A seagull perched on the balcony flew off with an indignant caw! as Leon's whip cleaved through the wood below the windowsill. A second later, the half-open window shattered as Leon was thrown through it, slamming into the rail, and Richie after him, tumbling face down on the floor. The shades pursued them, gliding like weightless shadows through the shattered frame, and tapping with catlike grace on top of the rail banister, looking down at the boys. The shades made chitinous clicking sounds, legs rubbing against each other and claws scraping in obscene eagerness.

Richie looked up from his hands and knees at the lithe shapes standing over them, feeling lightheadedness continue to dizzy him at an escalating rate. Leon’s whip lashed taut around Richie’s waist and yanked him out of the way as a shade buried its claws in the deck.

“If you stand still, they’ll just drain you. Keep moving.” Leon advised Richie.

The shades sprang at them from the ledge, bodies contorting midair as they flew, torsos twisting 360 at the waist with sickening cracking sounds, their back halves spinning after them like propeller blades.

Richie and Leon dove apart from each other, and the former started bouncing on his feet, emulating a Jeet-Kune-Do stance as he’d seen it in the movies a thousand times before. “Alright, bring it on, you fuckers!” he bobbed and weaved toward one of the shades, throwing quick jabs, hooks, and uppercuts from wild angles. His immaterial opponent however merely distorted itself like a skewed image to either side of his punches, bending and warping in unnatural ways that should have been impossible for a biological creature with solid bones.

The shade lunged a four-pronged claw at Richie, who narrowly stepped out of the way, backward and slightly to the side. It was the second action that saved him, as the shade’s extended arm just kept going on straight, long past the point its elbow joint should have been stretched out taut to its limit. A limb like rubber stretched the distance spanning the balcony to the far wall of the room beyond, straight through the busted window. Richie heard the splintering of boards as the claws punched completely through the wood.

Richie’s eyes went wide with fear.

“Don’t freeze up!” Leon said, lashing the other shade at bay from an attempted move on Richie.

The crack of the whip rushing wind past his face woke Richie back up, and he glared at the shadow limb extended past him, having ever so closely missed its chance to pierce his body. The boy hopped up a short distance, bringing his arm cocked high overhead, and dropped a downward elbow strike into the upturned crux of the shade’s arm. He heard the satisfying crunch of the joint being dislocated and caved inward, and watched the afflicted arm flail like that of one of the inflatable tube men used on street-side ad displays like at the car dealerships.

I think I get it now. They move around like shadows to evade my attacks, but they have to change their bodies accordingly when they want to attack directly. If I time my strikes to counter them when they have bones and ligaments to break, I can stand my ground. Richie focused his senses.

“Down!” Leon shouted.

Richie ducked under the broadside swing of Leon’s whip, which noosed itself around the neck of the other shade, pulling tight like a spiked snare and choking the thing’s facsimile of a windpipe. The shade was yanked off its crouched feet like the end of an extended flail as Leon dove off the balcony onto one of the lower roofs below them. The caught shade’s body collided with that of the one before Richie, still cradling its broken elbow and mewling. The bludgeon from behind knocked the wounded shade off the balcony as well, onto its back on an adjacent roof, directly under where Richie stood.

Leon whistled, calling for Sparta, and the trusty feline stead sprinted across the boardwalk alley between rows of shacks, running aside the building where Leon had gracefully landed, dragging his eldritch prey behind him in his makeshift lasso. Its fingers clutched at the thorns embedded in its inky black throat. Leon jumped from the roof onto Sparta’s back, and called back to Richie as the acrobat rode for the harbor engulfed in flame where Kokumo had scouted ahead before them.

“Meet us there! Don’t hesitate to hit these fucking things!” Leon called back to Richie over his shoulder as he and Sparta dragged the strangling shade behind them.

Richie gulped and nodded. He looked down on the dented slope of shingled roof below him, where the shade whose joint he broke had been clobbered to. He took a deep breath and leaped off the rail himself, to engage the enemy.

Somersaulting forward through the air, Richie curled himself into a ball with his knees hugged tight to his chest, unfurling himself moments before impact to drop his heel into the downed shade from above using the full weight of his body and momentum. The ax kick sank into the area of the shade’s chest, but he felt only the impact of his heel crushing shingles as the shade went flat like a shadow again to evade damage. Shrinking back behind him, the shade reformed, poised to strike at Richie’s back. Richie heard its claws scraping against each other, and felt its icy breath turning to mist on the back of his neck. Without even wasting time to look, Richie threw a back kick and felt his shoe plant its sole in the thing’s sternum, knocking the shade off the roof.

