Kill.

  That was the one thing I left my maddened body with when I retreated from the front lines of the battle. A single command whatever driving force was behind the wheel would follow without question and with extreme prejudice—I hoped. If it didn’t, I was dead and there was nothing I could do about it.

  The sensation of giving up my body was like sinking down into the Dead Sea. It felt wrong on a level so fundamental my mind couldn’t understand what was going on. I didn’t know what spiritual physics were going on, but I was willing to bet what was going on broke at least four different laws of metaphysical reality.

  I was still conscious, somehow, even though every other time I had done this I had blacked out and woken up minutes later with massive wounds and absolute carnage around me. This time was different, and I didn’t know why. That disturbed me—change wasn’t always for the better. Especially not if I was helpless to do anything about whatever was going to happen in the next few minutes, because whatever it was, I knew it was going to be unsettling in the least.

  I felt like Professor Frost in That Hideous Strength. I know, I know, it’s a fairly archaic book being what, three and a half thousand years old or some boggling number like that. Still, I think it’s a perfect analogy for what I felt like in the moment. My body was moving around without me being in control of it. I had a sense of vulnerability that I had never felt before in all of my years of living. The only difference between myself and Frosty the incomprehensibly stupid scholar was why I had lost control of my corpse. See, instead of rejecting the idea that the soul exists and thus dying in my own fire,

  I had accepted it existed and just removed it from the playing field for the sake of survival.

  At least, that’s what I had thought I was doing. Apparently not.

  And so, in an unexpected twist, I had been given a front row ticket to the movie theatre of my own life. I got to watch myself stand on my damaged right leg, causing even more damage to the already ruined appendage; I got to watch myself take a step forward, causing Dalia to take a step backward as she sensed something was deeply wrong with the situation; and to top it all off in a display of the most hardcore, utterly deranged, vicious, grotesque, and feral actions I have ever had the displeasure to see—I got to watch myself rip off my own arm.

  I was horrified.

  I mean, it wasn’t as though I hadn’t been expecting my body to do crazy things while I was away. But ripping my arm off? That hadn’t even entered the top hundred—it was just that crazy.

  As a side note: for the remaining duration of this dissociative experience, in order to refrain from twisting the language too much, I will just be referring to myself in the third person instead of both the first and third. Over the course of my… rather storied lifetime, I have found that switching the perspective up tends to leave disorientation in the listeners, or the readers, or whatever you prefer. And, while effective in a lot of places, first person has severe limitations in this particular area. I have written many an account of my travels before, but this is perhaps the most complete my story will ever come to be, and I would prefer for it to be as self-explanatory as possible.

  Now, continuing on…

  The man called Felix felt vaguely sickened as his arm came off. There was a wrenching sensation, along with a series of brittle cracks and sickening popping noises as his muscles strained and snapped from the strain. After a second or two, the shoulder gave out and the limb sprang free with a jolt. It had been surprisingly easy to do, all things considered, though the amount of blood it left pouring from his stump was alarming in the extreme. The cold had helped, freezing the capillaries, veins, and most of the arteries, but one of them was still at least part-way functional, pumping small spurts of blood from a gap in the frozen and mostly frozen blood-sludge that still covered his arm and gummed up the works. Hopefully this fight would end in time for him to get that treated.

  Felix jumped forward off his bad leg, swinging his frozen arm like a club. It slammed into Dalia’s head with a gut-wrenching crunch, causing her to stumble back, bleeding far too slowly for any head wound.

  He lunged forward again, repeating the attack with brutal efficiency, throwing around his arm like it weighed less than a paper clip. A pair of fingers snapped off of it, embedding themselves in the witch’s side when she failed to raise enough of a defense to ward off the blow. The hand snapped off at the wrist from a particularly hard strike, spinning away into the rubble beyond. Felix switched grips after that, beating Dalia with the shoulder and using the forearm as a hand-hold.

  Blood was now streaming from Dalia in a multitude of places. She held her side where the fingers had impaled her. Thin lacerations covered her face and arms where the sharp icicle protrusions from where the annihilation ritual had struck directly on the muscle and bone. Not the skin, though. That was already gone, having flaked and dusted away within the first few seconds of the onslaught.

  Felix had the indisputable upper hand in this fight, but even before he had entered this maddened state he had been running on fumes. His body was now eating itself to be able to continue. Dalia, on the other hand, was still at least partially healthy, running on a pair of infinite sources of energy—divine mana and ritual energy. To make matters worse, she kept healing.

  Felix, now that he no longer had to focus on his actions, had the time to examine what was going on in that department. Those chains of symbols on her arms—twenty in total, though he had managed to get her to use eight of them by now—were some kind of temporal healing spell. They were in chains, with each cast relying on the ones beneath it for power. Which meant that, after every use, the next successive cast became marginally weaker. It was a powerful spell, but even those had weaknesses.

  The interesting thing was, the fingers that had broken off of his arm were interfering with the healing. He knew that because every time a new one of the glyphs would flash, yet another spurt of blood would jet from her side as her supply was instantly replenished.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Dalia’s fingers were blurring, leaving behind complex silver lines and sigils that exploded in blasts of ice and beams of light that he leaped over without a second’s thought. He allowed one of them to hit his arm to seal up the bubbling blood that remained there. It had been draining his life away too fast; he would have been dead in minutes at that rate.

  In the interim, Felix kept wailing on Dalia with his arm. Cracks were starting to form along its edges and at least one hairline fracture was slowly winding its long way across the bone. The arm wouldn’t last for much longer, but neither—it seemed—would Dalia, what with the frequency she as taking heavy wounds, no matter how fast she managed to heal from them.

