“Everyone, to your windows!” Leon commanded.
Richie remained at Leon’s back, teeth still grit, hands clutching his first gun with white-knuckled strain. Inwardly, he wanted nothing less than for the windows to be left open to the shades, to invite the monstrosities pouring in to see what Richie was made of up close and personal. His tenuous rational side maintained its grip and kept this self-destructive impulse constrained.
The scrambling sound of the cats and monkeys sprinting up the tower walls set Allicia and Nuchi’s teeth on edge, but both split to maintain focus on their own respective responsibilities within the tower, privy to a routine protocol that Richie was oblivious to as a newcomer. Allicia leaned out her square of observation, pointing her sniper rifle out in a loose swivel-like grip. Muzzle flash lit up the night sky beyond the well-lit interior of the tower and the shockwaves of discharged gunpowder rang in Richie’s unaccustomed ears, but even so he found his gaze drawn toward the volunteer as she rapidly fired off shots, reloading at a rate that was beyond muscle memory, discharging hot-smelling empty shells that clattered across the floor.
Leon knew full-well that the ape-like shades shouldn’t have been able to cross the water unassisted due to their density, and that the jaguars and leopards and cougars trying to run up the walls with the aid of their fearsome retractable claws should not have been enough to bear the non-buoyant variants on their backs across the sea. No whales or marine mammals among the shade ranks had visibly breached the surface yet, and he assumed that the aquatic shades had remained unseen beneath the waves, discreetly ferrying the more terrestrial models of their kind to the tower base. Despite this surprise scramble up the walls, Allicia did not focus her shots on the climbers, instead concentrating her sniper fire across the waterway to the shades still stampeding across the docks and piers. Richie was astounded at the dexterity and speed with which the girl aimed, shot, and aimed at her next target, all while moving rapidly, undulating at random in unnatural ways for their animal shapes, and while blending into the darkness of the night, illuminated only by their vaguely-glowing fogged eyes.
No way, I’m seeing things. Richie thought, struggling to track the movement of the rifle’s muzzle - it seemed to be moving quickly enough that its length was blurring. The most advanced drones shouldn’t be able to keep up with so many targets like this single human sniper was.
Not to be outshone, Nuchi, evidently the resident electrician and tech expert, had produced what looked like a silver remote control crisscrossed with vibrantly colorful buttons.
“Hold,” Leon signalled a ‘wait’ gesture to the beatnik.
What were they waiting for? As impressive as Allicia’s gunplay was - and the other recruits not far behind her - no one was firing at the monsters currently climbing the walls. While Richie had been eager to pop a few of the shades in the face, his confusion at their strategy or lack thereof sent him into a disquieting sense of emotional whiplash, flecked with dread as he heard the damned things climb higher and higher. They seemed to have scurried more than halfway up the tower on the front side toward Richie from the sound of it, and no one was firing into this advancing frontline rank. Moments before Richie worked up the nerve to speak on it, Leon chopped a ‘go’ hand signal downward toward Nuchi.
“Floodlights!” Leon ordered.
Nuchi punched a yellow color-coded button, and Richie heard more electronics flash to life. Evidently the rim of the tower outside the windows was not a flat segue into the hexagonal walls of the tower’s main body, but a slightly-protruding square framework of slots with trapdoor bottoms concealing various anti-shade devices, downward pointing miniaturized UV cannons among them. Instantly, the exterior was lit up from above, the intense light cascading downward like the fall of a headsman’s ax. The cats and monkeys clinging to the walls, their claws half-way between physically holding grips in the wood and merging into the subtle dark hues of the tower itself, were hit full-blast thirty or so seconds from summiting the peak. They shrieked as their inky, shifting skin sizzled under the rays, steam and smoke rising off of it like burning bacon in an oiled skillet that had burned the liquid dry.
Amidst the screech of the shades being incinerated by the strength of the light, and the roar of the rifles at each window, Richie could now also hear the echo of the naval guardsmen’s gunfire rising up from below, providing ground level support from behind the fortified safety of the main UV cannons. Despite all appearances and logic, those two men in uniform being at the bottom and outside of the tower were probably the most securely protected against the shade attacks from that side, none of whom were eager to run headlong into the light of the cannons.
This, puzzlingly to Richie’s senses, left the other sides and faces of the tower seemingly exposed to attack by the shades emerging from the sea around them, struggling to clutch at the planks built into the rim. Here too, however, the overhead lights fell just as brightly, and even if they hadn’t, even the aquatic shades were not equipped to navigate the unseen freak sea current that circled all but the bridge side of the tower. Those that weren’t swallowed and spat out by an invisible series of sub-surface whirlpools elsewhere in the bay were merely pushed out of range of the rim by the return current. Coupled now with the raging tempest and thunderstorm assaulting the tower too, those currents began to produce massive standing waves that sloshed the captured shades around as helplessly as drowning bees stranded in a deep swimming pool. What was more, the encircling ring of planks allowed the soldiers manning the UV cannons to patrol the perimeter as needed, leaving the cannons to shine unmanned. Concealed, retractable bayonets slid out of their modernized musket-looking guns to provide close-quarters options in the freak event a shade got within stabbing distance.
Between the beats of twin bat-like shades being split by Alicia’s bullets at sixty yards or more, and of the German man, Wolfgang, nailing a passive shade-elephant camping out on the edge of a dock between the eyes with his Luger, Richie heard something that sounded like science fiction laser blasts. A few moments later, he realized that they were actually the sounds of taut metal cables being surmounted. The cats and apes which had survived falling into the bay from the burning power of the light pouring down on them had begun to cling to the support cables that were rigged to the first half of the tower’s stabilizing rings. These units were joined by others that had modified their bodies to include grip-support features like gecko pads, cephalopod tentacles, and spider legs lined with black silk to ease their ascent up the slick cables.
