For the one-hundred-fifty-third time, the spirit hefted his musket, barrel hot and burning in his hand. With the other flickering shapes on either side of him, he stepped off at the order to take the hill.
They moved through the trees, some real and some as spectral as themselves, inching their way up the steep wooded slope toward the muzzle flashes ahead through the leaves. Mechanically he loaded, tapped, and fired until just as the one-hundred-fifty-two times, a canon spat a roar of fire that lit up the entire hillside, revealing the carnage around.
Thirty lead balls almost the size of his boney fist flew down the range. They ripped apart the trees, exploding chunks of wood that joined the deadly missiles. Their force carried them along so that when they all met their target, there had been very little left of his solid body and his spectral one also dissolved, holes punched through that grew, expanded outwards and could no longer hold together.
Mist scattered. Ghostly splinters, canister, and body all vanished.
When the repeating battle ended, the mist tentatively slithered along and drifted together. He sat cross-legged on the grass in the shallow ditch their bodies still rested in. Nothing changed, the night kept on.