Cindy admitted she'd made a mistake, if only in the confines of her mind.

A ghost-thingy floated out of the mud, clawed arms swinging. Before she could try to stop it, a pair of Cindy's instances popped like soap bubbles as the undead monster tried to eviscerate them. Fortunately for the fifteen-year-old girl, avoiding deadly experiences by vanishing the versions of her that would experience them had long since become an ingrained reflex. Unfortunately, some things could not be thus avoided; the stench of the swamp, the exertion of running mile after mile, the unearthly wail of a murderous ghost being robbed of its meal. And there were far too many such ghosts.

The brunette shivered despite her muscles burning from running through the mud and twisted undergrowth. She'd tried punching, kicking, headbutting, grappling, stabbing, even throwing rocks but the dozens of incorporeal undead trying to mob her remained unmoved by all her many efforts to get rid of them. Just like with fighting a certain blonde bimbo, it did not matter that she could repeat any number of different attacks a practically infinite number of times if none of them could actually hurt or hinder the enemy. The same applied to anyone trying to attack her in reverse, of course; the vast majority of unpleasantness could be simply ignored by deleting any instances of her that experienced it, for all intents and purposes making it so they never existed. Unfortunately, the ghosties had proven one of the few enemies that could affect Cindy despite her nature, if barely.

Another murderous ghost screamed as its intended target vanished, the Cindy it saw never having been there for it to catch. One of the hardest implications of her power for most people to grasp was that she didn't exist as they saw her to be; where people saw her as was merely what instance of herself Cindy allowed to visually interact with them. In reality, Cindy was no single instance but all of them, simultaneously being and not being at all locations her power reached. Using this to confuse people in a fight was dead easy, especially since she could appear to be in different locations for different people - or even multiple locations at once. There was no "real" Cindy for the enraged ghosts to pin down; the 'fake' Cindy always turned out to be the one they attempted to murder.

Her problem was that, just like in little kids' games, when both sides could ignore each other's attacks at will, the winner was whoever could keep going the longest. Now, Cindy knew she was awesome. In addition to fabulous looks, her fifteen-year-old body was juiced up to superpowers that let her jump small buildings in a single bound, outrun most bicycles on foot, or throw around most European cars as if she possessed the full powers of a Cindy-sized radioactive insect. Her stamina however was her lowest stat. For most things that didn't matter as she could shift through instances until her goal was accomplished, but that didn't work in fighting these ghosts. She couldn't have some of her instances sleep, as the ghosts' frequent unearthly screams affected all of them. She could not have some sit out the trip, as all of them needed to run to get out of monster-land. And all of them had to deal with the stench, the mud and the twisted, infested wasteland.

The sweaty, muddy, stinky, panting, and entirely fed-up teenage girl was beginning to get annoyed. What the hell was everyone else doing? Hadn't they noticed she was being chased by ghosts? Were they just sitting back and laughing at her predicament? When she got her hands on them...

"aaaAAA!!!"

Her elaborate revenge plots involving itching powder, caltrops, hidden cameras and certain people's underwear were interrupted by rapidly intensifying shouts from above, followed by one of the targets of her righteous vengeance falling out of the sky a mere three hundred feet out of her path. Seizing on the opportunity, Cindy leaped off the narrow patch of solid ground and into the swamps, employing her superhuman agility to vault again and again before she could sink. Not all of her instances managed the maneuver. In fact, the vast majority of them got the timing wrong, or landed badly, or were snatched out of the air by ghosts. Being able to try every single permutation of the leap however meant that at least one instance got it perfectly and it was the successful instances she kept and propagated again and again, succeeding as long as it was possible for her to succeed.

"Hello Gabby!" she greeted the Hispanic boy with a fake smile and falsely sweet voice before growling. "Where the fuck were you? Murderous ghosts have been trying to kill me for the past quarter hour!"

