The fog bank clears from view of the city, scattered away on a sudden and imperceptible breeze. The gas spill, as the denizens will all remember it as having been, has been dispersed, the calamity contained. The process of relocating inhabitants to their vacated homes, and the civil order to its status quo begins, and will soon conclude, the anomaly quickly and efficiently swept under the rug with no one any the wiser. But one outsider to the city is not so convinced, particularly in light of the nightmarish things he has recently witnessed. That x factor is Richie, and his initial distrust of the unmarked globe-tower buildings is validated by the sudden emergence and as-sudden disappearance of the ominous fog. It didn’t move like any natural fog he had ever seen. He didn’t like the way it moved, like a crawling, hungry organism, swelling up from some rotted underworld deep in the bowels of an ancient earth. It was far too thick, far too viscous, and far too animate to be natural fog. And for just a moment, Richie felt from that fog the same thing his inner child had felt of the sewer tunnel in the instant before the giant albino alligator revealed itself with a hungry roar. There was danger within that cloud - predation. His coiling dragons whispered of it, had locked onto the scent of the now-eliminated Entelodont, instinctively driven to seek a confrontation for dominance.
“No.” Richie told them, rubbing his arms as if for warmth in a bitter cold night. “We have other priorities.” he looked back to the side of the city in which that liminal apartment complex lay.
Assuming the increasingly-sure reality that he had stumbled, by accident or by destiny, upon a dimensional intersection of worlds, then it seemed that regardless of where he found the entrances in the complex, their exit was at the junkyard, a singular portal out of the dreamspace within the impossible geometries of the backyard fence and unit closet - and perhaps of others. Were these entrances into that other place fixed points that would remain, or else part of a kaleidoscope of rotating doors that couldn’t be predicted with any earthly logic? Whatever the case, it seemed Richie had a knack for finding them. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say his dragons - his runes - did. He felt now for certain that he had only to return to the complex and he would find another door merely by wandering about as he had before. That cloaked creature who forced him to relive his worst memories came from somewhere beyond that threshold, and it would answer for throwing Richie into this deadly game of hide and seek with that clawed freak, and the other alleged contestants with whom Richie was pitted against for an unknown prize he never sought. It had said something about his father too, hadn’t it? That Richie’s father had been the architect of the dragon runes enwrapping Richie’s body, both protecting him while also acting as a beacon to danger. He wrestled with that sudden revelation. On the one hand, if the cloaked creature could be trusted as honest and not some demon planting false memories and ideas in Richie’s head, the boy’s supposed father had gifted him a powerful tool - and perhaps a weapon - of some kind, well outside the realm of human understanding and ability. On the other hand, it would be a tool he only needed because he possessed it, and it drew mad cultists and foes to him like sharks to blood.
Fuck you very much, dad.
Richie shook out his head. Don’t get distracted.
He had only one concern right now, and that was securing the territory of the complex. Others could lay their fences and piss their marks, and so could Richie. With new knowledge and the utility of his runes if only he could work out how to control them at his disposal, there was no point in looking at a confrontation with the cloaked figure and the clawed serial killer as a faroff theoretical anymore. The cloaked creature had made it quite clear that the latter would be looking for Richie anyway, and even if he hadn’t stated that, the nocturnal visitation in the jailhouse had been a promissory note of that fact all on its own. So strike first. The best defense was a strong offense.
So telling himself, Richie went to the complex with jaw clenched and knuckles cracked - he didn’t start this game, but he was sure as hell going to finish it, or at least force a stalemate. He had nothing to lose anyway - no prospects, no home to return to, no friends, no lover, no hope, no future; all in all, no life. Surviving was all Richie did. So he would stake at least that much on a chance to get something out of this metaphysical nonsense.
Armed with a steel baseball bat he had scavenged from the junkyard, Richie trod into the backyard of that overgrown complex where he had twice now been summoned to a space between worlds, and which he preternaturally knew was connected to that strange fog. He peered at the wooden picket fence where it met the perpendicular counterpart cutting the woods and the reservoir into distinct halves, where he had found the loose plank out of place. He blinked, finding again that he was staring not into the ivy tunnel, but merely the forest siddled against the dividing fence. He likewise felt no draw at his back, as he had with the semipermeable membrane of the closet. He looked back at it just in case, and saw no flickering lights or reptilian menaces - just an empty closet space.