Richie rushed to the edge to see what had become of the shadowy creature, and nearly lost his face as he crouched back from a trident of shadow flying up the wall at him. Those claws hooked into the edge of the roof and the arm pulled taut, then melded into the side of the house as the shade’s amorphous body shrank upward to meet the arm, like a long shadow compressing itself into an oval. Richie was forced back in quick bursts as the shade lunged out of its pool of shadow, hacking and slashing at the boy, its claws swiping only empty air by the thinnest of margins. Richie plunged a spear hand strike into the thing’s belly, only for the shade to open a hole in its torso and let Richie’s hand pass harmlessly through. In that same instant, the hole shrunk closed, trapping Richie.

Richie’s face froze in a grimace of agonized strain as it felt like his wrist and forearm were flash frozen in the tactile equivalent of clinical depression. Richie fell onto one knee as he felt his life’s blood being drained out of his entangled arm, and desperately jabbed short punches up into the shade’s abdomen. The off hand was not entrapped like the first, but still pistoned ineffectually through the thing, which had detracted anything of substance from its form, becoming only a 3d standing shadow that was as intangible as any other. The circle of vampiric quicksand-flesh around Richie’s trapped arm compressed further, and Richie felt like his arm was being bit by a bear trap made of ice.

The shade rematerialized its body’s mass only to coil around Richie like a snake of shadow, sinking its soul-shredding fangs into Richie’s body all over where it constricted him about the waist, hips, arms, shoulders, and neck. Richie fell onto both knees, crying out in pain even as he felt the energy to do so and the sound itself being yanked out of his throat - it felt like being in the grip of a slow nightmare where your best attempt to scream at the top of your lungs for help is choked to a hushed whisper. A tendril of the writhing shadow thing gagged his mouth, and he felt the putrid stench of death force its way inside and down his throat. His eyes were locked onto the empty white eyes of the shade, shifted to the end of the tendril and on the same side like a deformed flatfish.

Richie’s vision began blurring, and he felt his will to fight, along with his awareness, his hope, and his breath all being sucked up and out through his mouth, siphoned away by the living nightmare. He felt smaller plumes of life leaving him through the points of contact where the shade’s body clutched himhis in a cruel mockery of a loving embrace.

This is just like when the bedsheet ghost started snacking on my mind, only this bastard’s a lot better at it! It’s trying to suck my soul out my mouth, disgusting! Richie screamed internally.

He couldn’t move, and his lack of motion further snowballed the effects of the life-drain as Leon had warned. Suddenly his body felt incredibly heavy, and he fell over on his side, limbs falling asleep even as they felt the shade’s chilling bite. He envisioned a spectral tug of war between that wraith’s rapist tongue and the core of Richie’s spiritual energy within, a struggle that Richie was steadily losing. He could feel the ghostly filaments of his innermost being beginning to detach from whatever anchored them to his biological body of flesh and blood, and knew that, barring a miracle, his soul was about to be yanked out of him and swallowed, snuffing out his existence or worse.

A paradoxical euphoria began to fill him, making his body feel relaxed and airy, a sensation he recognized was being injected into him by the shade in a predatory reflex to sedate its prey against further struggle. Life was so hard, wasn’t it? So unfair, and so unkind. What was the point of a life of crawling from one filthy gutter to another, constantly risking life and limb for a few lousy pieces of moldy bread every few days? The chill of the thing’s fetid breath became like pleasant air conditioning on Richie’s skin, and the bottomless darkness Richie saw down its lifeless eyes seemed so tempting. Wouldn’t he like to just let go and come inside? Forget about everything and embrace the darkness? No more pain, no more anxiety, no more sadness…

No more hope, no more laughter, no more anything.

Richie couldn’t die here, not like this, not by this thing’s hands. Losing his soul meant being shut out of the afterlife he consoled himself with the thought of one day seeing his mother in again. He wouldn’t allow that, no matter what.

