Reborn to Restore the Beast World

The beast hit the barricade hard enough to lift it off the ground.

Harper caught the splintering timbers with her ability before they could fall across the people behind her. Roots punched through the broken pavement, binding wood to wood, dragging the whole sagging structure upright.

“Left side!” she shouted. “Don’t let it turn us!”

A rifle cracked beside her. Another answered farther down the line. The beast recoiled, jaws snapping at the smoke, and Harper drove a wooden spike beneath its raised foreleg.

It went down thrashing.

She did not wait to see whether it stayed there.

Beyond the barricade, shapes moved between the shells of abandoned buildings. Too many shapes. Low bodies skimmed the rubble while something larger shouldered through a doorway that had once belonged to a shop.

The street behind her team led toward open ground. Ahead lay more beasts than they could hold.

They needed room to withdraw.

Harper pulled her spike free and let it unravel into thin, searching roots. They crawled beneath the wreckage, finding cracks, anchoring where the pavement still held.

“Fall back by pairs. Cover whoever’s moving.”

“Commander, the barricade—”

“Will hold long enough. Move.”

She hoped she was right.

At thirty-two, Harper had learned the difference between confidence and certainty. Her people needed the first. The world had stopped offering the second long ago.

A team member stumbled past her, one arm looped over an injured companion’s shoulders. Harper lifted a broken plank out of their path without looking away from the street.

“Keep going. Watch your footing.”

Dust caught in her throat. She swallowed it and drew more power from the spirit core within her, feeling the familiar answering warmth spread beneath her ribs.

Wood surged over the barricade in a tangled lattice.

The next beast struck it teeth-first.

Harper braced. Pain sparked through her shoulders as though she had caught the impact with her hands instead of her ability. The lattice bowed but did not break.

Behind her, boots scraped over rubble.

Good.

She counted those passing by faces rather than numbers. The rifleman who always checked his weapon twice. The woman with a torn sleeve who had refused to leave the wounded. The youngest member of the team, pale beneath the dirt but still turning to cover the others.

People, not positions on a map.

She had lost too many of both.

The apocalypse had taken her family before she had been old enough to understand how a whole world could end and still expect her to wake up the next morning.

She had learned anyway.

How to find shelter. How to keep moving. How to make the wood respond when fear made her hands shake.

Later, how to give orders that other people might live long enough to resent.

“Eyes forward,” she called to the youngest. “You can watch me when we’re out.”

He hesitated, then obeyed.

The larger shape emerged from the ruined shop.

Its head scraped the broken lintel. Plates of dark, uneven growth covered its shoulders, and its forelimbs ended in hooked claws that scored the pavement as it advanced.

Harper shifted her stance.

That one would not stop at a barricade.

She sent roots toward its legs.

The beast tore through the first coil. Harper tightened the second, pulling against the anchors beneath the pavement, and its advancing stride faltered.

“Go!” she shouted.

The last pair started back.

Harper gave ground with them, maintaining the tangle between the beasts and her people. Every step stretched her control farther. Every impact took another breath she could scarcely afford.

Something shifted at the edge of her vision.

She turned toward falling masonry, already reaching for the roots nearest the wall.

“Look out!”

The warning reached her a heartbeat too late.

A beast slammed into her side. The impact lifted her boots off the ground, and the world narrowed to its hooked limb striking her abdomen.

Then she hit the pavement.

For a moment there was no sound at all.

Her mouth opened, but the breath would not come. The roots holding the barricade shuddered with her lost concentration.

The attacking beast loomed above her.

Harper thrust out one hand.

A jagged spear of wood erupted between them, forcing it back. She rolled behind a fallen slab, dragging her legs after her, and pressed her palm against the wound.

Heat spread beneath her fingers.

Not the steady warmth of her core.

She knew the difference.

“Commander!”

“Stay back.”

Her voice sounded wrong. Too thin. She swallowed and tried again.

“Stay back. Keep the others moving.”

She reached inward for the familiar thread of healing.