Again, Leon and the others seemed to pay this no mind. A quarter way up any of the cables, the shades suddenly and violently began burning all the same as if they were in full blast of the lights. The cables seemed to project an ethereal silver light.
“Consecrated silver is infused into checkered sections of the cables at precise intervals up their span.” Leon nodded to Richie.
Richie returned the nod.
“Nuchi, drop the water!” Leon said to the beatnik.
Another button was pressed, and another mechanism went to work. Shades were burning all around, under the glare of the lights, and on the holy power of the noble metal they clung to. Amidst that inferno of pain from their otherworldly perspective, the more clever among their ranks assumed their flattened, massless pure shadow forms to fly up the only section connecting to the tower that was still shadowed - the undersides of the cables. Before they could navigate how to skip across the sections of wire whose silver infusions could still afflict their shadow forms, they were doused with scalding water, well beyond boiling, flung from angled spouts built into the underside of the bulky rim. Richie’s curiosity got the best of him at this point, and he darted toward the window nearest Nuchi, following his gaze down the east side of the tower.
The shades that were flattened against the thin bit of shadow hugging the underside of the cables were behaving oddly. One of two things were happening; the shades that had touched the divine sections of cable after guessing wrong on which inches to jump were hissing and twisting, forced to partially dematerialize physical forms. These were struck by the following gallons of superheated water, and knocked off the cables by both the weight and scalding heat of the drops. Those that still clung to the safe sections of metal found their shadow-shaping abilities overtasked and stretched too thin along the narrow inches of surface they could hide from the light inside. Where the shadows of the falling water that fell along the tower’s side moved like transient wedges of darkness through the vertical shaft of light, the flattened and stretched-out shades had their bodies involuntarily merge into those falling shadows, sticking to them like gregarious standing drops of fluid. As those shadows fell, they wrenched the shades, kicking and shrieking, off of the cables as well, where they too were soaked in boiling water and steam and plunged into the turbulent sea. The guards at the bottom were just out of range of the heated fluid’s fall path, the spouts built into the rim calculated perfectly to fan the drops slightly out as they fell.
The sounds of gigantic splashes were all around Richie, melding into the cacophony of ambient storm noises and rhythmic gunfire. Shade after shade were falling from the tower, and their ranks were being gradually pushed back into the middle of the stretch of sea leading toward the tower that was circled by water on all sides. The shades that had been pouring into the bay from the docks were beginning to recoil and shrink back, features resembling hesitation and befuddlement forming out of the stygian black cloth of their malleable faces. All of these features together finally explained to Richie why Allicia and the others hadn't bothered aiming at the shades nearest the tower itself; the entire structure was specifically engineered to do one thing - give shades a bad time.
The thunderous cries of faux-wild-animals below were like that of a circus of shadows, and Leon's stately ensemble of performer's garments painted a strange picture to Richie that the eccentric man was entirely in his element, conducting a wild show - albeit, one in which the goal was not to make the beasts do tricks, but to keep them from devouring the audience.
The beating of leathery wings alerted Richie to the presence of flying shades, like those resembling gargoyles who had been mindlessly engulfing abandoned shacks in flame. Looking outside the windows, he saw more of their ilk, as well as shades resembling the noble silhouettes of great eagles with mighty feathered wingspans, cawing pterodactyls gnashing toothy beaks while curling human-like fingers merged creepily into their wing-tips, giant bats with sleek, fox-like faces, and huge brutes who resembled gryphons with heavy avian heads and powerful lion-like paws. All of them flew with single-minded purpose toward the windows, and all had the dead look of otherworldly fog in their blank, soulless eyes.
The gargoyles loosely formed the front rank, and Richie fell back despite himself, pawing at Leon that the beasts were about to unleash another volley of hellfire, surely the tower’s crippling weakness. Instead, the waves of crimson flame broke harmlessly over the tower walls, the wood completely sealed within a special protective varnish that was all but entirely fire-proof. When the burning projectiles were lobbed at the open windows to set the sniper room itself ablaze, the heat was detected by special sensors built into the outer rim of hidden appliances encircling the tower, and powerful compressed air gusts burst forth from the rim’s open funnels, blowing the flames away. Floodlights were suddenly cast on the winged shades making their direct assault on the sniper room, aiming to perch on the windowsills and spill into the room proper to attack the resistance within. The flying things balked and shrieked under the power of the blinding light, and Leon showed Richie that his time to exact retribution had come.
“Now’s your chance, let ‘em have it!” Leon trained his magnum revolver on a wave of bat-like shades that fluttered in place, hissing like warped hummingbirds who didn’t know what to do with themselves. The fragile shadow-things were split in half down the center, wing to wing, where the bullets struck, and in seconds a deadfall of bisected things which were once shades fell into the sea air and dispersed as so much black smoke.
Richie trained his firearm on an advancing, mighty pterosaur, and pulled the trigger. It was a cathartic feeling, like snapping a rope bound around one’s wrist that was pulling them back, and time seemed to pass incrementally again as Richie swore he saw the high-caliber bullet strike the fake dinosaur in the chest and explode its fetid heart. A spray of jet-black ink flew out the back of the shade’s chest, dissipating into little wisps and droplets of liquid shadow as the torrent fell apart in the stormy winds and rain. The pterosaur itself crashed headlong into the wall beneath the window ledge, cracking its skull and burning under the directed UV light, before its ruined form peeled off of the wall and plummeted into the deep - a triple kill, it seemed.
