The Villain Professor's Second Chance

The ruins of Kael'Thorne stood in uneasy silence, the kind that came after something vast and violent had reshaped the world. Dust still curled in the air, drifting in ghostly tendrils before settling over the broken remains of the temple district. The leyline had quieted, but its fractured energy pulsed faintly beneath the stone, the echo of something that refused to die completely.

I turned my gaze over the battlefield, cataloging every detail with the precision of a blade being sharpened. Most of the city remained intact—miraculously so. The meltdown had threatened to unravel Kael'Thorne entirely, yet the damage was surgical. Entire sections of the temple district had collapsed or warped beyond recognition, but the rest of the city? Spared. That wasn't natural.

Something—or someone—had guided the destruction.

The temple's bones still stood, but they were no longer whole. What had once been a place of ancient reverence now lay in fragmented ruin, its grand pillars snapped at odd angles, the once-majestic archways twisted like gnarled fingers reaching for something unseen. The collapse of the district had left jagged pathways in its wake, creating unnatural trenches where the leyline's energy still flickered in ghostly strands. The temple district was now a wound in the city's flesh, but it was not a fatal one.

Which meant the damage had been controlled.
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I had seen what unchecked leyline meltdowns could do—entire towns erased, landscapes rewritten into nightmarish labyrinths of shattered space and broken time. This? This was something else entirely. The destruction was precise, as if someone had carved out the pieces they wanted removed while sparing the rest. That kind of control wasn't just rare—it was impossible.

Unless, of course, someone had orchestrated it.

Asterion stood a few feet away, wiping blood from his face. His usual grace was dulled by exhaustion, but his eyes were sharp as ever. He watched me, knowing I wasn't convinced this was over.

"We won." His voice was hoarse, the words more of a question than a statement.

I didn't answer immediately. I was already running probabilities in my head, assessing the leyline's state, the unnatural containment of destruction, and the absolute impossibility of Belisarius's return without intervention. The leyline had been bent, reshaped. But by whom?

The battle had ended, but the war had not.

The leyline was quieter now, but not calm. It had settled into a state of uneasy slumber, its energy raw and fractured, pulsing just beneath the ruined stone like an exposed nerve. I could feel it beneath my boots—shifting, restless, waiting. Whatever had been done here had left scars that ran deeper than just the surface.

I strode toward the fractured dais, where the meltdown had poured its final breath into my uncle. The air still tingled with residual magic, threads of lingering energy curling at my fingertips as I crouched down. My fingers brushed the stone.

A pulse.

Not physical, not an attack. Something deeper. A rejection.

The leyline recoiled like a living thing, shrieking at the intrusion. For a heartbeat, the world blurred. The sensation was sharp, invasive, like fingers raking through my thoughts. My vision swam, not with exhaustion but with something foreign, something unnatural.

It wasn't Belisarius's will I felt.

It was something else.

A presence. Watching. Not distant, but close, coiled just beneath the surface, where the leyline touched the raw fabric of reality. An echo of interference—like fingers that had twisted a thread before vanishing into the void. The sensation was fleeting but undeniable. The leyline had been altered before I arrived—before Belisarius had even emerged from it. Someone had manipulated the meltdown, shaped its progression, guided it to this moment.

A shadow of something greater flickered at the edges of my perception. It wasn't just a rogue event, not just a cult's desperate attempt to grasp at forbidden power.

This was planned.

Then it was gone, slipping away before I could chase it, leaving only the taste of scorched metal in my mouth.

I stood slowly, the certainty settling into my bones like cold steel.

"Someone allowed this."

Asterion frowned. "I thought the meltdown was natural," he said, though he didn't sound convinced. "A wild event, like a storm."

I shook my head. "No. The leyline doesn't resurrect criminals on a whim. This was deliberate."

Asterion exhaled sharply, his gaze darkening. The weight of my words sank in, and he cursed under his breath. "Then we're not done."

No. Not even close.