In that moment, he somehow understood - the bedsheet he had fought and ‘killed’ had once been something like himself - a living being with a will to live, and something to live for. It had been devoured by one of these abominable things and had its sense of self and consciousness obliterated. The Phantom Pain, as Richie now realized it was called, was a kind of remnant, a psychic stain where the shades’ victim had fallen, consigned to an endless cycle of acting out its true self’s last moments. The ghost was no ghost at all, more like the cast-off shed snake skin of a consumed soul, left hollow and yearning, desperately trying to fill the void left behind. Richie’s life had attracted that sad empty vessel, and it had latched onto him and tried to feed from him the same way its victimizer had.

Richie remembered his mother’s words of the Phantom Pain having been a spiritual parasite unworthy of existence, and in these stretched-out moments at the brink of oblivion Richie realized that while that had been true, destroying that lingering fragment of will had been a kindness. Richie was filled from within by a fiery rage on behalf of not only himself, but whoever’s destruction had left behind that Phantom Pain, an unnamed victim who would be forever forgotten.

You don’t deserve my soul. You deserve eradication.

The heat in Richie’s belly radiated outward and worked life back into his numbed limbs, and the shade’s calming illusion burned away, bringing back the cold and the excruciating pain - and with them, clarity and determination.

Richie’s dragon runes roared to life, glowing bright azure and burning against the shade’s body. It shrieked a blood-curdling banshee wail and began writhing about Richie’s body, struggling to maintain its grip even as it longed to engulf him. Richie clamped his jaws down hard, biting deeply into the thing’s tongue. The squealing nightmare finally broke its fatal kiss with Richie as the boy’s dragons lifted off his body and sank their teeth into the shade.

Richie felt the python grip loosen enough to free one of his arms, and looped it through the thing’s coils as he sprang back to his feet. The creature reverted to its mockery of a human shape as Richie performed a shoulder throw, tossing the creature overhead by its gangly arm.

Where the shade impacted the roof, it plunged back into the depths of its own flattened liquid shadow, then sprang back just as quickly as a jutting black spike that Richie leaped back from. Not losing a moment, Richie lunged forward to slam a knee into the side of that black spike, only for the formation to bend at an exact right angle to meet Richie’s blow, piercing the top of Richie’s kneecap partially through. Richie grit his teeth and stumbled back, clutching at his knee with one hand and keeping the other in a guard position.

The shade whipped the rest of its body into the point of the spike lodged in Richie’s knee, only to drop facedown into the tiles as Richie slammed a fist down into where he anticipated the back of the thing’s neck to form. Richie saw the thing knocked flat and prone, and knew it well enough by now to guess that it was going to try to escape by flattening into a regular shadow again.

“Oh no you don’t.” Richie stomped on the back of its neck and heard a satisfying crack.

Not taking any chances with the shade getting back up again despite its broken neck, Richie dropped onto his uninjured knee and continued to wail on the mortally wounded wraith till he felt his fists punch through the freezing silk of its body and spill its reeking ichor. He watched the dead shade break apart on the roof and disperse into wisps of shadow that dissolved into the night air.

“Good riddance.” Richie spat out blood.

Below him, plumes of fire and plasma-like shadow began to punch through the ceiling underfoot, foretelling the shack’s collapse. Richie stumbled and swayed on his feet as his footing was destabilized, and he sensed more shadows at his back. Turning to the open night sky behind him, he saw pairs of shades materialize out of the darkness and spring across the rooftops after him, the dock and the sea alongside it spontaneously catching fire under the secondary shadows that they formed with their passing.

“Shit!” Richie turned and began sprinting across the tops of the shacks in the direction of the burning harbor where he was to rendezvous with Leon and Kokumo. “Time to book it.”

He athletically soared from rooftop to rooftop with the shades in close pursuit. He could feel the winds of their extending limbs lashing out after him at his back, clawing and grasping on shafts of black rubber. Flames jumped randomly from between houses and the intersections of the pierof pier, and at his left, inward toward the intricate web of docks that made up the bulk of the town, larger wooden buildings and staircases to the upper tiers began to collapse and kick up huge splashes. Richie’s dragons sniffed at the air and sensed the malevolent eyes of submerged shades below the sea’s surface, attacking the foundations of Tide Town from below. One of the hidden attackers leaped out of the bay like a hellbound dolphin to t-bone Richie from his right flank.

Richie just barely ducked under the scissoring guillotine of the shade’s airborne hug as the thing completed its jump’s arc unimpeded and flattened the shade against the far wall of another lodge. It danced in the flicker of a halo cast across the wall by a nearby tiki torch, and Richie glimpsed it ricochet itself across the auras of light around the torches framing the docks out of the corner of his eyes. Risking a quick glance behind him, he saw that the shades that were chasing him were out of sight too.

