This way of movement cost Emika a significant amount of energy. She kept it up as long as she could — in fact, longer than she could, judging from the headache that started piercing her mind after having focused on moving her proliferations non-stop for almost half an hour.

Finally, her concentration slipped as she was still going in full force, taking a shortcut to flatten a curve in the road. Somehow, she’d missed the empty shell of an abandoned stone shed in her path, and smashed right into it. Dust shot up in clouds as she lost all momentum, destroying the walls, then shooting back out a short distance on the other side.

Now she just laid there, all bruised and beaten up, breathing heavily. She tasted the brick refuse on her tongue. Then, she tasted the blood as it dripped its way inside her mouth from her broken lip.

This was her limit.

On one hand, she made a considerable distance. Probably dozens of kilometres. At some point, she’d even heard the sounds of the motorcycle ahead, seen the flames of the weasel blaze on the horizon. The issue was, she had no way to know how much further they’d go.

“What a disaster…” she mumbled between her breaths.

“InDeed,” a familiar voice suddenly issued out from behind her. She was too tired to turn around, but knew who it was.

“You again,” she whispered, eyes unfocused. She tried to bring his existence back into her tired mind. “Ah… Thanks for your help last time. It worked.”

“I can seE that,” the ghost chuckled, as he shifted through Emika’s head and suddenly became visibly in front of her — poking out from the ground neck upward, same eye-level as her.

“God, don’t do that. Super creepy,” Emika protested in a weak tone.

“I saw you take root! In front of Durand’s prEmise.”

Upon hearing that, she closed her eyes. “Thanks for the reminder,” she muttered and proceeded to gather her last bit of strength to grow a massive amount of roots from her body to take nutrients from the surrounding earth. “Still have to get used to all this.”

He simply smiled at her.

“Why are you helping me again, anyway? I appreciate it, but… You still haven’t fetched anything in return from me. I’m not going to regret this, am I?”

This time, she felt the effect from the roots even stronger. It was like they were pumping life energy right into her brain, muscles, and deep inside her, within this rich forest full of life. She could only imagine what the effect would be like in a proper, old mixed forest, instead of a monoculture tree farm like this.

“You happen to alreAdy be attempting to do what I was going to ask you,” the ghost mused. “Funnily enOugh.”

“Yeah, sounds very funny.”

The earthy smell of the forest and the gentle, cool breeze made her calm down from the incredible exertion she had just had. It felt like staying still and taking root was what she was always meant to do. Maybe that’s what her retirement would look like, one day.

And yet, soon — as soon as possible — she’d need to continue on. Continue to Melisande. Her only hope was that, somehow, Melisande was able to hold her own against Maxime for at least a while. A brutal, forlorn hope.

The ghost’s flickering expression turned gentle for a bit. “Humans are quite aRrogant, aren’t they?” he said. “I bet Durand has absolutely no clue you are already ouT. It must not even have occurred to hIm.”

“Weren’t you a human once, too?”

“Yes. But noT any more. They make quite certain one knows the diFference once they exclude you.”

Emika gave a weak smile. “That much we can agree on.”

“He is so arroGant, he doesn’t even see me as a threat. And I mean, I am not one,” the ghost then continued. “Ghosts canNot impact the world physically at aLL.”

The white noise around him flared up for a moment. “I bEt he wouLd never assume I’d be his unDoing by helpinG you ouT. Because he doesn’T see yOu as a thrEAt, either.”

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

“The noise is getting very strong. Can you, like, do something about it? Hard to follow you right now. Plus, I’m tired.”

He closed his eyes, pulling his brows together in a display of focus. A few seconds went by, then his entire body snapped like an old CRT screen that had just been turned off. When he came back, he was much clearer to see.

“Takes me a lot of effort to manifest this clearly,” he explained, his voice now sounding like an old recording, without the glitches and stops. “But I will do it, courtesy to you. What I was saying was, he doesn’t see any of us as a threat. And he has his little idea in his head of making the world a better place by being nice to monsters. ‘Being nice’ meaning not to kill them. And, maybe his ancestors had a point. Possibly, his grandfather or great-great-grandfather, they actually believed in it, and were trying to barter the best bargain for a monster when the world still actively despised and eyed them.”