He stood there for a few minutes, pondering and feeling a growing restless sensation of subdued frustration and uncertainty. Both times he had before found the other place he had not been looking for it, and had merely been drawn within as helplessly as someone caught in an invisible riptide is pulled out to sea, where sharks dwell. Again he pictured his runes as an open wound spilling blood that those sharks tailed.
“Hey! What are you waiting for? I’m here!” Richie finally called into the echoing trees, urging the door to open and end the suspense in between the determination Richie had made, and his ability to see the outcome through. Let it be or not, but don’t heap this meaningless waiting onto him, and let him stew in free time to second guess his resolve.
But his surroundings remained mundane. With a flare of anger more akin to a tantrum than anything else, Richie wound the crooked bat over his shoulder and struck out at the fence, bashing planks in and tearing the gap apart until it was some three times its original size, and a portion of the dividing wall had collapsed as well. Splinters and rusty nails flew wild and Richie barely blinked against them, thoughtlessly bobbing and weaving his head around the hazardous shrapnel, paying it only the mind necessary to avoid sticking his eyes so he could continue to beat the defiant planks into submission for barring him entrance to the playing field. Stumbling through the wreckage of the splintered and pulverized wood bits, unsatisfied with only this much destruction, Richie passed into the edge of the forest itself and wailed on a standing tree until bark had been broken off its front and dents bleeding sap had been laid into its trunk. Catching his foot on an exposed root in his exhaustion and his rage, Richie collapsed, sprawled upon the soil and the undergrowth, the bat rolling to a stop at the side of his head, his entire body aching and drained as he panted. One hand covered his eyes against the glare of the sun, only as he lay there and the rage subsided, he recognized the gesture for what it really was - an effort to hold back the tears. They seeped, hot and humiliating, between his dirtied fingers anyway, and as if a dam had sprung a leak, it then gave way altogether, letting the torrent of walled-off emotion flood into prominence.
Why did all of this happen?
“Mom…” Richie sobbed, remembering her warm smile, juxtaposed against the thunder of gunfire. The photograph of her face he framed in the camera of his mind was stained with blood. Both hers and his. Gutter-trash. A waste of breath. Unwanted. A tramp. A tramp with dumb tattoos that brought only trouble.
I never asked for this.
Being denied the outlet of venting his mixed rage and sorrow against the face - or lack thereof - of the cloaked figure who came to embody all of this negativity had been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Richie was no longer seventeen, he had regressed to twelve, maybe younger again. He wanted his mom. He wanted a warm hand to hold. He wanted someone to tell him everything was going to be ok.
When the tears began to dry, Richie opened his eyes again, and looked up at the sky. It was a vivid, lovely blue, so at odds with the gray haze of the sky in the rest of the city. He was so deep into that place, yet so far away, as to be under another sky. He thought he could see the twinkling night stars even through the light of midday above him, draw their shapes and contours and see the constellations codified and collected in those old astronomy books. Which star marked the flag post on the road to Neverland? He wanted to find it, to be somewhere that wasn’t here. Anywhere. It didn’t matter. He began to wonder if it had truly only been the dragons’ desire to enter the tunnels. Their motives may have differed, but Richie had still allowed the dragons to lead him through the gateway. He wanted to see another world, an escape from this one, this world where there was only cold concrete, hunger, and derision, maybe even at the cost of enmity with monsters. No, especially because of that. That’s what heroes did, wasn’t it? Hadn’t that been the trend of the stories that his mother read to him from a big book of fairytales at night, to fill his dreams with happy thoughts? Is that what he wanted? To be a hero? Perhaps it was a purpose. Any purpose.
Without a monster to slay, a hero was just a rebel without a cause.