Richie’s wrists were trembling, unused to the sensation of recoil flying through the length of his arm bones, but he stilled the sensation and focused only on aiming his next shot. An unearthly calm had come over him, one he suspected was akin to whatever Allicia felt while positioning her sniper fire at ridiculous speeds with such a casual and practiced hand that it seemed a force of nature. All six slugs were quickly spent as Richie mowed down a shade with each shot as easily as though he had been a master marksman all his life.
On the ledges beside him, Connie had withdrawn an unusual bludgeoning implement - what appeared to be a rust-flecked golf club - and swung it headlong into the face of a shade-hawk that had perched itself on his ledge. On contact with its beak, the club-head of the sporting equipment exploded into silvery light the same as the consecrated silver-infused cables had while burning the shades trying to climb them, and the bird went flying over the horizon. Elsewhere, Wolfgang had lodged a shot directly between the eyes of a black gryphon pawing at the window, rearing back its eagle’s head and screeching high-pitched death into the German man’s face. The latter stared impassively as he placed the muzzle of the luger against the mythic beast’s forehead and pulled the trigger without a twitch of the eyebrow.
Below, they could hear the sounds of shades that had managed to climb to or throw themselves onto the upper three stabilizing rings of the Sniper Tower that were unconnected to any of the blessed cables. The crackling sounds of massive electric shocks rose up to join the rumbling chaos of noises as those shades touched the upper rings and learned the hard truth of those rings having been electrified with thousands of angry volts. Blue, branching arcs of electricity spat out from those rings and jumped high enough for Richie to see them, and the charred lumps of shade flesh that were thrown from the rings with the explosive force of those shocks.
In the back of his conscious awareness, Richie could hear Jenny speaking something to Leon about the sensations and “colors” she had felt rolling in from the shades like waves. They were afraid, angry, and confused, as interpreted by the shellshocked fire and suicide survivor’s apparent aquired synthesthetic empathic perception. She could taste colors and touch sounds, read textures, and hear thoughts and feelings ever since she had passed through the Void and survived, but been changed by the experience. And what her extended mental receivers were picking up ever so clearly was that the shades were beginning to have their doubts.
Richie passed through the subsequent minutes - or maybe they could have been hours for all he knew in the haze of mixed frenzied bloodlust, fear, and cold determination - artfully striking down the enemy from afar with the gun he could already consider an extension of his body. It was a pity he would be squeamish around firearms under most other circumstances had his enemies not been soulless and thus unworthy of empathy or mercy in his eyes - and on that note he was not alone - as Leon could easily perceive that the boy was a natural sharpshooter, moral qualms and lack of experience aside.
The smells of gunpowder, hot metal, and burning shade flesh were very quickly beginning to fill the room even faster than the open windows and wailing winds could clear out the tainted air. Richie began to grow impatient when the waves of enemies seemed to slow to a crawl, and then to nary a sighting every few minutes.
“Are they backing off?” he heard Clark ask.
“Not sure.” Leon said.
He saw that Richie had begun to tremble where he stood, possessed by a dark manic energy that wanted off its leash. At some point, Richie’s fingers had slipped, and they had brushed the hot muzzle of the smoking gun and burned themselves badly.
“Rich, cool it for a minute.” Leon advised him.
When Richie gave Leon a defensive look, Leon waved him down a bit. “Remember, we’re trying to conserve rounds where we can. This room doubles as a stockpile and armory, but its resources aren’t unlimited even still.” he gestured about the chests and cabinets, some opened, some untouched, but most beginning to look emptied and barren.
“Is that what’s up with the golf club?” Richie gestured to Connie.
The prematurely-greying officer sneered at Richie. “If you must know, shades can be repelled by items of deep emotional and or spiritual significance to the user as well as they can by holy things like silver and light, or by counteracting positive energies. Something you’re attached to can act like a receptacle for those energies, just like a cross or a talismanic pendant. It just so happens I was pretty consistent at getting holes in one, thank you very much.”
“He played mini golf.” Allicia whispered to Richie, leaning into him.
Richie snickered, and Connie growled, mindlessly advancing on the younger boy with his trusty golf club waving around wildly so that Leon had to step in front of him and remind him exactly where they were and what the stakes were.
“Enough bickering, we need to stay focused, jumping down each other’s throats only creates openings for the shades to strike back. Richie, give me your gun, you need to take a break for a minute.” Leon said.
“No way! You’re the one who wanted to arm me with the damn thing in the first place!” Richie cradled his magnum protectively.
“I recognize that, but you’re the only one of us who opted not to take the euphoria drugs to guard themselves against emotional attacks, and you’re full of piss and vinegar in all the wrong ways right now. Center yourself a moment, try to think happy thoughts. Revenge alone isn’t a great long-term motivator against these things, don’t think they won’t milk that negativity for all its worth.” Leon rationalized.
In the end, Richie acquiesced.
“Fine.” he said, handing it over.
“Do something about your burnt fingertips while you’re at it, it hurts just looking at them.” Leon tossed Richie a bottle of aloe vera salve.
“More magic potions?” Richie asked.
“Not this time, no, just salve.” Leon told him. “If you want to keep up the offensive, go man that swivel gun over there by Allicia.”
Richie gestured toward what looked like the miniaturized fixed canon welded to its little iron platform built into the floor.
“Yeah, that. Fix its sights on the square up ahead, where those zoo animal rejects are congregating trying to figure out their next move.”
Richie looked through the affixed scope to see a herd of shadowy beasts like tigers, bulls, apes, bears, and other things that were beginning to take on more fantastical aspects, as had the gryphons and other flying shades before them. One shade began to resemble a gangly, towering skeleton with unnaturally long arms that dragged along the floor, while another sprung a nest of medusa coil hair from its black scaled head. They were constantly trying to change shape and adapt to their circumstances.