He glanced at Emika for a moment, then shrugged. “Not that I’d know, I’m not that old. What I do know is that Maxime Durand is nothing like that, and he’d probably kill left and right if he didn’t feel an obligation to his family’s tradition. After all, back when he and I were on a mission, he had no qualms at all to leave me to die when I got injured as we fled from a dragon.”

“What?” Emika gasped out.

“I’m a Spite Spirit. I hated the way I lost my life, which is why I still exist even now. That is, until I see him suffer enough to regret, or die. And you are helping me do this. I’m rooting for you,” he said, chuckling as he made a gesture towards the ground.

“Damn, that must suck.”

“Not at all. I was always a spiteful person. And, being a mage, I knew how to become a Spite Spirit quite well. That’s what I spent my remaining few minutes doing back then.”

“I’m sorry this happened to you,” Emika murmured, slowly pushing herself up from the ground, snapping some of the smaller roots out directly, while the others vanished into ash. “I don’t know if I can take revenge for you or anything. I do have my own reasons.”

“I understand, and I’m okay. Just see me as someone who watches this unfold with great pleasure. With a certain outcome I would like to see. But, alas, things don’t always go as we want them to.”

“What’s your name?” Emika finally asked, readying to give chase again.

“A name is one of the sacrifices one has to make in order to become a Spite Spirit. Immortality rarely comes cheap, even if it’s makeshift. If you will, just remember me as someone who tried to help.”

Emika nodded. “I will. I have to go. Goodbye.”

Then, she launched herself backwards.

Churning through the woods was almost as easy again as it had been when she started. The amount of strength she could absorb from the ground was massive. In addition, she had gotten a very good hang of it, now almost completely unimpeded by terrain, the cognitions to pull herself forward slowly edging themselves into her brain through relentless repetition.

That said, she just really hoped that losing those few minutes didn’t make the difference between life and death. For a brief second, the image of a spilled out Melisande flashed in front of her eyes, and it rendered Emika’s heart asunder.

She needed to be faster.

It was then, after about twenty more minutes of travel, that Emika finally came to see the burning weasel at the end of the street. It was still running after its owner, who had apparently pulled ahead with the motorcycle. Emika couldn’t believe her eyes.

The ghost was right. Maxime was just that unbelievably arrogant. To allow himself to split off from this creature, he must have been seeing anything else around him as mere defenseless maggots.

Emika had no intention to fight this being, and she hoped she could just move past it. However, she wasn’t so lucky. The moment the weasel noticed her approach and turned around, her field of view was completely swallowed up by flames.

Crashing to the ground, she tried to see what happened, but all that she could perceive were her deadwood proliferations on fire, while the living juniper branches resisted for now due to containing some amount of water still.

Amidst the flames, staring at her angrily, explosions of flames bursting out from it fire left and right, the weasel rushed forward in zigzag, then lashed out with a cone of fire against her. Emika barely managed to grow a wooden shield in time. Embers and ash flew by her as she ducked, continuously growing the shield back as it was being devoured by the attack.

When she felt her focus getting low, she launched herself into the air again. Quickly figuring out the being’s current location, she stomped down on it from above with a gigantic elephant’s foot worth of tree mass — so large she actually figured it impossible to dodge, but the creature somehow managed to… weasel its way out.

Angry at the pun that had popped up in her own head the moment she saw it happen, she lashed down with another stomp, but again, the critter dodged. A new sudden burst of fire unleashed from its mouth caught her mid-air, strong enough to launch her back, and this time, she didn’t have the focus up to protect herself. The fire hit her skin, partly burning through to her flesh.

Pain shot through her, she let out a gasp, vision turning blurry. Every single spruce she crashed through snapped apart on contact until she landed on the ground, all air being blast out of her lungs.

This wasn’t going to work. She couldn’t lose time while Melisande was facing Maxime alone.

Sacrifices had to be made.

And with that, Emika got up, conjured another, thicker shield from her wooden hand, and approached the weasel head-on.

It was time to see what would give out first. The forest inside her, or the familiar’s sea of flames.

Amidst the next burst, Emika simply persisted onwards. There was no turning back.