Richie picked himself up. He dropped the bat, and trudged deeper into the forest, pushing past and through overhanging branches of obscuring leaves, breaking through coils of what could have been poison ivy for all Richie cared. He didn’t know where he was going. It didn’t matter. Anywhere. Anywhere that wasn’t here. That had been the real reason to ride the rails all this time before. To escape.
I should never have broken out of that kennel. If I’d been killed back then, there would be nothing. Now that I’m alive, there’s only bad. Where should I go?
Stark light fell on Richie’s face. He looked up at a wreath of sun in the clearing’s sky, here at a circle in the trees framed by a fairy ring of polkadot mushrooms. Glittery particles flickered in the light, dancing like the fairies in Richie’s bedtime stories. For all the somber drudgery of his thoughts up till now, they were instantly broken and overtaken by a single word in Richie’s mind.
Beautiful.
Richie felt a moment of understanding then, and approached the nearest broad-trunked tree facing him. He took his swiss army knife from his pocket, and flicking out the blade, he carved his single initial into the trunk - an R, branded into this tree in this fairy circle out of a bedtime story picturebook, a defiant mark of existence. It was a proof that Richie had lived.
He touched his palm to the trunk, and his dragons felt the heartbeat of the tree. “Strange, even alone like this, I guess I’m surrounded by others. Even if they can’t talk back to me.” Richie gave a bittersweet smile.
His dragons growled again. Richie turned his head over his shoulder at a translucent figure like a fluttering plastic bag that had blocked the way from whence he came, the sun rays passing straight through it like an insubstantial ghost. Richie angled the rest of his body to face the thing head on.
It was a humanoid figure sewn in white sheet, not unlike a stereotypical cartoon ghost, but starkly more grounded in something truly uncanny and unnerving. The rippling texture of its bedsheet or plastic skin sharply divided itself at what passed for a waist, where legs like empty jean leggings dangled bonelessly, empty ankles where feet should have been floating above the ground rather than standing. Likewise, its empty arms dangled unnaturally long, wristcuffs dragging on the ground snagging twigs and dead leaves. A blank face on a sack head stared back, unblinkingly and lifelessly at Richie. The eyes were merely black ink dots on a mound in the shape of a face, which lacked a nose and ears, and whose mouth was a slit cut in the fabric. That head lulled to one side, and the entire entity merely hung there in the forest like an abandoned marionette, its strings caught in the branches above. Richie and his runes were anxious, but this anxiety felt different from the animal instinct terror of the sewer gator, or the horrible anti-nostalgia imposed by the cloaked figure.
This was like looking into the unseeing eyes of a porcelain doll, or the painted face of a mall display mannequin.
Richie tilted his head back at the thing, and it mirrored the movement. Richie fidgeted one tentative hand at his knife pocket again, fluttering on the pins and needles of the edge of fight or flight, unsure whether to draw a weapon against this thing or not, of whether it was a threat or not. There was a sickening feeling of it being different from the gator. While Richie had no chance against the reptile for its physicality - its size, its mass, its gnashing teeth and snarling rage - here Richie instead felt a deep cold emptiness instilled in him through the hollow eyes of the bedsheet ghost he stared across at, a thing frightening for its lack of physicality. It felt like staring down a dark lightless well left abandoned at the edge of a decrepit homestead, like you could drop a rock down its eyes and hear it ricochet in a great spiralling echo of the walls but never hit a bottom.
Tired of being uncomfortable with their staring contest, Richie moved to pass the empty bag, only for it to float to block the way he had gone. Richie altered his step to breast the other side of the thing, but as with before it repositioned itself in his way again. Testing the waters to find that this thing was insistent on obstructing his way, Richie took a few cautious steps backward, never breaking eye contact with the spirit - no, the absence of spirit, a kind of void of being in the shape of what might have once been a person, like a loss-shaped dent in reality. He was hyper-mindful not to stumble over any rocks or roots and fall upon his back, belly up to this entity. It floated smoothly toward him in a straight line, matching his rhythm.
Is it only copying me?
Richie didn’t get the sense that this thing was in any way alive - but was it aware? Dare he turn his back on it?