To evolve.
Richie thought to ask Leon about what he had seen when a solitary shade stepped through the decorative fountain and changed the crystal clear waters into that liquid darkness he had seen in the sewer pipes of Station Bay with Cuppy, but the idea was sidelined by his confusion at Leon’s orders. The pawing, pacing herd of bestial shades occupied a platform attached to the downtown area, and merged into the latticework of supports for upper decks and coastal shops.
“I can’t fire a cannonball here, I’ll just wreck more of the town!” Richie protested.
“Trust me, that’s been factored in.” Leon assured him.
Richie shrugged. It wasn’t him throwing caution to the wind, he supposed. He turned the somewhat heavy, but fluidly-rotating cannon barrel onto the platform, aiming into the center ranks of the stupefied shades. He pulled the trigger at its side, whose design reminded him of light gun cabinet games in the arcade, and felt a ffup! kick off as something silver, long, and cylindrical was launched far away into the soulless crowd. A metallic clack sounded off as the projectile clattered at those shadowed feet, and then the object exploded into a brilliant, crackling flash of light that lit up like a semicircle expanding sphere as luminous and magnificent as the sun.
The shades at ground zero or near enough to it were obliterated outright by the power of the enhanced flashbang cannon shots, and those at the edges of the flock’s formation were thrown, steaming and twisting in pain, from the platform into the sea.
“Oh fuck yes!” Richie grinned widely, excited sweat breaking out on his skin with the thrill of such destructive power to blow the monsters apart at his fingertips.
Something thumped on the roof, and Leon looked up in the midst of reloading his magnum's chamber and giving it a spin. His eyes narrowed. Either a flying shade had touched down on the wooden pyramid, or else carried and dropped off a terrestrial shade in its place. Leon heard the pacing and pawing atop the building's head, and wondered what the soulless swarms were playing at. There was no access point atop the roof, unless-
Leon's stomach dropped. "Brace yourselves!"
Heavy limbs slammed into the roof, caving in one side of the wooden pyramid and spilling the thing's form into the electrical room. They all heard the screeching static of slashed wires and fried electronics, and shrank back as the mild UV lanterns within the sniping room began to flicker and dim.
They've been distracting us with the frontal assault this whole time. Leon realized fretfully.
As he moved to ward Richie and the others away to the edges of the windows, a groaning noise creaked through the rafter boards above their heads. Leon gripped the pommel of his artisan stylized Polish sword in one hand, and the handguard of his magnum in the other, pointed upward toward the trapdoor to the attic. He expected at any second the hefty form of a bulked-up shade would crash through the boards and into the darkening room, teeth gnashing and spittle flying. Instead, streamers of liquid darkness seeped out in the shape of the trapdoor’s outline, and spilled like waterfalls from the cracks into the air above Leon’s head. The streams wove themselves together into the solid form of a humanoid shade with bulging shoulder plates and spiked bracers of sickly white bone adorning its elbows and knees. The entity dropped above Leon’s shoulders from behind his range to aim and counterattack, slamming its bent knee into the back of Leon’s neck at the base of the skull.
The circus performer gasped as he felt immense weight force his body downward onto one knee, the vertebrae in his neck making unnerving creaking noises that told him his neck had nearly been broken by the blow. The shade landed and straddled Leon’s back, claws raised high overhead, ready to finish Leon off before the stunned onlookers could react or position themselves to defend their nominal leader. Leon drew his szczerbiec blade by its bouquet-shaped grip, grunting as he hefted it up with himself in a forced spring, and swung the sword swiftly and violently in a wide semicircle arc to cleave the shade at his back.
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Richie watched with horrified eyes as the living shadow flattened out its form into a two-dimensional immaterial silhouette with no more true form than the shade of a swaying bough of an overhead tree. The fluttering shadow separated itself in half at the waist before Leon’s sword even struck it, and the ceremonial Polish blade passed through nothing and to no effect. As the shade reattached its halves into a single body, Leon’s overzealous swing born from that one moment of panic was enough to twist himself off balance, and expose his back to the monster again. It flew, weightless, back a small distance, warping its right arm into a boneless, slithering tentacle whose end extremity narrowed into a perfect spear-point. The dark tendril lashed forward, making little elastic waves along its shape, and the stabbing end embedded itself to the right of the small of Leon’s back, behind his waist.
Richie shrank back from small flecks of blood flung his way as the shade’s tentacle pierced straight through Leon’s lower belly, just below and off to the side of where his belly button would be, and kept going, stopping just a foot shy of striking Richie’s own face. The elongated fluidic limb had impaled Leon from behind, inclined up at an angle that lifted the circus performer off his feet a few inches into the air. Someone - either Allicia or Jenny - screamed, and Richie heard Connie shriek Leon’s name in shock and horror.
There was an agonized grimace on Leon’s face, but his eyes had yet to cloud over with the shroud of coming death. He grabbed the end of the tendril that had burst forth from his waist and yanked it, stretching like a giant piece of rubbery calamari, to his face, where he bit the tip savagely in his perfect teeth. The shade that had run Leon through shrieked angrily, and retracted its tendril forcefully from Leon’s clamped jaws, shredding the end, and back out the small tunnel it had bored through the man’s body.
Leon, entry wound and exit wound spouting fountains of blood, whirled on the shade, twisting his upper body before his feet even touched the floor, and raised his szczerbiec straight up over his head, growling from the further stress this exerted on his impaled body. With a protracted warcry, he brought the sword down with all of his strength, cleaving straight down the shade’s body from the center of its head out the bottom of its groin, hard enough that the blade buried itself a moderate depth in the wooden floor. Either half of the vertically-split shade tumbled apart and dispersed into fading black mist.