The corpse of the Harbinger lay sprawled on the fractured stone, limbs twisted unnaturally, his body contorted as if whatever had been holding it together had suddenly unraveled. The decay was unnatural—this wasn't the slow rot of a corpse abandoned to time, nor was it the violent aftermath of a battlefield death. It was something else entirely. Something deliberate.

The skin on his face had shriveled, stretched taut over his skull, as if the very essence of his being had been drained, leaving behind a husk more than a body. The air around him still hummed with residual energy, faint but present, like an afterimage of power that refused to fully dissipate. The leyline had devoured him in its collapse, taking back whatever was borrowed.

Asterion knelt beside the body, wary but methodical. He nudged aside the tattered remains of the Harbinger's robe with the tip of his dagger, revealing what lay beneath.

Runes.

Carved deep into his ribs.

Not just drawn, not inked, but etched into the bone itself with a precision that sent an immediate warning through my mind. These weren't the erratic, frenzied scrawls of cultists who dabbled in forbidden arts, nor the rough-hewn brands of those who twisted meltdown energy into primitive rituals.

No, these were exact.

Controlled.

Measured.

Asterion frowned as he traced the symbols with a gloved hand, careful not to touch them directly. Even in death, we didn't know how much influence they still held.

"This isn't meltdown magic," he muttered.

"No," I agreed, narrowing my eyes. "It's something else."

Asterion tilted his head, studying the pattern with the sharp scrutiny of someone who had spent his life recognizing threats before they struck. The runes were layered, interwoven in a design meant to reinforce itself rather than unravel—containment sigils, not unleashing ones.

"It looks… official," Asterion said, voice edged with something close to unease.

Official.

That single word settled in my mind like a weight dropped from a great height.

I had seen these runes before—not in underground cult hideouts or ancient ruins, but in carefully guarded archives, in documents that were never meant to leave the hands of the scholars who studied them. Not in the hands of cultists.

These runes weren't forbidden. They were protected.

I inhaled slowly, the cold realization threading through my thoughts.

The Magic Council.

Their scholars used runes like these for leyline manipulation—containment, stabilization, redirection. These weren't the marks of a rogue occultist trying to harness meltdown energy for personal power. These were the marks of someone who understood the leyline far too well. Someone who had the resources, knowledge, and authority to use it properly.

Which meant Belisarius's resurrection wasn't just an accident.

It wasn't a side effect of the meltdown.

It was orchestrated.

Planned.

Asterion must have caught the shift in my expression because his gaze sharpened. "You recognize it."

I nodded, my grip tightening on my sword hilt. "The Magic Council despises leyline corruption. They've outlawed meltdown interference entirely."

"That's what I thought," Asterion said. He glanced down at the runes again, then back at me. "But you're telling me these aren't cult markings. So what does that mean?"

I exhaled, letting the truth settle between us. "It means either a rogue agent used these to twist the leyline…" I met his gaze, letting the weight of the thought sink in. "…or someone in power let this happen."

Asterion went still.

His fingers clenched over the hilt of his dagger, tension rippling through his frame. His mind worked fast—I could see it in the flicker of understanding behind his eyes, in the way his stance shifted slightly, subtly, preparing for a possibility neither of us had considered before this moment.

A possibility more dangerous than any cult, any meltdown.

Because if someone inside the Magic Council had orchestrated this—if someone with access to leyline manipulation had intentionally brought Belisarius back—then that meant the real enemy wasn't scattered zealots or fractured cultists trying to tear open reality.

It was someone who already had the keys to the kingdom.

Asterion let out a slow breath, steady but measured, as if speaking too quickly might make the realization worse. "So we're not just dealing with a meltdown," he said, voice low. "We're dealing with something sanctioned."

I didn't respond immediately. My thoughts ran through the probabilities at lightning speed, breaking apart every assumption I'd had about this situation.

Belisarius wasn't chosen randomly.

The meltdown hadn't simply plucked him from the grave as an anomaly of fate.

Someone had tested this.

Someone had wanted to see what would happen if a leyline was bent far enough to bring back a Drakhan.

And now, we had to figure out why.