad it did, that was a limbo predator, they feed on bonds, they’re designed to drain connections." His voice was tight with fear. "But you made the binding into a weapon, you turned our connection into something it couldn’t consume."

"The seal helped." I touched my wrist where the mark pulsed. "I think it gave me the idea, like it knew what to do."

"Your mother’s magic," Azryth said quietly. "It’s still protecting you...us."

We stood there for a moment, both shaking with exhaustion and adrenaline.

The binding hummed between us. Strained but intact, stronger, maybe, for having survived the assault.

"How much time has passed?" I asked after a while.

Azryth checked his internal chronometer. "Forty-two minutes since we entered."

It felt like years.

I looked at the compass, the needle was still pointing forward, still unwavering.

"We need to keep moving," I said.

"We need to rest."

"We can rest when we’re out of limbo, right now we need to find the arbiters and get answers before something else finds us."

He looked like he wanted to argue, but he knew I was right.

"Let’s stay close," he said. "Closer than before, if another predator shows up..."

"We’ll handle it." I squeezed his hand. "Same as we handle everything else."

His affection and exasperation bled through the bond.

We started walking again, slower now, both of us exhausted from the fight.

The gray ahead was still thick, still heavy, still pulling at us.

But the compass pointed forward.

So forward we went.

My blade stayed manifested now, ready.

Azryth kept his power close to the surface.

And between us, the binding pulsed steady and bright.

A beacon in the void.

Which, I realized with growing unease, might be exactly what had attracted that predator in the first place.

The brighter we burned, the more visible we were.

But dimming the binding wasn’t an option, it was the only real thing in this place.

Our only anchor.

We’d just have to hope we could handle whatever else came hunting.