"Dodging more murderous ghosts myself," the boy replied with a groan before hopping out of the crater his fall had carved into the mud. He looked up and winced. "Not that it worked any better for me."

"What the hell are you... no, no, fuck you Gabe! You did not just bring in more of those things!" Unfortunately for both Cindy and the boy, the huge cloud of ghosts descending from above in Gabby's trail was every bit as real as the one Cindy had briefly left behind with her leaps.

"Shut up, bitch! As if I wanted to fall out of the sky with rejects from the underworld on my ass," Gabby shot back, ignoring the girl's furious scowl. Yes, Cindy might try her stupid power-assisted hazing again if he didn't grovel but they would both be dead long before she got the opportunity if they didn't find a way out of this.

"Thanks for nothing, dumbass," the brunette bitch retorted as both groups of wraiths surrounded them, their unearthly screams sending shivers through both teenagers' bodies - shivers Gabby was certain was their life and stamina slowly being drained. From Cindy's sorry state the boy was sure even her tricks did not help against it. "Don't just stand there!" she added as he saw half a dozen Cindies getting popped by ghostly claws in half as many seconds. "Do something!"

"Yes, because you're doing so much better!" She wasn't. Yes, invisible punches and kicks swept through every single inch of the attackers, minutely pushing the wraiths to and fro but otherwise amounting to nothing. "I tried stabbing them. Normal blades, magic, fire, lightning, disintegration, void, everything!" He rolled frantically under a trio of wraiths trying to claw his back; most of the enemies seemed to be focusing on Cindy but a few attacked him every so often. "Most just passed through. Even the ones that seemed to work they healed from in moments."

"Useless as always. Why am I not - wait." So many Cindies turned around to stare at Gabby that they fused into a single mass with no respect for human anatomy, Euclidean geometry, or common sense. "Did you just say one of your stupid swords could hurt these things?"

"Well, yeah!" Gabe forced his magic into several dancing swords to fend off the latest attempt to eviscerate him and nearly doubled over. After making Caladbolg and having his connection with it snap, it felt as if he had nothing but dregs in the tank. Just forming a lightning longsword and two sabers of white flame left him weak-kneed and about to puke his guts out - and not because of the swamp.

"Is it one of these?" a Cindy appeared before him and demanded even as dozens more of her kept the wraiths at bay by merely becoming more inviting targets.

"Is it one of what?" Gabe asked in confusion. Either the battlefield was becoming weirder or he was experiencing a hallucination; where was all that blood coming from?

"Yes or no, Gabe, can these three swords hurt the wraiths?" the brunette demanded then gasped and nearly doubled over, her face pale. "Quickly, I'm literally having to die to distract them."

"Yes, lightning and fire work, a little," the boy admitted. "But I can't make enough. Couldn't even up there."

"Yeah, you can't," Cindy spat, though Gabby got the impression her fury was not directed at him. Then the girl grabbed his lightning longsword and flickered. A split second later there wasn't just one sword, but thousands, maybe even missions - more than Gabby's power could count, filling every cubic inch of space within several hundred feet. "ROUND TWO MOTHERFUCKERS," a million identical teenage girls' voices shook the air.

Then the wraiths died. It wasn't a fight, or even a slaughter. It didn't last any span of time Gabby could perceive, couldn't be perceived as separate blows or even a storm of them. One moment the wraiths were there. The next, every bit of space their incorporeal bodies had occupied was taken up by crackling lightning blades. Before his mind broke trying to track what had happened and why, there was only one lightning longsword again, held by just one Cindy standing before him.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

"OK, Brownie, I take it back," the most terrifying and second prettiest girl Gabby had ever met gave him a genuine smile for the first time. "You can be useful on occasion."

Around them the smoke-like remains of a hundred incorporeal undead were carried away in the wind.

xxxx

"Repeating the same action and expecting different results is the opposite of reason, you know."

