The bay was calm. It glowed under an unusually bright light.
“I thought you guys said the sun didn’t rise here?” Richie asked.
He was floating on his back on a piece of debris partially resting under the surface of the water. All around him, similar pieces of wreckage were scattered about the sea and the docks. A few small fires were still smoldering weakly, more smoke and embers now than flame. The light that bathed Tide Town was not the sun, but a blue star that shone like a glittering diamond in a sky that was suddenly vivid with galactic vapor and full constellations. The atmosphere was calm and quiet, the terror that had gripped the town gone with the ship now resting again in its rightful place at the bottom of the ocean.
Leon looked up at the night sky with eyes that seemed far away. He stared into the cosmic distance for some time, unblinking and taciturn.
“It doesn’t.” he said finally. “Sometimes the Sapphire in Silk shows itself after the rains clear. That’s the closest we get to dawn here. I never expected to see it this time of the year.”
Leon looked across the dock, beside which Richie still lay. The boy was looking up at the night sky with a similar stoic expression. “I’m trying to find star formations I recognize. That might be the Big Dipper.” he raised a tired arm that he barely felt, and pointed.
“Aye.” Leon nodded. “From what I understand, the whole six degrees of separation thing applies to different worlds more often than you’d think.”
“Is this another version of Earth after all?” Richie asked.
“Couldn’t say. This world flooded a long time ago.” Leon slicked his hair back.
Richie heard the dock creak under Leon’s footsteps, and looked up to see the entertainer offering a hand to help him up. He took it without complaint.
“Watching you last night, I think it’s safe to say your physical abilities are nothing to laugh off.” Leon said as he lifted Richie back up onto the dock. “But what I really can’t get out of my head is your uncanny ability not to get yourself killed when you by all rights should have.”
Richie narrowed his eyes. “I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“In the short while you’ve been here, you’ve cheated the odds countless times, especially all of last night. It’s unprecedented for a newcomer to roll right out of a hospital bed swinging at an army of shades.” Leon said.
“I did my fair share of running.” Richie said.
“We do what we have to to survive. If you live to fight again another day, then I’d say there are worse things you can do than beat a strategic retreat. That said, I think the stress pushing you full-circle into snapping is what gave you the strength and clarity to return their blows with interest.” Leon said.
“My dragons did most of the work.” Richie shrugged.
“They’re no different than my whip, or Kokumo’s feet. A tool is only as good as the skill of its user. What I’m curious about next is how you’ll cultivate it.” Leon held his chin. “A pity I won’t get the chance.”
“What do you mean?” Richie asked.
He still felt hazy and fatigued. They had fought together for twelve hours straight.
“You have a home to get back to. We need to put you on a boat soon if we’re going to put you on a train.” Leon said.
“Oh yeah, I never did get the chance to ask you guys what the fuck you’re talking about with that nonsense before we got jumped by Hell’s smegma bits.” Richie grumbled.
“How poetic. Well, there’ll be time to recount everything in the tavern. I think we could all do with a drink.” Leon folded his arms, chuckling.
“Fuck yeah, booze!” Kokumo draped her arms around both of their shoulders from behind.
“K-Kok-K-” Richie froze up, face going beet-red as he recoiled from the skimpy woman’s touch.
“Where did you come from all of a sudden?” Leon asked, quietly incredulous.
“Shut up and buy me a drink!” Kokumo grinned.
“Buy you a - we just saved the town, if a full bar isn’t on the house, I’m unsaving it.” Leon retorted.
Richie covered his eyes imperfectly, unable to avoid peaking between his fingers out of morbid curiosity. “Please put on some clothes.”
Kokumo tilted her head at Richie. “Absolutely not.”
Leon stretched out his back and cracked his neck. “Come on, numbskulls, there’s a hero’s reception in the tavern, I’m sure.”
“They tailed me here, didn’t they? I just cleaned up my own mess.” Richie scratched the back of his neck.
Leon smirked. “Don’t give yourself so much credit, greenhorn - it’s not like the bastards weren’t coming soon anyway.”
All the same, Richie’s instincts demanded he withdraw and hide somewhere away from people. Somewhere a bit more confined, with only one entrance and exit so he could monitor for intruders, preferably with boobytraps at his disposal, and-
He didn’t realize he was unconsciously scooting away until Kokumo snagged him by the wrist, eliciting a terrified squeak out of him.
“Ah ah, no. Come on, let’s go get shitfaced.” Kokumo tugged on him.
“I-I’m not old enough to drink!” Richie protested weakly.
“Don’t talk back.” Kokumo effortlessly lifted Richie and draped him over her shoulder again.
“What the fuck, put me down!” he panicked.
He didn’t like how getting swept off his feet by Kokumo was becoming a pattern.
“Nope, you need to loosen up.” Kokumo led the walk to the downtown tavern, from which honky tonk music and celebratory cheers could already be heard drifting out. “- and learn how to talk to girls.” Kokumo winked at Richie.
“Leon, help!” Richie pleaded.
“No. This amuses me.” Leon smirked, chuckling lightly again.
The lion tamer waited a few paces for Kokumo and Richie to get a lead on him so he could walk a comfortably private distance behind, free to think his thoughts.
After facing down shadows, zombies, a giant alligator, and death at every turn, Kokumo is what scares the kid the most? I don’t think he understands the scope of what he pulled off last night. I suppose we should tell him, but,
Leon shrugged.
Whatever.
-
Clips of last night flashed through Leon's mind, of the two of them fighting the shade-possessed corpses on the deck of the raised shipwreck. Richie punched a zombie's arm right off. The bone snapped audibly, crunched in by the hard knobs of Richie's silver knuckle dusters. From the empty arm socket severed at the elbow joint, spurting greenish-black blood, a shade's flailing shadow limb erupted with fingers warped into a pitchfork. The boy dodged it, kicking out the zombie's leg. A sopping black tentacle unfurled in its place to prop the decaying creature up.
