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the nearest ones by lunging with her sword. “How long does it take for them to snap out of it?”
    Sekiro hunched her shoulders. “Long explanation short: some never do. It’s very sad.”
    Roxie sheathed her sword and held up her hands unthreateningly. She’d have to remember how to detach her shield later. “Hey! Everyone, stop!” Shouting didn’t help her headache, but she had to make herself heard. If these ghosts were still people, then there was no point in attacking them with her sword. The shadow people directly in front drifted within arm’s reach and kept creeping closer, their gliding footsteps silent. “I said stop! Please! What do you all want?” She pressed her back and wings into the lighthouse. The nearest shadow people reached out for her with arms that rose like black flags billowing in a sudden breeze. Roxie drew her arms to her chest.
    One of them whispered, “Energy.” Its voice drew out the last syllable and sent shivers up and down Roxie’s spine.
    Roxie swiped at the nearest amorphous arms. Her hand went right through them, but those she swiped through stuck like a squid’s tentacles latching onto prey. She let out a cry of alarm as she tried to shake off their freezing grip. The shadow people touching her stopped moving and went rigid. Their forms solidified, filled out, and became detailed to the point where their clothes were visible and faces readable, fingers clamped around her forearm. At the same time, it felt like she was being drained of energy--not the power that made her a fully-realized Aigis, but the energy that kept her alive.
    The people that had robbed her of energy let go, grinning with mouths stretching wider than their eyes. Something wasn’t right with their eyes as well, but she couldn’t focus her blurred vision on them. What she was able to notice is that the energized people came from varying eras. One was a Native American, another a Colonial man, and the third someone from the early 1900’s. They let go.
    Roxie clutched her frozen arm to her chest. She could still move her fingers, but slowly.
    “Roxie, move! They don’t care if their greed kills you. Just get away from them!” Sekiro fluttered into the air, but stayed just above Roxie’s head. None of the shadow people’s gazes followed the Numina.
    Guarding her face behind her fists, Roxie barreled forward at superhuman speed. She knocked over the people who’d stolen her energy but passed right through the shadow figures, and just like before, their limbs latched on to her. There had to be hundreds of them. Their touch intensified her nausea, making flying out of the question. It felt like she was wrapped in ice.
    Once she broke out of the crowd on the other side, she noticed her body was lost in shadow from upper arm to her ankles, making out her ornate boots through small gaps in the dozens of shadow tendrils clinging to her. She slowed her stride as she tried to wrench herself free, flailing her arms and lunging this way and that, but it worked as well as trying to detach her own shadow. She turned and walked backwards, the tendrils hindering her no more than if she’d changed sleeping positions under her sheets. The shadow people followed her at a walk, which was faster than their creeping pace from when she’d first seen them. Hundreds of black shadow ropes stretched between her and them, and they didn’t waver or wobble. She reflexively swiped at the elongated shadows, but her arm passed through every last one. Desperate, she drew her sword and swung upwards and her weapon swished through air.
    “Keep running, Roxie,” Sekiro said from above her. “The more distance between you and them, the better.” She alighted next to her and, grabbing ahold of one of Roxie’s arms, began prying off the shadows with her free hand as she walked with her.
    The tendrils lengthened in Sekiro’s grip and reattached to Roxie, filling her with fresh waves of icy numbness, and she gasped for air as she