What am I hesitating for? I had already decided to throw caution to the wind. Do whatever you feel like, weird sheet thing.
Richie gave an irritated shrug, flipped off the bedsheet - which tilted its head like a confused dog to the gesture in turn - and turned his back to go another way.
He was staring into the ink spot eyes of the bedsheet ghost, an inch from his face. He jumped back, heart in his throat, stumbling over a dip in the ground and crashing his back, shoulders, and head into the base of a tree. Somehow, that thing had instantly warped to being in front of him the moment he let it out of his sight.
It tilted its head down at him again.
“Wh-what are you?!” Richie demanded of the sack.
It tilted its head at him again, and this time Richie thought he saw a glimmer in its till-now 1-dimensional painted eyes. He was no longer thinking of the entity as an it, as an impersonal object devoid of consciousness - he called it a “he”. A masculine. A proper noun. A living thing.
The thing swirled into a new shape, or the beginnings of one, and Richie heard the sickening crunching and snapping of new bones and ligaments trying to form within the spectral outline, as its transparent shape began to fill in with solid, impenetrable white. This thing which was less than something it could have been - this lifeless spectral memory, or hollow or whatever it was - might have been as harmless as a shadow on the wall, merely mimicking the body language of curiosity at most - but Richie’s sudden fear and demand had gifted it validation, and recognition of a life behind that featureless face. It started making a clicking noise in the throat it didn’t have, and its sleeve arms twisted and spiraled into vine-like filaments, striking Richie absurdly as grotesque corpse churros, and tipped themselves in bony fingers that were far too long, like waxy feelers.
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At the same time, Richie felt the life in his runes begin to drain and grow colder, and his panic-stricken eyes could see the bits of their azure blue glowing light drift through the air the same as he had seen the dust caught in the sun. The particles were drifting toward the phantom thing, being drawn into it - consumed by it, making it more, making it whole.
Richie felt a crashing wave of lightheadedness and fell to one knee, eyes clenched shut tight, feeling more than just the color of his runes being dragged out of him. His life’s blood was ebbing away, incorporeal and spectral through the gaze of that mutating psychic remnant, the ghostly parasite assimilating Richie’s life force into itself, stripping him as bare and empty as it had been. Darkness began to encircle Richie’s vision, and he felt his consciousness begin to sink.
This wasn’t exactly the peaceful end he had pictured for himself, groveling on his knees as his soul was sucked out of him by a dumb shopping bag with ink dot eyes.
I couldn’t do it, mom. I couldn’t survive with the life you gave me. I’m sorry. This is the end.
Richie saw his mother’s familiar face looking at him from the shadows within the dark edge of the gulf between life and death. She smiled warmly at him, and walked toward him, placing her hands on either side of his face.
I know you died protecting me, protecting me from the people after me for these dragons. I’m sorry I couldn’t make use of your sacrifice and live in your place as you had wished. I wasn’t good enough.
She held his chin and cupped his face up toward her, her eyes warm and radiating faith in her son.
“Richie, stand up. You are my little dragon. Get off your knees, it doesn’t suit you. You’re a survivor, like your father.” she said to him.
“I never got to meet my old man. What was he like?” Richie asked.
“Survive, and go find out.” she told him.
“I don’t think I can. If I did, I’d just be running away forever.”
“Then run toward something instead.”
“Toward what?”
“That’s up to you to decide.” the woman looked back at a globe of light that lit up the darkness, beckoning her. “I can’t stay here, I have to go back to the world spirits belong to. But it isn’t your time to join that place yet.”
“Wait, mother, please don’t leave me alone!” Richie, a little boy again, tugged at his mother’s hem of her skirt.
She turned and knelt beside him, pressing their foreheads together several long moments. “You aren’t alone, Richie. I am always with you in spirit, even if you can’t see me. I always have been, and I always will be. We are part of each other, and of the world. There’s a lot of it left for you to explore. Go find something to live for, you’ll know when you find it. That’s the beauty of being free. You aren’t a helpless child at the mercy of luck anymore. Go show them what you’re made of.”