Wood power had never meant only roots and sharpened branches. There was life in it, too: the persistence of a shoot finding sunlight, the patient closing of a split trunk.

She had called on that persistence for torn muscles, cuts, wounds that should have left her unable to stand.

She called on it now.

Warmth gathered beneath her hand. For an instant, pain softened at the edges.

Then her breath hitched, and the warmth scattered.

Harper tried to bring it back. She could feel her power answering. That was the worst of it. The ability had not abandoned her.

It simply was not enough.

The injury lay deeper than anything she could close here. Even as she worked, strength slipped away faster than she could replace it.

She stopped pushing.

Not because she wanted to.

Because she knew.

A shadow fell across the slab. One of her team had come back, crouching with an arm extended toward her.

“We can carry you.”

Harper looked past him.

The larger beast had broken loose. Her barricade sagged. Smaller shapes were spilling around its edges, gathering where the street opened behind the retreating team.

If they stopped for her, the beasts would reach them.

If she let go of the roots, the beasts would reach them.

There was no route in which she walked out of this street.

But they still could.

Harper looked down at the hand he held out. It trembled, though she knew he would deny it afterward.

She wanted there to be an afterward for him.

“Listen to me,” she said.

His eyes met hers.

She made herself hold them, refusing to let him mistake her silence for uncertainty.

“Take the others. Get clear of the street.”

“I’m not leaving you.”

Behind him, the youngest had stopped again. The woman supporting the wounded turned toward them, her face tightening as she saw Harper on the ground.

Harper could not afford their loyalty now.

“You are,” she said. “Because I’m still giving the orders.”

The man’s gaze dropped to her hand against her abdomen.

Then to the roots shaking around the barricade.

He understood before she said anything more.

“No.”

Harper reached inward, past the thin thread of healing, to the core itself.

All her life since awakening her ability, she had drawn power from it carefully. Called, shaped, released. However desperate the fight, some instinct had always insisted that she keep its force contained.

Now she loosened her hold on that containment.

The warmth sharpened.

The man flinched as light traced the roots nearest her boots.

“Harper—”

“Retreat.”

No plea. No apology.

One last order.

For a terrible moment, she thought he would disobey.

Then he stood. He caught the youngest by the shoulder and turned him toward the others, shouting for them to keep moving.

Harper watched him go.

Only when his back was turned did she let her face change.

She was afraid.

Of course she was afraid.

She had survived too much to pretend that dying was easy simply because she had chosen what to do with the time left.

The world blurred. She blinked hard and searched for her people through the dust.

Still moving.

She could work with that.

Harper drew the last of her searching roots back toward the street. She was no longer trying to hold the whole barricade. She only needed to keep the beasts looking at her.

A branch snapped against the larger creature’s plated shoulder.

It turned.

“Here,” she whispered.

Her voice could not carry, but the wood could.

Roots struck the pavement in front of it, a challenge it answered with a roar. Smaller beasts followed as it advanced, crowding toward the gap where she lay.

Harper pulled herself upright against the slab.

The motion cost her. For a moment she could see nothing but darkness at the edges of her sight.

Then the street returned.

Her team was reaching the far end. The injured companion was still between two people now; someone had gone back to help without stopping the withdrawal.

Good people.

Stubborn people.

Hers.

She did not have a speech left in her. Nothing grand enough to sum up a life spent surviving one impossible morning after another.

She only wanted them to have another morning.

The core pulsed.

Harper let more power rise, no longer shaping it into anything her body could safely hold. Light slipped between her fingers. The roots around her stiffened, their grain shining through the dust.

The larger beast climbed over the failing barricade.

She waited.

Beyond its shoulder, her people disappeared around the bend. The last rifleman backed away, fired once, and followed them.

Harper held on until she could no longer see him.

Then she stopped holding back.

For an instant she felt the whole street through the wood she had rooted there: cracked stone, broken beams, the heavy advance of claws.

Behind her, the retreating footsteps were beyond her reach.

That was enough.

Harper overloaded her spirit core, and its contained power broke free in a blinding detonation.

The last thing she saw was the light.