Then the lights went out entirely.
“Don’t forget your positions!” Leon snapped at the snipers manning the windows. “Nuchi, I want you and an escort with the melee ability to back you up in the attic, get the power back on.”
“Lee, we need to give you a potion, you’re-” Connie approached Leon.
Leon roughly waved him back. “We don’t have time right now, mind your own business.”
“Your guts are going to fall out if you keep working!” Jenny shrieked.
“Then I’ll stuff them back in.” Leon nodded grimly.
Clark stepped forward, pulling iron knuckles with protruding spikes lining their front from his pockets. “I’m a decent boxer, I’ll head up with Nuch.” he volunteered.
“Excellent, get going.” Leon nodded him and Nuchi onward. “If there are any more shades up there, withdraw and we’ll swivel the flashbang cannons in here to clear them out.”
Leon grimaced, eyes squeezed shut as he folded over and clutched his bleeding waist, inflamed from the effort of talking and barking out emergency orders.
With the lights momentarily out, the shades scaling the walls were free of the cascading UV light blocking their ascent, and Wolfgang’s grunt of pain alerted the group to a surprise attack at the window. A large, gorilla-like shade had partially entered the window with one leg inside the room, and its huge hands gripping either end of the frame to support itself. Its ape-like jaws had closed down hard over Wolfgang’s forearm, and although the teeth were mostly blunt save for a pair of large pointed incisors, they were clamping down with enough force to start audibly crushing bone into pulp. The flesh of Wolfgang’s arm bulged with the strain and began bruising purple, and a few streamers of blood began to leak down from areas where the skin was breaking.
The large German only grit his teeth and blocked out the pain, engaging powerful thighs as he forced himself to stand tall, draping the false gorilla over his back by its stubborn mouth-hold on his arm. He rammed his shoulder on the bound side of his body into the corner of the open window frame, slamming the ape against the unyielding wall and partially forcing its jaws open and its teeth dislodged. Twisting again so that he could get an arm pointed up at the beast, Wolfgang jammed his luger’s muzzle down the shade’s throat and fired. Black blood exploded out the back of the monster’s neck, and Wolfgang gave another strained cry as he shoved the dying beast out through the open window. They all heard its form crash into and knock several other climbing shades off that wall-face as it plummeted to its death.
Clark and Nuchi fell back from the attic door, pursued by flailing black scythe-limbs on the ends of shadowy tentacles, and Clark was forced to roll backward to avoid smacking the base of his skull. Without needing to be told, Jenny swiveled one of the flashbang cannons inward and fired a shot into the attic itself, and the tremendous crack of sound and flash of blinding light disintegrated whatever foul things those tentacles were attached to instantly. Ears still ringing, the two repelled men plugged their ears with orange foam wedges in the event another round was needed, and scrambled back up the drop ladder into the claustrophobic workspace of the combination attic-generator room.
A shade with a long, flexible weasel-like body and matching pointy teeth side-wound its way across the window nearest Wolfgang, taking him for weakened prey. Jenny was at the huge man’s side, and where her PTSD-shaken hands fumbled her gun, she instead locked eyes with the mustelid horror and held two fingers to either temple. A ringing noise like high blood pressure in Richie’s eardrums seemed to rise, and the shade’s head began to vibrate and shake as it emitted a terrible screech of pain. Jenny finally squeezed her eyes shut, a vein visibly bulging out in the side of her head from some great mental effort, and the shade’s head exploded into black-painted viscera with a pop like a balloon pierced by a throwing dart.
Evidently, Jenny had come out of the Void with more than just nightmarish memories, and Richie could spare only a second or two in the chaos to wonder if others who had made the transition between worlds may have been touched by unknown powers like that in some way or another. He only had this much time to blindly guess however before Leon grabbed him roughly by the shoulder and pushed him toward one of the supply chests.
“Arm yourself for close-quarters combat, don’t bother with guns till we’ve got these fuckers off our backs and Nuchi has the backup power going.” Leon said, clutching at the hole in his front, blood seeping between his fingers slowly but surely.
Richie nodded hastily, and kicked open the lock of a stereotypical-looking treasure chest, not bothering to see if it was already unlocked or not - there wasn’t time to dilly-dally. Within was an assemblage of daggers and long knives, blunt maces and flails, short swords, and polearms like halberds and executioner-styled axes. Richie’s eyes fell immediately on a classical European sword of a similar make to the Excalibur replica he had conjured to his hands while fighting the Phantom Pain at the threshold of the Backyards proper.
Richie took the smooth black grip of the longsword just below the ornate crossguard, and lifted its blade free of the trunk, admiring the sheen of the keen, razor-sharp edge on either side of its length. A shade like the one that had attacked Richie was closing in from the side, and Richie took a slash at it, only to shrink back with dismay to find that the morbid shadow figure had deformed its body out of the way, narrowing its waist freakishly rail-thin, and retaliating with a swipe of claws that caught Richie at his side above the ribs, drawing shallow cuts that made him wince and stumble back. The sword felt unbalanced in his hands, the length of the blade too heavy and cumbersome for his inexperienced arms to guide properly, leaving the mythic-looking sword little more than a crude iron bar in his hands. An overhead chop, like the kind Leon had used to bisect the shade that had stuck him through the back, felt like it had far too much wind-up time, and telegraphed itself with painful transparency. The blade buried itself in the boards at the shade’s feet as it hovered backward in that half-incorporeal state they shifted between to dodge and attack as they pleased, and no matter how Richie tugged, he found that ‘Excalibur’ was as hopelessly trapped in the floor as its legendary namesake counterpart had been magically lodged in its stone, awaiting the arrival of the future King Arthur.
