I ran.
Oh boy, did I run.
There was nothing that could induce a good cardio quite like a malevolent spirit streaking after me like it wanted to eat my soul. Oh wait, not a spirit, a Level 1 Phantasm, whatever the hell that meant.
“What do I do?” I asked the strange voice in my head as I ducked into an alley and sprinted down the length of it.
“Defeat it.”
“Right! Just defeat it! Why didn’t I think of that?” I reached the fence that I knew separated the alley from the back of the sports center parking lot. It was a shortcut I used occasionally, and it was almost always open.
Except for now, of course.
I could tell from a dozen or so feet back that not only was it closed, but it was locked with a heavy chain.
“Today just isn’t my day,” I grumbled breathlessly.
And yet I still didn’t stop. It was almost as if my body took over completely, and I jumped on top of a closed dumpster, then leapt to catch the top of the fence and landed in a crouch on the other side.
Huh.
I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t have been able to pull that off before. Sure, I biked a lot, and I dabbled in fun physical hobbies here and there when I could, but I wasn’t exactly athletic.
“Weird,” I murmured. “You got any opinions on that?”
The voice said nothing. Of course. Why would she want to be useful in a time of need? No, it apparently had more important things to do than saving my life.
But I didn’t have the time to stand there and snark at it, so I bolted across the parking lot. My breath was rasping in my lungs, and yet, despite the burn, I felt no fatigue. That was definitely unusual, and I would have to poke at it later.
When I wasn’t running for my life and all that.
I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough, the Phantasm was still streaking toward me, jumping forward in strange glitching stutters. Almost like a video game. It was as disconcerting as it was unsettling, and I decided on doing a whole lot more running and a whole lot less looking.
Besides, once I whipped my head back around and took a running leap toward the back of the building, I realized that I could sense the thing behind me. It wasn’t quite like an alarm, but it was definitely a sticky feeling of apprehension. Like something was wrong.
Good to know.
With my attention back in front of me, I didn’t quite realize that I’d grabbed onto a window ledge on the side of the ice rink. Surprised, I hauled myself up, getting my feet solidly enough on the wall to leap up to the next window.
Yeah, that’s definitely new, I thought to myself.
It was strange how my own internal voice was so different from the foreign voice in my head. Almost as if we were speaking aloud. But that was yet another thing to ponder when I was out of danger.
Assuming I made it.
“Excuse me, but . . .” I grumbled as I made it to the roof and pulled myself up onto it. Man, could I do pull-ups now? I was pretty sure that I could do pull-ups now.
Rad.
“. . . your whole life-after-death is going to be really short if I get chomped by this thingy.”
“I am not alive. I am dead. This is just . . . my echo. And the Lost Spirit can’t physically eat you.”
“Oh, then what can it do?”
“Nothing too dramatic. Possess you, potentially. Steal your life force. Force you to kill yourself or cause bodily harm.”
“Is that all?” I said breathlessly, launching myself from the edge of the rink over to the ice cream shop next door. But I didn’t have time to bask in the glow of my newfound athletic prowess as the thing was glitching across the ice rink toward me. Hurriedly, I raced down the fire escape, which rattled just as threateningly as the spirit following me.
“Just defeat it.”
“And how, pray tell, do I do that?!”
I jumped down the last few steps, hitting the ground hard and tucking myself into a roll. I’d never been able to do that before, but man, was it cool.
It would have been a lot cooler if there wasn’t a strange shrieking roar above my head.
Suddenly, the Phantasm landed right in front of me, its form expanding like some sort of inky miasma.
Oh dear.
I backed away in a hurry, raising my fists like that would do something, and I swore the mark was pulsing under my bandage. But I didn’t pay it any mind, if only because my back slammed into solid brick.
That was decidedly not good.
My chest heaved as I realized I’d reached my end. The Phantasm came closer to me, moving slowly as more and more arms grew out of it. And yet, they weren’t quite like actual limbs. They were almost like smoke, shifting this way and that at the slightest whim, and some had too many fingers or too few or had claws tipped in long deadly nails that were dripping with pure black inkiness.
It made my skin crawl, and everything in me was screaming that this thing was wrong. Unnatural. My palms itched like I could actually do something about it, which I most certainly could.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
I raised my fists, like they would do anything. Sure, I was clearly going down, but no one could say that I was giving up without a fight. I’d worked really hard for the meager life I’d managed to carve out, and I wasn’t giving that up easily.
But I never got the chance to throw a single punch. One moment, the creature of darkness was steadily stalking toward me, a predator that knew it had trapped its prey, the next it was being ripped away.
What the?
I watched, completely gobsmacked, as the Phantasm went sailing in an arc far over my head. It slammed into the fence near the street and slid down. Suddenly, there were three figures in front of me, clad in all-black robes that seemed just as smoky and ephemeral as the creature.
But they didn’t feel wrong. In fact, I was pretty sure it felt like the cavalry had come.
Voice, you got any insight on this? I asked inside of my own head. But my voice just echoed in my thoughts like usual. Was the voice gone? It seemed like possibly the worst time to have just vanished.
In the voice’s absence, the trio moved together, glitching through the air in that same in-and-out flicker that made my eyes cross a little. But I was able to track their movements enough to see they were surrounding the Phantasm, an intimidating front. I wondered exactly what they were going to do to it when abruptly, lights flashed within each of them, and weapons appeared in their hands.
“Whoa,” I breathed to myself as I took it all in.
One had a scythe that was taller than they were, the blade glistening on the end of a shining steel shaft that appeared to be made of an ornate, gilded metal that was ebony black with bits of gold veining in it. The second figure carried a scimitar, blade curved and wicked. The third had two long blades, far too lengthy to be daggers but too short to be swords.
