57. How Do You Kill a Possessing Ghost?

How Do You Kill a Possessing Ghost?

You know that famous Superman joke, the one where he gets shot in the eye and just shrugs it off?

Yeah. Complete nonsense.

Sure, shotgun pellets could no longer truly injure me… but just as a bit of dust in an ordinary person’s eye would not cause real harm and still hurt, itch, and drive them half-mad, this was still painful, irritating, and deeply unpleasant.

Her next several shots made things worse while I flailed blindly and tried very hard not to turn the old woman into meat paste.

Long story short: the shadow creatures could possess people.

Gathering all the refugees together and finding a way to exorcise the things possessing them was not fun. But we had no other choice.

If we did not find them, even a few infiltrators that could not normally be detected might cause horrifying destruction by appearing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

If we did try to find them, well, then we had to deal with the same problem I was dealing with right now.

“Die, you freak ape! Die!” Grandma Zhao cackled, firing shot after shot in my direction.

She definitely had some kind of power backing her up—possibly more than one. Her ammunition had not run out, and despite my speed, every shot was extremely accurate and hit hard.

I tried to get close and grab her, but her body blurred, turned almost translucent, and sank into the ground.

My supernatural senses could track her intangible body moving underground. Unfortunately, that did not make it any easier to stop her ranged hit-and-run attacks.

“Fall down, you troll-spawn!” the possessed old woman shouted after two solid slugs only slowed my advance slightly.

I began to suspect the dark spirit possessing her could use her skills and powers—including her skill at cursing—but could not access her real mind or knowledge, because the insults were embarrassingly bad.

After another two minutes, once the slugs striking me felt more like slaps than anything else, my patience began to run thin.

I had been trying for a while to get this ghostly thing out of my old neighbor, but its shifting and intangibility made every attempt useless.

The only power I had that could reliably hurt these ghosts was thorough incineration. When an innocent person was possessed, that was not a viable option…

…or was it?

First, I played hide-and-seek with the possessed woman for a little while longer, letting the possessor get used to its apparent invincibility and grow overconfident.

Then, before the ghost could react, I burned through a large portion of my stamina reserves and activated three energy-intensive abilities at once.

First, I triggered Instant Action. Within two subjective seconds—seconds in which my enemy could neither act nor perceive, because this was not real time at all—I reached out and touched the old woman before the possessor could make her intangible.

Second, I layered a Force Adjustment field over her, making everything about her several times more solid.

Finally, I enhanced the impact force of the air molecules around her, effectively wrapping her in a field of fire that moved with her and could not be extinguished so long as air remained nearby.

Then time resumed.

The ghost discovered that the body it possessed was surrounded by very real and very painful flame.

It immediately tried to escape the fire by sinking underground, and that did work…

Until it surfaced again, and the air ignited all over again.

It ran around, flailing its arms, stopping, dropping, and rolling, all to no effect.

Then it abandoned poor Grandma Zhao in the fire and tried to flee.

I immediately caught it in a forcefield bubble and dismissed the Force Adjustment field that had created the flames.

A smoking, unconscious, but physically intact old woman collapsed to the ground without a single burn mark on her body.

The flames had been real and intense, but the reinforced solidity field had kept her alive through the brief time it took the ghost to decide possession was no longer worth it.

Relieved that everything had gone reasonably well so far, I burned the captured ghost and went to deal with the rest.

A little girl with an adorable brown ponytail leapt across the gaps between trailers, trying in vain to escape me.

The ten-year-old girl was the last possessed survivor. Inside her hid the last ghost in the area that was still alive, and it seemed determined to make me chase it properly.

A weak superpower let her move a little faster than an Olympic sprinter. She knew this particular section of the trailer park better than I did.

She was small enough to use even tiny hiding places, and the ghost possessing her had skills stronger than the others.

None of that helped.

My senses could pierce physical obstacles, my flight let me move through real bullet time, and the ghost either could not or would not stay underground for long.

It and its companions—things that hijacked human minds and mimicked personality—could never resist stopping to curse, brag, or monologue like the dumbest villains in a Saturday-morning cartoon.

After a brief chase, the girl finally collapsed, having exhausted all her stamina keeping her low-level speed skill active.

Before I prepared to use fire, the ghost left her body.

I appreciated that.

My method probably did not do much physical harm to the victims, but they would still feel as if they had been set on fire.

I knew exactly how awful that felt. It made me furious, eager for revenge, because those ghosts had left me no other choice.

But I was not grateful enough to let the hateful little ghost escape.

In desperation, it chose to hide underground again, knowing that sooner or later it would have to come out and become vulnerable.

Unfortunately for it, I was no longer willing to wait that long.

I applied Force Adjustment to the ground, amplifying every vibration. Tiny heat-induced movements within the structure of the soil were magnified, producing more heat, which caused more vibration, which produced more heat, cycling again and again.

Used in air, the same trick created a plasma field.

Used in earth, it was much slower, but in the end it turned everything into glowing, churning, hissing lava.

The ghost fled again.

It did not get far.

Before I could finish it, a fist nearly as large as my torso thrust out beside the chassis of a burned-out trailer.

The fist caught the intangible villain as if it were entirely real and squeezed until the monster burst into something that looked like ectoplasmic slime from a ghost movie.

Behind that fist, a genuine giant emerged into view.

He was at least half again as tall as my enhanced self and several times wider.

His muscles bulged like sacks stuffed with watermelons, grotesque with raw, rough, fleshy power.

Familiar dirty blue eyes narrowed down at me from a face that was just as fleshy, rough, and horribly familiar. His filthy blond hair had been cropped short.

“Glad to see these useless things don’t amount to much against you, girl,” a familiar voice rumbled, magnified into thunder.

At the same time, the giant flicked the ghost slime off his hand into the darkness with disgust. “Warms an old man’s heart.”

“You don’t have a heart, old man,” I shot back.

The good mood I had earned by saving refugees from evil and destroying a dozen very dangerous monsters vanished the instant I saw him. “You replaced it with pure spite a long time ago, remember?”

“Watch that mouth when you speak to me, little girl,” he growled threateningly, exactly as he used to. “You’re not too grown to avoid a deserved punishment.”

“Oh, really?” I sneered, fists clenching at my sides, every muscle in my body tightening with anger. “Why don’t you come closer and say that again, old man?”

Then my former coach punched me in the face.