"Leave the limbs intact!" Leon shouted, in the sword bind with a rotting swashbuckler whose cutlass swung heavily into Leon's defending Polish blade. "They'll just sprout out their real limbs and go shadow-form on you again!"
"So what?" Richie cried.
His fist clashed with the creature's trident, crushing it inward all the way back into the ragged stump, eliciting a squeal out of the shade's true body, filtered through the garble of water-logged lungs.
"I can actually punch them now." Richie smirked.
The consecrated silver knuckles he wore were more than adequate to protect Richie's hands from the shade's contact life drain effect. His other fist punched clear through the creature's chest, and the black vapor of its purified core exploded out the exit wound of the corpse's back.
Leon blinked rapidly, processing Richie's meaning. He jumped back from the undead swordsman's chop, then slashed his Polish blade straight across. The zombie's head was severed cleanly, and rolled away. From the neck stump, a tendriled head of pulpy darkness bloomed like a demonic flower. Leon unfurled his thorn whip in his other hand, and lashed the shade's head in two down the middle.
There was merit in Richie's approach. The kid could navigate the clumsy zombie swings of physical shambling corpses easily enough compared to the impossible contortions of the living shadows in their base form. While possessing dead bodies may have solidified their presence and given them greater strength, their mobility was halved. Richie, whether knowingly fighting tactically or not, was cleaning house by severing limbs and heads to force the shades to expose themselves to fill in the gaps, inadvertently putting their true bodies through a bottleneck. It was much easier to anticipate their unnatural movements when they couldn't twist and flatten themselves at will, or swarm their prey with many bladed tentacles on elastic limbs.
Was it just instinct? Did Richie already possess this kind of aptitude for exploiting the flaws in his opponent's approach from the very beginning?
Leon didn't know, but the counterattack gave him an idea.
"Alright, have it your way then. We're changing tactics, expose the limbs and faces!" he said.
Leon took up his sword and criss crossed paths with Richie, swinging and chopping as the latter threw armored fists. Severed zombie limbs and heads half-rotted down to the skull flew into the air as the two blitzed around the creaking ship deck. Black limbs of shadow unfurled from the stumps of every shade-possessed corpse, waving and lashing.
Leon looked up at the window of the Sniper Tower and nodded.
"Richie, to the sides!" Leon barked.
The both of them vaulted over the banisters of the ship and hung from the edges against the sides of the hull, heads down and eyes closed tight.
A flashbang cannon shot dropped onto the deck from the Sniper Tower, and the eruption of light and crackling sound swallowed the shades. Their agonized hisses and shrieks joined the cacophony of noise as their exposed shadow limbs were burned and repelled by the light. Richie and Leon threw themselves back onto deck to see that the creatures were expelled from the holes adorning their host bodies. Blasted bits of shadow plumed out of the stumps, and as the shades evaporated, the emptied vessels of the drowned sailors dropped to the deck, lifeless once again.
The victory was short-lived as a shade elephant leaped from a dock onto the deck of the ship. The massive crash shook the boat, throwing Richie and Leon off balance under the rocking weight of the pachyderm carved in ebony leather and jutting bony plates. The massive feet that carried the behemoth had flattened out into shadows that sprawled across the deck, evenly distributing its chosen weight to avoid falling straight through the deck. The ship tilted off course, and was caught in a titanic ocean current that roiled beneath the waves. As the fog that bore the crew of revenants faded, the eye of the cataclysmic storm passed, and the rain and thunder renewed themselves with vigor. As the boys were pounded by the storm, an immense maelstrom began to twist and bubble into existence some few hundred feet from the solid ground and relative safety of Tide Town.
Richie's attempts to side-swipe the elephant were handicapped by the slippery deck and violent epilepsy of the ship, and he was squeezed in the lashing coil of the monster's powerful trunk. It lifted him, crushing and suffocating him in its bind where it wrapped around his arms, thighs, stomach, chest, and neck. With his limbs pinned at his sides, he had no leverage to break free. To make matters worse, the deadly clutch was quickly draining his energy and will to live as well, leached out of him like torrents of so much spilling blood. Leon didn't waste another moment, and drew his magnum, firing three shots into the beast's chest. He would have just kept on shooting if he hadn't run out of ammo. The crack of the gunshots was almost sub-audible against the booming thunder, but the elephant's bellow of pain and rage exceeded them both. Richie felt like his eardrums were going to blow out.
The shade elephant rose its trunk, and Richie with it, high over its head so that Richie was looking up toward the weeping sky, and felt the icy wind lashing unimpeded at his bare face. The beast sledged its trunk into the waterlogged deck of the ship, crushing in rotted boards and slamming Richie head-first through the floor. When the trunk released and pulled away, Richie was left planted up to his waist down into the split deck, his legs kicking madly up at nothing as he reeled with the concussive daze of the blow within the darkness of the ruined and hollowed out interior of the ghostship.
“Damn!” Leon tutted.
He leveled his sword and advanced on the lumbering shade. Its chest and under belly were unprotected by the jutting plates of bony armor that sporadically covered the majority of its hide in jagged hexagonal patterns, and the three bullet wounds were still there, visibly leaking sickly black fluid. Leon needed to deliver a coup de grâce to what passed for the shade’s heart, and quickly. His thrust was diverted at the last moment by the jutting forward of the creature’s ivory tusks, no less malleable than the rest of its parts. They corkscrewed toward Leon, clashing with his blade like giant openers or drills. The immense force pushed Leon back, but in the wake of the clash, the dumb thing had been diverted from planting a foot on the incapacitated Richie and crushing him. Instead, the elephant’s undivided attention was on Leon now. The tusks, grinding like great big white girders scraping against each other, lurched forward and curved around Leon, suddenly scissoring inward. Leon backflipped up and over, out of the enclosing reach of the scissoring tusks. The ivory had ‘bitten’ like the mandibles of a great stag beetle.