One erupted out of Richie’s own shadow where it connected to the dark of the space between roofs. Its lamprey mouth snapped at Richie’s face from directly in front of him, forcing him to reflexively flinch back and trip, automatically triggering his Level 2 to bail him out of taking the hit by swapping his body with a disposable afterimage. The shade’s seeking teeth ripped it apart.

Richie himself felt his feet tap down on the narrow surface of a safety rail like a varnished bannister, and he pinwheeled his arms frantically for balance. Grasping tendrils of shadow nearly looped about his arms before he pulled them back to his chest. He fell to the side and expected to plunge headlong into the bay, only for his feet to find purchase on the circular tops of pilings jutting up out of the sea at various heights and intervals from each other. He madly dashed from pole to pole, fearful that any moment a clammy hand of shadow would clamp like a vice around his ankle and yank him down. WhenWhere he finally touched down on the deck again, his afflicted knee gave out and tumbled him head over heel across the lower tier of the boardwalks. He crashed into the wall of a shack and struggled to stand only in time for a shade to ram him from the side, knocking him breathless against the rough wood, his chest pushed too tightly to breathe.

The shade's grasping feelers became adhesive pads affixed to the wall like a squid's suction cups, binding Richie in place and slowly asphyxiating him. He groaned as he fruitlessly tried to push back against the black mass crushing him, but couldn't get any leverage. In addition, he could hear the footfalls of the other shades in pursuit, catching up to him and congregating.

The side of Kokumo's foot wheeled into the binding shade's head, crushing it against the wall to a pulpy splatter of black blood. The thing still twitched and sprung claws blindly swiping at them as the blood spurted from its empty neck hole, the remnants of its pseudo-skull driven into the wood. Richie was given a window to free himself, rapidly jamming elbows into the headless torso straddling him, finally dislodging the wraith and stumbling it into Kokumo's waiting legs. Standing on her hands, the woman grabbed the fiend under the arms with her calves and cartwheeled across the deck with it, throwing the body with a violent crash into a horde of its companions skittering toward them.

Kokumo yanked Richie to his feet. "Come on, let's go!"

A few steps out, Richie's wounded knee buckled again, and he fell. Kokumo heard the boy crash, and looked back behind her, screeching to a stop on her cloth-wrapped bare feet. A trio of shades leaped at them, aiming to land upon Richie. Kokumo assumed another handstand and spun around on her palms, unleashing an explosive centrifuge of kicks as she seemed to almost breakdance across the deck. Lightning bursts of clubbing feet knocked the pouncing shades back and aside, throwing one of them into the bay with a great splash.

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Kokumo sprung to her feet again and grabbed Richie. "What's wrong, kid?"

"My knee." Richie gestured.

Kokumo looked with widening eyes at where a hole was drilled through Richie's kneecap. She slung the boy over her shoulder and took a ready stance to sprint with him across the deck to the checkpoint at the harbor, where the rising flames licked the black sky.

"Hold on tight." Kokumo said, and kicked off.

Over her shoulder, Richie could see the hordes of shades bursting from the night's womb and chasing them, all inky black shapes with dead blank eyes moving with distorted, spastic imitations of feline grace. Their bones cracked and popped like roasted chicken carcasses thrown in the high heat cycle of a laundry dryer. The sounds they made - ungodly.

Lashing claws at the ends of tendrils whipped at Kokumo's back, just barely glancing off with every thrust.

"We're not gonna make it!" Richie shrieked.

