The Villain Professor's Second Chance

Ash filtered down through fissures in the vaulted ceiling, dusting the broad shoulders of Dravis Granger like gray snow. He ignored it. The tremor rolling under the aqueduct floor mattered more than the debris drifting from above. A deep-set vibration beat its way through stone and sinew, landing in his boots as an arrhythmic metronome—two steady pulses, one softer echo, a pause. He matched his respiration to that cadence, lungs rising on the first thrum, falling on the second, holding on the lull. Stability, here, was a timing problem.

He advanced three silent steps. Red-brown water oozed across the culvert's edge, licking at the toes of his boots before retreating again like a timid animal. The aqueduct had been pristine once—he could still read the masons' marks, clean dovetails at every join—but Orvath's sabotage had warped the stone. Whole cornices sagged. Support arches bulged as though the channel were breathing in its sleep. Dravis's pale eyes—ice under lamplight—measured each deformity in a single pass and filed it away under collapse risk: moderate.

Above him, the patrol clanked by. Two sentinels in iron frog-skin cuirasses paused to share a flask. Their voices bounced off vaults in loose echoes; to untrained ears the echoes were pointless noise. Dravis haunted those echoes, letting their chatter smear his footfalls into the background. He reached a buttress, pressed flat, and flicked a finger. A fingernail-sized sigil bloomed on the mortar—dull garnet light outlining hairline cracks stenciled across the entire weight-bearing seam. The aqueduct would survive maybe one more quake. Possibly two. Definitely not three.

He nodded once—good enough—and slid onward.

Lantern halos kept bobbing across the upper gallery. The guards' lights revealed jagged graffiti: spiral symbols scored into the walls like mazes scraped by a furious child. Memory tethers, he noted—Orvath's handwriting. Any soldier brushing a bare hand over those spirals would lose an hour of recollection for every second of contact. Dravis stepped deliberately around them, mind already drafting an exit path that would herd any pursuers through the traps. He wasted no thought on pity. Pawns should know the board they marched upon.

More ash drifted. Somewhere, high in the city, parts of a roof must have surrendered. He tasted the air: iron filings, burned pitch, the faint ammoniac sting of alchemical accelerants. Good; the diversion teams were doing their work. Fewer eyes meant fewer variables.

At the culvert's midpoint he halted. The stone wall was glossy here, slick with condensation. He palmed the surface; lines of rune-ink flared beneath his glove in ghost-white, sketching an invisible blueprint—every pressure vein, every weld seam, every fatigue fault spidering through the valve chamber beyond. The right-hand flank glowed brightest: left valve, third seam. Exactly as predicted.

He whispered, "Left valve, third seam." Spoken confirmation triggered the sigil code. Symbols snapped brighter, confirming target integrity.

A tremor spat shards of limestone from overhead. He ducked beneath an arch as debris clattered like thrown dice. A lesser infiltrator might have hesitated, recalculated. Dravis merely shifted his stance half a pace to account for a changed traction coefficient on fresh rubble. His heartbeat never left that steady three-beat loop.

Thirty strides brought him to a recessed alcove where the main pressure valve slept behind a bronze grille. Greenish water gurgled under the platform, rising by fractions of an inch each minute. A bank of inscriptions—dense as embroidery—clung around the release handle. They pulsed in long, slow breaths, hungry.

Memory-leech ward, he logged. He leaned closer, studying the pulse frequency: four flutter beats, one long pull—an intake cycle matching the siphon rate of cortical recall. He could break it, yes. Counter-glyphs, micro-fracture in the hash lines, reversed polarity on the siphon path. Two minutes' labor. But two minutes translated into one additional Gate convulsion, perhaps enough to shear the plateau above in half.

He drew one of his twin blades, its matte edge swallowing lantern light. With the whole aqueduct quaking, the gesture was quiet but decisive, as if marking a number on an abacus. His other hand hovered mere centimeters from the runes, feeling the ward's electrostatic tingle.

The clone's face remained expressionless. Emotion added no value here. Only outcome mattered.

Option A: Defuse.

Probability of success: 94 percent. Time cost: 127 seconds. Downstream casualties: unpredictable but non-zero.

Option B: Overload.

Probability of success: 88 percent. Time cost: 11 seconds. Personal survival: nil. Downstream casualties: negligible.

