WORLDBREAKER: Rise of the Reborn Flame

The rain came down hard, cold, heavy, unrelenting.

Adam Smith’s feet pounded the slick concrete as he sprinted through the alleyway, heart slamming against his ribs like a war drum. The scream echoed again, it was a sharp, desperate cry from the other side of the darkness. A young woman was trapped.

He didn’t think before acting, he never did in moments like these where someone seemed desperately in need of his help.

A huge man stood before her with a knife. His shadow flickered in the glow of a flickering streetlight. As the woman shrank away with her purse clutched to her chest. Her eyes met Adam’s for a second, sending a message that she needed help, she looked terrified. So he launched forward.

“Hey!” he shouted.

The attacker turned almost immediately and all Adam saw was a flash of steel and rage and then came the pain. A white hot line across his abdomen. Warmth. Blood. The woman screamed again, but it was distant now, like wind through a tunnel.

Adam didn’t fall immediately. He hit the man, hard. They both went down. His fists found the attacker’s face, again and again, until the man lay still.

And then everything grew cold.

He collapsed beside the stranger, blood mixing with rainwater. He blinked up at the gray sky. The sound of sirens wailed distantly, but already his mind was slipping, detached from the world he once knew. There was no fear. Just... emptiness.

And silence.

***

He wakes up screaming.

But it wasn’t a hospital.

He wasn’t even sure it was Earth.

The air reeked of damp earth and smoke. His vision blurred, then cleared. Wooden beams arched above him, crude and splintered. A straw mattress prickled beneath his back. The pain in his gut was gone, replaced by a hollow numbness.

Adam sat up slowly. His arms were thinner, his skin pale, no longer the twenty-one-year-old college dropout who had grown up in Boston. His reflection stared back at him from a cracked tin mirror on the wall: same blue eyes, same dark hair but younger. Maybe seventeen. No scars. No signs of the stabbing. No familiar tattoos.

What the hell?

The door creaked open.

An old woman entered, hunched, wrapped in a thick fur shawl. Her face was a map of wrinkles, her eyes cloudy but not unkind.

“You’re awake,” she said, voice dry as parchment. “The gods were merciful. You almost didn’t survive the birthing.”

“Birthing?” Adam rasped, his throat raw.

“Aye,” she nodded. “You came to us screaming in the night three moons ago. Eyes wild. Fevered. No one knew who you were. We thought you had been cursed. Possessed. But your soul held firm.”

Three months?

The weight of it hit him all at once. He had died. Truly. That world, his world, was gone. Replaced by... this. Wherever this was.

His hands trembled as he pressed them to his chest. No wound. No scar. Just smooth, healthy skin. But deeper than skin something else stirred. Something alien.

Something... powerful.

The village was small and bleak.

Huts of stone and thatch lined the narrow paths, surrounded by forest and shadow. Men with axes worked from dawn to dusk. Women gathered roots and herbs under grim skies. Children played with wooden swords, their laughter sharp and brief.

Adam walked slowly, taking it all in.

There were no signs of modern life. No power lines. No cars. No roads. Just mud and firewood. Every corner held suspicious eyes, guarded, and old with fear. Not of him. But of something else. Something that seemed to be close all the time.

“Beasts,” the old woman had told him that morning. “They roam beyond the hills. Orcs, sometimes. Worse things if you go too deep.”

She called this place Greymoor. A border village, too close to the wildlands for comfort.

“No kingdom protects us here,” she’d said. “We survive because we’re quiet. Because we’re forgotten.”

But Adam could feel it now, like an itch beneath his bones. A pressure. A pulse. Something was changing within him. Dreams, strange and vivid, plagued him every night of blades dripping blood, towers crumbling beneath crimson skies, and a voice that whispered through fire and ruin.

“You are not of this world,” it said. “But you belong to it now.”

A week passed.

Then came the beasts.

It started with silence. The birds vanished from the trees. The children stopped laughing. Even the wind held its breath.

Then, one night, something howled from the woods.

Adam stood at the edge of the village with a rusted hatchet in hand. The village men had armed themselves with pitchforks, clubs, and rusted blades. No armor. No formations. Just desperation.

“They always come in pairs,” muttered a man beside him, grip white-knuckled on a hunting spear. “Orcs scout first. If they don’t find easy meat, they call the rest.”

The howls came again, closer now.

Adam’s heartbeat quickened. Not from fear but from recognition. Something inside him stirred. Heat flowed through his veins like fire drawn to oil. His vision sharpened. He could smell them, the sweat, the rot, the bloodlust.

Then the trees parted.

Two figures emerged massively, hunched, green-skinned brutes with tusks jutting from their jaws. Leather armor, crude axes, yellow eyes glowing in the dark.

Everyone froze except Adam. He moved without thinking just like always.

One orc lunged, Adam ducked, pivoted, and drove the hatchet up into its gut. The metal cracked through bone. Blood sprayed hot and foul. The creature shrieked, collapsing in a heap.

The other orc roared and charged.

Adam turned to face it but tripped.

The beast raised its axe.

A blur of silver flashed through the air.

Steel cleaved bone.

The orc's head hit the ground before the body realized it was dead.

Adam blinked up at the man who had saved him.

Tall. Broad-shouldered. A white beard that trailed like smoke in the wind. His robes were scorched at the hem, his eyes pale with ancient weight.

“You’ve got fire in you, boy,” the old man said, lowering his bloodied blade. “But no sense.”

Adam coughed. “Who... are you?”

The man offered a hand. “Walter Reed. Swordmaster. Magician. And if you live long enough, your teacher.”

