You can redeem it straight to lightning.

What is in Nostr is an ecash locked to your pubkey. Usually you redeem it for a new and unique unlocked token and store it locally (hopefully encrypted) so that you can hand it to someone else in the future.

But you don't need to trade ecash for ecash, you can just submit a lightning invoice paired with your ecash and the mint will pay the invoice.

You can think of ecash as a partial request packet that needs to eventually make its way to a mint if you like, only when you redeem it for something, be it a new never before seen ecash or a lightning payment, you can assume you haven't been paid yet.