“What I’m made of? I’m just a drifter, a worthless tramp!” Richie screwed up his face, clutching at his hair.
“No. You are a warrior. Beat that thing, not just to survive, but because you’re better than it. It doesn’t even exist, it’s just a broken memory trying to latch onto a life to steal. It’s a monster whose existence cannot be permitted in this world or other people will be in danger. Don’t bow to a pathogen like that. So put on a happy face, plant your feet, and kick. Its. Ass!”
Richie’s mother was pulled away into the light of the afterlife, and Richie watched it fade, stranding him in the dark.
The forest was quiet outside of the dreamspace in which Richie had spoken to his departed mother. His limp body was in the clutch of the phantom pain, lifted and dangling off the ground, his skull being squeezed in the vice grip of the thing’s oversized hand. From between the spindly fingers, Richie’s stream of tears leaked, and streamed down both the length of its arm, and down Richie's own torso. One drop spilled off of his collar and struck his wrist, at the dragon head.
The tattoos began to glow burning azure blue.
The phantom pain shrieked and recoiled, dropping its grip of Richie, who landed on his feet, swaying dizzily but standing. Richie looked down at his hands, seeing steam rising from them where his tears had spread, evaporating on the ambient heat of the hotblooded spirit of his guardians.
“Level 1 - Unlocked” Richie said like a single-verse mantra, operating again on the memory of the dragons sharing his flesh.
The creature finished twisting its filaments into functional limbs. A pair of stringy legs ending in tripod-like splayed claws dug into the earth. The thing bent over like a hunched willow, a sickly spine pressing its ridges against the taut flesh of its back. Its black ink spot eyes were glowing yellow now. It swayed like a reed in the wind, face always turned toward Richie in place no matter how its body twisted.
Richie calmly raised a palm to the thing. An animate dragon head lifted itself from Richie’s wrist, glaring at the phantom pain. Richie tensed his arm and lunged, and a gale was caught on the jutted dragonhead, visibly trailing around the limb like a mach cone, and a compressed ball of high-pressure air sailed forth from Richie’s fist like a cannonball. The air broke over the phantom pain, indenting its papery torso like a shot that had nearly punched straight through. Luckily for the hollow parasite, it had only partially managed to realize a true body for itself, and that spared it an instant killing blow. But its insubstantial weight let the blow throw it back like a bag in the wind it so resembled. It threw its flailing arms wide to try to slow itself, then arced up high at an unnatural angle, curving into the sky and back down at Richie.
“Level 2 - Unlocked” Richie felt a surge of reflex to dodge a coming sweep. He shifted a half dozen feet to the right, heels sliding backward through dead leaves as he kept his front toward the ghostly thing. It struck through only Richie’s glowing afterimage, and pulled up into the sky again, twisting to lock onto Richie.
“Come.” Richie beckoned his foe.
The thing dive bombed him again. Richie braced himself, crossing his forearms in front of his face.
“Level 3 - Unlocked” Richie said, his arms coating over in razor-sharp azure scales, trailing wispy energy. Richie’s dragons were coiling and slithering around his body now, hissing along to his breath, making their will to fight known.
The monster launched a spiraling open claw at Richie, and the splayed palm clashed against Richie’s scaled guard. Richie’s heels dug trenches in the dirt as he was pushed back by the pressure. He grit his teeth, beginning to resemble fangs, and lowered his stance. The monster closed those claws around Richie’s right arm. It felt like it was freezer burn on his arm in the shape of the thing’s grip, and he saw more of his energy being sucked up through the extended arm, into the psychic parasite.
“Take a hint and cut your fucking losses!” Richie grabbed the thing’s arm with his free hand, and yanked it toward him. The spirit whiplashed on its own tendril-like arm into Richie’s sights, and he cocked a fist to throw at its stupid face. When the moment came, he threw an overhead haymaker into the creature’s face deadcenter. But, Richie felt no impact, his fist, arm, and body, passing right through the thing, and throwing himself off balance. As he stumbled, he looked back at the creature floating behind him now.
