We drown further into the earth, Sawyer with his hand on top of my head, twisting my neck into the dirt to push himself up. A chaos of bugs. Tiny legs burrowing into my ear cavities. My eyes disappearing into the earth, my throat choking up. They treat my eyes and nostrils as a home for their endless squiggling, their birthing and dying.

Inside the earth, my hand glows as a silver-blue hilt appears between my fingers and thumb. A blade springs from the hilt in an explosion of mist.

I sprout like a tree from the dirt and wave the sword over my head, cutting away dirt and brambles and striking Sawyer in one fell swoop.

With a hiss, he throws himself off me in a backward dive to his feet.

I stab the ancestral sword into the ground and push down on the hilt to force my way up. I sprout like a tree as a cloud of ecto-mist forms beneath my feet, giving me a solid place to stand on the shifting dirt. I pull the sword out, twirl it around my wrist, and dive for Sawyer.

I cut his face open, once across, opposite the direction his hair sweeps. His skin cracks. Pieces cake away like volcanic dirt. From under the skin, creepy-crawlies pop like bullet shells, squirming and simmering, fading into nothing.

He is made of the earth and bugs and trees. The forest and its creatures.

Chunks of skin return to Sawyer’s lips, nose, and eyes, and I strike again, this time at the chest.

My weapon vanishes through a cloud of red smoke—he’s gone. He’s reborn again as a hand at my back. It pushes me beneath a falling tree that’s tilting over slowly, in its death loop.

Chains of red and black rise up, catch me by my wrists and ankles, and pin me to the ground. The ancestral sword disappears in a blur of smoke. And the tree falls, its shadow coming over me. The ecto-mist sweeps across the forest in a glittering semicircle of ice blue, capturing the restraints at my wrists and exploding them, freeing me in flight.

I flip backward to safety just as the tree hits the ground in a burst of light.

I land on my feet with a new sword in hand and catch Sawyer racing up the hill.

My physical body is knocked out in the truck. I command myself to rejoin it, and a carpet of mist forms beneath me. It flies me up the hill, over Sawyer’s head. I throw the sword toward him. It shanks one leg. His calf bursts into beads of red light. They escape like precious rubies down the sand and pull him lopsided into the earth.

I win.

He’s dying behind me. The souls and earth eating him. The ecto-mist is teaming up with ghost ticks and leeches to feast on his flesh and make him obsolete.