Upon landing on his feet again, Leon seized up and grit his teeth with a pained grunt. His sword hand fell, planting the Polish blade point-down in the rotted deck, and his free hand flew to his waist, still unmended from the earlier attack that had stabbed straight through his body. In the chaos, the best he could make do with had been heavy bandages pulled tight around the wound to try to stifle the bleeding, but now the shock of his own landing had caused another flower of blood to begin blooming through the bandages, soaking them red.
I’ve lost too much blood. Leon realized grimly, face slicked with cold sweat, and fingers quivering with little jolts of the stabbing pain signals his brain was madly firing throughout his body in desperate warning.
He leaned into the pommel of his sword, struggling to hold himself up against it, like a cane. The swish of air as the elephant’s trunk cleaved through the night rushed through Leon’s ears, and a tightly-closed eye opened in time to see the roughly four hundred pound bludgeon swinging broad-side into him. The shade’s body had gone murky and distorted, negating most of its mass to twist itself as a fluidic shadow, and the trunk became akin to a massive whip, lashing with great speed. The weight of the trunk was concentrated into the surface area of the segment about to collide with Leon, like a flail-head that had sped up at the last second.
The heft slammed into Leon’s waist, directly striking the area of his bleeding impalement wound. The wrestler’s eyes shot open as he was knocked breathless, an agonized grunt thrown from his throat before it was choked off. Blood splashed around the circle of impact, and spurted from the entrance wound at the small of his back in a misty red fountain as the bandages were torn and scattered. Loose shreds of blood-soaked bandages fluttered into the night sky as Leon was thrown back dozens of feet from the weight of the maddened elephant’s whiplash. He flew up and over the banister of the ship, off over the enraged sea. He was sent soaring in the opposite direction of the giant whirlpool the ship was on a collision course with now, but the sea was still too turbulent for the strongest of swimmers right now.
Richie was still planted in the deck when he heard Leon splash down, and that gave him the strength to pluck himself free, ripping a few loose boards and chipped pieces of wood loose with his yank. He coughed and dusted off his neckline and chest, dislodging a myriad of nasty splintery bits, then turned toward the elephant again. It turned in kind, its trunk writhing and coiling like a great dark python hissing and baring its fangs at him. Leon’s abandoned sword still stuck out of the deck beside the elephant, like a graveyard cross marker.
“Bastard.” Richie growled, his tone low and his fists clenched.
The shade flashed its trunk forward, lunging alongside the whistling missed shots of the snipers remaining in the Sniper Tower far behind the ship now, fruitlessly trying to help bring the behemoth down. The trunk engulfed Richie’s right arm, swallowing it up to the shoulder like the giant snake it had begun to resemble. Richie shrieked, feeling a spiral column of needle teeth within the interior of the appendage begin to pierce into his arm as the trunk constricted around it. His energy began to drain rapidly through the beast’s trunk, up through its face and into its impermanent stygian body.
Richie was forced onto one knee under the suffocating weight of the wriggling tube sucking the life out of him. Grunting triumph, the shade took Richie for incapacitated, and jut the tusk closest to Richie forward to pierce his heart. Instead, the boy's hand shot up from below and grabbed the tusk around the tip, clutching tight and stopping the deadly spear in its tracks. Richie tilted his face up toward the shade elephant, a deadly scowl stretched across his face.
"I'm sick of you assholes. Level 3 unlocked!" Richie declared.
His body felt a surge of strength as the backs of his shoulder blades and arms were coated in hard azure scales, from which ghostly wisps of cool white fire flickered steadily. The dragon scales encircled his fist, merging the silver knuckles into his hand, and fortified his grip.
Richie hadn't quite figured out exactly what these levels were, how they connected to his dragon runes, or what the criteria for unlocking them even were, but he was beginning to pick up on the mechanics of how each level worked through trial and error. When he cycled through all four of them in their inaugural fight with the phantom pain, he had observed a central effect in each. Level 1 seemingly activated only the dragon heads at Richie's wrists, bolstering his punching power and extending its range through the medium of the air directly in front of his knuckles itself. The air displaced by the striking dragon heads formed a spherical shockwave that hit like an invisible bomb when Richie punched a certain way. Level 2 had enhanced his speed, which he was beginning to realize was paid for in muscle tone, forcing his body to go more lax and noodly in order to not injure itself from sudden abrupt movements and sharp turns. In short bursts, he could probably keep pace with the speed of his own dislodged shockwaves, but he doubted he was actually fast enough to leave behind true afterimages. Whatever that effect actually was, it was a mystery to explore for later. Of immediate interest to Richie now was Level 3, the antithesis to the level before it, trading in mobility and flexibility for yet more strength, and heightened durability. Over a small area of his body at a time, Richie realized he could will the armored skin of the Seiryu dragons his tattoos represented to crystallize his skin and protect it against edged, ballistic, and blunt force trauma alike.
Additionally, any body part Richie completely coated in these scales became immovably rigid and tough - perfect for holding down enemy limbs and weapons like a hard gemstone vice.
Not unlike how Freyja had discovered new applications of her shapeshifting ability when she occupied midway points between her human and wolf forms, Richie had finally discovered a secret of his own ability - that, logically, having enough energy reserves to sustain the higher levels of Dragon Sign - the name that had come to him all of a sudden - implied he could move between they and lower levels at will to draw on prior techniques. His body couldn't simultaneously use both Level 2 and Level 3 in the same place at once, but there was no reason he couldn't shift aspects of his forms freely along different parts of his body.