The shade threw a backhand slap at Richie on an extending, whip-like arm, and Richie felt pain explode in his ear and temple as he was flung back, stars appearing before his eyes.
Richie didn’t get it - he could use Excalibur just fine when he fought the Phantom Pain!
Except -
That was just something I cooked up with my imagination. It was just some generic baseball bat, and I was close enough to the Backyards or whatever to believe it into something I could use. Of course I could make use of any weapon I want in a lucid dream facsimile. But Tide Town is a real, physical location all its own, and I’ve never used a sword a day in my life, of course I’m going to suck at it. Richie realized with inward-facing embarrassment at his own lapse in logic.
Wolfgang, his Luger spent along with the precious seconds needed to reload it, tagged in to save Richie from being pounced by the shade that had just knocked him upside the head. The huge blond man grabbed the monster from behind just as it resolidified its body into a semi-biological shape that it could attack with again, and roughly pinned its head at the crown and jaw as though he were going to put the wraith in a headlock. Then Wolfgang soundly snapped the shade’s neck so completely that the thing’s head tilted on its shoulder at a sharp, sickening diagonal angle. The shade collapsed onto its knees and was gone into mist before it could slump the rest of the way facedown on the floor.
Another shade at Wolfgang’s back took this opportunity to pay a sneak attack unto a sneak attack, and the jaguar-like form gave a shrill shriek as it pounced into Wolfgang and crushed the both of them straight through the entry trapdoor into the Sniper Tower, smashing the hatch to splinters and spilling both combatants down the immense plunge of the tower’s well with a rising echo that ended in a great splash - followed by the sounds of struggling within the watery pit.
“Gang!” Connie cried out, crowbarring a fluid shade whose form was still vacillating off of himself with his lucky golf club before impulsively jumping down the shaft after his comrade. Seconds later, Richie heard him splash down too.
Something dropped down onto the floor from above, startling Richie. He whirled to see that it was a dreamcatcher with colorful beads and feathers woven into it - a piece of arts & crafts that Nuchi had dropped like a bomber’s payload from the attic above. Where the dreamcatcher landed, a glowing silvery dome of light exploded outward from its edges, swirling in the shape of the threaded twine at the talisman’s center. The edges of the protective barrier forced the encroaching shades out of the sniper room as the darkness was temporarily banished, and Richie heard the hooping and hollering of the bestial things as they were shoved backward out the windows to fall into the sea once again. A brave shade still struggling to hold its ground within the light made another blind swipe at Leon, who stayed diligently out of its range, and Richie rushed to the wounded man’s aid.
Richie threw a powerful full-body roundhouse kick into the side of the shadowy humanoid’s head, slamming its skull into a corner of the room. Leon used the break in their deadly dance to slice his blade upward through the thing’s neck, decapitating it and partially cleaving through the edge of a window frame. Black blood spurted from the empty neck hole and wafted away as transient black smoke before it had time to fall back to the ground as liquid drops.
Even so, Richie felt the top of his foot where he had kicked the shade go cold and numb, and that wearying sensation shoot up his leg like a jolt of frozen electricity. He clutched at his leg as he struggled to maintain his balance.
“Thanks.” Leon huffed. “Be careful though - remember, they can drain your spirit right through your limbs and any other part of your body they get to directly touch.”
Richie propped himself up against a wall as he waited for life and sensation to return to his drained leg, and as the headless body of the shade evaporated under the talismanic light of Nuchi’s deployed dreamcatcher.
“About that.” Richie asked, recalling how Kokumo, Capoeira master extraordinaire, was able to consistently and rapidly crush shades literally underfoot, protected only by white bandage wrappings, without losing so much as a skip in her step.
Leon already knew that Richie was going to ask why only Kokumo was able to fight - and kill - the shades completely unarmed with no ill effect.
“Because some idiots in this world are incurable pollyannas who dance in the puddles when the day rains on their parade.” Leon shook his head with a grudging smile of repressed admiration. “Now, get me one of those vials-” Leon asked for a health potion.
Those who remained in the tower looked on in horror to realize that where the supply chests those elixirs were stored in had been set, there were now only outlines painted in accumulated dust.
“Clever dicks.” Leon groaned, realizing that some of the shades had had the foresight to deprive the tower of what emergency supplies they could.
The monstrosities were soulless, but they weren’t mindless - at least, not all of them were mindless.
Elsewhere, shades were scaling one of the iron bulkheads blocking the way the rigged evacuation transport ferries had gone to carry their passengers to the relative safety of the upper bays. The fiendish things scrambled with the scraping and snapping of ravenous badgers leaving clawed streaks in the metal surface. Beyond the gate, the ferries would have passed over a circle of stone rising out of the sea, its center submerged beneath the waves like an aquatic hole in a giant concrete donut. This fortified structure concealed the control room that operated the trawl system, and provided an extra security checkpoint to ward off shades, equipped with outward and inward facing UV light cannons of the same kind that armored the Sniper Tower. At the front of the stone circle was a gateway that opened like a seesaw rather than a direct door, and which admitted the ferries into the defense circle area only for maintenance and cargo checks. During these lookovers, the seesaw - which was a water channel on a hinge where the river connected to the incline linking the upper bay and the lower sea - was lifted, creating the opening. The workers of the checkpoint couldn’t access their stone fort from this way, and instead commuted to work by way of secret underwater passages.