He favored Option B. Efficiency was loyalty to the original.

Dravis allowed himself one fractional smile—an almost imperceptible twitch that never reached his eyes. "Clever," he said, voice as dry as cracked clay. Orvath deserved that much acknowledgment; the leash had been baited ingeniously.

He rolled one shoulder, loosening the long muscles in his neck. With his free hand he carved a last sigil—small, perfect—on the inside of his left arm. The rune tethered a single memory bundle: the coordinates of the plateau, the mathematical proof of the Gate's weakness, and eight words of farewell the prime Draven would feel as a pinprick of information arriving unsourced. Insurance, nothing sentimental.

Then he pressed his palm flat on the writhing ward.

Pain flared—cold, not hot—like ice water injected into bone. The siphon yanked at his constructed consciousness, trying to unspool years in a heartbeat. His vision twinned, blurred, steadied. He fed it everything. Tactical rigs. False childhood recollections woven into the clone's persona. The exact taste of coffee in an alleyway café that had never existed. He watched the ward swell, gorged past design limits, sigils puffing into steam as circuitry overloaded.

"Even copies," he murmured, "can make choices."

He wrenched the bronze handle. Metal screamed as the valve cracked open. A thunderclap of pressurized water exploded through the chamber, slamming him backward in a sheath of broken light. Stones snapped like ribs. The aqueduct howled—a sound so raw it shook dust off rooftops three streets away.

Dravis never heard the second tremor. By then he was—at best—data vapor.

Far beneath the seabed, Orvath lurched against his forge dais as feedback slammed into the storm-key shard. The crystal hissed in his palm, whining like a live wire drawn across glass. Pale light crawled through the veins of his forearm, climbing into his throat so each breath backlit his ribs in a ghastly glow. It hurt, but pain was a note in the harmony; he wrapped his fingers tighter.

"So the puppet cuts its strings," he rasped. His forge spirit—an ever-turning halo of molten runes—stuttered, then recovered, orbiting his shoulders in lazy, threatening loops. "Commendable."

Around him, suspension shards hovered like icy petals. Each sliver held reflections: a wyvern's beating wings, a woman's face framed in argent sparks, a severed stone valve spiraling down a chasm. He sifted through them, picking his view of the collapsing aqueduct like a scholar chasing marginalia. A grin pulled at his mouth.

"You hear me, don't you, Draven?" His statement slipped out across their psychic tether, threading the mid-storm static that linked him to every artifact the professor had ever touched. "Your clone moves like a polished blade, but it was always a courier. A courier delivers, then dies."

He twisted, channeling raw arcana into the ring of pylons encircling the Gate's mouth. The calcified plates juddered, cracks splintering wider. A roar—half oath, half birth cry—bled into the waterlogged chamber.

"Come, storm's courier," he hissed, feeding more power into the matrix. "Deliver me my key."

Night air clawed at Sylvanna's cheeks as Raëdrithar banked hard, riding a current that felt less like wind than a living fist. The wyvern's indigo membranes stretched to screaming transparency; veins glowed violet as lightning crawled beneath the skin. Sylvanna adjusted her seat, wincing when a spasm of static snapped from her wrist to the saddle pommel. Mercury runes tamped the discharge, but only barely.

Below, spectral wraiths pinwheeled across the drowned forge. They weren't whole bodies—more like the outlines of memories given mass. Each looked half-finished, faces incomplete, eyes hollow sockets pulsing blue light. They shrieked as they rose, and the shriek tugged at Sylvanna's senses, trying to graft stranger's recollections into her skull: a child calling for a mother, a soldier begging a god, a poet forgetting his last line. She grit her teeth and kept her gaze forward.

Azra shouted against the wind, voice breaking. "Flux pressure's spiking! If we wait any longer we'll lose the angle!"

"I know." Sylvanna spat coppery saliva; lightning sickness made every taste metallic. "Hold the charge."

Raëdrithar flexed downward, clipping a wraith. Mist exploded around his shoulder armor, spraying sparks. The beast shook its neck, a low rumble of protest vibrating up Sylvanna's legs.

Ahead, Scout Deren dangled half outside his harness, reaching with a pry-bar to knock free a tumbling chunk of masonry. The slab had sheared from a buttress high on the forge and was tumbling end over end—straight for Azra's satchel of detonators.

"Deren!"