The poor bastard swallowing Richie's arm was about to be the guinea pig he tested this theory on.
A Level 1 dragon head cocked itself forward from the wrist of Richie's trapped arm, adorning the back of his hand like a mythic bazooka.
"How nice of you to give me a nice straight shot to the inside of your thick skull." Richie smirked.
He fired off an air ball inside the elephant's trunk. Its spherical shape bulged out the wrinkled black silk of the trunk as it shot up through its length, as though the elephant had snorted a basketball. The concussive burst shot into the beast's skull cavity, bulging out its forehead and eyes where the trunk melded into the facial structure. A muffled boom went off inside the monster's head. It bellowed and tried to recoil, but Richie's Level 1 dragon head was snagged inside the trunk, and his Level 3 grip was still clamped around the tusk. When the elephant went back, Richie went with it. He thought back to angling in the reservoir with Cuppy, and how he had grabbed the big catfish through the gills.
It's you who can't escape ME. Richie thought, victorious.
He didn't let up. He kept firing air balls up through the creature's flexible, muscled snout, until black blood geysered out of its tremendous floppy ears, and its skull fractured open from the inside out. Its dumbass peanut brain flew up and out of the cracks like a small volcanic eruption.
The trunk engulfing Richie's arm dissolved away into mist from the shoulder up. The elephant keeled over on its side, breaking off the tusk Richie gripped, now brittle like a hollow clay sculpture, in his hand. The beast dissolved into black mist before its weight could further sink or tip the ship. Whatever black magic still kept the ruined vessel afloat hadn't run out yet, and Richie felt an inward spark of glee that finally, everything these damned abominations tried to stack the odds in their favor with was now turning against them.
Thanks to the possessed sailor corpse stunt, Richie could now ride out the storm in a sturdy ghost ship. That he had no idea how to sail. Caught in a vortex. Taking him out to sea, away from his allies.
"Fuck." Richie gulped.
A form breached alongside the runaway ghost ship, and Richie stood on guard. The slicked mane of orange fur alerted Richie that Sparta was swimming out to sea next to the boat, dog paddling with what Richie took for a look of utter exasperation. Leon, soaked, shivering, bloody, and frothing at the mouth, started coughing and sputtering himself conscious again, wrapped around the lion's back with the length of his own whip. One exhausted eye opened and looked up at Richie, and Leon meekly pat Sparta's head as the big cat gauged a proper distance from the vessel.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
Richie watched what should have been an amazing spectacle with only a diffuse feeling of embarrassment and resignation to it.
"...sea lion…" Richie said monosyllabically, completely relieved of his panic for a few moments. "This is… completely fucking retarded…"
While Richie stood there, disapproving of this ludicrous situation, Leon found his second wind and lashed his whip free, tossing it like a grappling hook around the hilt of his sword still stabbed into the deck of the ship. He scrambled aboard, dropping to his knees and hacking up more water. Standing on trembling legs that were loudly creaking, Leon tossed Sparta a raw steak, pulling it out of nowhere that Richie could tell in particular. The lion snapped its reward out of the air, then reasonably bailed on following the ship any further, as the event horizon of the figurative Charybdis was upon them.
"Are you done fucking around?" Richie asked.
"I have salt water in my intestines, you can shut right the fuck up." Leon flipped him off.
Then the circus performer got a better look at the yawning spiral antlion of ocean the ship had begun to dip into, caught on the outer rim of its impending, swallowing current.
"Oh that's bullshit." Leon sighed.
Richie. his dragons projected into the boy's mind.
"Now's really not a good time, guys." Richie pat his arms.
There is a rival to us within the vortex. they warned him.
"That's nice. We're going the other way." Richie nodded.
He dashed to the wheel of the ship, struggling to turn it against the overwhelming power of the tide. The pounding waves were roaring in their ears, like the cataclysmic bellows of a titanic angry wash cycle.
"Leon, help me!" he cried out.
But he was working against his runes, which had begun to lift off his body and try to drag him to the side of the ship facing the dark heart of the maelstrom, glowing again and eagerly sniffing out a fight with an opposing alpha.
It's too late to escape the pull, we must fight head-on! the runes said.
"The hell you say!" Richie argued.
"Am I interrupting something?" Leon asked irritably.
The ship began to upend and lilt nose-down into the whirlpool. One of Richie's dragon heads coughed something up into his hand - another vial of that green healing potion.
Well hot damn, Richie thought, his boys were pickpockets too.
"Alright, I see what your game is. Lee, catch!" Richie chucked him the vial.
Leon caught it and yanked the cork out in his perfect pearly white teeth.
"Maybe next time you can cut the call even closer?" Leon returned Richie's cheeky remark with a matching smirk before downing the revitalizing kelp concoction.
As Leon's strength swelled and his wounds knitted themselves closed, he and Richie swapped places, the lion tamer putting his back and everything he had into making that sun-shaped wheel turn. Richie perched himself on the bow of the ship, looking out over the edge into the churning darkness, barely holding himself together not to flinch from the flecks of whitewater spittle it was flinging at them. The stench of sea salt and decayed fish and weeds was all-encompassing now, rising up like a pungent column of gas from the maw of the ocean.
Level 2 activated itself, and suddenly Richie was standing in the crowsnest of the ship, having cleared the distance reflexively from the deck to the top of the mast in the space of a blink. As it tilted out over the churning chasm the ship was rapidly circling and spiraling into, he saw through his dragon's eyes what lay at the depths beneath the window that had opened into the sea. A great, ancient dark presence, gibbering and malevolent, lay dormant within, slowly rousing, its dead dreams carrying a rhythm that the lesser shades marched to like the beating of a war drum. When it breached, a buffer would be placed between the ship and the watery grave within the heart of the maelstrom, and the conductor of the nightmare play they had danced to would be presented plainly for the encore. The only drawback was that this would completely draw its attention upon themselves.