Ahead, the circle of flame drew closer, widening into a vista of burning shacks and lumber sheds, and a series of large docks with giant pegs run through them mooring great sloops and caravels floating in place. Beyond a wall of fire separating Richie and Kokumo from the working space, men in naval uniforms worked great fire hoses whose coils were sunk through the surface of the sea, working like giant regurgitating snakes to unleash huge sprays of seawater, dousing the flames. Men with hatchets broke down jammed doors to free the terrified occupants, and men with guiding lanterns and signal flares gathered and herded the civilian masses through safety gates at various meeting points between pier walls and pillars. Beyond the fenced areas, emergency refugee ships outfitted with handfuls of canons and deck-mounted gatling guns were quickly being loaded to capacity, long gangplanks creaking under the weight of stampeding civilian feet. The sails bore the emblem of Tide Town - a pair of linked Ts in an old fashioned scrawl, set against a backdrop of cresting waves - and the ships themselves were squeezed in between rows of docks cutting that side of the bay into channels. Great, thick ropes looped through a gigantic crank and pulley system lying on its side guided the departing ships, tugging them through the canals like automated ferries. Beyond the halfway point of the sea lanes divided like sections of swimming pool set aside for laps, immense iron bulkheads on raised steel slots dropped down into place like blunt guillotine blades, sealing off the paths behind the departed rescue boats. The sanctuary beyond was encircled by linked wooden boards and reinforced rings of iron circling them, where clanking tracks sloping upwards like those at amusement park water rides carried the ships to higher ground on a raised reservoir, hundreds of feet above ground like an artificial second bay. It struck Richie as nautical bunk beds as he wriggled and turned on Kokumo's shoulder to get a better look.

They were very near the wall of fire now, and the regathered shades were snapping at their heels. Richie was jostled by a bump in the road - a rotted board or something - and fell backward over Kokumo’s shoulder, hanging awkwardly by a leg, looking head-on as a bold shade lunged apart from the darkened masses to tackle him and Kokumo. Its claws were splayed out and seeking, and its jawless lips lashed lamprey-mouthed tendrils that cried out for flesh. Richie flinched back, feeling those nested teeth scrape skin from the tip of his nose.

Then Sparta was upon the shade with a tremendous roar, pouncing and stomping like the gigantic alpha predator that he was. Paws splintered wood where they fell, and giant white teeth found the shade’s neck and broke it in their clutches like a fragile toy. Sparta shook the limp, squealing creature around like a ragdoll, then chucked it into the crowd of advancing shade ranks. Richie watched the shadowy predators stumble over the evaporating corpse of their kin, into the frenzied roars and blows of the enraged Sparta. The mighty lion tore through their chaotic formation, trouncing over them like a stampeding steamroller shrouded in golden fur, leaving the floored monsters reeling in his wake.

Even so, the relentless onslaught of soul-devouring wraiths split into two streams around Sparta, single mindedly trying to close in on their escaping prey. Sparta sailed over their heads with a great leap, and swung his huge head under Kokumo’s sprint, bucking up to throw her and Richie astride his muscular back. Even double-mounted, Sparta could far outpace the shades once he got serious, and Richie had no doubt that if they had radar guns to confirm the big cat’s velocity that he would clock in at over seventy miles per hour, a whole twenty miles faster than what was supposed to be their maximum speed in short bursts, and only ten shorter than the sprint of a cheetah, the world’s fastest land animal - at least, from the Earth that Richie was familiar with.

The wind breaking on their bodies was incredible, and Richie welcomed its sting against his bare back and face even as they were ready to collide with the thickets of raging flame. The thump of the road beneath Richie’s seated body was like the thunderous charge of a rodeo bull, and he had to clutch first at tufts of Sparta’s fur, then, almost reluctantly, around the front seated Kokumo’s waist when his fingers slipped hold of Sparta’s built-in reigns.

“We’re going to burn!” Richie shrieked, and would have shielded his eyes were he able.

Kokumo only leaned forward, clutching the upper sides of Sparta’s mane tighter with an adrenaline junkie’s rapturous smile on her bronze face.

“Hang on tight!” she giggled in excitement, as though she were riding a roller coaster.

They held fast to Sparta as the tame lion crouched and leaped up high over the fanning flames, their dispersing embers licking the underside of his broad belly and its amber stalactites. Richie felt the heat rising through their mount, even fifteen feet above the deck, and five above the flames themselves, and his eagle vision could see that even that much distance was not enough to cover the bed of flames and land safely. The fires had spread to engulf the greater part of the outer dock they had been racing across, and there was no safe place to land aside from the bay itself, which under the circumstances of shade infestation spelled certain doom either way. Even so, neither Sparta nor Kokumo faltered in their forward motion and their conviction in that leap of faith, and their spirits likewise soared higher.