Walter’s grip was calloused but firm, like stone shaped by storms. As Adam rose, he felt the weight of the man’s presence not just his power, but something colder, heavier, like the echo of a grave that had never been filled.

“You’ve got decent instincts,” Walter said, eyes scanning the treeline. “But instincts alone won’t keep you alive in this world.”

Adam steadied himself, blood still buzzing through his limbs. The first orc lay twitching on the ground, its innards steaming in the night air. The other was little more than a decapitated ruin.

“Are there more?” Adam asked.

Walter’s curved sword of pale steel that seemed to hum faintly remained unsheathed. “Always. If two came, five watched. If five watched, ten will follow. This wasn’t a raid, boy. It was a whisper.”

Adam swallowed hard, glancing toward the village where lanterns flickered and terrified eyes peered from behind doors.

“A whisper of what?”

Walter looked skyward. The stars here were colder than any Adam remembered from Earth. Sharper as though they’d been carved rather than born.

“War,” Walter said, voice low. “One that never ended. One that you’ve now stepped into whether you like it or not.”

They burned the orc bodies by sunrise.

Walter didn’t stay to explain. He vanished into the woods as the flames curled skyward and the villagers muttered prayers under their breath.

Adam helped pile the corpses, hands sticky with gore. None of the others spoke to him. Some stared. Others turned away. A child cried behind one of the huts, her voice muffled by a mother’s palm.

By mid-morning, the village elder summoned him.

She was old, older than time it seemed, her skin like weathered bark. Her name was Mother Elna, and she sat beneath a stone arch covered in moss, her eyes milky-white but far-seeing.

“You carry a storm inside you,” she said as Adam approached. “And storms do not pass without ruin.”

He frowned. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“No one ever does,” she said, splaying her fingers over a shallow bowl filled with ash and cracked bones. “But something chose you, boy. Pulled you here from death’s grip.”

Adam hesitated. “I died... in another world. Another life.”

“I know.”

He stiffened. “How?”

She smiled faintly. “Because I see things. The moment you screamed yourself into this world, the sky wept fire. Ravens fell from the trees. The air warped. And something ancient whispered in the dark corners of my hut.”

“Whispered what?”

She stirred the ashes. "The Vessel has arrived."

That night, Adam dreamt again.

He stood in a field of blades, millions of swords buried in black earth beneath a sunless sky. A voice neither male nor female, but made of thunder and sorrow rippled through the mist.

"Your soul is fractured. Your blood is borrowed. Your fate is not yet your own."

Adam looked down at his hands.

They were stains of crimson. And not all the blood was his.

He turned and saw the tower. Vast, obsidian, stretching into the heavens. Chains hung from its sides, and from the highest balcony, something watched him. It had no eyes. No shape. Just presence.

“Claim power,” it hissed. “Or be devoured.”

He awoke to the smell of smoke and the soft scrape of a sword being sharpened.

Walter sat outside the hut, legs crossed, the curved blade resting across his knees. Sparks danced with every stroke of his whetstone. The morning was mist-thick and silent.

“You’re late,” Walter said without looking up.

“For what?”

“For your first lesson.”

Adam rubbed sleep from his eyes. “Lesson in what?”

Walter stopped sharpening. “In survival.”

Training wasn't permitted in the village. So Walter led him to a clearing deep in the woods where the trees opened to a stretch of stone and moss. Scorch marks painted the earth. Fallen stumps, split boulders, and cracked bones told tales of battles past.

“Why bring me here?” Adam asked.

“Because what we’ll do would frighten the villagers. And rightly so.” Walter tossed him a wooden sword. It was heavy, roughly carved, and unbalanced.

“This is a joke, right?”

Walter raised a brow. “Do you see me laughing?”

Adam caught the sword in both hands, stepping back into a ready stance he vaguely remembered from childhood sparring classes.

“Good stance,” Walter said.

“Thanks.”

“Let’s see how long it lasts.”

The old man moved like lightning.

Adam barely saw the strike before it hit. His blade flew from his grip and clattered across the rocks. Pain exploded in his wrist.

He gasped. “What the hell?!”

Walter circled him. “Your stance is good. But your mind is slow. Your spirit is still in another world.”

Adam retrieved the blade, wincing. “So what, you want me to forget everything?”

“No,” Walter said. “I want you to remember the pain. The weakness. The moment you died. Let it anchor you.”

Adam bristled. “Easy for you to say. You’re not the one who ….”

“I’ve died more times than you’ve lived,” Walter said sharply. “And I’ve buried every version of myself that couldn’t survive.”

For a moment, the air turned cold.

Not from weather but from memory.

Hours passed. Adam’s arms ached, bruises bloomed along his ribs, and sweat soaked through his shirt. But something inside him had started to burn, not rage, not frustration, but... hunger.

Walter stood silently as Adam struck at a dummy made of old armor and straw. Again. Again. Again.

“Why me?” Adam asked finally, panting. “Why did you save me?”

Walter stared at the rising sun. “Because I saw a spark. And I’ve lived long enough to know that even a spark can burn down an empire.”

Later, as they returned to the village, a messenger arrived, bloody, breathless, half-conscious.

He collapsed at the elder’s feet, wheezing out a warning.

The orcs had razed two nearby settlements. Dozens slaughtered. No survivors but him.

Mother Elna turned to Walter, her lips pale.

“They’re moving west.”

Walter nodded grimly. “They’re probing the border. Testing the strength of the weak.”

Adam felt it again, deep in his bones. That pressure. That calling.

He wasn’t just reincarnated.

He was being summoned.