'ADRIAN!' His mind raced as the rock that he was clutching slipped free of the wall.
'Am I going to die? What can I do? Can I do anything? Why is this happening?' A lot of questions raced through his mind as he began to fall, but one thing stood out from all the rest.
'ADRIAN' Rosy. If he died, so did she. Their bond was that strong. He could feel her scream. It came from the very depths of her soul. She was going to jump off the wall of her own accord. Kill herself along with him.
'Rosy, don't!' Adrian's head was clearer than ever. The thoughts flowed freely between him and Rosy.
And he was stone cold calm.
Adrian reoriented himself as soon as his body lost its connection with the cliff. With a single motion, as if he'd done it hundreds, maybe thousands of times in the past, he pulled his sword out of its scabbard and stabbed it into the rock wall beside him. It landed precisely in a crevice just big enough to hold the sword, stopping his fall with a jerk that almost dislocated his shoulder.
Holding himself up by his sword, Adrian didn't even bother to stop to appreciate the incredible craftsmanship of his sword, capable of stopping his fall and holding his weight without either bending nor breaking.
'Rosy.' Adrian gave the vampire princess clear instructions through their bond before beginning his climb again. The words now flowed freely through their bond.
'Okay.' she agreed after hearing what he had to say.
A few of the gryphon-creatures had noticed that Adrian had managed to stop his fall and attempted to dive after him, but Rosy shoved her right arm into a hole in the cliffside before giving out an impressively loud whistle.
The effect of her whistle was instant. Every single gryphon-creature on the mountain suddenly turned their target to her. Even the ones in the middle of dive-bombing towards Adrian stopped mid-dive and started flying up. Adrian's plan... to attract all of the gryphons to Rosy and make full use of her incredible survival skills was a success.
Without Adrian holding her back, Rosy could have climbed up the gryphon-creature wall insanely fast, but instead she'd been forced to keep pace with him. That was why they'd caught all of that attention. With that being the case, it was pretty obvious what path they should take now that the entire nest was going after them.
It was impossible for them to get up the wall while the gryphon-creatures were following them both. Adrian just wasn't fast enough. But nobody could survive being attacked so incessantly while they were in an area without any footholds. Not even Rosy.
Luckily for both of them, the solution to both problems: Adrian being too slow, and Rosy not having footholds, were the same.
"This is going to be fun." Rosy cracked a smile as she jumped off of the cliffside, right into the air.
...
Adrian climbed as if his life depended on it. If a foothold looked loose, he'd shove a knife into the dirt and gouge out a handhold instead. He didn't know how long Rosy could keep going for.
He didn't dare watch Rosy do her thing as he climbed, knowing that it'd just slow him down, but he could feel the residual adrenaline that she was using course through his veins, driving him to go faster. Climb better. With single-minded determination, he climbed until his hands bled from the rocks. Until his nails were all bloody, broken nubs, he climbed.
...
Pure exhilaration ran through every fiber of Rosy's being as she bought time for Adrian. These gryphon-creatures were actually called Griffins. The similar moniker to the gryphons that were human chimeras made it a common confusion, but the Griffin Mountain range was actually named after these things. They were fairly calm creatures normally, but if another being got too close to their nests, they'd get incredibly violent. Gryvus had been named after the human-chimera gryphons, but they treated the griffins themselves as something similar to 'holy creatures.'
You'd think that Rosy's father would end up coveting these things for their value as mounts, but griffins weren't capable of carrying people during flight, making them worthless in his eyes. Once he found his way through the mountains, he'd likely end up simply ordering their genocide or something.
But Rosy wasn't her father. Her goal wasn't to kill the griffins, but rather to gain their attention long enough for Adrian to get past their nest. She didn't blame them for attacking the both of them, since the beasts clearly simply thought of the two of them as intruders. The attack made sense, and therefore Rosy saw no reason to retaliate with lethal force.
She jumped from griffin to griffin, fast as a ghost. When a griffin attempted to dive-bomb her, she'd grab its neck in passing before leaping to the nearest one. Since they weren't creatures of human intelligence, they didn't understand that she needed to repeatedly jump between griffins in order to stay in the air. If they'd stayed away from Rosy, then her position in midair would certainly mean certain death for the vampire, but they weren't smart enough to do so, so the dance in midair continued.
'Rosy, I made it.' Adrian finally told her telepathically after a seeming eternity of distracting the swarm. She could feel him transfer a bit of his own stamina to her in order to bolster her flagging endurance. Even someone like her couldn't keep repeatedly jumping from bird to bird forever, after all.
As soon as she received Adrian's message, Rosy let out a short sigh. He was safe. It was time for the game to end. It felt a little bittersweet. It'd been a fun little dance for her, after all.
She quickly managed to jump into one of the larger griffin holes before scurrying all the way up the cliffside at speeds comparable to a normal person's running speed if they were on a flat surface. Once she was at the top, the griffins decided that she wasn't a threat to their babies anymore, and stopped attacking her.