Miracleborn Saga

A dry wind brushed past the outer wall.

Andrew stood still, eyes fixed on the haze beyond the gate. His black gloves gripped the rifle tightly. Around him, ten Vanguards waited in silence. The air was tense, thick with the scent of smoke, rust, and something fouler—death.

The land beyond was quiet. Too quiet.

Then came the sound—a distant groan, low and endless, rising like a tide.

Figures emerged from the fog. Dozens. Then hundreds. The undead marched forward with twitching limbs, broken bodies, but sharp purpose. Many had strange marks on their flesh. Some leaked green liquid from open wounds. Others had armored bones poking from their shoulders.

"They're coming," whispered one Vanguard, adjusting his stance.

Andrew didn't reply. He raised his fist. The soldiers aimed. No yelling. No panic. Only breath and steel.

The first volley of gunfire rang out—sharp, echoing across the empty land.

Zombies dropped. Heads exploded. Limbs flew. But they kept moving.

One zombie, its belly swollen like a drum, staggered forward faster than the rest. It let out a strange rattling hiss and flung its arms up.

"Down!" someone shouted.

BOOM.

The explosion hit the left side of the gate, rattling the steel. A chunk of the wall cracked, bent inward. Smoke clouded everything. When it cleared, there was a hole.

An opening.

From it, new zombies rushed in—faster, sharper, different. One had sickle arms. Another walked backward with its head twisted around. A third opened its mouth and sprayed a fine venomous mist into the air.

Coughing. Screams. A Vanguard collapsed, his face burning.

Andrew didn't speak. He moved forward, shot the twisted zombie, pulled the fallen soldier to safety, and pointed. Three others rushed to seal the breach with barricades.

But it was failing. The line was breaking.

Another Vanguard shouted, "They're flanking us!"

From the sides, more undead came. Crawlers. Spitters. Bursters.

Andrew's lips pressed tight. His eyes didn't blink.

He knelt beside a dying soldier, closed his eyes, then stood again. The enemy was changing. These weren't just zombies—they were engineered. Deliberate. Designed.

He raised his rifle and gave the order with a hand signal.

Hold the gate. Or die trying.

The wall trembled again.

The fog thickened like a curtain of smoke. The moans grew louder. Bullets rang out across the field, but the wave of undead didn't slow.

The Vanguards held their positions—sweating, bleeding, breathing heavy. Their bodies were tired, but their wills hadn't broken.

Andrew's coat flapped in the wind as he scanned the horizon, jaw clenched. His sharp eyes caught something—movement. Faster than before.

A new group of zombies tore through the broken gap in the gate. These weren't ordinary.

Their bellies glowed faint green. Their veins pulsed like lava tubes. Their bodies were bloated, twitching violently.

Exploders.

"Everyone, look there!" one of the Vanguards shouted in panic.

The undead rushed, ten of them, swaying from side to side—unstable, foaming. One explosion and the defense would collapse.

Andrew stepped forward and raised a hand. "Fall back ten paces!" he barked. "Snipers, target the feet. Don't hit the cores."

Everyone moved. No hesitation.

"Form a half-circle. Trap them in a funnel!"

The Vanguards quickly shifted formation. The charging zombies were pulled into a narrow zone, surrounded from both sides. Andrew stood behind the trap, waiting.

"Suppress them now!"

Shots rang out. Bullets slammed into knees, shins, and thighs—breaking legs, tripping bodies. The Exploders collapsed before reaching the center.

Andrew tossed a smoke grenade—masking the field.

Then—he moved in. Swift. Cold.

He fired into the air. One signal. A sharpshooter on the tower fired a special round—piercing the heart of the middle zombie. It erupted, but the explosion was contained within the smoke, surrounded by fallen corpses.

The rest exploded in chain—harmless, unable to reach the living.

The ground shook. Fire licked the air. But when the smoke cleared…

The Vanguards were still standing.

Andrew stared ahead, face unreadable. "That was a scout group," he muttered.

One soldier swallowed. "Now… what's next?"

Andrew didn't answer.

He was watching the mist again. A deeper growl echoed now—closer than before.

The earth shivered once.

Then again.

Three giants zombies stepped through the breach.

