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Author note:
For those still reading my fanfics thanks and sorry this chapter came out a little later than later and I am working on pumping out these chapters out a bit fast from now on. But like I always say please remember to leave your thoughts on the chapter and maybe even a review.
For those wonder how James and Syliva look like I will post their looks:
James
Sylvia
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The Tongass forest at night was a monolithic cage of ice and shadow. The moonlight struggled to pierce the dense, suffocating canopy, its pale rays scattering helplessly against a thick, unnatural icy mist. A biting wind howled through the skeletal cedar branches, carrying a deep, primordial chill that bit straight through to the bone.
Deep within the pitch-black brush, something moved. It was a massive, low-slung shape creeping forward on all fours with an eerie, weightless silence. Its skin was a bruised, leathery black, completely devoid of hair, and its large eyes burned with a dull, predatory red light. The beast stalked toward the mouth of the cavern, salivating at the scent of the three lab survivors resting inside. It craved their flesh.
But just as it prepared to crouch, the green-haired boy inside the cave shifted it's ears twitched, realizing its prey was alert, the hairless death-hound let out a silent, frustrated snarl. It melted backward into the swirling fog, retreating for now, though its insatiable hunger remained.
Inside the cavern, Miracle let out a ragged, frustrated sigh and rubbed his bloodshot eyes. The phantom pressure he had just sensed near the perimeter had vanished into thin air.
'Koma ada, give me a break,' Miracle thought, sucking his teeth in pure irritation. 'I'm really starting to hate this forest. Just what the hell is hunting us now?'
"I'm not picking up a distinct signature either," Tinashe's voice softly within his mindscape, her cosmic eyes filled with concern. "The malice in this place is thick. The sooner you leave this forest, the better, before its wickedness completely consumes you."
Miracle refocused his gaze on the self-inking parchment map Yéil had given him. He traced the black lines, mentally calculating the safest, most efficient route to reach civilization without pushing their broken bodies past their breaking points. At Tinashe's urging, he had dialed back the gravitational output of his training. The sub-zero Alaskan weather was a brutal enough adversary on its own.
"I still don't trust this map or the bird it came from," Tinashe murmured, crossing her arms.
'I don't really trust it either.' Miracle replied internally, his thoughts heavy. 'But what freaking choice do I have man? The phones are dead. Any path I choose blindly like a dumbass would have us running in circles or freezing to death before reaching even a campsite.'
He lowered the parchment, his ringed green eyes drifting over to where James and Sylvia were huddled.
'Hey Tinashe remember what Sylvia told me when we first met,' Miracle admitted, a rare softness bleeding into his cynical mind. 'She said they took her parents away from her. That means there's a chance she still has family out there.'
"You want to help her find them?" Tinashe asked gently.
'I would like to. She didn't deserve any of the horrors that happened to her in that chair,' Miracle thought, shivering as a stray gust of wind swept through the cave. 'But we're in 2009, not 2023. From all those true crime documentaries I watched in my past life, missing children cases back then were really messy. Maybe James has a family out there too? I don't know'
"Looks like they've grown a little on you. But don't start getting too soft Mira~" She teased a bit.
'Fuck off.' Miracle playfully scoffed.
"Excuse me boy, watch your manners around your elders~."
'Aren't you technically the younger one here?'
"Machanda aku Miracle." She playfully retorted and Miracle chuckled a little at her attempt to use Chichewa swear words.
She even put extra emphasis on it too.
proceeding to stay alert for possible threats with Tinashe keeping him company throughout the whole night.
Later that morning
"Miracle! Miracle!" she cheered, her small boots crunching loudly on the frozen earth as she sprinted toward him.
"Hm?" Miracle didn't look up from the map, his spiral-ringed eyes mapping out their daily mileage.
"Look!" Sylvia beamed. She dipped her hand into her pouch, pulled out a single, gleaming golden seed, and pressed it against the tip of one of her makeshift wooden arrows. A vibrant, emerald-green glow erupted from her palm. In a matter of seconds, the seed rapidly mutated, expanding and hardening to take the place of a sharp stone arrowhead.