Seconds later, as they hung in the air framed against the backdrop of fire that cast them as darkened shadows gliding across the harbor, all three heard the crack of Leon’s whip, and the sonic boom alerted Richie to follow its trail below them. The barbed flail of flacid vine thrust through the wall of fire like a shot harpoon, and the recoil and snapback as it was yanked into a spiral-like formation - or like a corkscrew - pushed the wall apart in two outward collapsing domino rows of incendiary waves. A trench of extinguished boardwalk was carved out between the rows of flame, leading the way to Leon at the whip’s handle. He stood point in a fanned out v formation of naval officers armed with rifles locked and loaded, pushed against their shoulders and ready to fire together as a squad. Sabers were sashed at their waists, while Richie could perceive under the ruffles of Leon’s reacquired red overcoat that the acrobat had a concealed Polish szczerbiec sword slung in a leather strap crossing his back.

Sparta, Kokumo, and Richie landed down safely on the deck, and sprinted through the cresting flames that were already beginning to collapse back against each other and into each other. The shades mindlessly pursued, but were moments too late, and were soon caught in the reborn raging inferno. The trio heard the agonized squealing of anti-animals burning alive behind them. Before Richie had time to process this entirely, a lucky shot from within the veil of flame saw a burning oak barrel chucked out of the sea of fire, striking Sparta’s back side and shattering there. The lion bounced and fell to its side, sprawling and sending his passengers tumbling.

"Don't falter!" Leon commanded resolutely.

He drew his sword from its sash and raised it skyward, blade glinting in the moonlight. Richie could see that the grip was stylised as a bouquet of roses from which the crossguard sprouted its prongs in slight angles to the blade itself, which was exceptionally long at six full feet. Leon swung that blade down, arm straight and rigid, to signal their counterattack.

"Fire!"

A volley of rifle fire penetrated the flames, striking black insectoid forms with grotesque sounds of puncturing and splashing, spilling the cloying smell of fetid shades' blood into the superheated plumes. That repulsive scent was aerosolized and spread like a noxious gas over the docks, and Richie reflexively covered his mouth and nose, forcing back bile in his throat and blinking through involuntary tears.

The sustained gunfire of the riflemen saw the inky black things caught in the torrent of flame shredded apart limb from limb, but even Richie could tell the battle was far from over.

The flickering shadows the flames cast on the deck and walls rippled like a violent tempest, and dozens more shades launched themselves from the palpable sheets of darkness. As they fell upon the gunmen, shots went wild where their ranks were toppled and trampled, rifles tumbling from shaking hands.

"Swords!" Leon led the attack, shifting focus for the unit to close quarters combat now that the enemy had breached their defensive line.

Leon's Polish blade stabbed through the side of a shade's head, lifting it, twitching and creaking, from a terrified soldier it had pinned. With an upturn of his wrist, Leon sliced cleanly through the shade's face, freeing his sword once again. Sickly black ooze stuck to the steel, steadily leaking shadowy mist.

The rest of the platoon followed Leon's example, laying into the opposition with heavy blows from their sabers, hacking and slashing as if through overgrown jungle vegetation. The frenzy of fighting for survival turned the tide of battle, and men pushed to the extremities of adrenaline and hysterical strength tossed and kicked the pouncing predators off of them, charging to return their damages with interest. Richie pivoted toward the inner wall of their rough circular formation, scanning across the burning battlefield afloat on the bay with wild, awestruck eyes. He felt at his injured knee and desperately wondered how it was before that he had summoned the draconic scales to armor his body. That had been Level 3. Level 3 of what though? In all this time since he first traded blows with the phantom pain in Station Bay, Richie had never had the time to sort out exactly what it was that his dragon runes did, or how they worked - let alone why. He strained his muscles and his eyes trying to will them to work, to roar to life and shield his body in their azure kevlar. Yet, the tattoos remained stagnant, hissing only weakly.

“What’s the big deal?! You guys were raring to go a second ago!” Richie smacked at his arms, trying to spur the twin dragons into action.

A shade, attracted to Richie’s frustration, rammed through the ranks and bolted for him, swiping claws clumsily overhead at a diagonal angle. Richie stepped back from the splitting talons and cracked out his knuckles. He was still a street fighter, magic runes or not, and he didn’t intend to drop out of the fight so quickly. He peppered quick jabs into the thing’s side, where an ordinary person’s kidneys would be, dodged counter-thrusts of the shades’ claws, and rhythmically parried its wild mantis limbs as it scythed toward him, deflecting their trajectories by lightly glancing the inside’s of the monster’s elbows and forearms. Richie swung a vicious uppercut upside the shades’ face, and felt like his fist sank into freezing putty as the black silken substance twisted into itself like blending pancake batter. The monster scraped its teeth across the marks on Richie’s knuckles where they had been cut in his fight with the crazed addict, and pain flared up as those wounds were reopened. Richie stumbled backward, briefly hallucinating that wriggling white maggots were spilling out of the splits in his skin as the memory of the haggard man’s diseased mouth flashed through Richie’s mind. He thought again of the gigantic albino sewer gator he had encountered, and of how the phantom pain had swallowed Richie’s memory of his cultist kidnapper to grow stronger.

