Lt. Adam Kaplan was angry for a variety of perfectly valid reasons.

Everything every priest had ever told him about the afterlife had been a lie, or at least, a gross misrepresentation. He'd been taught that faithful, Angel-fearing souls would get to enjoy an eternity in Paradise.

This was not that. Granted, the pleasures of Paradise had never been specified to any extent, but Adam was pretty damn sure that having nearly everyone around him trying to blast him out of the sky was not one of them.

And it wouldn't even kill him!

As far as Lt. Kaplan was concerned, he was an imaginary version of a man who was already dead. Worse, his fucking caretaker had just left by merging with spaceship with a bad case of the plague to hack into some sort of alien cyberspace. And, somehow, magic was also involved?

It was bullshit. It was all such bullshit.

When—if—this was all over, Adam resolved to throw his dignity to the wind and conjure up that swimming pool filled with swimmable, drinkable beer-filled he'd been pining for. As far as he was concerned, this afterlife was in need of some serious improvements.

The mechs down below pelted the underside of the ship's hull with laser fire. Adam knew this because the wall-spanning viewscreen that had appeared up in front of him had all these nifty little purple indicator arrowheads along its lower edge that pointed at the mechs.

The knowledge-packages I'd given to Lt. Kaplan told him pretty much everything he needed to know about operating the ship, and—thankfully—that came with an understanding of the meanings of most of the viewscreen's indicators and displays.

The viewscreen was currently presenting a kind of augmented reality display. It showed the view of the scene from the ship's nose, but overplayed it with extra layers of information. Any moving object of significant size was rings in a razor-thin halo of color. Friendlies were haloed in red, while anything infected was haloed displayed in green. Anything not in either of those two categories got a thin outline of purple. Adam thought those first two color choices should have been the other way around, but it's not like the ship had a slot for filing complaints.

Frustratingly, the ship's computer stubbornly refused to acknowledge the other Vyx ships as enemies. It took multiple shots from a red-outlined target before the system changed the color of their overlay and indicator icons, and even then, it put them in purple, not green, as if the damn machine wanted to believe it was just friendly fire.

As a result, purple outlines were spreading across the display like a nasty rash. They were positively eating everything up.

As was I.

My body sat motionless, embedded in the control panels and surrounding walls only a couple of feet from where Adam stood. He tried to ignore me by pretending that I was just a statue, wafting out spores like some kind of theme park animatron.

More sparks flew. Alarms keened in discontent.

That was another thing that pissed Adam off: the stress. Stress from fighting on behalf of the monster who had murdered him; and stress from dealing with the fear and anxiety coming off the spirits I'd left behind. Yes, though I had set my body to keep producing the wyrmsong needed to maintain my spirits' ability to interact with one another and the other wyrms, I had unfortunately forgotten to inform my spirits that I'd be out of commission while I was jaunting around inside the Vyx Network, or, for that matter, that the moment of his departure would be so viscerally palpable to the spirits.

In my defense, at the time, I hadn't known it would be a thing.

While it hadn't hurt, it had felt like some bones, a kidney, and a couple feet of intestine had suddenly vanished from Adam's (admittedly phantom) body. It was the feeling of something missing, and of being on your own.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

The other spirits' worries stained the tenuous network of interactions held up by my wyrmsong. The Lieutenant did his best to ignore it; it took all of his mental effort to try to figure out how the weapons systems worked and fly the ship at the same time.

This was yet another thing Adam was pissed off about: the knowledge-packet I'd given him had come with only the vaguest sense of how to operate the death ray. He knew there was a button that fired it, just not which one.

The one he'd thought was the obvious candidate turned out to be the kill-engine button, an utterly terrifying mistake.

Adam strained his mind, trying to find any clue as to what he should do.

One of the other ships fired its rays, blasting away the cluster of wyrms that had been mobbing it.

Then, a voice came through the spirit network that the lieutenant couldn't ignore.

"Dr. Howle?" General Marteneiss said. "Dr. Howle?"