Mark ignored me in favor of blasting his swarm of wraiths with various combinations of more and more powerful military weapons. Statistically speaking, he should have stumbled into a combination that worked in part if not in whole by then... but he was being neither methodical nor random. He was currently trying timed-burst bombs in combination with some form of rotary autocannon, delivering an impressive weight of fire to his surroundings. Unfortunately, that was all he did.

"You are faster but less maneuverable, so stop trying to dogfight and pull them into a stern chase," I added for good measure, but he once again ignored my advice.

"Either start helping or shut the FUCK UP!" the African American boy roared over the blast of a dozen explosions, the only reason he was heard despite the cacophony being my enhanced senses.

"I am helping," I told him, using my powers to speak directly to his ears from a distance. "Killing these wraiths for you would only help you today, for this one fight. Teaching you how to kill wraiths yourself will help you for the rest of your life."

"If you don't stop with the pseudo-philosophical bullshit, I swear I'm gonna blast you out of the fucking sky!" Mark shouted at the top of his voice right before he got a face-full of murderous undead spirit for his troubles. His anger was part of the problem he was refusing to acknowledge and until he did all my attempts to actually help him instead of just solve his problems for him were not going to work.

That did not mean I couldn't keep him alive until he changed his mind; it just needed to happen in ways he did not notice as help. A gust of wind here and a wraith that could have clawed his back open fell short. A few invisible pushes there and the claw that would have cost him an eye scraped against his left cheek. A subtle but broad adjustment on the wraiths' method of locomotion and their tireless flight matched his own instead of quickly overwhelming him as he grew more tired, his weapon mimicry became sloppier, his speed and reflexes diminished.

It wouldn't, couldn't last forever. Wraiths were undead spirits and even the least knowledgeable person about the monsters that invaded our world would eventually realise I was basically directing the flow of the battle for my own ends. Or maybe Mark would pass out through exhaustion and sheer, single-minded obstinacy... but that was unlikely. Teenagers, inasmuch as I remembered being one a bazillion years (six months) before, were almost as lacking in patience as they were in common sense. In fact, if I'd judged Mark's character correctly...

"The fuck are you just sitting there, anyway?" he demanded about fifteen minutes after my arrival. That he'd mostly given me the silent treatment for that long was quite impressive. "Are you not supposed to be the resident adult, or something? Well? Adult these stupid things away!"

"Oh? Is the great and mighty Mark finally ready to listen to older and maybe... possibly... wiser people?" I snarked back, flinging away the wraith that tried to assault me half a mile away with a flick of my finger and an invisible application of force.

"...yes damnit!" the boy yelped as I allowed a wraith to get just close enough to bite at his ear. He was a fairly powerful superhuman; the missing bits would regenerate in a day or two, tops. "Tell me how to fucking murder these things already!"

"You can't; they're already dead." Heh. This bullshitting teacher gig could be fun, at times.

"YOU KNOW WHAT I FUCKING MEAN!" Mark exploded, and I meant that literally. He detonated a few really big mimicked bombs far too close to his own hide, leaving him with a torn costume and dozens of superficial but still bleeding scrapes and bruises. Wraiths I could protect him against; his own idiocy, not nearly as well.

"Right... listen up, kid." From how he immediately bristled he obviously hated being called kid by someone who was only a couple of years his senior, biologically speaking. I waited a couple of seconds for him to curse me to high heaven, back-talk, or make snide remarks but nothing came. Good; that meant he was finally willing to swallow his I-know-what-I'm-doing-but-you-can't-understand-me attitude and actually listen. Getting him to that had been the whole point of letting him flail against the wraiths for so long. "Wraiths are both incorporeal and regenerating. This means anything mundane will go right through them and even if you do hurt them some they'll just reform."

"Gee, I hadn't noticed," he scoffed but kept listening, even forgot to evade properly while paying attention. I held back the wraiths trying to mob him from behind; couldn't have the stupid ghosts ruin things now that the kid had finally opened up.