Still, Richie preferred those odds to being swallowed to the bottom of the ocean for sure.
"Come on up, you lazy son of a bitch!" Richie roared.
He threw his arms above his head, Level 1 dragon heads bulging out like extensions of the holy silver knuckles he still wore. They began nosing the air, rapidly vibrating and making a low noise, like an ambient hum, as the tempest winds were channeled, collected, and concentrated between their snouts. A glossy bubble, like a soap foam from a frothy bubble bath, began to compress between Richie's arms. A sphere of high-velocity gale force winds squeezed into each other, layering, and shrinking into a single dense blob that grew denser and darker the more it shrank. It was like a localized typhoon had been squeezed into the shape of a beach ball, and then once again into a pulsing, glowing wind plasma construct the size of a soccer ball.
"In my hands, I clutch the heavens themselves." Richie chanted.
He held his compressed ball of air, an undetonated shockwave waiting for its pin to be pulled, overhead, like Atlas holding the heavens above his put-upon form. Leon lost his gaze in the silvery light of the perfectly smooth sphere of atmospheric plasma.
He could do even something like this? He just put the air itself through a grape press, condensed it into a tremendous static shockwave just waiting to burst. Are we in range too if he chucks that thing? Where does he mean to fire it? Leon wondered inwardly.
Then he followed Richie's eyes into the swirling pit within the oceanic spiral drain.
He's going to wake up whatever's in there with one hell of an alarm clock.
The atmosphere orb was ready to drop its payload.
"All this psychological fuck-fuck and torturous death. For what? Souls of your own? What dumbass gave you the idea you could earn souls by cutting ties with everything that makes you human? Everything that gives meaning to the idea of a soul?! HUH?!?"
Richie raised his climakinetic bomb overhead, body chiseled and rippling with the coils of serpentine dragon bodies bulging beneath his skin and muscles.
"Come up here and see just how much stronger your prey are than you!" Richie finally chucked the condensed ball of hurricane straight down the gullet of the maelstrom. It sank below, diving out of sight to the bottom of the rough and tumultuous topography of the ocean floor, in whose flooded chasm the elder thing lay dreaming madness.
"Come pay for the meaning of a soul you've trivialized." Richie said calmly as he folded his arms and waited for the chain reaction that had been set in motion to climax.
"I call this move - Torrential Flow. You can just call it your wake up call that you nightmares aren't hot shit. You're remorseless parasites, and you're going to be exterminated down to the last shadow."
There was silence, and then a massive column of seawater exploded out of the center of the whirlpool, geysering a mile high. As it fell, the whirlpool settled into choppy, broken water, and a low hum hung over the sea. Dark storm clouds held overhead, hissing and spitting lightning and thunder like cobra venom. Out of a sailing purple thunderhead that flowed to meet them like a ghostly barge, deadlight eyes the size of lighthouse beams opened up out of the gloom and murk. The sea caved in and swelled repeatedly, like a non-Newtonian fluid trampoline. The clouds condensed, and tentacles, pulpy and grasping, suction cups ringed with vampiric fangs, spasmed out of the mist around a central gelatinous head whose ears and ragged mouth line leaked black ichor and sickly green ooze. Draconic wings, framed in black and highlighted with a muted, darker form of royal King's purple, unfurled with overwhelming force that displaced the winds like the sonic booms of passing jets. A draconic claw tipped the end of a club-like limb whose shoulder slumped below the filmy neckline of the thing, dotted with strange knobby protrusions that looked like breathing barnacles. From the shoulder itself, a glassy squid eye with a milky film pulled over it opened in the warped flesh, blinking rapidly. A comparatively humanoid, but discolored opaque blue arm whose fingers were linked by translucent webbing, had an ivory-like lance of white bone protrude backward from its elbow joint, spearing well passed the bulge of its grotesquely swollen shoulder muscles, breathing like worm-ridden air sacs. The blue hand clutched a great and mighty golden trident, like Poisoden may have forged, polished, and brandished as the symbol of his absolute authority as God of the oceans in his long-passed glory days of reverence.
The monstrosity swiveled its head down at Richie, who had dared to wake it up. The seas and skies shook with the sea god's tremulous bellow. The ghost ship spun freely, carried to the side of the great beast on a rogue current dislodged from the dead maelstrom. As Richie rocked in the crow's nest, the behemoth raised its blue arm, elbow point down so that its jutting ivory pillar of organic polearm hung its spearhead over the sea. The ship was directly in the path of the titanic elbow-polearm, barreling into alignment for the hull to be impaled and the ship sunk. With a surge of his revitalized strength, Leon forced the wheel to turn, hard, and twisted themselves out of the tidal deadlock. When the lance fell, it stabbed straight through to the bay floor, displacing massive swells of water. Like a camera tripod, the under-elbow javelin had propped the behemoth's arm so that it was supported, trident lined up for a colossal lunging strike.