Miracle's eyes snapped up, his interest instantly piqued. Sylvia gave a proud tug to her custom bow, notched the modified arrow, and aimed at a massive boulder a few yards away. The bowstring snapped. The moment the arrow struck the solid stone, it exploded into a violent, churning mass of iron-hard black veins and thorny roots that instantly wrapped around the boulder, crushing it in a suffocating cage.
"Well… damn," Miracle mumbled, genuinely impressed. He turned to Sylvia, who was practically vibrating with a wide smile. "That's pretty dope, Sylv. But save them up. Only use those trick arrows when you absolutely need to, okay?"
Sylvia nodded happily and immediately lunged forward to throw her arms around him. Reacting on pure, trauma-fueled instinct, Miracle deployed a transparent telekinetic barrier between them, halting her mid-air before she could touch his clothes.
"Stop trying to do that," he warned, his voice stern. Sylvia's face instantly fell into a heavy, tragic pout, her green eyes brimming with frustration and sadness.
"It just makes plants. You could already do that," James muttered from the side finishing his breakfast fish, tightly wrapping a heavy deer cloth around his shoulders covering his bare chest.
"Forest gave me!" Sylvia countered proudly, waving the pouch.
James ignored her, glaring at the parchment in Miracle's hands. "So you're saying that piece of paper is actually going to get us out of here?"
Miracle nodded, floating a few inches off the ground as his esper powers activated. "Yep. I hope so. If we keep a steady pace, we should reach the edge of the perimeter in about three days."
"You said the exact same thing about following the river, and it didn't do anything but lead us anywhere!" James snapped.
"Hey, if you've got any better ideas lizard boy," Miracle shot back, raising an eyebrow. James opened his mouth to argue, found no words, and fell into a resentful silence.
With Miracle hovering slightly ahead, the two children fell into step behind him, marching deeper into the wilderness.
After an hour of quiet trekking, the landscape altered drastically. The trees grew dense, gnarled, and rotting, plunging the path into a claustrophobic, perpetual twilight. A thick, unnatural ice-fog rolled over the forest floor, causing an immediate, heavy sense of dread to settle over Miracle and Sylvia as they sensed something off with it.
Then came the voices.
"Help me..."
"Stay away..."
"Mommy, it hurts..."
The ghostly, hollow whispers echoed from every single direction, ice-cold and overlapping. Miracle's stomach turned the alarm bell in his head began screaming. His first instinct was to grab the kids, turn his ass around, and find a completely different route. But he steeled his nerves, forcing his boots to hover forward.
'Okay, so we're either dealing with another monster that mimics voices, or we just entered a valley of spirits,' he rationalized internally, glaring at the map and cursing in his native language at the raven deity.
"Scary," Sylvia whimpered, her childhood innocence instantly shattering under the weight of the creepy echoes.
Terrified, she reached out and grabbed Miracle's hand. Miracle's automatic reflex was to violently push her hand away to protect his personal space. But when he saw the sheer, unadulterated terror freezing her features, he let out a grumpy, defeated groan. He allowed her to keep holding on, even lowering his hovering height so she wouldn't have to reach up.
"Where are those voices coming from?! Come out and fight me!" James roared, his fists instantly erupting into aggressive teal sparks as he spun around, desperately looking for an enemy to punch.
The ice-fog parted. Standing directly in their path was a pale, hollow-cheeked little boy dressed in the tattered white smock of the Khaos Brigade facility. Where his eyes should have been, there were only empty, black sockets dripping with dark, congealed blood.
Sylvia shrieked in absolute fright, hiding her face. Panic flared in Miracle's chest, causing him to violently float backward, his telekinetic aura forcefully dragging James and Sylvia into the air with him.
"Take that!" James yelled, instinctively throwing a concussive blast of teal fire straight at the specter. The flames detonated, but as the smoke cleared, the eyeless boy stood entirely unharmed.
Before James could fire another shot, Miracle grabbed his shoulder. His esper senses were picking up an incredibly warped, empty reading from the entity.