Had I just stumbled into the world’s most involved LARP?
My answer came when that strange interface opened in my peripheral vision again, three blocks of information sitting there one right after the other.
Name: Jamison DiMaggio
Race: Human
Class: Reaper
Level: 4
Name: Kim Hye-Kyo
Race: Human
Class: Reaper
Level: 2
Name: Maqbul Msalame
Race: Human
Class: Reaper
Level: 3
Wait, Reapers! Wasn’t that what my descriptor had said?! Were these guys like me? Or rather, was I like them?
Where is my scythe?! I wondered with a definite touch of envy. If I had to be a Reaper, I deserved to have the cool weapons too.
I could only watch, jaw dropped, as they quickly—and ruthlessly—dealt with the Phantasm. The creature’s arms would lash out, only to be cut by the sharp blades the Reapers were wielding, vanishing into a puff of smoke without a trace left. I half expected black blood to spray across the ground or the specter to shriek, but no. The creature seemed so focused on trying to do some sort of damage to the three attackers that it had no sense of self-preservation.
Then again, I wasn’t sure its limbs being severed by the flashing blades was actually doing any damage. The Phantasm didn’t make a single sound, and as soon as one arm vanished, another appeared.
And this was supposed to be a Level 1 creature . . . monster? What would a Level 5 look like?!
I didn’t know, so I continued to watch, absolutely gobsmacked. None of the three seemed to even register that I was there, and I realized that I should probably be running to safety, given the distraction, but I just . . . didn’t. My curiosity had been presented with something way more interesting than survival.
Maybe my priorities were messed up.
Perhaps, but I didn’t bother to torture myself over that, and instead watched as one of the cloaked figures finally got a hand on the Phantasm, their palm pressing into its chest. I didn’t see how that would be very useful considering that their bladed attacks didn’t seem to be doing any lasting damage, but then the figure’s hand glowed a bright gold.
That was the last thing I saw before I was blinded by a flash of light so bright that it seemed celestial. Once, I would have called it heavenly, but that was before the gods arrived and revealed that the afterlife was a whole lot more complicated than that.
“It has been purged and returned to the queue,” one of the black-robed figures said, and their voice was . . . odd. Part of it was completely normal, like a twenty-something woman explaining something quite droll, but part of it echoed and slanted in strange ways, whispering while booming. Like it was something I wasn’t supposed to hear at all. “Should be sorted soon enough.”
“I wonder what this one was doing out here hunting,” another said. “These kind usually stick to a single target.”
“Something must have caught its attention,” the one that carried the scythe and seemed the most like their leader said in a deep gravelly voice. I was pretty sure that it was the one called Jamison, but I wouldn’t put money down on it. I still had to figure out how the information that popped up on the edge of my vision worked. “Do a sterilization of this area and then we’ll head out. This is our fifth of the day, correct?”
“Yeah. Seems like more souls are getting lost lately.”
“That, or we’re getting better at purging them.”
One of them busied themselves with making some gestures with their hands and chanting while the other two acted as if they were coworkers casually chatting beside the water cooler. I watched with rapt attention as a strange golden circle began to glow under the chanting one’s feet.
This time, however, there was no explosion of light. Instead, the glow grew and grew until suddenly, it vanished without so much as a warning, and then a short rush of warm wind washed over me.
It . . . tickled, almost? And it was a type of warmth that was comforting, given the weather but would have been a bit nauseating in the dead of summer. Almost as soon as the feeling arose, it vanished, leaving me blinking at the three who were ignoring me like I was the audience and they were putting on their own little play.
“Sanitation’s handled,” the figure said, wiping their hands on their ethereal robes that seemed to solidify at their touch before returning to their misty spookiness. “If it left any corruption behind, it’s gone now.”
“Alright then, let’s head back.”
Wait, they were just leaving? That seemed a bit abrupt. What about me?
I should probably be grateful that apparently, I was going to escape a life-altering situation without any actual life altering, but something seemed all wrong. Why were they ignoring me? Shouldn’t they wonder why I was being chased? Either these three were absolute Mean Girls, or something else was afoot.
“Hey,” I called, taking a step forward from the wall I’d practically plastered myself against. “Hey! Don’t go yet!”
Much to my surprise, the trio froze and turned to me. It was pretty intimidating to have three shifting, formless and yet formful shapes suddenly face me, and I swallowed hard before continuing.
“What did you just do here? You said something about purging? How did you actually stop it? Was that magic? Can you do magic?”
They didn’t answer because of course they didn’t. Maybe they were friends with the voice, who seemed to feel no compunction to explain anything else. Instead, the three of them exchanged a look like they were all saying something, but I knew they weren’t because I was capable of hearing them, no matter how much that seemed to surprise their cliquey little trio.
“You can see us?” The one with the scythe who was maybe the ringleader of their little group asked after looking at me with a scrunched-up face for a few seconds. If I was right about that one being Jamison, he was the one with the highest level. Huh, that was a weird way to think about people—not that I was certain they were technically people, considering how their edges all seemed to fade into the ether. But I supposed it offered the very real possibility to command someone to “get on my level.”
“Yeah,” I said, deciding it was too late to pretend otherwise now. “That thing was following some old lady, but when it saw me, it started chasing me, then you guys swung in and stopped it. I saw it all!”
The trio shared another look, eyes barely visible from within the shadows of their hoods, and I was half tempted to snap at them to stop that. It was rude. Not to mention that it reminded me far too much of high school, which wasn’t exactly the greatest time for me.
But then, I blinked, and their ringleader went from standing right beside the other two to appearing right in front of me. I yelped, backing into the wall all over again, wondering if I was about to be purged like the monster that had been chasing me.
“Be still,” the Reaper rasped before flicking my forehead.
The entire world disappeared.