Reborn Mercenary: Epic Fantasy With Progression

3

His armor, worked with gold lions, shows several mortal wounds from earlier fighting. Punctured lung from the wheeze. Opened belly held closed by his off hand. Missing the lower half of one ear. Behind him, I glimpse white-robed figures already moving forward. They’re ready to drag him back, stitch him whole, make him fresh for tomorrow’s slaughter.

He knows it. I know it. The unfairness tastes bitter.

“Captain. The Wolf himself. The Red Gale,” he rumbles through blood-flecked lips. “They said you’d be a fight worth having.”

I plant the spear. I hold my intestines in with my free hand. “Hate to disappoint. Not exactly at my best.”

“Oh, you won’t.” He coughs, sprays red, keeps grinning. “Win or lose, I’ll drink to you tomorrow. Good wine too, not that piss you mercenaries call beer.”

“Must be nice, knowing there’s a tomorrow.”

“It is.” No shame in the admission. “Almost feel guilty about it.”

“Almost?”

“Well.” He shrugs. The wound in his belly tears wider. “Not that guilty.”

He moves, unconcerned about dying with the healers waiting. Our weapons meet in a shower of sparks that lights the courtyard. My spear shaft, more prayer than wood now, groans but holds.

We trade death back and forth.

His flamberge cuts stone. I move around the strikes. Spear point finds every gap: knee joint, elbow, the soft spot under the chin. Robert staggers back, bleeding from half a dozen new wounds.

He laughs, wet and wondering. “f**k me. You’re a tough bastard for a mercenary prick with no Brand. That barrier trick drained you dry, didn’t it? No blessed marks. A runestick and twenty years of killing.”

“Thirty,” I correct him. “Started young.”

His mailed fist catches me across the chest. Ribs fold inward with wet snaps.

I hook his ankle and send him crashing down. We roll in the mud and blood, two corpses refusing to lie still.

He abandons technique for brute force. He drives that massive blade through my chest. The cold hits instantly as steel parts organs. The spear falls from nerveless fingers.

Robert leans close. Breath rattles through his punctured lungs. Behind him, I see the healers rushing forward. Hands already glow with stored miracles.

“No one will remember this, no songs, no glory, just meat feeding crows.”

I gather everything left. Hate, humor, the absurdity of it all. I shape it into words that bubble up through iron-thick blood. “f**k you.”

I spit red into his eye. I watch surprise spread across his face.

Then his blade twists. My knees fold. Stone rushes up to meet me.

As darkness eats the edges, I hear boots pounding closer. Healers’ voices, urgent, pulling Robert back from the edge he barely touched. He’ll live. Walk away. Fight again.

The unfairness of it all makes me want to laugh, but I’ve got no breath left for it.

The last thing I see is that white banner with its gold lions, and healers’ hands already working their expensive miracles on a man who can afford them.

Not a bad sight to die to.

Reminds you what you’re really worth in the end.

Nothing.

Time Has No Meaning Here

I don’t feel the blade leave my chest. I feel the world leave me. Everything drains through the hole Robert carved: sound, sight, the copper-sick taste of my own blood. Stone drops away. Pain follows.

Then the falling starts, and I learn that death isn’t the end. It’s the beginning of something worse.

No light. No sound. Just the drop through nothing, falling so long that down stops meaning anything. Time becomes a lie the living tell themselves. I fall through black that makes midnight look bright, through cold that makes winter feel warm.

「Thread detected. Soul in transit.」

I hit hard enough to powder bones I no longer own. Roll twice, come up in a fighter’s crouch from muscle memory alone. My hands sink into the floor, bone meal ground fine as flour, cold and dry. I watch it sift between my fingers. All ten of them. I lost three in the battle, but here they’ve returned, pale and numb.

I look down at myself. The wounds remain. The hole in my chest where Robert’s blade punched through. The ruin of my left arm, bone showing through meat that doesn’t bleed. When I touch my face, the left side is smooth and empty where the witch’s fire took my eye. My armor hangs in the same tatters it wore when I fell. But I’m solid. Heavy. When I press my palm to the floor, the bone meal takes my weight.

The dead have bodies here. They just don’t work the way they should.

The spear that should be in my hand isn’t. Just phantom weight where ancient oak should rest.

Red light seeps through the dark, steady as coals breathing in a forge that’s burned since before the first man drew breath. I look up, and my remaining eye adjusts to the dim glow. I’m inside something’s ribcage.

Something just as old as the gods that claim this place. The ribs arch overhead, yellowed with age and carved with runes that hurt to read. The floor is a polished sternum, smoothed by centuries of traffic. Between the ribs hang curtains of flesh that stopped rotting eons ago, preserved by whatever power claims this corpse for a throne room.

Through the gaps I see an endless necropolis. Skull-cities stacked to forever. Vertebrae roads wind between towers of bone, and on those roads, the commerce of death grinds eternal. Caravans of chained dead shuffle past, iron links singing their misery, sorted into lots by hooded things that might have been men once. Collectors tally souls the way quartermasters tally grain.

Between the coffles wander the lost ones. Those who refuse to be processed, who won’t accept their deaths. They drift against the current of chains, eyes focused on nothing, going nowhere forever. Some still wear the wounds that killed them. A woman passes with her throat opened to the spine. A soldier drags himself on stumps, leaving wet trails in the bone dust. They don’t see me. Don’t see anything but whatever memory keeps them walking.

I’m standing in the corpse of a god that died before men learned to sharpen sticks.

◇ ◆ ◇

I walk deeper into the bone cathedral, following the red light. My footsteps land wrong, like drums played backward, the sound arriving before my boot touches ground. The air tastes of old stone after rain, clean and terrible. The silence presses against my ears, thick and patient, swallowing everything.

The ribs open into a heart-chamber, and here the red light burns strongest. The floor isn’t bone anymore. It’s a weave of coarse gray threads, millions of them, stretched drum-tight across a loom the size of a battlefield. They hum with cold-iron weight.

When I step onto them, new colors coil through the pattern. Rust reds, gutter-smoke browns, the green of gangrenous wounds. All coming from me.

One thread blazes different from the rest. Silver, bright as moonlit steel. It runs from the center of the weave straight into my chest, through the hole Robert’s flamberge carved. I tug. It tugs back, connected to something far above the void.

「Silver thread detected. Soul claim: PURCHASED.」

“Still unsevered.”

The voice comes from everywhere, from the bones beneath my feet and the ribs overhead and the threads humming their dead frequencies. At the loom’s center, on a throne carved from a single enormous molar, sits Mawcaron, Lord of the Underworld.

He’s built from battlefield leftovers. Armor plates that don’t match, stitched together with copper wire gone green with age. A crown of finger bones, all pointing in different directions. Antlers made of broken swords rise from his helm, and runes crawl across his breastplate, rearranging themselves when I try to read them. One eye is carved in black stone. The other is just a hole that shows the skull beneath.