Each movement slow, measured. Their footsteps did not echo—but stayed, as if sound feared to vanish from their weight. Ten feet tall, armored in crude iron grown like fungus over bone, they halted just within reach of the dying moonlight. Weapons scraped against stone—an axe like a church door, a spear laced with pulsing veins, and a sword that shimmered like a mirror cracked with screaming faces.

Andrew saw it all—then blinked.

He didn't see one path. He saw hundreds.

One where he fled. One where they broke him. One where the Vanguards screamed his name in vain. But there it was—splintered between failures, tucked under the weight of impossible odds—a single possibility where they died, and he stood alone.

He breathed in. Blood still clung to his cloak, but his eyes were dry.

Andrew drew a whistle out of nowhere which fell all the vanguards there in sleep.

And then,

Andrew stepped forward without a word.

The gladiators snarled in unison, and charged.

Andrew flicked his fingers once. Illusion fell like ink. Ten Andrews emerged in a circle—each wearing a different mask, each wielding a different weapon. The first gladiator, with the mirror-sword, cut through five instantly, its blade reflecting possibilities and killing even the false.

Andrew weaved through the aftermath like mist.

He whispered a twisted invocation.

"Fracture the slumber—let them dream of drowning."

The ground beneath the second gladiator turned soft, unreal. A dream-trap. The world bent—ropes of liquid memory lashed its limbs, dragging it through a field of its own forgotten rage. It roared, breaking free—but the dream left something behind. Confusion. Delay. That was enough.

The third hurled its axe.

Andrew blinked again—stepping sideways into a forgotten thought. He vanished, appearing behind them, hand raised with a gesture shaped like a question.

A concept shimmered into form:

"The Blade of Regret Never Spoken."

It struck soundlessly, cutting not flesh—but intention. The first gladiator faltered, missing its next step entirely.

But the giants were no fools.

The second gladiator twisted its chest open, revealing a second face—a mouth that screamed so loud it tore through illusion. Andrew's false selves vanished. Blood ran from his ears. The third gladiator clenched its fists, and grew—its aura distorting the space, becoming heavier, fouler. The sword-wielder vanished—no, moved faster than thought, its blade tearing into Andrew's shoulder.

He winced, coughed—and smiled.

"Now… it begins."

He inhaled his own dream.

And the world around him twisted.

Illusions didn't dance anymore—they screamed. A cathedral of impossible architecture rose behind him, windows made of unfulfilled desires. From it walked beings of half-formed truths—creatures pulled from dreams he never finished, nightmares that wore pieces of his own face.

He summoned another concept: "The Hourglass That Reverses Guilt."

Time faltered for one gladiator. Its last step played again. And again. And again—until Andrew cleaved through it with a dreamblade formed from his own childhood grief.

The fight dragged on, seconds stretching like entrails.

One gladiator used Echo Blades, swinging a weapon that attacked twice—once in the present, once in the near future. Another exhaled Hallucination Smoke, distorting Andrew's senses, forcing him to stab illusions of his own allies. The third, eyes glowing with Aura Drain, tried to consume Andrew's very willpower.

But Andrew… had been farming aura the entire time.

Every step, every breath, every illusion was built to draw fear, awe, focus. Even the gladiators felt it—the dread rising. The twisted glory of a lone man breaking fate. Everything those three gladiators did or saw till now was just a manifestation of Andrew's made dream.

He was standing above the cathedral, clock flickering like a flag.

At last, Andrew called his final dream.

"Sleep, in the shape of ruin."

The cathedral beneath him collapsed into tendrils—The Sleepborne Maw. It devoured two gladiators in one breath, their bodies twitching as they forgot they'd ever existed.

The final one fell at his feet, limbs severed, mind broken by a reality it could no longer trust.

Andrew stood in the silence.

Blood down his brow. Illusions gone. Aura thick in the air like burning incense. His coat barely clung to him. His breathing slow, jagged. But he remained standing.

And behind him, unseen, the possibility he had chosen faded…

…as reality became his will.

Andrew's steps were slow but steady. His gloves were soaked—blood, water, fragments of nightmare—but his eyes were focused ahead. The last battlefield lay behind him, where the mangled corpses of three towering monsters waited silently. Vanguard recovery teams would handle it. They'd see the scars he left across the stone, the shattered ground, the inhuman wounds carved clean by will and illusions.

