The Villain Professor's Second Chance

"I'm not in the mood," she muttered, arching a brow in warning. The quill froze. Possibly for the best—she'd never quite figured out how to discipline a rebellious writing implement.

With exaggerated care, she pushed aside the quill and rummaged through the clutter, eventually extracting her battered research ledger from beneath a half-unraveled spool of arcane thread. The ledger's corners were bent, its spine cracked from too many long nights flipping pages, but it was the only place she'd diligently recorded every fleeting insight and half-formed idea for her thesis. She brushed a bit of dust off its cover, taking a moment to feel the reassuring weight of it in her palms. It was disorganized, contradictory, sometimes nonsensical—but it was also entirely hers.

"Found you," she said under her breath, to the ledger or perhaps to herself.

Slamming the locker door, she let the wards re-engage, watching the teal glyph lines crawl back over the seam with quiet efficiency. Then she leaned against the cool stone wall, gazing out through the open archway. Beyond it stretched the spire-lit courtyard below, illuminated by everburning lamps that hovered at various heights to form a loose constellation of light across the campus. A fresh breeze glided through, stirring her robes and carrying with it the faint scents of baking bread from the lower district and the sharper tang of brewed potions from the nearby labs.

All around her, the university maintained its steady pulse of life. Students hurried by with panicked expressions—probably late to some specialized evening lab session. A pair of robed librarians drifted past on a low-float platform, discussing cataloging new grimoires in hushed tones. At the far corner, a group of advanced enchanters tested a glowing barrier that threw dancing reflections across the stone floor.

Amberine exhaled softly, letting herself absorb it all. No matter how frustrated or jaded she sometimes felt, she still appreciated these small details—the intangible hum of magic in the air, the swirl of robes and the flash of enchanted quills. The spires might overshadow everything in grandeur, but it was the people's quiet dedication and frantic energy that truly breathed life into the old stones.

Then, almost like an afterthought, a realization hit her. It was the same creeping anxiety that had been on the edge of her awareness for weeks now, rearing its head with renewed vigor. Her credit count.

She held the ledger in both hands and flipped open the back cover. The final page, dog-eared and scrawled with half-faded ink, housed her meager attempt to track academic progress. She'd avoided looking at it, partly due to fear of what it might say. But no more dodging.

"Oh crap," she muttered.

Amberine stared at the number like it had personally insulted her, as though the digits themselves had conspired to mock her ambitions. Her eyes flicked over the parchment again, confirming:

Total Credits Required for Graduation: 340

Completed: 125

Remaining: 215

Two hundred and fifteen. That staggering figure hung in her mind like an ominous stormcloud. A knot of tension formed in her stomach, mingling with the dull ache still lingering in her calves from the day's long trek around the slums and up the university slopes. She hadn't realized just how far behind she was. Or, more accurately, she'd known but refused to acknowledge it. Sometimes, ignorance was kinder—until reality slammed into you, as it had here, in the back cover of her battered ledger.

"Two hundred and fifteen... seriously?" she repeated under her breath, scowling at the swirling lines of her own handwriting. "Gods, and I've already got 'Advanced Mana Threading' and 'Magical Ethics' on my roster... that's only twenty-five credits. That's nothing." A groan rose from her chest, and she tilted her head back in a theatrical display of exasperation. "I need at least twenty more if I don't want to end the semester in a panic."

Her voice echoed slightly in the arched corridor, though no one seemed to pay her outburst any mind. Most of the foot traffic had drifted toward the main spire or the dormitories for a final meal before the inevitable push of evening labs. The faint scent of parchment, arcane ink, and cooling stone enveloped her. Overhead, a line of small, floating orbs cast a soft bluish glow across mosaic tiles, each orb aligned with a roving pattern that responded to passing footsteps.

Shaking off her frustration, she glanced at the margin of the page. There, among scrawled doodles of mana circuits and a tiny, furious mimic creature, she'd tried to list potential electives. Most hovered around five or ten credits. She'd need at least two or three just to keep pace. And if she wanted a better buffer, she'd have to either find a particularly hefty course or risk overloading her schedule so badly that her sleep would become a distant memory.

Amberine's brow twitched at the thought. The last time she'd overloaded her schedule, she'd spent half the semester subsisting on conjured coffee illusions that did nothing for her actual fatigue. The memory made her shudder involuntarily.

But then her eyes locked onto a bold line near the bottom of the page, the single largest chunk of credits she had left unaccounted for. It felt like a quiet threat, practically looming off the parchment:

ARC 407: The Arcane Philosophy and Applications of Sequential Spells

Instructor: Professor Draven A. von Drakhan

Credit Value: 20

Semester: 2 (Early-Year Eligibility: Confirmed)

Reputation: Nightmare, Do-Not-Touch, Academic Death Wish

Just seeing it made her stomach flip. A little more than a year ago, she'd seen an announcement pinned to the main lecture board, advertising a "limited-time enrollment for advanced study in sequential layering." She remembered that day vividly: the hush in the hallway, the flicker of curiosity in a few older students' eyes, and the overwhelming sense of dread from everyone else. Draven's name had been whispered with either awe or fear, sometimes both. Rumors said that course devoured students' GPAs whole and spat out their shredded confidence. She'd also heard that the credit payout for passing was enormous—twenty credits in a single go, enough to catapult anyone ahead by an entire semester if they survived.

Amberine winced, recalling how she'd enrolled in that monster of a course during her second semester, a time when most students were barely coping with mid-level illusions and basic runic theorem. She herself had been stable in core classes, but something reckless burned within her. Maybe it was the lure of the credit bump, or maybe it was a deeper, rawer drive. In truth, it had been a swirl of factors, none of them particularly rational.

She remembered how the counselor had furrowed her brow when she came in with the registration slip. "Are you sure?" that woman had asked, lips pursed in concern. "You're still early in your core progression. This course is... advanced. Most take it after Semester Five, or at least after passing all the recommended prerequisites."

Amberine had forced a confident smile that was all hollow bravado. "I'm sure," she'd replied, voice tinged with a challenge. "I'll manage."

She had not managed.

The course was merciless, almost militaristic in structure. Each lecture delivered a barrage of concepts that made her mind reel—intricate synergy loops, arcane layering that defied standard logic, historical examples that required knowledge of multiple timelines. She'd never forget the day Draven casually introduced a multi-affinity diagram that had half the class scribbling furiously while the other half just stared, wide-eyed, already lost. The textbooks he assigned were heavier than most advanced grimoires, some borderline archaic, quoting mages who'd existed in the earliest days of recorded magic. She'd lug them around in a battered satchel, shoulders screaming by midday, cursing her own pride.

At night, she'd slump over a desk in the library, forging citations from the dustiest corners of neglected shelves. The essay prompts demanded cross-referencing magical philosophers who hadn't existed in the last two centuries, many of them only partially translated. She'd found entire paragraphs in Draconic runes, or references to planar theory that required footnotes from half a dozen contradictory manuscripts. It felt like forging a puzzle out of broken shards that had never been meant to align.

Somehow, unbelievably, she scraped by with a 74. A hair's breadth above failure—just enough to dodge academic probation. But that grade carried the unmistakable stench of near-disaster, broadcasting that she was a "second-semester overreach." She recalled the sympathetic glances from older students who'd heard rumors of her meltdown during finals. Even her own roommate had tiptoed around her, offering tea laced with mild calming wards.