Damian staggered but did not let go. "Damn it—" Adrian made another choked sound, sharper this time, almost a whimper buried under the strain. His fingers seized around Damian's wrist in pure reflex.
"No," he breathed again, but there was no force in it now, only horror. Because he felt it too. He felt the way the power inside him had changed the moment Damian touched him, felt it reach greedily through the point of contact, not content with the walls, the poison, the blood, or the living nightmare around them. It wanted everything unclean, everything damaged, everything wrong.
And Damian was there—too close, too warm, too real.
Adrian's gaze dropped to their joined hands. For one blinding instant, some wild instinct inside him rose with the same terrible certainty as the light itself: clean it. Clean everything. The tunnel, the corruption, the blood, the hurt, the weakness, the world. His breath hitched.
Damian's hand was still locked around his wrist, still holding on, still refusing to let him go. Something twisted hard inside Adrian's chest. It was not logic or strategy, but something worse—something painfully, helplessly human. He did not want that hand gone. He did not want Damian to step away. He did not want the only solid thing anchoring him to disappear into white.
So Adrian dragged the power back.
It fought him. The light surged in fury, lashing outward in a silent wave. Behind them the tunnel died another foot at a time, the corruption peeling away in widening circles. Flesh shrank, membranes burst and vanished. The living passage did not collapse because it was crushed; it collapsed because too much of it had been stripped away to remain alive.
Damian felt the pull sharpen and then stutter. Adrian was resisting—not well, not cleanly, but resisting. Damian tightened his grip until his knuckles ached. "Come on," he snarled. "Move."
Adrian shook his head once, ragged and weak, his hair whipping loose in the radiance. The light around his body thickened again, swelling hard against the remains of his torn shirt. It made him look larger than he was, his torso rounded by compressed brilliance and his shoulders almost normal only to disappear into that unstable, overfilled glow. His feet barely touched the ground, and his whole body floated wrong, buoyed by power that had nowhere to go.
Damian yanked him. Adrian lurched. For a second he did not move like a person at all; he dragged like something caught between weight and weightlessness, resisting gravity one moment and collapsing into it the next. Damian planted his feet and pulled harder. "Now!"
That got through. Adrian stumbled forward.
Behind them the rupture screamed—a wet, splitting shriek as Caleb's frost shattered and the dying tunnel tried one last time to close around the space Adrian had carved open. Damian hauled him through.
They did not run so much as crash forward together. Adrian's shoulder slammed into him, and Damian nearly lost his balance but caught himself and kept dragging. White light poured off Adrian in waves with every step, stripping the walls they passed. Corruption dropped away behind them in dead gray flakes. Tendrils that lunged from the ceiling shriveled before they could touch. The poison damp in the air thinned to nothing. Everywhere the radiance reached, the nightmare ended absolutely—no blood, no rot, no stain, no residue, as if those things had never been permitted to exist.
Ahead, Caleb shouted something and Ethan answered. Marcus was already farther down the corridor with Neol still hanging over his back as he pushed toward the next turn. Damian heard none of it clearly. All his focus had narrowed to the hand in his grip and the body stumbling beside him.
Adrian was breathing in short, ragged bursts now, every inhale scraping. His fingers spasmed once around Damian's wrist—tight, desperate, almost painful. Then the pressure shifted and the current reversed. The white radiance around Adrian trembled, wavered, and began to collapse inward, not all at once but step by step, like water being forced back through a shattered gate. The glow around his shoulders thinned first, then the swollen brilliance wrapped around his torso tightened and drew close to the lines of his body. The air stopped screaming, and the oppressive pulse hammering against Damian's bones weakened. Light streamed back into Adrian's skin in long, ragged threads, vanishing beneath flesh that looked too pale, too strained, too human to have held any of it.
Adrian made a broken sound and nearly folded. Damian caught him by the arm and kept going.
By the time they reached the safer stretch beyond the breach, only a faint white sheen clung to Adrian's skin, outlining his throat, his fingers, and the edges of his torn clothes like an afterglow. Then even that began to fade.
Adrian hit the wall hard enough to make a dull sound against the stone and slid halfway down it, bent over and breathing like he had been gutted. Damian still did not let go.
Neither of them spoke for a second. The silence felt wrong after everything—the collapse, the pulse, the quiet annihilation of an entire living corridor. Adrian's shoulders were shaking, and his silver hair hung over his face again, hiding whatever expression had replaced the earlier panic. He tried to straighten and failed.
Damian looked down. His hands were clean. The blood was gone, and so was the dirt. The cuts across his knuckles had vanished so completely that there was no trace they had ever existed. His expression changed. Slowly, he turned his hand over, staring at the unbroken skin, then looked back at Adrian.
Adrian followed the movement, saw it, and went still.
For one long, raw moment, neither of them said a word. Then Adrian's fingers tightened weakly around Damian's wrist again—not enough to stop him, just enough to say don't. His lips parted, but no sound came out at first. When he finally spoke, his voice was wrecked.
"I didn't mean to do that," Adrian whispered. He swallowed hard, and his gray eyes lifted through the loose curtain of silver hair—clear now, exhausted, and threaded through with something Damian had never seen in him before: fear. Not of the tunnel, not of dying, but of himself.
Damian said nothing. Because he had felt it. Not the shape of the power or its name, but the certainty of it. That white light did not wound; it removed, absolutely. And it had stopped—not because it ran out, but because Adrian had pulled it back.
His gaze dropped once to their joined hands. Adrian saw that too, and something unreadable flickered across his face—mortification, confusion, something more fragile than either. Then the last of his strength gave out. His knees buckled.
Damian caught him before he hit the floor. Adrian's head fell against his shoulder, his breath hot and uneven through the torn front of Damian's shirt. He did not wake again.
Behind them, somewhere deep in the stripped, collapsing dark, the dead tunnel finally gave way with a distant grinding roar. Ethan swore, Caleb turned, and Marcus shouted that they had to keep moving.
Still Damian did not move immediately. He was looking at Adrian—at the singed tips of silver hair, at the too-pale face, at the hand that had nearly erased a nightmare from existence and had still, somehow, chosen to hold on instead. It was not a brute-force Combatant ability, nor any ability Damian had ever seen. It was something else, something impossible.
Then Damian tightened his hold, pushed off the wall, and carried him after the others.