Richie glared, rapid-firing air balls up at the deep sea goliath. They pelted the rubbery squid-like skin to little effect, indenting patches momentarily before the slick flesh and muscle pushed back out, like an unclenched stress ball. That golden trident flashed in the moonlight, and fell with the beast's unfurling planted arm, the ivory stake below the elbow compressing like a spring as the weight of the thrust was put upon it. Leon careened their ship out of the way as the tri-bladed pole plunged into the ocean, pulling great furrows in the seabed. Then they were circling the behemoth again, caught in a circular current that hadn't entirely gone away with the maelstrom's hungry core. Sea salt spray flew like arrows over their heads as Richie and Leon rocked violently with the wave-stricken vessel under their feet. When they drew round the bend where they would be facing the old one again, Leon had begun to uncoil his thorn whip, forcing the ship's wheel on track with a static leg press that strained the muscles of his thigh and calf. The plan was to lash the whip around the ivory spike, and the other end around the mast of the ship, to anchor themselves in combat range. It was a risk that likened them to ants right under a cruel child's tread, but they weren't going to win by playing ring-around-the-rosy. The squid eye set in the heart's shoulder had free movement relative to the rest of the body, rotating in 360 degrees like a swivel or a ball joint. Its pupil had widened over them as that eyeball tracked the boys' circuit around the legs of the sea beast. The monster - whether an aquatic conglomerate shade, or perhaps a departed deep one whose body had become a shade ecosystem within some abyssal deep sea trench of cold dark murk - had no intention of letting the humans do whatever they wanted. Throbbing, puckering sphincters and suckling orifices opened up and unzipped all over its body, showering the sea with a rain of condensed dark purple storm clouds, pressed into orbs rippling and crackling with bottled lightning. Hundreds of these spherical thunderstorms exploded the waves to mist all around the revived ghost ship, and the static charge in the air was enough to raise the hair from the boys' heads. Electric clouds pummeled the deck like meteorological cannonballs, and the shroud of rain and smoke in their wake obscured Leon's and the ship's condition from Richie's line of sight below the mast. At the highest point on the ship, the mast like a great beacon for lightning, Richie had no chance of escaping unscathed. He passed through a torus of darkened cloud that mainlined the wrath of Zeus through his body like venom from dozens of vaporal snake bites peppering him all at once. Zapped nerves twitched, Richie's left arm badly burned and spasming at his side. Steam rose off of his body in little curling wisps of dead skin and dust that had vaporized right off his body.
The beast swiveled its head and upper torso toward the electrified ship. Its planted arm bent the upper portion clutching the trident sharply at an angle, the entrenched prongs of the fork kicking up big, frothing wakes. The arm wielding the trident had the advantage of being boneless and powered by a network of elastic, extensible muscle beneath the skin. It was unencumbered from having the spear at its elbow planted in the ground, as the arm itself could twist like a great tentacle, spinning the huge trident with it. The entire scene gave Richie, still jittering from the residual effects of the electric shock, the image of the colossal monster being some school girl lying on her belly with her face propped up by an arm resting on its elbow, reading some gossipy magazine.
It wouldn't get away with taking him lightly.
The other arm, a swollen mass of grotesque dense muscle, brandished its recurved reptilian talons, and swooped down at the ship, trying to scoop up Richie. Those claws tore the mass loose in their stroke, Richie deftly rolling backward between the gap in the beast's fingers. His arms caught one of the rungs of the rain-slicked ladder that had led up to the crow's nest, ripped off along with the upper half of the mast. His position compromised, Richie watched, dangling there, as the other arm lunged its trident at them.
Leon's whip lashed up, striking the trident with a sound like the sonic boom of a stealth bomber making a flyby, and the trident was pushed off coarse. The outermost tine hooked and tore off the banister, grazing the side of the ship's hull as the trident plunged into the sea again.
Richie leaped from the sagging mast onto the slick surface of the trident's haft, dragon tails enwrapping the length to secure a foothold, and his arms pinwheeling for balance. As the ship passed by, Lean leaned over the side with his Polish blade outstretched, and cleaved the ivory support spike in twain. The monster's unsupported arm dropped down, nearly spilling Richie from the trident, but the brawler forced himself back up the now vertical cliff face of the trident and arm that gripped it. It looked like Richie had done a stomach crunch while hanging upside down. He shot his dragon heads up the pole, clutching the beast's pulpy wrist, ethereal fangs punching into the squishy flesh like undercooked calamari. Then, Richie was running up the arm.
The tracking claw-arm swiped at Richie again, to rip him from the arm he climbed, but Richie passed through the fingers again, and now was running up the comparatively level road of the bulkier limb. His eyes were narrowed and focused. The stench of dead things from the deep, of the storm, were washing over him in churning waves, but pure adrenaline had taken the wheel. He didn't so much as blink when a barricade of giant barnacles erupted midway up to the beast's shoulder, focusing on Richie like cannons and firing volleys of laser-like bursts of bright plasma.
The beast's tentacled face was turned toward its shoulder, watching closely when the row of organic turrets shattered to flecks of rubble, Richie barreling through with his retaliatory storm of punches. The beast spread its face-tentacles far apart, revealing the serrated, metallic parrot-like beak at their center. It would bite the pesky human in half, effortlessly.
Richie was having none of it. His thoughts turned as dark as the storm.
It’s just one thing after another. Cultists, muggers, monsters and soul-stealing wraiths - I’m so sick of it. So absolutely SICK of it all. I came all the way here to another world, crossed the boundaries of time and space, and the sky still keeps pouring down on me. It’s suffocating, like there’s no way out. I can’t find the exit. You and your damn thunder clouds are getting in my way. You’re blocking my climb to the Heavens!
Richie phased out of sight, and the behemoth’s beak snapped shut over nothing. Then a light tapping alerted it to the boy’s footfall on top of that beak before its eldritch eyes even processed what they were seeing. Now, Richie’s gaze was deadlocked with the giant sea monster’s as he stood quite literally in its face. The beast flailed its tentacles, ten pointed tips of each and every one aimed at Richie, surrounding him like an omnidirectional hail of organic harpoons waiting for the signal to fly. With a low rumble bellowing up from the monster’s throat, those tentacles tensed and coiled like the lithe necks of serpents about to strike.
Richie’s face was intricately-lined with the intensity of his glare, and his eyes literally seemed to darken. The sounds of the crashing thunder and pounding rain all around them hushed to a far-off ambient echo, and time seemed to stop - for the monster. Its instincts were screaming that its eyes were wrong - that the boy on its beak was towering over it like an unstoppable cataclysm.
