I was only 10-15 minutes away from home. So far, those two didn’t follow me. I thought I could relax and forget about them like a horrible nightmare.

  “Don’t even dream about getting rid of them that easily,” he said.

  “My mood is already in the dumps, did you have to ruin it further?” The events of this day completely drained me of any remaining energy.

  It didn’t help my mood that I had to stop due to red light. Perhaps I was too tired to worry. There were already a lot of self made problems on my mind. That was probably why, I was very calm when I asked.

  “So what will happen from now on.” I made eye contact with the bird sitting on my head as I looked through the rear mirror.

  “Licho loves to feast on human misery and you…” he paused. “ You are a special kind of delicacy, in your current state.”

  Don’t wake Licho while it’s sleeping, I believe that’s what my grandmother used to tell me. Sorry, I couldn’t follow your advice. It was what it was. Now, I just needed to find a way out.

  Dying wasn’t really part of my plans. “So what can I do?” I asked.

  “Change your life. Fix what is causing you pain.”

  That was simpler said than done. Did you really think I didn’t try? Past 6 years were pointlessly spent trying to change. Instead, I just fell deeper into abyss, a hell of my own creation. Despite how many troubles I was facing, I did consider myself to be very lucky in life. My only problem was myself. My mind in particular was the source of all my current suffering. I was given so many chances and yet…I wasted them all. Fix what’s causing me all this pain and suffering. Yeah, right. If only it was so easy. I didn’t know what I supposed to respond with.

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  To be fair I was glad, he didn’t give me the chance to respond. “You don’t have to worry about the Jorogumo.” He smirked, “You are not her type.”

  Not sure if that was his way of making me feel better, but I don’t think it was working.

  “Licho is what you really need to worry about. So you better find happiness to use as shield asap.”

  I had a feeling he would say something along those lines. In my old house, back in Ukraine, I used to read a lot of books about mythical creatures. Those books were a fond memory of mine. It was also precisely from those book that I knew about Licho. It doesn’t have a gender, but could take any form it wishes. It does like to attract potential prey with tempting outer shell. Beneath it, however, is a creature akin to what I saw that day. It’s fast and nearly impossible to kill, but it always had this one particular weakness.

  At times, those myth I read were different from the ones you could have found online. However, my mom had always told me that the stories in our library were more than mere myth. I suppose, she was right. Today, I myself was a witness to their existence.

  It was a blessing that I knew a lot about my enemy, but it was also a curse. Because of those stories, I knew exactly what horrible fate awaited me if I were to fail.

  Take Licho, for example, it loves to play with its food. Not only that, it is extremely calculative and hard to trick. It knew exactly how to make your suffering worse. Then, when you reach the peak of your despair, it consumes you, erasing your existence from the world. This creature would make it as if you never existed. Of course, there were times when your loved ones would be the only people to remember you. Alas, even that was just one of its ways to feed off the misery from the people who missed you, before consuming them as well.

  How was a loser like me supposed to deal with a creature like that?

  “Be cautious,” he warned. “Licho already caught on to your smell.”

  Yeah. I knew that. From the moment Licho noticed, it would not let go till somebody died. Its keen sense of smell was bound to lead it to me. There was no way for me to escape. The only solution was to face it head on.