When it was time to evacuate, the seesaw swung down and connected the diagonal bridge, like a missing piece from the bottom of a slide being fit back in. The water flowed freely again, and the hook and chain hauling system was affixed to the ferries to elevate them to their rapture in the Tide Town sky. As of right now, the seesaw had been lifted again, severing the direct link to the upper bay to further stimy shade efforts to reach the refugee stations. Even still, the spiritually-dead brutes continued their climb, those that were too far on the outskirts to be seduced by the delicious smell of the cortisol chum that poured from the Sniper Tower. Rifle fire from the men stationed at the circular checkpoint was ineffective from behind a giant steel wall.
When the first shade reached the top of the gate, however, it was greeted with a pair of almost-bare feet planted in its squishy face of textured shadow. The shade fell from the top of the bulkhead with Kokumo - who had been patiently waiting atop the wall for trouble to find her - riding its falling form down to the docks below like an improvised safety cushion to absorb the impact. The shade was imprinted hard into the wooden planks of the floor with Kokumo’s high-altitude dropkick finishing its voyage with the heels of her feet planted in the creature’s chest. The touchdown caved the shade’s stomach inward and ruptured it, splattering black ichor, and folded the thing inward like it had had its spine snapped from compression. The boards beneath them cracked and cratered inward a bit, nearly demolishing that square of the deck down through the bottom to open a window into the bay below.
Kokumo chuckled. “And she sticks the landing, what a perfect performance!”
Growling, more shade-kind circled her, arms elongating into noodly tentacles that shaped themselves into crude ax-heads and pitchfork prongs at the end. Slithering hissing noises worked up from the backs of their frigid throats, and their deadlight eyes were like glowing circles of fog surrounding Kokumo.
The dance battler smirked and scratched the tip of her nose, not fazed in the slightest.
"You wanna boogie with me? Then let's dance!" she offered a gleeful, deadly invitation.
The things advanced on her. She swayed like a steel reed around and under the curves and lunges of their tendrilled attacks, blades and spikes missing her by inches. Heels and tops of tanned feet flew, crushing tentacles, chests, legs, and skulls of solidified shadow. She fluidly wove in and out of elaborate handstands, backflips, and crazy acrobatics that made it look uncannily as though she were breakdancing all over her enemies.
A roundhouse kick caved in the side of one shade's head, an outward spinning crescent kick broke another's back from behind, an ax kick snapped a neck - very quickly, Kokumo's feet were dyed black with the blood of many shades.
"Your problem is you've got no rhythm." Kokumo waggled a lecturing finger at them.
The inky black things were actually hesitating, a few of them hesitantly beginning to back off. Kokumo folded over backward, walking on her feet and hands with belly facing up toward the night sky, back arched like an inverted cat's.
"It's a beautiful moon out tonight, but it's not the eclipse quite yet. Come back when you're actually ready to take things a bit more seriously." Kokumo giggled.
Her own pool of shadow beneath her began to ripple and bubble. A shade had occupied it, as had the first arrivals who attacked Richie and Leon back in the medical room. Spear-like fingers were getting ready to explode out of the shadowed circle beneath Kokumo, to impale her through the back from below.
When these spikes jutted forward, they hit nothing - Kokumo was engaged in another handstand.
"That was sooo predictable!" she chided, then dropped a kick onto the exposed shade, driving his face through the boards.
His kin flattened into shadows and swam about Kokumo, circling like immaterial terrestrial sharks.
"Shadow Dance!" Kokumo declared as the monsters leapt at her out of the dock.
No matter how they twisted, warped, and distorted their bodies like shadows, Kokumo was three steps ahead of them at every turn, contorting around their attacks herself.
In under two minutes, all but a single shade disintegrated at Kokumo's feet.
The last remained hidden in its flattened form, devoid of mass and substance. Kokumo stood in front of it, arms folded.
"That trick's not going to work on me, buddy!" she grinned.
Kokumo plunged her hand into the dock, grabbed the edge of the circular shadow, and peeled it off of the boards like a sticky pancake.
If the shade could speak, it would cry foul, that it was at base in their little game of tag. And Kokumo would have told it to give her a break - that this game was rigged to begin with.
No such words passed between them. Instead, Kokumo just sank a side kick into the shade's stomach, sailing it over the rail, off the deck, and into the sea.
She smacked her hands against each other, dusting them off. The storm rain washed the black blood coating her feet away, and she watched it seep through the cracks, draining away into the endless ocean.
"Good exercise. Huh?" Kokumo regarded a thick, heavy fog that was beginning to flow in, flooding from the ruptured dams of crackling purple thunderheads blanketing the sea.
The cold mist signalled the end of the rain and the streaks of lighting being wept from the sky, and felt like a stage play intermission ushering in a tense dramatic silence.
The fog crept over Tide Town, and began to crawl over the base of the Sniper Tower. The naval guards posted there sucked in startled hisses of air as they disappeared into the white blanket. The combatants remaining in the tower precipice itself were not immediately aware of the encroaching fog. They were still too busy on their own front.
Alicia was struck in the back by an extending shade kick that had rocketed in from the window at her back, one of the ghoulish things finally managing to thread the needle around the checkered infusions of holy silver mixed into the cables. The kick carried the immaculate sniper across the length of the entire room, chucking her out the window.
"You swine!" Leon roared at the offending wraith.
Richie, his hands guarded by protective silver gauntlets Leon had given him to protect himself from the creatures' contact soul-drain, raced to the window the girl had been flung out of. Looking out frantically, he could not see her, but recognized the swell of fog rising and falling in round waves below them. Alicia seemed to have vanished into the fog.