All around him, Richie could hear the muffled cries of terror from his sudden allies all at once, as the shades punched their phantom roots through the soft soil of their traumas and their phobias. Across from him, a soldier battedbat at his arms and legs spastically, flailing and frothing at the mouth with fright as he was blanketed and consumed by thousands of imaginary spiders. Slumped over the deck, moaning apologies to someone unknown and long gone, another soldier’s unzipped entrails tumbled into the bay, and drifted there, tugged lightly by the current. The water erupted into a rolling boil of snatching limbs as submerged shades hooked their claws into the human offal and dragged the disemboweled man into the water by them. Where he splashed under the surface, a small whirlpool formed under the force of the shades’ feeding frenzy, and then a cloud of red starkly shone against the moonlight, dying the sea. Another man had strayed too close to a burning shack, where an intact window finally cracked under the warping heat of the flames consuming the building. The glass shattered, and the falling shrapnel bit into the man’s flesh and bone, stabbing his face and chest. Defensive wounds, like those attained failing to ward off a crazed burglar with a knife, formed where shards impaled the man’s soft palms, held up in a vain effort to shield himself from the fatal rain. He slumped over the deck, blood leaking and dripping between the boards. Black tendrils sprang from the cracks between the deck elsewhere, snaring a man’s foot, ankle, and calf with an adhesive, acidic sizzling sound, eliciting an agonized groan from the captured soldier as the corrosive slime ate through flesh, exposing glistening muscle and stark white bone. Seconds later, he was pulled straight down through the deck by the force of those tendrils tugging, cracking and splintering wood, boards seesawed upward as they were snapped in half by the man’s form being forced through them. Richie saw a stray broken end of board impale the snared man through the belly, and break off inside him before he fell into the dark sea below with a splash, followed by the gurgling sounds of a dying man struggling not to be dragged under.

All around was the smell of burning flesh, the sounds of snapping bones and cracking skulls, the vile slurping of flesh from the tattered bodies of the dead and dying. Shreds of naval uniforms fluttered in the air like nightmare confetti. Richie looked back at his arm where he had punched the shade, and saw that the flesh was stripped from his limb all the way to the shoulder. He screamed in sheer terror, stumbling back from the advancing shade from whose rudimentary mouth the long strips of Richie’s torn flesh and sinew still hung, glistening wetly. Richie watched the degloved sheath of his arm sucked up into the shade’s mouth like he would slurp up spaghetti.

Then that shade was cleaved in two down the middle by Leon’s sword, and either half, spurting black blood, toppled apart.

“Don’t lose your head! This isn’t real!” Leon called to Richie.

Richie started, white as a sheet, unblinking at his stripped arm. He clutched at his wrist where only a chunk of gristle remained, dimly trying to put pressure on the wound to stifle blood loss, even knowing that there was no blood left to lose. Another shade roared behind Richie, standing tall on his fear, towering over him with a jutting ribcage mouth of separated ribs each moving independently like clutching jaws carved vertically up the shade’s torso. A giant, glaring eye filled the infinite darkness of the opened cavity in the shade’s rib jaws. Those recurved tusks extended outward to grab Richie and pull him in, to swallow him whole.

Leon's blade stabbed forward just over Richie's shoulder and pierced the shade's stomach-eye. It howled fury to the darkened skies, and pulled back, away from them as its eye drained of sickly clear fluid and shriveled up.

"Snap out of it!" Leon grabbed Richie roughly and shoved him out of harm's way.

As if dunked into cold water again, Richie looked back at his arm with fresh alertness - it was intact and unharmed, save for his reopened knuckle scratches. Hearing the terrified moaning of others afflicted with horrific visions, Richie looked around the platform where half the soldiers had lost their minds to the shades' influence, cowering or meekly waving their swords at hallucinated hazards. The shades nearest these transfixed men mostly stared from a few feet's distance, their unnatural blank white eyes enlarging and projecting ghastly pale light over their paralyzed victims. A few had closed in tighter, their claws changing to thin, long feelers that curled around their prey's skulls, digging into the skin of their temples, foreheads, and scalps. Richie's dragons sensed the neural connections in these invaded brains being forcibly severed, and their fear hormones being forced into a flood of overproduction.