Richie’s dragon runes stirred, eyes shifting up toward their host.
This is… they thought amongst themselves.
In the beaten-down boat below, Leon felt a shiver go down his spine that bit more deeply than the frigid rain. “What the?”
The monster’s eyes shrank to pinprick pupils, recoiling from the overwhelming pressure of Richie’s presence. Richie rolled up his right sleeve, rotated his shoulder cuff a few times, winding his arm, and silently channeled Level 2 into the limb. He cracked out his knuckles with a twitch of his fingers, then chambered his arm across his chest. Suddenly, his muscles went lax. The monster blinked once, making a sound analogous to a gulp.
“What,” Richie said - then his arm flailed out at the beast’s eyes, blurring in a zigzag of motion like a
Whip! Leon realized.
Richie’s body seemed to be framed by an overlay of Leon himself. The mirage was somehow crisp and clean, yet transparent and enwrapping Richie like a fine mist at the same time. The wavy line of Richie’s snapped-out arm seemed to become the thorned length of Leon’s cherished heirloom weapon, and the symbol of his projected image of mastery over all beasts.
“the FUCK are you looking at?!?” Richie roared at the monster.
His whip-arm dented both deadlight eyes into their sockets, reflexively forcing the eyelids snapped shut, and eliciting a bloodcurdling screech out of the deep one.
Leon felt the currents shift as the titanic creature stumbled backward, dispersing the last of the dead whirlpool’s pull. The immense resistance blocking the turning of the ship’s wheel was removed all at once, and the circus performer whirled it hard right. The ship curved around like a nautical boomerang bouncing back at the monster one last time. Leon had just what the doctor ordered. He clutched the last flashbang he had on him in his palm, eyes narrowed on the decayed figurehead of the ship.
“For Tide Town.” Leon said.
He chucked the flashbang sky-high, lashed his whip about it, lassoing the light grenade, and swung it like an explosive flail into the waterlogged mermaid which formed the bow of the ship. The whip crack and the explosion melded together as one cacophonic symphony of noise, and the carved siren was split and blasted apart, leaving a jagged spear of wood sticking out of the ship’s face like a giant bayonet. Returning his whip to his sash, Leon took the wheel again, and aimed straight and true for the sea god’s back.
Above, Richie’s arm dangled at his side, the elbow and wrist joints dislocated, and his shoulder pulled out of his socket. The entire outer forearm of his limb from elbow to pinky was dark, plum purple, deeply bruised, and he had probably suffered several tiny hairline fractures. He didn’t care.
Richie was on the beast’s shoulder then, performing a handstand with his one remaining good arm, legs together spearing toward the sky. Those joined legs swung, rotating with his hips, and he began to twist and spin on his planted palm and fingertips. His feet kicked up winds that drew inward like a localized vortex with the centrifugal force of his rotation. Sparing a glance above from his kamikaze battering ram with the ship, Leon saw that once again, Richie was enveloped in the mirage image of another combatant whose style he had drawn from - this time it was Kokumo. Leon stuck out his tongue in distaste at having to see Kokumo’s phantom boobs jiggle from Richie’s scrawny, ratty chest. It was a distressing enough sight that Leon almost drifted off course.
Almost.
The blinded beast clutched its hands to its crushed eyeballs, groaning in an almost plaintive way. Its keen ears heard the whirlwind of Richie’s accelerating handstand kick, commingled now with the chitinous sound of snake-like scales scratching against each other. Under the bronze mist of the Kokumo outline, Richie’s dragon runes had begun to rapidly coil around his body, writhing and twisting about each other like a reptilian atomic nucleus in motion. As Richie hit his peak speed, the dragon rune of his left arm darted down diagonally across his body, flipping its tail from Richie’s right ankle, and jutting its head out along his foot instead. The Seiryuu glowed bright azure, spilling trails of ghostly bluish-white cold fire and air plasma. Its fangs gnashed, whiskers trailing far beyond its snout and crown of thorns like streamers behind the base of a polearm’s spearhead. The inked eyes sketched into the tattoo construct’s face reflected Richie’s own determined death glare, and the dragon had taken on a rock-solid texture that was heavy and solid, as though Richie’s foot had literally grown a crocodile-like skull. The rest of his body was shrouded in flecks of blue fire and scale patches, like blood vessels beneath the skin of the phantom Kokumo outline. In the second before impact, Richie’s gaze met the sky, pouring an ocean of its own down on the darkened flooded world.
And that was when something clicked inside Richie. It was an internal knowledge, like something he had only dredged up and which had always been there, waiting to be discovered. Storms came and went. Had he died back then, in the kennel, as he had seemingly been fated to, he would have avoided so much pain and suffering in this life. But he also would have never gotten the chance to build his strength and avenge his mother, or push back these abominable things making mockery of life and souls. He wouldn’t have met his first and thus far only friend, which he realized Cuppy had become at some point in his mind, as vexing as that was. For years, he’d been stepped over and spat upon, and then one day, he was rescued, tended to, and consoled by a friendly stranger who expected nothing in return. Save Richie’s company.
The world - all of them - was a cruel place. But it was also beautiful. It was home. Richie’s mother had met downpours with a defiant, cheerful smile that could melt snow, always keeping faith that the warm morning sun would rise again. Her death had been the beginning of the long storm assailing Richie. But it was finally sinking in that he was meant to be the sun which rose after, which inherited her will and spirit. And like the sun, he would rise to take his place in the heavens, so far above the earth that he would even be above the storm clouds.
As long as he kept her memory, he could weather the storm.
Life goes on, and I want to be a part of it.
Richie’s dragon-headed leg swung heel-first into the side of the abyssal monstrosity’s pulpy skull.
“QUIT RAINING ON MY DAY!!!” Richie roared.