As the shade who had kicked Alicia out of the tower crouched in the windowsill, it was met with instant retaliation. The sniper girl's feet planted themselves in the shade's back, and drove its body to the floor as she flung herself back in, surfing its body across the boards. Whipping backward, Richie saw a grappling hook cable retract to a belt across the girl's waist, and realized she had swung herself around the tower before she could hit the bay. Alicia pressed the barrel of her rifle into the back of the shade's skull and fired.
Leon lashed his whip about the arm of another climber that had breached the tower. It wound tight in a spiked coil around the limb of the fiend, then yanked hard as Leon spun round and round like a human centrifuge, taking the snagged shade along for the ride.
Letting a length of whip go slack suddenly, Leon slammed the captured shade's face and chest into a sharp corner of a cabinet.
"I call that the Polish Whip." Leon gave Richie a proud smirk, accompanied by a thumbs up.
"I don't care!" Richie snapped incredulously.
A shade had stretched up at Richie's back. He whirled round and knocked its head clean off with a solid uppercut.
All three shades died and broke apart into mist.
"More importantly, do something about that wound, it hurts just looking at it!" Richie winced at Leon's impaled waist, still bleeding profusely.
"Not much I can do, is there?" Leon pointed back.
He clutched his waist. His bravado aside, it was clear he was hurt badly, and at risk of bleeding out at this rate. His composure would have to hold until he could actually afford to take a break and patch himself up. He just had to hold out for a while, that was all there was to it.
Richie looked back down the tower walls at the fog. It didn't look or feel like the ether fog he had unknowingly encountered twice now back in Station Bay, the fog neither he nor his friends waiting back home realized was creation itself in the form of particulate clouds. This was just 'natural' sea vapor. All the same, he didn't like it. The fog carried an ominous edge to it, as if synchronized with the unnatural quiet that had suddenly come over Tide Town.
The others in the tower seemed to share his sense that something was wrong. They guarded themselves warily.
As if to confirm the chills going down their spines, the animalistic shades at the dock platforms - the lions and tigers and bears - shrank back into the sea fog and disappeared. The trickling bubbles of a shade dolphin below the waves stopped. A shade elephant locked its malevolent, pale glowing eyes with Richie's, and turned back into the fog, trudging unevenly along its way, trunk of shadow swaying with its gigantic steps until it and they were gone.
"Did they just cut their losses and escape?" Richie asked, suspecting the answer and not wanting to hear it.
"No…" Leon said.
A low creaking noise echoed up with the sounds of massive water displacement, and a dark shadow floated into view through the fog. A tattered, frayed white sail adorned a cracked and waterlogged mast. The ruined bannisters of a revived shipwreck were strangled by coils of dripping seaweed. A fatal gash drawn in the side of the ship's hull forever marked where it had run aground of a jagged coral reef and sunk itself. The discolored, pulpy figurehead of a silken-haired mermaid looked now instead like a drowned ghoul with spaghetti-like ropes of slimy dreadlocks. Her eyes, the paint cracked and washed away, looked like those of the shades - dimly glowing, fog-like, full of dull, unnatural soulless deadlight.
Shapes moved about the splintered deck of the ghost ship they had brought to the surface. As the vessel pulled in next to the bridge side of the Sniper Tower, Richie and the others all saw the decayed faces of drowned sailors, their flooded corpses raised from Davy Jones' Locker like inglorious skin suits to the shades who had possessed them.
Cracked, rusted cannons that shouldn't have physically been able to fire even had the gunpowder not been long ago soaked launched heavy cannonballs into the side of the tower. The explosions rocked the deck, sending earthquake-like tremors up the legs of all those in the Tower's keep.
"There goes our UV light strategy, even if we get the power back on." Leon grumbled.
"What? Why?!" Richie balked.
"Using disposable host bodies like that, they can protect themselves against their natural weaknesses. They get stronger by anchoring themselves to physical bodies, more concrete - closer to being real." Leon explained.
Grappling hooks flew up the sides of the tower and lodged themselves deeply into the walls. A thunderous collective warcry, like the jeering of frenzied pirates or vikings, rose up from the ship in the sea. Cutlasses came off of waist sashes, and pistol shots were loaded.
"As you can see, being in a human proxy body makes them smarter too." Leon announced calmly as he returned his whip as a coil to his waist.
"Then why do you sound so calm?" Richie asked.
Leon smirked as he drew his own sword. "Because they just got a lot easier to hit directly."
The undead sailors threw themselves up the walls, clambering and hollering, baying for blood. In the thunderous uproar of metallic clatters and wild gun rounds, one specific sound distinguished itself from all the others, even as the unreal panorama quieted to a whisper and time seemed to freeze in place all around Richie.
We're coming.
Richie heard their voices. His dragons.
Walking in a daydream on sleepy instinct as he had when he first entered the wandering corridor to the Backyards, Richie went to the windowsill. Soaked zombies moved in slow motion all around him, but none could make contact with his body.
As the shade ship passed under the ledge of the tower window, Richie stood tall and relaxed, the air cool on his face and fresh in his lungs.
He walked off the edge and fell in a straight plunge for the deck of the possessed vessel the shades had commandeered. As the winds parted around his falling form, he cocked a fist at the ready, holy gauntlet gleaming in the moonlight like a comet dropped from the heavens.
The shades made things a lot easier - just re-sink the ship.
His literal leap of faith made its success known as his azure dragons, enlarged to great size like the mythological guardian beasts they represented, swirled around his freefall like a giant glowing coil of ethereal DNA.
They combined again with their host as all three entities struck the deck together, and the blue-white glow expanded and engulfed Tide Town, leaving no sound, nought but the settled waves.