The Villain Professor's Second Chance

The march began at midday, once rations had been distributed and the last protests smothered by Vaelira's clipped commands. They descended the chalk bluffs in a broken column: Vaelira's vanguard first, iron-reed cages lashed to sleds; then Helyra's wagon stacked with star atlases; then Draven's infiltration pack; finally the rear guard—Justiciar prisoners now shackled wrist-to-waist in a chain so they could carry ammunition without fleeing.

With every yard the procession advanced, the world seemed to tilt farther from any natural order. The seabed was a battlefield of mismatched eras, each revelation stranger than the last.

Splintered clams, split by sudden pressure change, coughed out final hissed breaths. Their pearlescent shells gleamed under the sickly blue light, and some still twitched, refusing to accept the sky's presence where water should have been.

Schools of silver fish flopped on mudflats, scales dulling second by second. One soldier tried to gather them—old instinct to save good meat—but the fish convulsed the moment his fingertips brushed their skins, imprinting shards of alien lullabies into his mind. He reeled back, eyes wide, bleeding from the nose. Draven called a halt, checked the man's pulse, then ordered any dead creature left untouched. "The water knows us. When it retreats, it drags our names with it. Don't feed it more."

Wrecks protruded everywhere. A two-mast schooner lay half-embedded in silt, its hull torn open like ribs pried apart. Helyra climbed onto the listing deck to scratch notes—dates etched on a weathered beam matched captains who'd sailed a century before. In the hold, she found jars of sea-glass containing children's teeth, each tooth engraved with an unfamiliar rune. Draven yanked her back onto firm sand before she could reach for one. "Catalog later," he warned. "Bloodlines first."

She tried to protest, but a fresh tremor quaked through the timbers. The entire wreck groaned, ribs cracking again, and she thought better of it.

Blue fog began to coil from fissures in the basin floor—thin at first, like breath on glass, then thicker. Every swirl carried half-formed voices: lullabies, fevered arguments, a mother's cry for a lost child. The air tasted of salt and nostalgia.

A five-man squad trudged through one such pocket. Seconds later they staggered out slack-jawed, eyes glowing with faint iridescence. Their speech had changed. Syllables rolled off tongues in an archaic dialect: clipped vowels, harsh aspirated consonants. Draven recognized it from monastery archives—High Sylvan of the Second Dawn, five hundred years dead.

One of the dazzled soldiers broke ranks, tears streaming. "Mellai is alive—she's waiting in the orchard," he sobbed, words so old they scraped the air. Mellai. His squadmates tried to restrain him; Draven intervened with a blunt blow to the solar plexus, dropping the man gently into mud. "Breathe," he ordered, gripping the soldier's temples. "Anchor." He recited names—rank, birth village, unit—forcing the soldier to repeat them until modern speech returned in a hoarse croak.

Helyra scrambled forward, stylus dancing across a wax tablet, capturing every archaic phrase before it faded. When Draven released the soldier she showed him the crude phonetic notation.

"The Gate was once a tongue," she read aloud. Her voice trembled. "That's what he mumbled."

He absorbed the line, filed it. "And tongues can be severed," he answered, then pressed the wax back into her hands.

They pushed on in deliberate silence, choosing only the darker bands of sand—Draven had discovered by probing with his knife that pale ripples collapsed into shafts that breathed cold air. A single misplaced boot could drop a man thirty feet into unmapped cavities. Sylvanna kept rear watch, Raëdrithar swooping overhead like a charcoal comet, marking out pockets of memory fog and alarming vent holes with sharp screeches.

Hours bled away. The sky, unanchored by familiar tides, shifted to violet-grey long before sundown, as if the sun itself was trying to remember where it belonged.

When the basin's center finally yawned open ahead of them, everyone sensed it before seeing. Pressure changed—a hush pressed against eardrums, muffling the rattle of armor. And there, between two enormous spurs of barnacle-plated rock, the Leviathan Gate showed its throat: a circular depression half a mile across, rimmed by black stone polished smooth by centuries of current. At its heart lay a depression like a waiting iris, blue vapour swirling above it.

They had maybe ten heartbeats to process the scale before the brine-automata erupted.

The first wave arrived underfoot—mud blistered, then burst, flinging shards of shell in every direction. Automata rose as though hoisted by unseen strings: crustacean chassis, but lean, jointed with shimmering brine that moved like sinew. Their eye-stalks pulsed cerulean; cores throbbed in rhythm with the sea's hidden heartbeat.