But Andrew didn't wait for medals. He walked toward the station alone.

As he neared the bridge that arched over the Thornriver, the sound of soft footsteps echoed. Then another. Wet, disjointed.

He stopped.

Six figures swayed in the fog ahead, blocking the narrow passage across. Their eyes glowed faint—like lanterns drowned in muck. None spoke. None needed to.

Andrew drew a shallow breath and pressed his fingers together.

"Dreamless." he whispered.

The world rippled. Shadows bloomed.

The first creature lunged.

Andrew's foot snapped forward—its skull shattered before it even touched the ground.

Another came. He vanished.

The sound of clapping—echoing, unreal—confused them as he cut through the middle with a folded illusion, slicing one in half with a blade that didn't exist.

Three seconds. Six fallen.

The mist returned to stillness.

Then, a scream.

High. Fragile. Real.

He whipped around—eyes catching a girl, barely ten, teetering on the crumbling edge of the bridge's southern side. She must've been running, fleeing something, barefoot and wild-eyed. The old railing was broken. Her foot slipped.

Without thinking, Andrew ran.

Time contracted.

He dove just as she fell—his arm stretching far enough to seize her coat. With a burst of raw force, he hurled her upward. Her small body hit the stone with a thud—but she was safe.

He didn't stop falling.

The wind tore past him. His cloak flared like torn wings. Then the Thornriver rose up and swallowed him whole.

A crash. A splash. Then silence.

The girl crawled to the edge, crying out.

"Sir!? Sir!!"

But the river had already dragged him beneath.

Down into cold currents.

Down into the dark.

Only the fog remained above the bridge…

…and ripples in the water where a man had once stood.

The girl was panicked. Until a large feather, might be of a casual paper size, fell on her head. She dragged it and read the words.

" Don't worry, I am just chilling. Go to the southern coast, you might find help there. "

Then the feather in her hand bloomed into a water lily.

....

Andrew drifted downward like a torn feather, swallowed whole by the black. His body didn't thrash. No desperation filled his limbs. No struggle to rise. He simply sank, arms loose, cloak billowing in soft ripples around him.

Light shimmered above, fractured by the surface. It looked almost holy.

A school of silverfish spiraled past his boots like a ribbon unraveling. From a deeper layer, ghostly jellyfish pulsed with dim bioluminescence—blue, pink, like stars humming under water.

Beautiful, he thought.

And then laughed. A small, broken laugh. The bubbles escaped his mouth in slow, lazy orbs.

"I should've brought a towel."

His voice echoed only in his head. The world wouldn't hear it.

"So this is it, huh? Some kid gets to live, and I get a front-row seat to nature's screensaver."

His back hit the silt. It kicked up around him like dust, rising in a bloom. His eyes remained open. Somewhere above, the bridge was just a blur—shadow and light playing a trick.

" What a dumb ending... All that training. All the blood. For what? Saving five people no one will remember? I couldn't even make any of my beloved people smile, what a failure. "

One jellyfish floated over his chest. It pulsed, almost comfortingly.

He stared at it. Blank. Exhausted.

"A real hero saves the world, right?"

"A real hero doesn't get his name scratched off a roster by a drunk officer two weeks later. Doesn't die alone in a river with squids for pallbearers."

The jellyfish glowed brighter, brushing against his skin. He didn't move.

"Maybe I'm just... a cutscene. A side character in three billion stories. A face in someone else's montage."

The thought didn't even sting. It was just… true.

Another wave of tiny fish spun above him, catching the sun's rays like falling glass. Even the river was more alive than he felt.

"Can't even be bothered to drown right. Look at me. Just floating here like an idiot. I didn't even wear my clean cloak."

His heartbeat slowed. He felt it.

And yet…

He didn't panic. He didn't gasp. No pleas to gods or memories of family surged in his mind.

Just… silence.

A peace, almost.

"Maybe that's the joke," he whispered in thought.

"The world's biggest comedy. Where I play the disposable fool who smiled too late, what a failure.... "

And the river, full of light and dreamlike weight, cradled him gently—like it, too, understood.