Richie realized that, for some reason or another, the wounds had not drawn any blood. In fact, as he looked, he further noticed that he hadn’t actually been pierced at all. The fingers merely disappeared, without substance or piercing force, inside Richie’s stomach, as though they were empty shadows again, melding into the ordinary shadows around them to give only an optical illusion of penetration.
He could question why only this attack hadn’t worked later - for now, Richie had another golden opportunity to retaliate. He grabbed the claw around the wrist, feeling it was solid enough to grip, and yanked as hard as he could with both hands, throwing his full weight backward. The shade was whiplashed along the length of its elongated arm, and snapped back to it like an outstretched rubber band that was suddenly released. It crashed face-first into a patch of spilt petrol burning in the bay, and screeched as it splashed and burned.
Richie nodded with a grunt of embittered approval as the shade splashed fruitlessly in the polluted, burning patch before sinking under the waves. This area appeared to be momentarily cleared of shades, or so Richie thought, before he felt another presence at his back. Certain that another pursuer was springing a surprise attack, Richie twisted around with a sweeping haymaker that had all the force he could muster to put behind his fist. At the same time that he felt a hand clasp his wrist and stop the punch cleanly, dead in its tracks, Richie registered the stoic face of Leon, who had finally found him again.
“We should really stop meeting like this, you know.” Leon said. “People are going to talk.”
Richie yanked his hand back. “Spare me your nonsense. Maybe next time you can cut the call even closer!” he glared daggers at the blond man’s lackadaisical treatment of Richie’s escape from the massive alligator.
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“What was that brute, anyway? A shade?” Leon asked.
“How should I know?!” Richie snapped. “Figures that bastard would actually follow me here from the sewers. That reminds me, is your lion going to be ok?”
“You don’t have to worry about Sparta, he’s my sidekick for a reason. Come on, Kokumo has already gone on ahead to help the town guardsmen evacuate the remaining districts, the safest place for you to be right now is in secure higher ground. I need to restock on supplies with my men. Our destination is the Sniper Tower, there.” Leon pointed up over the horizon beyond the boathouse alley from where the shade had harmlessly impaled Richie.
Past a series of interconnected carpentry decks and rope pulleys and cranes that still carried crates and lumber frozen mid-delivery was a tall, spindly wooden spire with hexagonal sides. It was a deep auburn color, and struck Richie as being constructed of some kind of oak, reinforced with encircling steel rings like giant hardware nuts. A vast assemblage of steel cables that looked almost like the rough rigging ropes painted over monochrome rose up from the base of the tower and its perimeter in 360, ensnaring the tower as a circular spiderweb whose connecting filaments were bolted into the sides of the stabilizing rings going up three levels. The remaining six stabilizing rings were free of support cables. At the tower’s summit was a squared-off section capped by a triangular roof tiled in rusty red that reminded Richie of a combination castle watch tower and battlement. On each of the top room’s four sides was a wide open, but narrow, bay window from which something shiny and reflective sparkled in the moonlight - canons or mounted guns of some kind, if Richie were to hazard a guess.
Richie felt a groaning pain in his knee, and looked down at his pierced kneecap where his jean leg had begun to saturate in fresh blood again. A maroon blossom had already settled into the fabric by the time the wound had begun to clot, and now it seemed that Richie’s overexertion had broken the seal and started bleeding freshly again. His legs creaked, and that knee began to shake a little, as if giving predictive foreshocks to it buckling very soon.
Richie sighed and hoped inwardly that the Sniper Tower wasn’t much of a walk to get to from here.