Adam steered the ship upward, dodged an incoming lightning-bolt death-ray combo, and then spared a couple precious seconds to reply to the General's pressing concern.

"I'm afraid he's AWOL, sir," Adam said, glancing at the wyrm partially embedded into the machinery. "AWOL in a wall," he added, "believe it or not."

The General sputtered. "What?"

"He's in the Network, sir."

General Marteneiss groaned. "Good news at a bad time isn't much better than bad news, y'know?"

"That I do."

After much deliberation, Adam decided to press another button, hoping it would trigger the weapon.

"What the hell is that?" the General groaned, as did Lt. Kaplan.

It seemed he'd pushed a music button. At least, Adam was pretty sure it was music. It sounded like EDM, yet somehow worse.

Adam pressed the button again, and—mercifully—that turned off the music, not that he could celebrate it.

"Fuck me," he cursed.

It looked like everyone and their grandma had decided to start firing at him. The Vyxit down below were firing at him. The other ships were firing on him. Even some of the wyrms were firing at him, though not intentionally. Alarms flashed on the side of the viewscreen. Adam did not know what they meant aside from the general impression of scream-your-head-off awfulness.

A series of explosions percussed along the ground. It took a second for the lieutenant to realize what had just happened.

"Shit!"

A good deal of their line of tanks and aerostats had just gone up in smoke.

A combination of big blasts from the mechs and magical shit from the ground troops had done it.

Adam focused on the spirit network. He yelled. "A little help, here! I've got Dr. Howle on board!"

Several wyrms came flying toward him, brandishing psychokinesis. Unlike them, Adam didn't have the wyrmsight or whatever to see the magic as it happened; he only knew it had been used when the incoming laser fire got bent or deflected—to varying levels of success—as it passed through the quiveringness that came billowing out from the wyrms' bodies, or when one of the wyrms bound their spores into a solid shape and swung.

One of them had made a spore sword that came apart like a chain-whip when swung. It was ridiculous, and it bothered Adam that it worked—and, not only that, but that it worked well.

It was definitely cool, he'd grant them that, not that that was anything to write home about. Though Adam understood the gist of what was going on, he was still peeved that he had to fight on behalf of the disease that destroyed the world. If General Marteneiss hadn't personally asked him to set aside his qualms—and if his own spiritual existence hadn't also depended on it—Lt. Kaplan would have rather stayed in his afterlife zone, going on crazy adventures with what he remembered of his mates from high school and boot camp.

Adam tried pressing another button. Like the previous times, the experience began with apprehension and uncertainty, but then he realized he'd finally hit the jackpot, and Holy Angel, that was satisfying!

It was like he'd just turned on the high beams on his car's headlights, only these high beams actually set things on fire, instead of just making the targets' eyes feel like they were.

The thick, red beam erupted from the nose of Adam's ship with volcanic fury, right as the wyrms hounded a Vyx ship directly into the line of fire. The energy shields flickered, cracked, and gave in—all in a matter of seconds—shattering as the death ray plowed through the ship's rear flank. While the hit didn't blow the ship up, it did accomplish the next best thing: sending the spacecraft careening toward the ground with smoke and flames and blue flames streaming from its wounds, and with no way for its pilots to do anything but brace for impact as it scraped along the ground in a long trough that made glass bowling pins out of Vyxit troops and smashed a walker-mech into the dirt as it slid to its chaotic stop.

An indicator appeared on the screen, and from the way it was slowly filling up, Adam knew that had to show how much time was left until he could fire the beams again. He spent the next twenty seconds deploying every lunatic flying trick every commander he'd ever had had always told him not to use in order to dodge the oncoming attacks: laser fire, magic lightning, a giant boulder, and even the chassis of a ruined mech-walker.

The machinery beeped once the beam finished charging. It was a glorious sound, the single most wonderful thing Adam had ever heard. The instant it hit his ears, he leveled out his flight path, angled the nose of the craft slightly downward, aimed for the thickest cluster of those fucking aliens, right where they were running past and leaping over the demolished line of Fort Marteneiss' defense, and then fired the death rays at them with extreme prejudice.

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