"Get a hold of yourselves!" Leon lashed his whip free, shredding apart the shades' feelers.

The soldiers broken free of the probing fingers fell to their knees, drooling and shaking. A few curled into fetal positions. Richie watched a shade over one of the victims' crouch and use its claws to waft the air into its face, as if savoring the scent of the cowering man's fear.

Richie startled as another shade lunged past him, and he pivoted into a reverse elbow strike at the back of its head. The thing stumbled, but its arm twisted backward, suddenly boneless, to strike out at Richie. Gashes were drawn down across his unprotected right shoulder, and he clutched at it with a hiss of pain. Warm, sticky blood seeped between his fingers.

The physical danger they pose isn't to be taken lightly either. Richie realized.

These things preyed on blood and emotion alike, so long as a lot of either flowed freely.

Crouched in a corner, slumped against a wooden post, a soldier with maddened eyes and a pale face swallowed the barrel of his rifle and pulled the trigger. Richie watched his brains splatter out the back of his skull across the wall of a boathouse.

"No!" Richie cried out.

Amoeba-like blobs of darkness rose out of the sea, climbing the wall to cover the mulched greymatter and draw it into themselves.

Upon a low rooftop, Kokumo kicked a climbing shade off the building, and it fell back first onto a tiki torch, impaling it through the chest and burning it alive and squealing like a wickerman of one.

Straddling the edge of the platform, a hapless soldier had his throat ripped out by a merciless stroke of dark claws. Richie smelled the metallic reek as the blood splashed freely.

He could no longer tell what was real and what wasn't, and which of the brutalities playing out over his eyes were physically happening and which were waking nightmares shoved into his psyche by the ravenous void incarnations.

He heard high-pitched screaming all around him, and the pleading shrieks turned from those of grown men and hardened sailors to those of abused children, weeping pitiably into the night. Richie shrank back from their cries, covering his ears and sinking to his knees as he lowered his head.

"Stop!" he begged.

He was twelve years old again, and the struggling crowds of men and shades around him had been replaced by stacked rows of cages, each imprisoning a single marked child. He was back in the child kennel again, back under the power of the bad man in the trench coat, and his mad cult. Pale, sunken faces of condemned children grasped at the bars, pointing accusing fingers at Richie.

You left us… you alone escaped, and you left us to die!

We were tortured! We suffered great fear and pain! And then we died.

We were murdered.

You left us to die. It should have been you. You should have died!

The wailing ghosts of sacrificed children circled Richie's head as the darkness tightened its circle around him. They taunted and jeered, heaping barbed tongues and guilt upon the boy's shoulders.

Hot tears welled up in Richie's eyes.

"I'm sorry!" Richie cried out.

Suddenly he was looking into the warped face of a shade, inches from his own. It flashed dead light from its gaping eyes. In the black funeral shroud of its body, Richie could see tiny hands pushing up against the fabric from within, joined by impressions of young faces pushing out through the shade skin covering them. The shade's mouth fell open with a sound like crunching leaves, and the echoes of children screaming for their parents drifted out, sounding like they came from deep down a rocky chasm.

Leon's blade slashed those faces open.

"Get the lead out!" Leon berated Richie, yanking him back to his feet.

Richie pointed, gaping in horror at the lacerated black wraith.

"There- there are people inside! Kids!" he stammered through a lumpy tongue.

"No," Leon barked back. "Don't fall for it! Those are just bad memories they've absorbed! Fight back, damn you!"

Richie couldn't move. Others shared his paralyzed stupor, falling at the enemy's feet all around.

"Damned fools," Leon cursed under his breath, and tossed a triggered flashbang into the fray.

A tremendous bang rang out with a blinding screen of white. Richie felt like his eardrums had nearly burst, and a hollow, echoey ringing persisted in them for what felt like eternity. As the blinding light faded, Richie saw that although the men clutched their ears and hid their eyes against the backs of their sleeves, the attacking shades had been dispersed in a thirty foot radius around them. The un-beings of molded darkness were forced back by the explosive walls of bright light.