"I-I think he's a g-ghost." Miracle mumbled and the two just looked confused not knowing what a ghost was.
"S-S-Scared... Don't hurt me anymore," the ghost boy wept, his voice echoing with the layered crying of a dozen different children.
Suddenly, the fog churned violently. Three more eyeless, blood-soaked children materialized from the mist, their hollow voices rising in a miserable chorus.
"Help us..."
"It hurts..."
"No more, please..."
Miracle decided he had seen enough. "We're leaving!" he shouted, spinning around to retreat, only for the path behind them to be cut off by a towering, bleeding figure.
It was Gregory, the low-class Devil who had tortured them for years. He formed a wicked, sadistic smile, blood dripping from his cracked lips. "You thought you escaped me? I will haunt you for the rest of your miserable life you pathetic human!" he jeered.
Behind him come more children, guards and some of the mages but they were missing limbs.
But James and Sylvia were seeing different images making them freeze up.
James saw the image of a pretty Caucasian woman around her early thirties with black hair reaching upper back dressed in a lab coat. Beside her was a pretty little Latino girl around James age with short brown hair and yellow eyes.
"Ms. Sandra. J-Juliet." James shuttered
Sylvia saw the image of the scientists who were in charge of her experiments but their white lab coats and masks were dripped in blood.
"B-Bad p-people." Sylvia stepped back in fear.
Miracle gritted his teeth, but his own mind was fracturing. The fog was projecting images of looking at his ringed, spiral green eyes with absolute disgust, calling him pathetic, weak, selfish. Worse, a pervasive, supernatural drowsiness was washing over him and the temperature around them got colder and colder.
Because Miracle was not accustomed to the brutal Alaskan cold, and because he was running on absolute zero sleep due to his chronic insomnia, his eyelids felt heavy as lead. His brain was shutting down.
'Wake up, mwana wanga! They are feeding on your mind!' Tinashe's maternal voice screamed within his consciousness, providing the desperate anchor he needed.
"Enough of this bullshit!" Miracle roared, channeling every ounce of his remaining cognitive strength. He pulled James and Sylvia tight against his sides and unleashed a devastating, pressurized psychic burst in a 360-degree wave.
The explosive telekinetic wave violently tore the ice-fog apart, instantly causing the temperature to rise back to normal. The ghostly illusions of Gregory, Juliet, and the scientists shattered, dissolving into gray energy particles with a chorus of frustrated, dying screams.
With the veil lifted, the true culprits were exposed. Surrounding the children were ghoul like people. They possessed skeletal frames, long yellow fingernails, rows of jagged, razor-sharp teeth, and wide, glassy eyes filled with nothing but absolute insanity and ravenous hunger.
Miracle didn't waste a single millisecond. Raising his hands, he used his refined telekinetic threads to execute a massive psychic grip, pinning five of the charging ghouls flat against them. He couldn't really properly focus on crushing their bodies as his head began to hurt and the drowsiness had yet to leave him.
"JAMES, BURN THEM!" Miracle barked, his voice laced with strain as he struggled to keep his balance. "That was not Sandra and Juliet! It's just like the river these bastards tried to trick you! Send them to hell!"
The strict, commanding words pierced through James's paralyzing grief. His shock instantly converted into a volatile, explosive fury.
"ARRRGHH!!" James roared. His entire body erupted into a brilliant column of teal flames.
James unleashed a colossal, hyper-compressed blast of teal fire. The laser-like stream of draconic flames instantly incinerated the pinned ghouls, reducing them to ash before they could even screech and causing an explosion.
The remaining eight more ghouls leaped into the air, flanking them from the shadows with feral agility but Miracle reacted quickly putting up a flickering shield around them.
The ghouls mercilessly scratched, kicked and bite onto the shield who was straggling to keep it up, even a bit of blood was dripping from his nose. He would have easily dealt with them if he wasn't so fatigued.
Looking down at Sylvia she looked like she was still in shock so he turned to James.
