Chapter 17 The Price Of Protection

All around Alex, the whole scene exploded into frenzy. The guardians came at them in waves from every side, a primal horde whose quarry they could have scarcely comprehended in the resort of October 2023, the slightest suggestion of figures everywhere impossible to track in the void of dark. He could feel their eyes on him, the lust for the power of the gate pulling at him like a gut string, but he wrestled with every fiber of his being to keep them from tearing asunder the world he was trying to save. The blade sang in the dark as it cut through one of the shadow things, and the steel sizzled as it found its mark, but all the guardian did was stagger, then reconstitute its form, its body writhing and warping in ways that made no sense. No, the Abyss had perverted them into something greater than just demons. They were the avatars of destruction, bound to the gate itself.