The monster’s cheek and jaw hinge caved in, squishing its face in from the side grotesquely, and its head rocked back and forth with such whiplash that its neck cracked out of alignment. The ballistic force of Richie’s kick shot straight on through the beast’s face, exploding out the opposite cheek like a hollow-point expanding bullet exit wound, showering the sea with squid ink and gore.
The monster’s vision was blacking in and out.
At its back, Leon crashed the ghost ship into the back of the monster’s waist, just above the pelvis, driving the giant stake that had been the ship’s figurehead straight through its rubbery body as intended. The splintery spear tip jutted out through the split flesh of the monster’s lower belly, swelling up ringlets of black blood and decayed seaweed that had been absorbed into the bedsores of the thing’s form where it had spent innumerable decades laying in a deep sea trench, growing over with kelp and barnacles as it was cemented to the sunken rockbed. The monster’s arms went slack and fell away from its contorting face, the mouth-lining tentacles fluttering weakly.
Finish it. Leon thought as the keel of the undead ship finally cracked open again, splitting the ship in half and beginning the irreversible process of sinking it once again, as it had sunk so long ago before the dark will of the unborn had raised and healed it.
The titanic sea god’s shoulder eye tracked Richie, the only remaining scope it had on its body to get a visual on the boy. What it saw, to its shock and supreme panic and terror, was Richie flipping backward over from the shoulder, dragon head receding into his leg, and the boy righting his body to face the beast’s chest. His hand was curled in a claw-like position, silver knuckles gleaming. The monster felt the well of souls it had consumed, stockpiled by an entire colony of shades filling out the recesses and cavities of its appropriated body, begin to stir and pulse with azure light. The restless spirits, cut off from their birthright of the peace in the great beyond, were swelling up, wailing and rebelling. They were lost, scared, sorrowful, bitter, jealous - but above all, they were angry. Their anger was thick and clotted, and the combined light of their souls was glowing incandescent power, like cherenkov radiation blooming from the beast’s chest. The breastplate of the titan seemed to stretch out and thin in the middle, the flesh going thin like wet tissue paper as the swirl of souls condensed and concentrated themselves into a single blue sphere core pushing out against the breastplate from the other side - trying to claw their way to freedom from within their eternal prison.
On Richie’s end, his mind flashed back to his battle with the Phantom Pain, the moment of its attempts to feed on his life force forever ingrained into his psyche. Something like this had happened back then too. When Richie had plunged his fist into the gash torn into the Phantom Pain’s torso, his fingertips tickled and twitched as they felt the drops of energy that had been stolen from him and swallowed begin to seep back into his body and soul through his arm. That vitality, or aura, was a star that burned low and slow, refusing to fade quietly. What souls or fractions of souls that hadn’t yet been digested shared something in common with each other - a will to escape, and reenter the natural cycle of life and death. For some reason, Richie began to think of those two bookends of an entity’s time on this earth as being one and the same.
As Richie reflected on this unclear collection of gut feelings and guesswork, he fell below and out of the range of the sea god’s weakened chest marking the boundary between freedom to cross over, and condemnation to be nutrition for those without souls of their own. The beast grunted a sigh of relief.
But Richie refused to fall yet. He launched an air ball under him, using the recoil boost to throw himself back up to the monster’s chest level. His dislocated arm flapped in the wind next to him, the icy rain stinging his face like wasp pellets from the force of his improvised one-shot jetpack maneuver.
We aren’t your livestock. I’m going to make you cough up every last person you devoured.
Richie plunged his fist into the glowing azure well of the shade conglomerate being’s chest, breaking the thinned barrier. His hooked fingers clutched the bulge of the swirl of animistic energy, and he ripped it out as though he were an Aztec high priest plucking the heart from a sacrificial victim as an offering to the gods. In a way, that was accurate.
“Clear the sky!” Richie decreed.
He flung his arm skyward, and the released souls shot up into the heavens as a swirling blue column of radiant glowing blue energy bridging the sea and sky. The peak of the column impaled the dense masses of thunder clouds scarring the atmosphere like a spreading cancer, and the column widened then thinned as it shot up into that singular point. Its dimensions flattened out to zero before it dispersed itself in a great expanding halo of azure, ripping the storm open from within like the blast radius of an atomic bomb. As the dark clouds were completely scattered far beyond the visible edges of Tide Town’s backdrop, the blue halo dissolved into sparkling mist, within which the raptured sounds of freedom to rest in peace or reroute themselves into reincarnation echoed down to Richie.
Behind the destroyed stormscape, the great blue star that Leon hadn’t expected to show itself, the Sapphire in Silk, twinkled like a torch lit in honor of Richie’s triumph. As he fell back to the sea, consciousness fading out, his mouth curled into a soft, satisfied smile, face and red locks bathed in the warm light of the beautiful star.
-
The tavern erupted into cheers as the trio entered, exactly as Leon had predicted. He wouldn't tell Richie yet about the flood that the eclipse was still going to bring, with or without the shades. The ferry voyage to Blue Terminal would take a week or more in the tumultuous weather, and the boy had already been concerned about the safety of the friend he had left behind in Station Bay. But, it was folly to shove too many healing potions down the kid's throat and ship him off. Too many of the elixirs in too short a time acted like a double-edged steroid - whose painful ill effects Leon was already becoming acquainted with. He decided to grin and bear it. They needed to take Richie's mind off his troubles for one night and give his body and mind time to heal naturally. What concerned the wrestler most was that the bitemarks of the shade who had taken the form of Richie's mother to chomp down on his aura had not yet faded. Their shadowed indents still stained Richie's torso, as dark and physical as the dragon runes tattooing his body. Even if they funneled all the healing juice in Tide Town down Richie's throat, physical remedies could not heal a direct wound to the soul.