"Point is, they still interact with the world, especially both the most fundamental and the most mystically significant bits." I gestured at the swarm around us. "You can still see them, for one. For another, you don't see them left behind because they ignored the planet spinning around itself and the sun. Plus they can cut you up even if they're incorporeal. What does that tell you?"

"That gravity or light might work?" he asked but then immediately shook his head. "No, that doesn't make sense. They're still floating and they're mostly see-through... they can choose to ignore stuff!"

"Exactly. Being incorporeal IS their power, so they can choose how it works. But we can also choose how our powers work, to a point," I told him, repeating the insight I'd gleaned from my own fight earlier. It would have been better if he'd come to the realisation himself but if getting thoroughly trounced for twenty minutes had not pushed him to it, it was unlikely he would before passing out.

"You're telling me I can choose to hit them? Just like that?" He shook his head in obvious denial. "Bullshit."

"Magic IS bullshit; we do choose to ignore reality in the ways we like." We just needed to have the power to do so. "But here you're trying to choose to hit the wraiths while they are choosing to avoid being hit. They got a thematic advantage because 'avoid getting hit' is all their power is about. Even so they aren't avoiding everything so..."

"I need to use something they don't usually avoid that I'm also trying to make it hit them?" he finally worked it out. "Like light but as a weapon! And since it'll be a power rather than natural I can actively tell it to hit them!"

"More like mean it to hit than speaking out loud, but yes," I agreed. "Now do you have something like that? We don't have all day."

"What do you..." he turned around, saw all the wraiths struggling to push through an invisible barrier and scowled. "Fuck, this whole fight you kept the training wheels on me?"

"This was supposed to be a training exercise," I shrugged. "Now get going, Gabby and Cindy already killed their wraiths, no training wheels needed." He shot me a half-furious, half-wounded glare before turning around and tapping into his power. The shadows of two enormous military vehicles formed over the boy's space, the peculiar spatial distortion of his weapons mimicry combining them into something more than the sum of their parts in a way I still couldn't read beyond the fact that all three of them were aircraft of some sort.

"Come here you fucking ghostly shits!" Mark shouted, not that anybody other than me could hear him under the circumstances. The wraiths certainly could not, but I let him have his moment. It would help with remembering the lesson in the future. "EAT WAVELENGTH!"

A deafening, impressively bright beam burst out of his pointing arm, halfway between an actual laser and a continuous explosion. With me keeping the wraiths from fleeing, what would have been at least a few minutes of tiring pursuit as their swarm split in a dozen directions was reduced to a mere twenty seconds of very cathartic blasting.

xxxx

"Team exercises fucking suck," Cindy stated as she dragged her sweaty, filthy, exhausted body on a rock before collapsing. "They suck mutant Dodo wang."

"Dodos became extinct in the 17th century," an even more messed up, grimy and lightly bleeding Gabby countered, then collapsed next to the girl. To Mark's great surprise and my satisfaction, he was not immediately assaulted by invisible Cindies, only wordlessly shown the finger by the panting brunette. "But yeah, Teach. This totally sucked." Mark just added his own low-key grumbles and fell face-first before even reaching the boulder. Fortunately for the black teenager, the ground was not particularly muddy where he fell.

"What are you talking about guys, you did great!" I announced in my perkiest, preppiest voice, once used for demotivational purposes in cheerleader meetings. "You got all the wraiths, used teamwork or Yours Truly's sage instruction to do so, even took the first steps into overcoming your worst flaws - assuming you don't return to being misanthropic little beasts the moment you feel better." I stretched, not coincidentally showing off my perfectly clean, completely unblemished costume, freshly washed hair and very pleasant body odour with not a hint of sweat or foulness. "And I got to take an awesome, steaming hot bath, skinny-dipping in molten magma." Exhaustion or no, the kids immediately attempted to drown me in the nearest swamp.

Team cohesion: improving.