Before Adria and La’Var, the stricken spirit, a thing that broke the natural laws, that towered over any other living thing, and whose claws could cause a hardened warrior to shiver, melted into a pitiful silvery liquid. Sizzling, it flowed down the rocks, towards the two. There was no way this wasn’t the defeated remains of a crooked creature. It couldn’t be what La’Var feared.

Yet La’Var pulled her away from the spirit matter with a mean tug and his eyes shattered any prayers she could’ve had.

“Say goodbye to fighting these spirits. They’re a side dish,” La’Var explained. “We’re dealing with a Possessed Savage now and there are no textbook guides on how to win against it. We have to figure it out…”

The glimmer in his eye told Adria he’d done so before, but had barely come out of it alive. And this time would be different.

Adria’s hands itched, whispering for her to strike while there was time. She craved the element of surprise and not to, ever again, end up on a fine line between life and death. But even with the ghosts half alive at best, the thought of inflicting suffering made her skin crawl, and wisdom kept her hands in place.

If I attack now, I’ll end up only making it worse, she knew.

Adria, La’Var and the looming spirits watched. The pitiful silvery liquid--which couldn’t be anything, but the remains of a defeated spirit, incapable of causing any more harm--picked up from the ground and shifted into blobs. They merged.

What had been the remnants of the ghost’s legs formed a dark steel glove. It was the size of a merchant’s caravan. This glove held a shining steel sword. Inscriptions of skulls and ancient texts lined the blade. It wasn’t the type of sword needed to defeat Adria and La’Var: it was a sword for slaughtering giants and tearing apart castles.

The hovering weapon was trapped by a circle of human-sized eyes. All of which looked down upon Adria and La’Var.

There was a moment of silence.

As Adria’s fear and anticipation peaked, her breath stopped. Episodes from Black Ice Bastion flashed when she was mastering the art of the blade and painting the walls crimson.

Wind threw Adria’s hair up.

The Savage’s sword swung down.

Adria and La’Var jumped in opposite directions, and the blade crashed into where they’d stood. The ground shook. Pebbles shot out, and a cloud of dust kicked up.

The floating hand gripped the sword and pulled it out of the ground.

The hunter shook salt over his weapon and tossed the condiment to Adria, who grabbed it out of the air and enhanced her bone dagger. She pocketed the salt and through the veil of dust in front, four spirits emerged, swinging claws and rusty steel. They were teasing. They weren’t attacking. Just yet.

Adria’s heart stopped and her teeth pierced her lip as she jumped to the side. The Savage’s immense sword missed her by a few paces, but the shaking of the ground tripped her, and the soaring rubble stabbed into her forearms. It burned like hell. Crimson flowed down the sides of her arms, adding to the layer of soot and dust.

Adria hissed through her teeth. La’Var looked down with a frown. He winked at her.

Follow your lead, she thought. Got it.

As the ghastly sword lifted out of the rocks, the hunter lunged, stabbing and slicing at the spirits on the ground. Adria got up and followed. Something flashed in the corner of her vision. There wasn’t time to look around. If the blurry thing in her eyes would stab her in the back, then so be it -- she had spirits to slice.

Once one turned Savage, the ghost’s principles were forgotten faster than the Twenty Gods. Two faced La’Var. Two dealt with Adria.

Adria’s bone dagger connected with the chest of the spirit in front. It howled. The other got a stab to its chest, and Adria earned a split-second of rest. After it, the tables turned. The ghosts dropped their swords. Claws whooshed centimeters in front of her face while she scampered backward. Water splashed Her feet got wet. Retreating, Adria had made it to the pebble-and-weed-infested lake.

She glanced at La’Var.

The hunter dueled the two remaining spirits, not landing a hit with his sword, yet not getting hit either. He yelled. Then a crash overshadowed his voice: the Savage’s sword slammed into the ground in front of him, slicing open his shoulder.

Adria got too distracted by the view: a claw soared straight at her neck. At the last moment, her right hand flicked up. The claw pierced her forearm. A warm drizzle sprinkled on her face: blood spraying from her arm.

A lump clogged her throat. She couldn’t breathe. Nor could she scream.

Biting her tongue, in one swift move, she pulled back her arm, taking it out of the claws and slashed at the arm of the spirit that had stabbed her. Howling and screeching erupted whilst the arm disconnected from the hazy body. From the side, the other spirit lunged with a sword aimed straight at Adria’s ear.

She gasped and closed her eyes.

Twenty Gods, this is it!

La’Var’s blade sheared the spirit’s shadow-enveloped head, and he landed in the water beside Adria, sweat pouring down his green skin. The spirit twitched and went limp. As it collapsed into the water, it evaporated into dust.

The hunter pulled Adria, retreating them deeper into the water.

“Three left,” La’Var uttered beneath his breath, then pointed above. “And main course dish too.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

The hands, blade and eyes of the triggered spirit above melted down and returned into shapeless blobs of silvery matter. They became eyes and mouths. The eyes stared down whilst the latter whispered and laughed. at Adria and La’Var.

“Ever seen this before?”

“You don’t go around hunting spirits without turning a few into Possessed Savages, but… This… In particular… Never. That’s what makes them savage: they come up with new and better ways to kill you every single time.”

The hundreds of eyes and mouths floated above the water. And they began to rain down. The water splashed, cleaning soot, dust and blood from Adria’s skin. At the same time, the color of the water changed from a dreadful dark blue to a black that swallowed all light.

It took even the determination of the three standing spirits -- they marched back to the island of rocks/.

Adria shuddered.

Swords stabbed out of the water. La’Var howled and cut them all down. More emerged, encircling the two.

