Ch. 67: Leaving Gryvus (2)

'Rosy, am I hallucinating?' Adrian asked Rosy mentally as they glided after the Gryphons leading them through the mountains, pointing Rosy's attention downward with his mind. 

'What are you... Oh!' Rosy looked for what Adrian was trying to draw her attention to, but she weighed a lot less than Adrian did, and her handling of the glider was better, so she was a lot higher up than him. It took her a moment to find it. 'Nope. That's an angry Griffin beast, and it's flying right at us.' She agreed. 

'It's coming right at me!' Adrian shouted in his head.

'Don't dodge until you absolutely need to! You'd need to sacrifice too much height for speed!' Rosy shouted in her head, taking action. She pulled one of her hands out of her harness, destabilizing her glider a bit for a moment, placing her fingers in her mouth and letting out a loud whistle to get the Gryphon team's attention. 

The Gryphons all turned around and looked at Rosy in unison, stopping their flight in shock when they saw that Rosy was almost half-way out of her harness, and gesturing wildly towards Adrian. Looking below, they saw it. A griffin beast the size of a large dog was flying straight up at him, murder in its eyes. It probably remembered him from when he and Rosy had climbed right through their nest before. Now, it was out for revenge.

"SKREE!!!"

"RROOSY!" Adrian shouted aloud, watching the beast close in on him. He was getting ready to jump off of the glider if the griffin didn't change course. 

Rosy couldn't actually hear Adrian's cry with her ears, but she knew exactly what was going on in his head.

"CAW!" Right before Adrian was planning to jump out of his harness, one of the gryphons slammed into the griffin beast's side in a devastating dive bomb. There was a scream from one of the two, or maybe both birds, as the beast's trajectory veered sharply right of Adrian's glider, missing him by a mile before losing momentum and beginning its fall, unconscious. Three of the other four gryphons dove after their teammate, leaving Adrian and Rosy helpless to do anything but continue to follow the last gryphon off the mountain.

Unfortunately for Adrian, the griffin wasn't going to give up that easily.

'Adrian, it's back!' Rosy called mentally.

'I hate this!' Adrian complained back, watching the griffin beast speed back up towards him, four birds hot on its tail. 

'Hard left!' She shouted in his head.

'You said that changing directions-'

'DROP LEFT NOW!' By the time her thoughts registered in his brain, Adrian was already moving. 

"WHOOSH! BOOM!!!" Adrian was barely out of the way when Rosy's glider dropped right beside him. In the next moment, she released a huge magic bolt from her lips, since her hands were busy controlling her flight. The bolt didn't have much magic in it, but it hit the griffin beast square in the face, causing it to falter for a moment with a small explosion. That explosion also helped Rosy get a bit of her altitude back as well. She ended up just a little lower than Adrian.

"SKREE!" The explosion didn't stop the griffin beast, only made it switch its target to Rosy. But in the instant that her magic had bought...

"Down, beast!" As the griffin beast neared Rosy, one of the gryphons managed to catch up to it. Immediately, the bird changed back into a young man wearing light clothes, and dropped onto the griffin beast's back with a shout.

"CAWW!!" The beast wailed, falling from the sky once again, unable to carry an adult man by itself.

'We're safe.' Adrian sighed.

'And, since he can fly, that gryphon should be fine. Hopefully.' Rosy agreed. There was a chance that he'd be injured if he went into his bird form near the griffin beast, but this was a trained gryphon, so he'd probably be fine.

'Right. Let's just focus on getting away from these mountains.' Adrian thought.

They flew through the range, one mountain at a time. But eventually, they ran into a problem.

'We're too low!'

'Hold on tight, Adrian! I'm going to use magic to lift us out of the hole!' After all the maneuvering that they'd needed to do, Rosy'd ended up pretty close to Adrian. They'd also both ended up on course to run directly into the walls of the gulch between the first and second mountains, the same one that Rosy'd been worried about ending up in. The gryphons followed them from behind, using magic to enhance the wind, but it was nowhere near enough. As good as gryphons were supposed to be at wind magic, not even four of them were enough to lift two whole people up high enough to make them miss the cliff.

"ADRIAN!!! I NEED MORE!" Rosy shouted aloud as she used her magic, feeling it bottom out as her spell sapped all of her magic in an instant. Her current power wasn't enough.

Adrian sent her all of his magic energy, but it felt meager to him. After all, Rosy's magic reserves were basically bottomless in comparison, since she enhanced magic just by existing. 

Suddenly, Rosy's spell took effect in full force. All of the air was pushed out of Adrian's lungs... by air, as the winds suddenly slammed into the two of them with incredible force. They rose, barely making it over the lip of the cliff, landing with a thud on the grass on the other side, absolutely exhausted.

"Argh... why does the only route through the mountains with that many thermals end on the widest gulch area?" One of the gryphons complained, having turned back into human the moment that they made it to solid ground.

"That's gotta be like two hundred feet." Another gryphon agreed.

"Owww. My arm just healed." Adrian complained.

"Yeah, that's pain, all right. Yours seems to be a little worse than mine, let me look at it." Rosy said, tugging Adrian's shirt up to look at the new bruise on his chest.

"You're in pain too, Rosy." Adrian reminded her with a groan.

"I heal faster."