Vaelira's voice cracked across the flats: "Shields!"

Iron-reed cages slammed into place, forming a mobile wall. Lightning residue from Sylvanna's previous assault still clung to the reed lattice, turning each bar into a shorting rod. The first automaton to strike sparked violently—core jolting, limbs locking mid-lunge before splitting open in three planes. Its death shriek sounded like tidal gates clanging shut.

The machines adapted fast. The next wave spat jets of mineral foam that hardened on contact, insulating against electricity. They climbed over the fallen, mandibles scissoring, legs spraying fans of brine that hissed on iron.

Draven pulled aside two scouts earmarked for infiltration. "Hold the north flank until Vaelira's line settles," he commanded, then gestured to Azra. Her face, still pale beneath dried blood, set into determination. He sliced her wrist chains—but left them dangling loose like decorative cords, a reminder. "You misstep, cuffs go back on."

She lifted a brow, managing a sardonic smile even now. "And here I thought we'd become friends."

"Survival isn't friendship," he returned, then shoved a disruptor rod into her good hand.

Battle noise blossomed: the clash of steel on chitin, screams muffled by memory fog, the crackle of electrified reed. Marrin's axe whirled overhead—he fought like a smith refusing to give up a hammer, every strike ringing. One automaton lunged; he ducked, split its knee joint, kicked off sprockets that sprayed oily brine like arterial blood.

A coil-worm, eel-thin and plated, shot from the sand behind him. It latched onto his hip just below the chainmail seam. He roared and pivoted, catching Vaelira's eye even as toxin launched plastic-blue veins across his flank. She saw the acid blooming, knew the damage. Yet another cluster of brine-creatures broke the line opposite, and her soldiers hesitated.

Marrin, voice rough with pain, barked: "Hold, damn you!" His axe hammered a final blow that threw three smaller units aside. The effort cost him; he staggered, blood drenching his greaves. But his stand gave Vaelira the narrow opening to rally.

She raised her sword—pointed it at the surging knot of enemies—and chose.

"Press." Her order fell like a slab of granite.

The phalanx heaved, iron-reed cages surging forward. Spears thrust through cage gaps, hooking automata sensors, dragging them closer so lightning-laced blades could chop cores. Behind her shouted command, Draven noted a fractional hitch in her breathing, the micro-tremor of grief postponed. Marrin fell away from the cage line, clutching the worm latched to his flank. Blue acid hissed through chain links. He landed on one knee, but still swung his axe at another machine's foreleg, snarling.

Draven wanted to reach him—to sever the coil, apply memory-ash powder to slow the burn—but his place was already chosen. Vaelira had given the press order; his infiltration team had to move during the distraction window. Somewhere beneath their feet, valves waited, counting down to the next breath.

He slipped into a crouch, fingers brushing Sylvanna's elbow as she loosed arrow after arrow from behind the mobile cage wall. She didn't glance at him; she felt the brush and understood his silent farewell. Raëdrithar keened overhead, then banked toward the wind-spire—a black-winged herald.

Azra matched his pace, disruptor rods slung across her back like strange, slender spears. The two scouts followed, stepping in his footprints, trusting his uncanny sense for safe ground. They slipped past struggling soldiers, ducked under a cage brace, splashed into icy water pooling at the basin's lip. Brine burned shallow cuts, but they never slowed.

Marrin's roar—half pain, half defiance—echoed behind. Draven's jaw set. He did not look back.

"Press," Vaelira growled again, voice raw iron scraping on stone.

Her order rolled down the shield wall like a cannon-shot. Mail links rattled, spears bristled, and the entire phalanx leaned into the surge, boots grinding shards of shattered automata underfoot. Metal screeched where iron-reed cages bit into churning mud. Blue sparks—leftover halos from Sylvanna's earlier lightning storm—skipped along the lattice, fizzling out on impact with the brine-slick chassis crowding the front rank.

Behind the commander, Marrin's broad silhouette swayed. The coil-worm clamped to his flank pulsed, pumping acid so potent it hissed through his scale skirt in steaming threads. Blood soaked the leather beneath, bright as fresh berries against the dun palette of sand and rust. He kept both hands on his war-axe, roaring a challenge that tore the last moisture from his throat.

No one could spare him; the line had to hold.