It should have been an easy mission, no people, no hiding, just a village full of curses and lingering spirits, but here he was, running for his life. Thankfully, it had been night time, the best time to find spirits roaming around, and also the best time to hide.

As a mage and a triple, he was far from defenseless, but the other side had a way to deal with curses which was why they settled here in the first place. Death and fire didn’t have good methods to deal with arrows, and his ability with air was so low it could only be used to reinforce the other elements.

He conjured a wind shield anyway. It’d only shift the trajectory of arrows slightly away from him but a bad protection was still better than none. He regretted his initial action of trying to take prisoners: if he hadn’t wasted his time on curses, he could have fireballed them all to hell.

Still hiding under a pile of debris, he overpowered a nearby spirit to look at the surrounding. He didn’t like doing that since it’d hold a grudge towards him afterward but he wasn’t in a situation to be choosy.

His attackers hadn’t let their guard down. They only moved as groups of ten while keeping some spaces between them to avoid getting taken out at the same time. They seemed too organized to be bandits, but it wasn’t impossible either, it wasn’t unusual for the remnants of mercenary bands to turn to crime after an unrecoverable defeat.

‘Bastards!’ The third group was looking inside his bag, and they knew the trick to access its most important content. ‘Scratch that, they aren’t mercenaries, they’re scouts for a foreign power!’

The church of the elements was independent and didn’t interfere in matters of state, but he doubted they’d give the opportunity to play this card. ‘If he still had his bag, he could have used the same trick as with the kid a few weeks ago, but as filled with hate and curse as the soul here were, they had just been normal people in life: he couldn’t sacrifice them to save himself.

He laid another layer of curse on the already much cursed terrain, but it was warded against by the mysterious invaders’ protection.

‘I need to reach the graveyard somehow… or make my own corpses.’

Easier said than done, acting through a familiar, he was seriously limited in his option, and he’d die the instant he got out of his refuge. Suddenly he had an idea, animals didn’t come near this place, but he could go and look for them. It was a risky since he’d lose sight of this place, but sooner or later they’d start looking under the rubbles.

The spirit flew at high speed, circling around the village but he found only small birds and rodent; nothing worth possessing. A noise alerted him to the presence of someone nearby. He quickly recalled the spirit to this place to look at the events.

The situation wasn’t ideal, but it wasn’t the worst either. The broken-down house shielded him from over half the enemies. If he called upon a fire tornado and reinforced it by absorbing the surrounding necrotic powers… he’d probably get burned to death too.

As soon as he’d release the spell, he’d give his position away, so he’d have less than a second to deal with his troublesome neighbor. ‘One, two, three, go!’

The man turned towards him. Since he was near a building, he had taken hold of his sword, carrying the bow in the other. Ignis shifted to the side and the deadly blow bounced against the rubbles. That was all the time he needed, a narrow jet of blue fire struck at the man face, burning away the assailant’s eyes and lung.

‘Here’s my first corpse.’ Ignis ran out of his now brightly light hiding place to hide behind the building, while suggesting to the nearby spirits to possess the corpses. He couldn’t really order them around since he hadn’t submitted them to his will, but influencing them to do something they already wanted to do wasn’t too hard.

The nearby resurrected corpse immediately attacked him. ‘Ah, yes, I forgot this one was holding a grudge against me.’

The sword missed him by a hair and shattered against the wall. The spirit control over the body wasn’t so good, but the strength was there. Ignis destroyed the zombie legs with another fire jet. In the distance he could hear cry of pains and sounds of battle.

He dismissed the firestorm, even in the eye of the storm it was getting hot enough that he had trouble breathing. A few steps from there, the zombie crawled resolutely, decided to satiate its grudge.

Already, he could ear the sound of battle fade and feel the ire of the nearby spirits turn towards him. He felt that maybe exchanging professional killer for unrelenting undead hadn’t been such a good idea after all.

He ran and the undead followed after him. For now, he had the advantage in speed but they’d soon master their new bodies and then…

’Better not think about it.’ Without his tools, he couldn’t create a proper ward, so his only two ways to deal with them was to either destroy the body, or the spirits and the later wasn’t an option he was willing to take.

He put a curse of decay on the ground in behind him to do just that but the zombie went through without harm.

“Damn bloody ward!” Swore the mage who had forgotten about them. He used a small air spell to enhance his breathing and ran away again, going in a circle around the undead in order to congregate them all while preparing his next attack.

He lobbed a fireball, but unlike with the previous spell, the flame didn’t dissipate, they clung to the corpse, the wood, the rubble, consuming everything it touched.

Finally, Ignis dropped to the ground exhausted. Maintaining this last spell when it wasn’t his specialty had taken everything from him. All around, the spirits freed from their worldly flesh gathered to curse him. It was a pain since they had gotten stronger from his action, but they weren’t quite yet evil spirit: he’d seen worse;

He walked back to the village, what was left of it, to recover his bag. As expected, the bag might have a strong fire ward, but it had been open at the time and a lot of his tools had been destroyed. He closed the bag and shifted, this one was better hidden because it contained his contracts and familiar as well as a few emergency tools and items he had yet to uncurse.

He was tired and he wanted to look at his attacker belonging to see where they had come from but he had become the sole target of the spirits’ grudge. And so, he got back to work.