“I’ll deal with this,” the hunter said. “The rest are calling for a death by your hands.”

Adria nodded and dashed through the water for the island of rocks. Black water sprayed her as swords glimmered around her. Air whipped. The savage ghost’s swords slashed at her feet.

Imagine this is the alleys of Black Ice Mountain -- you’re escaping after a job on a fancy home! Adria jumped repeatedly, restlessly.

Each of the swings missed her.

Sometimes, Adria’s luck turned. Now it happened again. Like led by the Twenty Gods themselves, she stepped afoot on the rock island unscathed. Yet here awaited a fate perhaps even worse: three swords and pairs of claws pointed down her face. Gulping, she pointed back up her measly bone dagger. Even though fear and pain gnawed at her inside, she put on a brave face. Shaking gave her away, even though both sides had no doubts about whose heart would end up pierced by a blade.

No, no, no, this is not a lost cause, Adria refused to let her soul falter. Just imagine… I have an opportunity to kill the biggest evil in this world. Imagine they’re the Liar!

The bone dagger fell from her hands.

A sudden, throbbing headache brought Adria to her knees. A shockwave slammed against her body. For a moment, she felt like her skeleton was going to tear through her skin. Then the feeling was replaced with all the magic draining from within her and blood streaming down her face.

After an eternity, this unbearable suffering lessened its grip on Adria and let her raise her head.

The faces of the spirits flickered between shadows and… the white mask of the Liar. Then the flashing stopped. One of the faces remained on all of the spirits. The face of the Liar.

The ground beneath Adria seemed to disappear while the hairs on her body rose up.

The spirits went limp.

They collapsed to the ground.

Their fading bodies then evaporated into dust.

Heaving, Adria rolled over. In a flash, any sort of life and energy had left her body. Darkness crawled into the edges of her vision, and she met the eyes of La’Var, who was surrounded by a dozen swords: for every one that he cut, three emerged out of the pitch black water.

The hunter’s superb swordsmanship that could be put up in a museum was no match to the viciousness of the half-dead, who would defend its new home and source of entertainment until the very end.

Adria tried to scream for the hunter to run, but the blood in her mouth choked her up. And she could barely hear her own faint whimper.

La’Var reached a breaking point. The eyes floating in the water saw victory

La’Var’s blade turned against him.

The hunters had a similar set of principles, and a way of life, to the knights. One’s own hand brought about the most honorable death and La’Var’s was about to grant such peace to him, but… A dozen eyes shot out of the water and morphed into chains, and they wrapped around his arms and legs.

Tears welling in his eyes, he pushed against the ashen binds and the tip of his blade kissed his chest, yet stopped before it could stab deeper.

The chains whipped the blade from his hands and dragged him to the rocky island, a dozen steps ahead of Adria. They melted and shifted, once more, turning the spirit matter back into the ghost’s original form, albeit taller and more muscular, and with white flames dancing on its head. With a tight grip, the spirit held La’Var in its claws.

Adria was slipping in and out of consciousness, exhaustion like never before pounding at her head and weighing on her eyes. With the last drops of strength she could muster, she raised her hand and extended her palm at La’Var.

The hunter did the same.

“You want to be a fool, but now’s not the time,” he uttered. “If I couldn’t defeat it, then you sure as shit won’t -- run. Find a way to--”

“You two can’t defeat it, but I can!”

A blurry figure flashed in the right and then in the left corner of Adria’s eyes.

From behind, a rusty sword pierced the chest of the Possessed Savage.

It howled then its head dropped, and it growled through the pain, incapacitated.

Adria snapped back to life, thinking, right! There were six of them, but we fought only five!

Behind the savage stood the ghost who’d slipped away unseen. One hand pierced the Possessed Savage while on the raised claws of the other hung the hunter’s saltshaker and the Groundshaker horn, which Adria hadn’t noticed disappeared from her.

“Twenty Gods!” La’Var’s eyes widened.

“Oh no, absolutely not at all. I’m not the Twenty Gods. I’m not even one god -- I’m just Martin. Or so I think I was called when I was alive. Maybe it was Martha, actually, but that’s not a name for an evil spirit, is it? Either way--”

“You killed a fellow spirit! How did you do it?!”

“See, if you haven’t noticed by my speed and nonchalant nature, I am… Well, immensely powerful. And I also hold your fate in my left claw.”

Quickly, the amazement faded from La’Var’s face, replaced by weariness.

“What do you want?” he grumbled, adding with a bite. “Spirit?”

“A deal: if you accept, I’ll pour salt over my friend here If you don’t, I’ll pour Groundshaker horn dust and leave you to finish sorting out your matters.”

“What do we have to do in exchange?”

“Hah’Dria, don’t you dare! If you make a deal with a ghost, the luck you’ve had will seem like a gift from the gods!”

“Just attach me to your essence until the day you die and feed me so I don’t wither away. Basically nothing on your end”

The flaming head of the Possessed Savage raised up. The creature moved again. There wasn’t much time: Adria had to decide now. She looked at the ghost then at the hunter, who violently shook his head.

“I’m sorry, there’s no other way out,” she said, reaching out. “We have a deal, Martin.”

With a claw, the ghost shook Adria’s hand.

The alien energy of a spirit’s possession pierced through her skin. There was pulling, pushing and twisting within Adria. The world lost all meaning and shape, white and black flashed all around. Lastly, the feeling of being bound by chains wrapped around her.

This was it.

She was attached to the phantom for the rest of her life.

“I’ve changed a lot since the days of being alive and a knight,” he whispered. “But no matter how many years pass, murder never gets old.”

Martin started pouring salt.