“An afterimage? Still copying me, eh?” Richie tutted. “You know what they say - if you don’t make your own story, you become part of someone else’s!” he rushed the spirit beast.
The monster zigzagged toward him in a lightning-quick flutter of fabric. For just a moment, Richie was reminded of the man in the trenchcoat who had kidnapped him to that dark kennel all those years ago. That moment was enough. He watched the image of that man be pulled like a physical thing from his own imagination-vision free of his being, drawn into the creature. The silhouette of the kidnapper overlapped with the phantom pain, and then settled into it, absorbing into the white fabric.
He ate a figment of my traumatic memory? Richie shuddered. That’s creepy!
The fabric of the creature’s body shifted color from white to brown, and its limbs and torso thickened as its shoulders spaced themselves further apart, and the whole of the creature bulked up. Heavy boots stamped the ground where they had once been tripod claws. A shady fedora bloomed out of the top of the phantom pain’s head like a blossom of beaver felt. The wide brim shadowed those glowing yellow eyes, which began now to narrow into predatory reptilian slits, definite, pinprick pupils training on Richie when the thing tilted its head up at him. Its face was runny like wax, trying and failing - only barely - to form into a human facial structure. The husk was nearly full of memory and energy to incarnate itself as a living being.
Richie froze up under the faux-gaze of the cultist ringleader who had been responsible for nearly ending Richie’s life in some sick ritual. He regressed, feeling himself sink back into the scared mindset of a cornered child again.
Stranger danger! he thought despite himself, and felt the fire quiver and threaten to die at his draconic scales.
The trenchcoated spirit lumbered toward Richie, towering over him and seeming to grow ever taller. It ripped open a rudimentary mouth that struck Richie as being rigid and artificial like that of a nutcracker. A sickly orange glow emanated out of its throat, and a firefly orb of destruction was spat from its maw at Richie. The orb struck Richie’s chest and exploded in a shower of sparks and dust, throwing him in an arc a dozen feet back and landing harshly on exposed roots. He coughed and clutched at his ribs, bruised at best and broken to splinters at the likely worst.
The real one couldn’t do THAT.
Richie forced himself to sit up and stare across the gulf at the stranger. It tilted the brim of its hat at him again, almost a neighborly gesture coming from a human, but from this damned thing it was like the pawing of a bull readying itself to charge and gore the object of its ire.
Richie stood on shaking legs that felt ready to crumble under him. The figure tilted its head, then sprinted at Richie, the bony talons of its previous form still piercing through the dark glamor of its loose human disguise, nearly bursting from the sleeves.
Too fast!
Richie threw his arms out and closed his eyes, looking away as he waited for the impact. He heard a metallic clank, and felt solid weight in his hands. Forcing his eyes open, he looked up to see the metal bat he had discarded at the gate again in his hands, held like a crowbar to twist the monster away from himself.
“What?!”
The dragon runes hissed at Richie.
You’re right, now’s not the time to ask.
Richie shoved the fedora-headed phantom backward, freeing up his personal space. He was never much for baseball, but he took a batting stance anyway, waving the sporting goods bludgeon as if ready to strike a homerun, then stepped forward and swung. The bat clobbered the side of the phantom’s head and threw him against a tree trunk.
He’s heavier - more substantial - for sure, but he’s still hollow inside, like an empty doll. I can’t let him become any more real. I’ll exterminate him right here and now, whatever he is. I won’t let you become real, monster!
Richie sprinted toward the monster with a protracted warcry, baseball bat held wide at his side.
The thing stood up erect again, and spread its claws out in front of its body to catch Richie’s swing.
Lucid dreaming is for chumps, so I guess that makes me a chump alright! This place doesn’t work by the same rules as the waking world, so if it’s a nightmare I’ll turn the tables on the monster and make it HIS nightmare!
