The Gembound: The Price of Keeping Chapter 104: Volume 4: Chapter 96 – The Warning

Read chapter 104 of The Gembound: The Price of Keeping by Taliorn on NovelPedia.

Volume 4: Chapter 96 – The Warning The cistern shuddered as the slug surged fully into view. Stone bowed inward around its mass—not cracking, not breaking, but softening , dissolving into pale slurry as its body slid past. It didn’t eat with teeth or acid. It ate by presence , by being a place where matter ceased to remember how to be solid. A hundred feet of blind, pale flesh moved like a slow tide. Sam stepped forward immediately, planting claws into the stone. The bears formed a triangle: Graveclaw at Yara’s left, Stonehide at her right, Shadowfang behind her. The cistern’s acoustics held their growls like trapped thunder. Harry leaned against a pillar, claw tips gouging deep grooves. The fragment’s glow beneath his scales flared into a yellow-green fire, pulsing in time with the slug’s movements. He swallowed hard. “Yara… it feels like I’m standing next to a god’s corpse with teeth.” “No teeth,” Scythe corrected flatly. “Just hunger.” The slug turned toward them. Not with eyes—there were none. Not with senses, Yara understood. But it felt. It felt the Gem in her spine, the fragment in Harry’s chest, the dead god’s echo in the Riftblade at her hip. It recognized them. And the cistern shook with its slow, seismic approach. “Sam,” Yara said. He lunged. The big Scion hit the slug like a battering ram. His weight made the stone floor crack—crack, not dissolve. The slug’s outer flesh rippled, dented inward, then bulged back like a water skin struck with a fist. Sam recoiled, claws scraping against a surface that wasn’t quite flesh, wasn’t quite fluid. He snarled, plates flaring. “It bends. It doesn’t break.” Stonehide charged next, halberd-arm slashing a long, gleaming arc across the slug’s flank. The blade sank an inch before the material swallowed it, tugging like mud. Stonehide ripped free, staggering backward as the halberd-steel came away pitted. Graveclaw took a measured step, greatsword-arm raised, waiting for the moment inherited patience guiding the strike. Shadowfang darted to the side, watching for patterns, blind spots, and waves of motion. Scythe darted forward, blades flickering. He didn’t attack, yet he watched the creature’s ripples, the timing of its contractions, the way its mass shifted. He was mapping it like a puzzle. Behind them, Eliza pressed her back to a carved pillar, ledger somehow already out, hand shaking only slightly as she sketched the thing’s outline. “You’re documenting this right now?” Yara snapped. “If we die,” Eliza murmured, “someone needs to know this existed.” Gayle stood beside her, clutching his staff of repurposed metal. “This isn’t a creature,” he whispered. “This is theology gone wrong. ” Then the slug moved. A wave of force, not wind, not magic, but sheer displacement, knocked Sam sideways. Bears stumbled. Shadowfang slid across the stone. And the slug’s front third lifted huge, boneless, rising like a tidal wave. It slammed down. The floor dissolved beneath it, liquefying for an instant before snapping back into stone. The shockwave threw Scythe off balance, slammed Stonehide into Graveclaw with a jarring crash of metal and fur, and made Harry cry out as the shard inside him flared white-hot. Yara stepped forward. Gem-fire threaded down her spine, limbs, fingers. Green light gleam crawled along her veins like someone drawing new lines beneath her skin. She summoned the Riftblade. It came to her like a whisper, a cloth tearing in another dimension. The blade hummed hungry, but not with the slug’s hunger. With purpose. With recognition. He recognized the thing before them. Yara lifted the sword. The slug pivoted toward her instantly. Harry snarled. “It wants you.” “It wants the Gem,” Scythe corrected. “Same thing,” Harry snapped. The slug surged forward, mass rolling, floor dissolving in a spreading radius. “Move!” Yara barked. Sam intercepted, slamming into the slug’s flank, buying her seconds. Stonehide followed, halberd sweeping low to force the creature’s base to shift. Graveclaw