Crop dusting. That’s where I started. It’s hard to track how one thing led to another over the years, but that’s undeniably where it started. Watching my dad fly in his bright yellow biplane, wheels almost touching the ground my mother and I had worked just the morning prior. I could never get close, but I remember him looking back at me, thumbs up, as I grinned helplessly at the sight of him.

Those same crops were on fire two weeks later. Spirit attacks had grown rampant in neighbouring villages, but we never thought they’d reach as far as our village.

“Spirit! Spirit!” the old cobbler yelled from the village entrance.

“Is that big thing a spirit?” I asked my father as he ushered me forward, my mother in his arms. Unconscious, but safe.

“Yes…yes, it is…”.

I know looking back, this sounds cliché, but if a Spirit like that could even make expressions, I could’ve sworn I saw one of agony. For a moment, almost as if it was being scorched by its own flames. No, that wasn’t the case.

Four days later, we came back to the village. The buildings had been blackened into a state of unrecognisable decay, and the Spirit lay where it had screamed. Bullet holes riddling its beautiful body.

“Mommy?” I remember asking. “Can you tell me that story again?”

“I need to help your father replant the crops, so maybe another time.”

“Please?” I asked. I remember being a handful, but I don’t remember my mother ever lashing out at me. If I was horrid, I’d blame my narcissism on her, but she’d usually let me have my way unless it was destructive.

“Oh, okay fine, but I’ll keep it short,” she said sternly, keeping that gentle smile on her face. Slightly disgruntled, she sat down in her woven chair, and pondered on where to start reciting from. She always did this. She still does. The wrinkles on her face grow as she tries to remember details. But, without fail, she would always start her stories well.

***

“And because that Chieftain had the ability to control Spirits to his will, he became the most powerful hero amongst the humans. However, he believed that true peace wouldn’t be gained just because he had such an overwhelming power.”

“So, what did he do?”

“You know that already.”

“Tell me again!”

My mother giggled at my frustrated face. She teased me as smoothly as she stroked my head, lulling me into an early sleep.

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“So, the beautiful Spirit Queen made a deal with the Chieftain, that she would stop attacking humans as long as he was never seen in the realm again.”

The ending had never sat right with me. Why was the Spirit Queen so beautiful, virtuous, and godly, if she attacked people, and only stopped when one brave hero sacrificed himself for it?

She got up from her chair and headed for the doorway, a brand-new door propped up against the wall next to it. The wall itself was only a week old.

“Hey Mommy?”

“Hmm?”

“Are Spirits bad?”

“…”

She took a moment to respond, choosing her words and their meanings carefully. For her generation and for that country, it was a rare sight to behold. When it came to Spirits, few held their tongue.

“They’re like a force of nature. That’s for you to decide,” she said as she smiled at me one last time before heading outside.

I remember the same boring classroom several years later. Somehow, after only a week since the last attack, the same damp musk had returned to the flimsy wooden walls, and the blackboard still had countless generations worth of chalk rubbed into it. The one thing that had been saved in the chaos. The lights above us threatened to spark out every minute or so. The place was a fire hazard, but class had to stay in session.

I sat there, unresponsive, spinning my pencil with one hand while the other pretended to crush the teacher’s head with just two fingers. The teacher might as well have been talking to statues. None of us were listening.

“Spirits gain life force from a substance called aether, it is unknown to us where it comes from, but their survival off this substance is what gives them unique anatomical properties, and what separates them from animals, and us humans.”

I feigned interest.

“As you all know, the Spirits of the region of Sidos are extremely aggressive and are a threat to the human population. Over the next few days, we will be….”

That’s roughly where I tuned out of the lesson. I don’t remember much else. I had been one of the lucky few. With a small family and little to my name, it was easy to come out of an attack unscathed. Compared to those who had lost family, homes, livelihoods to Spirit attacks, I had zero investment. I just knew they were bad because someone had told me they were.

Did I hate Spirits? No. But fighting them was a matter of business. It was justice. The right thing. That’s what people like me were supposed to set out to do. The rumbling of the diesel machines I flew only a few years later would be the trumpets signalling me onto my virtuous crusade.

Sometimes, I miss being young.

The one thing I got right, was the fact that everyone needed a reason. Mine was to prevent disaster. Save lives. Be selfless.

Yet how intangible is that? When do you get to feel success? When do you get that rush of validation that really lets you know what you’re doing was worth it?

Pilots are the closest you’ll get to one-man heroes, and even they’ll never get a standing ovation.

No, the reason I fought was to prove myself. To show everyone that I was the best. That was good enough. More than good enough.

First. That was something real. The rest would come after that.

That was me, Major Elliot Maxwell of the Sidosian White Devils, Spirit Hunting Corps.