Richie’s mother had read him the expansive volumes of the Arthurian legend. Richie felt the heartbeat of the child inside him he had once been, the innocent him who had listened with rapt attention to the tales of chivalrous knighthood and a boy’s ascension to kinghood. And the implement of providence that willed itself to the man who would be king was a magic sword. Richie made himself remember the name of that blade, reassembled from the scattered pieces of his memory and rising from its ashes in the fire of his heart. Let it come to my side, let it be -
“Excalibur!” Richie summoned, and the bat in his hands was no longer a bat at all but the holy double-edged sword of legend. He cleaved it cleanly and seamlessly through the monster’s shielding claws, splitting those wavering arms apart, and opening a slash diagonally across the monster’s torso from left shoulder to right hip. It shrieked to the heavens as Richie watched particles drift up out of the opened wounds. Some of them returned to the atmosphere and the trees around them, but those Richie distinctly recognized as the azure blue of his own dragon runes began to drift back to himself, to return to their master.
“You still need to give it back, what you’ve stolen from me.” Richie told the beast.
He raised Excalibur overhead, ready to cleave the trenchcoat phantom in twain. The thing’s nutcracker mouth split open again, and another orange ball fired loose, blasting the sword out of Richie’s grip. The steel caught the sun as the sword whirled through the air, cleaving a tree branch free, and embedding itself point-first in the ground.
Richie looked down into the gash opened up in the wraith’s core all the same, and saw a blue sphere shimmering inside. He revved up his right arm, muscles bulging in the throes of adrenaline, and jammed a straight punch into the the center of the gash, partially impaling the monster on his fist.
It wailed another bloodcurdling banshee shriek.
“Yeah? Well don’t start fights you can’t finish!”
Richie clutched hold of the blue orb within - the sum total of the energy the hollow entity had stolen from him in its single-minded pursuit to steal his life for its own - and squeezed it into his palm. The spirit matter rejoined with Richie’s fist, and he felt power flowing through him like the bellow of his dragons.
“Level 4 - Unlocked” Richie said triumphantly. The game was his to win.
A spiraling serpent head burst clear out through the monster’s back - Richie’s azure dragon rune had sprung free of his arm and shot forward in a spin, punching through the phantom pain the rest of the way like a corkscrew-shaped spear or giant bullet.
The monster’s head went limp, and it lost all mass, becoming just limp empty white sheets around Richie’s wrist. And then, these too disappeared, dispersed like a trick of the light now ended.
The glow of Richie’s tattoos summarily faded, and they receded into his arms, still and lifeless as the ink they were composed of once again. Richie felt his surge of energy peak and then collapse, and he in turn collapsed to his knees. He held himself over the ground on his hands and knees, struggling to choke back vomit. The adrenaline dump into his system was like the world’s most extreme caffeine overdose, only without the promised relief of imminent death to take away the crippling nausea. Thick ropey tendrils of saliva leaked down from Richie’s mouth and swirled into snail-like formations upon the grass and leaves. Only the sight of these spit-carved mounds motivated Richie through sheer disgust not to collapse, less his face flatten them to pancakes. He stood on legs still shaking like lap dogs with nervous urinary retention. He placed a palm on the trunk of a tree to steady himself against the pit in his stomach, and a joining sensation of faint lightheadedness. As the shock subsided, he began to take in his accomplishment. He just fought and killed some kind of ghostly monster, with only his bare hands and a little help from his flesh-bound guardian dragons. That had been no tweaked-out thug or half-baked thief Richie just put away. But was “killed” the right word? Somehow, it didn’t seem to fit, as though the deed had been no different from deleting a line of malfunctioning code. Perhaps a line of code that had loosely developed a Chinese Room of AI that could mimic pleading for its artificial existence, but a line of code all the same. Or, more like tearing apart a badly-crafted sock puppet with lifeless googly eyes. Like a virus on the fringes of biological criteria to be called a living organism, which can only propagate itself and evolve by hijacking the cells of other beings, that phantom pain as Richie found himself calling it was a robotic aberration, a glitch in the program of the universe. It wasn’t alive, and that suited Richie just fine - he didn’t take to the idea of being a murderer. Still, it had made a good show of being alive, if not with its facial cues, than at least with its shrieks - those ungodly, bloodcurdling shrieks.