  But all that faded into the back of his mind when Felix drove Dalia in a direction that allowed him to catch a glimpse of his new acquaintances. They weren’t faring too well.

  Angel threw herself awkwardly to the side, ribs screaming in protest. The treant’s arm slammed into the dirt where she had just been. It threw up a spout of dirt and other debris where it landed, then scraped along the earth to land a glancing blow against her leg. It went numb.

  She had taken the first strike fully across the side, and her ribs had buckled and snapped like spaghetti before going into the boiling pot. Yeah, she was going to have to agree with the Italians on this one—she liked her spaghetti nice and unbroken, thank you very much.

  It gave her good perspective on just how durable Felix was. Sure, she had watched him take an explosion to the face and stand back up with only a few scratches more, but seeing a thing and understanding it were two completely different things. Felix had survived a beating from this thing at level two. TWO! Sure, he had had a high defense stat from the very beginning, but this was just crazy. He was even more durable now, she was sure of it.

  Focus on the fight, numskull, she told herself sternly.

  The fight wasn’t looking too good. The treant was showing a great deal less intelligence than they had expected, and they had very low standards. Felix had said the thing was dumb, but he hadn’t mentioned it was this bad.

  It had started the fight by attacking the very first thing it laid eyes upon: herself. And no matter how much they tried to get it to turn its attention on to someone else so Angel could get some distance and do her job, it refused to do so, so intent on killing her first was it.

  Mark and Harald were pummeling it from either side, trying to get its attention away from here, but their attempts weren’t working. The only reaction they got was the occasional swat of annoyance as one of them jammed their sword into the thing’s side.

  The first time Mark had done that, the treant had snapped his sword in half with a single swipe. To be fair, it wasn’t as though the sword was that durable in the first place. It had been bought with spare coin on the first floor as a semi-passable means of protection. But still…

  Angel was forced to dodge backwards once again as the creature swung another wrecking-ball fist at her. This was getting desperate.

  Harald was flung five yards by a swat of annoyance that made her teeth rattle in her skull even from where she was. He tumbled end over end before coming to an abrupt stop against a tree. His shield, which had thankfully taken the brunt of the blow was cracked down the middle.

  Mark fared a little better, only getting his arm snapped cleanly in half, rendering it useless and dangling.

  The earth rumbled as the treant took yet another step toward Angel. Little pebbles jumped off the ground and clouds of dust puffed in concentric circles with the expanding force. There was a crackling sound, as the thing tore a wine-barrel thick branch clean off the tree and brandished it at her. It raised the pillar-equivalent piece of wood over its head, preparing to bash her skull in. She wouldn’t be able to get out of the way this time. She was going to die, wasn’t she?

  Then a dagger slammed into the base of the treant’s neck.

  The ghost sighed. He would rather not have gotten involved in all of this. It irked him when he had to insert himself into other people’s business—especially fights. Still, he didn’t want to find out how the man would react to his companions’ deaths. And besides, the girl knew some of what was going on. She didn’t know a lot, but even what she knew was enough for him to keep her alive.

  She was also a descendant of the Nation Feller. That helped his decision along even further.

  He smiled slightly when his dagger hit. It was a small smile, nothing more than a quirk at the corner of his mouth, but it was more emotion than he had shown in the past few days at least—possibly even longer than that. He took pride in his work, and that throw was a perfect example of what he was: a ghost.

  A ghost was a silent killer, fading from shadow to shadow and striking when the opportunity arose. A ghost was never seen, never heard, never sensed in any capacity other than pain, violence, and death.

  Then his smile dropped a little. He was going to have to retrieve that dagger. What a pain. Perhaps he would ask the man for some help when he got done giving the witch a well deserved thumping.

  The ghost settled back to watch the fights, confident that things would work out. They always did.

  Mark saw the dagger streak through the air and bury itself in the treant’s neck. Where it had come from, he had no idea, but he wasn’t going to pass up on the help. He jumped on the opportunity and swung the remains of his sword with all his might. The sword embedded into the treant’s neck, right above where the dagger had entered, cutting through the thing’s defenses quite nicely.

  Was it just him, or was that easier than before?

  Either way, he ran the treant to the ground before yanking the dagger out—feeling himself grow noticeably stronger as he did so—and pounding the point straight into the creature’s eye.

  It bellowed in agony, thrashing about and causing his already screaming left arm to release a cacophony of squealing, screeching complaints like nails on a chalkboard. Or perhaps, as a less cliché simile, like a large piece of machinery with a bunch of large gears in which someone had just chucked a metal pipe to gum up the works. Torque and tension caused the parts to grate together and create skull-splitting sounds that would make the devil himself flinch away.

  That didn’t stop him from pulling the dagger back out with a disturbing mix between scrape and squelch and then plunging it into the other eye to blind the thing. bioluminescent blood belched from the wounds like magma from the depths of a volcanically active gulch.

  He wiggled the knife back and forth, edging it deeper until something finally popped and the violently bucking treant stopped flailing and started twitching weakly. Those twitches gave way to the stillness that all creatures recognized as the end.

  Mark rolled off the dead tree (careful not to jar his arm too badly) and just lay there, panting. Then he started laughing long and loud.

  They had done it. They had done the impossible.

  The treant was dead.

  Congratulations! You have reached Level 8.

  Because you do not have a tier, the system will assign your stat point(s) for you.

  Str 9 > 10

  It felt good!