Suddenly being shoved to the ground with an irresistible force was just about enough to disrupt Anna's sleep.
She groggily woke up with a pained cry.
"Aah! What is going on—"
Her words were caught halfway through her larynx when she witnessed what she had woken up to.
Standing a few meters away from herself were two figures. One was her boyfriend, Aaron, and the other was something atrociously evil and sinister.
However, Aaron seemed a bit different than before. His body was as still as a mountain but seemed to be choking on the slim, wispy, light thread that flowed out of his mouth and into the strange figure's wooden staff.
And as the flow continued uninterruptedly, the girl could see as Aaron's body became paler and paler with each passing second.
She was beyond petrified.
**
Summoning every bit of willpower left in her, Anna managed to stand to her feet and staggered towards a wooden chair—placed on another side of the living room.
"You leave my Aaron alone, you devil!"
She uttered loudly as she crashed the wooden chair against the Shtriga's back.
She had done so in an attempt to at least disrupt the Shtriga from absorbing Aaron's life and soul essence.
However, the wooden chair only proved to be nothing more than just wooden crisps, because it shattered into tiny bits as soon as it made contact with the Shtriga's back.
"What the—"
The befuddlement in Anna's eyes was very hard to miss. She had struck a seeming living creature with something as hard as the particular chair she had been armed with, but somehow the former seemed to be more durable than the latter.
How absurd!
Despite Anna's failed attempt to rescue her boyfriend from the Shtriga's hold, it wasn't entirely a pitiful one.
This was so because: Shtrigas are also known to have a very crippling yet common weakness amongst themselves.
Whenever a Shtriga initiates her feeding process at any point in time, and on any particular victim, she would assume an immobile state, meaning: She can't move unless the soul extraction was completed.
And if the process, in any case, gets disrupted... then whatever amount of life and soul essence she had managed to extract from her victim would be transferred to its original owner.
However, despite seeming to be quite vulnerable during each process of extracting people's souls, most Shtrigas tend to experience a tremendous increase in their overall endurance and durability — meaning that they can't experience as much damage as they would when they aren't extracting souls for their filling.
So, seeing as the Shtriga had paid no heed to her previous assault, Anna decided to follow up her attacks by stabbing the figure with a sharp wooden spike — which she had sourced from the wooden debris of the broken sit-up chair.
But sadly, she didn't manage to get within the Shtriga's attack range before the latter made an abrupt swipe of her other hand, slamming it into the girl's face.
The Shtriga was able to generate enough force within that one simple swipe to be able to send Anna's body hurtling backwards across the room, and then finally slamming her body into a nearby wall.
The pain, accompanied by the terrifying force from the Shtriga and alongside the confusion and fear, was just about enough to bring Anna towards the precipice of unconsciousness.
She spat a mouthful of blood as she tried, strained, and willed her body from collapsing.
But without a sufficient amount of strength to press on her assaults, Anna could only punish herself by watching as the Shtriga continued draining the life out of Aaron.
"Aaron. No!" She gasped in pain and horror.
She was almost on the brink of blacking out when two gunshots resonated through the stiff air in the living room.
She hazily turned in the direction of the gunshot sound and saw Aaron's father cocking his shotgun to fire another round of bullets at the Shtriga.
"Let him go, right now!"
The man uttered as he fired another round of bullets at the Shtriga, aiming his shots away from his son to avoid shooting him instead.
But like the first round of bullets fired by the shotgun, this second round of bullets completely disintegrated at just about a few inches from Shtriga's flowing robe.
Anna covered her ears as more shots were being fired at the Shtriga, who didn't seem to let up on her soul extraction.
"Where is Dave and that goddamn flamethrower?!"
Aaron's father boomed as he continued firing bullet after bullet, trying fruitlessly to prevent the Shtriga from killing his son before his very eyes.
His wife, Aaron's mother, had been compelled by her husband to remain in their car as soon as they returned from work after their meeting.
He did so because as he pulled over into their driveway, he had caught a glimpse of the situation that took place upstairs.
So, with his shotgun, he had intended to shoot to kill the abomination that had infiltrated his home.
At least, he had intended on doing so before the creature left his son in an unrepairable state.
However, he had apparently given his shotgun a bit too much credit because, as of now, the bullets still couldn't cause a single damage to the Shtriga, and he was running out of bullets to fire.
But as he continued to burn through his munitions, a figure crept up behind the Shtriga and pointed the nozzle of a flamethrower at it.
"Time to go back to hell, you devil!" Dave, the guy who Aaron's father had been anticipating, uttered when finally arrived.
And as soon as he got a perfect aim at the Shtriga, he pulled the flamethrower's trigger and unleashed a torrential wave of flames that washed over the ominous witch.
The next thing that happened afterwards literally stunned everyone present in that living room:
Not only did the flames ravage the Shtriga's body, but they also ravaged her mind, causing the concentration she had on her soul-extraction process to waver a bit.
And with the non-existence of the tether that bound Aaron's soul to the Shtriga, Aaron's body crumpled to the ground while he gasped for air in large drags, his true colour slowing reigning over his face and body once again.
Aaron's father reacted fast by rushing to his son's body to pull him away from the burning witch so they could finally rain down fire on her without restraint.
Dave, the guy with the flamethrower, took it upon himself to pull Anna away too, bearing the same reason as Aaron's father.
But before any of both parties could come closer to any of the two Incapacitated victims, the Shtriga emitted an ear-splitting scream that debilitated everyone who heard it.
The two men who were directly before the Shtriga felt as though a thousand bells were being rung in their heads, coupled with a Scale-10 magnitude migraine, which was also known as the highest level a certain migraine could ever get.
But the Shtriga continued screaming and thrashing around the living room as the searing flames slowly devoured her body to absolute nothingness.
And soon the local police arrived at the scene and took over from where the two brazen gentlemen had left off.
They made sure of Aaron's safety during his transport to a nearby hospital and that Anna was operated upon as soon as she got admitted into another specialist hospital. Her brief tussle with the Shtriga had cost her several broken ribs and multiple ruptured blood vessels.
But the policemen couldn't do anything further to assist the victims of the attack if they couldn't tell what exactly it was that had attacked them that night.
They only found it very hard to believe that a mythical witch existing only in folklore could suddenly appear in their house and make an attempt on a young boy's life.
Of course, Aaron's father's witness testimony would have been proved beyond a reasonable doubt if the singularity was still revolving in their backyard. The police would have definitely seen a reason to believe what he had narrated to them.
But the singularity had disappeared a few seconds after the Shtriga made it out of it, so they couldn't quite prove how its reality met theirs.
Also, the flames that had previously ravaged the Shtriga's body didn't leave so much as a single limb to at least prove that there had been a threat in his house just a few minutes ago.
So all the policemen could give Aaron's father was the benefit of the doubt that he didn't actually know more than he was letting on, and there wasn't a bigger picture of what had happened to their son.