"Hey, get ready to kick their asses." He gestured to the dragon boy who formed a wild grin.
Miracle expanded the shield pushing the ghouls back and James using a new move from training quickly shooting concentrated lasers of teal fire from his fingers managing to hit two of the ghouls and the others managed to dodge.
But James was relentless as he lit himself of fire rocketing towards them and hit two of them knocking them down but before they got up he followed it up with grabbing their heads and lighting them up with his flames.
Miracle did not want to give them time to get their bearings either so he snapped his fingers, unleashing a heavy, concussive psychic pulse attack straight into the chest of the remaining, while covering Sylvia.
To his complete surprise, upon making contact with his psychic energy, the ghoul didn't just explode its insane, bloodshot eyes. suddenly cleared, softening into a peaceful expression as its body began to glow with a serene, golden light before quietly dissolving into the wind.
Without knowing it, the pure spiritual nature of his focused psychic energy was actively exorcising the trapped human souls within the monsters.
One was going for a quick sneak attack to the back of his head while it thought he was distracted but he had noticed it though before he could react it was hit by an arrow making veins warp around it tight so he shot a psychic pulse causing it to also dissolve in the golden glow.
Miracle turned to see Sylvia breathing a bit heavily holding her bow tight.
"'Huff'... G-Good job," Miracle wheezed, his esper hovering trick instantly failing as his feet hit the dirt with a heavy thud. His head felt like it was being split open by an axe, and a steady stream of blood began trailing down from his left nostril from pure mental exhaustion.
He slowly turned around, his ringed green eyes softening as he looked at the trembling girl. "Hey... Sylv. Ma-..."
He didn't even get to finish his sentence. Sylvia let out a sob of pure terror, lunged forward, and wrapped her arms tightly around his waist, burying her face into his shirt as she cried hysterically.
Miracle's immediate, lifelong trauma reflex flared. Every muscle in his body tensed, and his hand instinctively rose to manifest a telekinetic force-shove to blast her off his body and re-establish his boundaries. But as he looked down at her small, shivering shoulders, and remembered the horrific image of the bloody scientists she had just been forced to face, his heart gave a reluctant, aching tug.
His posture softened. Slowly, awkwardly, Miracle lowered his hand and gently patted her back, letting her weep against him until the terrifying echoes of the lab finally faded from her mind.
Once her breathing hitched and she began to calm down, Miracle gently pried her off and took a ragged breath. "We... we need to keep moving forward," he murmured, blinking heavily against the dark spots invading his vision.
He took one step, his knees buckled, and Miracle collapsed face-first onto the snowy ground, completely unconscious.
"MIRACLE!" Sylvia screamed in absolute terror, her voice cracking as both she and James instantly dropped to their knees beside his limp body.
"Hey! Come on, wake up! Get up!" James yelled frantically, his tough-guy facade completely shattering as he grabbed Miracle's shoulders and began to shake him with rising panic. Seeing Miracle down like this was the most terrifying thing they had faced yet.
But then, a soft, rhythmic sound broke through their panic.
'Zzz... phew... zzz...'
James and Sylvia froze, staring blankly at the green-haired psychic. Light, peaceful snores were drifting up from his nose. The realization hit them simultaneously, and both children let out a massive, simultaneous sigh of pure, exhausted relief. He wasn't dead; the paranoid control freak had simply run out of fuel.
James looked down at the magical parchment map resting near Miracle's hand. He picked it up, turned it upside down, and furrowed his brows in complete confusion. "Uh... can you read this?" he asked, pointing at the glowing ink.
Sylvia stared at the strange, swirling lines and slowly shook her head, her cheeks still tear-stained. "No. Can't read at all."
James grunted, carefully rolling Miracle's small, eight-year-old body onto his back, hoisting the sleeping psychic up securely. "Maybe we should just continue going the way he was pointing us before."
Sylvia took out the moon shaped Pinecomb which was held by a vein and tied it around Miracle's neck. She softly looked at him as she was yet again a burden for him but tightened her grip on her bow determined to protect him while he rested.