The Villain Professor's Second Chance

"Deren!" Sylvanna's voice cracked raw.

He swung, steel bar meeting stone with a bone-thudding clang. The fragment veered, splashing harmlessly into black water. Spray hissed off hot rubble. Deren flashed her a grin that looked too white in this dark. "Still breathing, captain!"

A fresh downdraft slammed the wyvern sideways. Sylvanna's vision filled with sparks as her shoulder snapped against the saddle bark. Pain lanced her arm; lightning fizzed out in ribbons, spraying into the clouds. For a half-breath the world tilted, and she saw twin images: the real forge below and a hallucination hovering just above it—her father, cloak flapping, hand outstretched in welcome. The vision stank of Orvath's meddling. She blinked hard. The phantom guttered like a candle in wind and was gone.

Azra hammered her fist on the saddle. "We need that breach, Sylv!"

"I said—" She sucked air, steadying the storm boiling in her chest. "—not yet!"

The submerged forge's topmost hull plate rotated, exposing a narrow seam that pulsed with sick green light. It reminded her of a wound that refused to clot. That was her window.

She loosed the wyvern's dive signal. Raëdrithar tucked wings and fell. Wind shrieked. Wraiths blurred past like inverted comets. Sylvanna's heartbeat hit a staccato roll, every pulse radiating needles of electricity down her arms. Her fingers curled around the notched arrow—storm-glass forged from lightning sand and Draven's proprietary binding salts.

"Azra—now!"

The engineer hurled the demolition charge. Flame blossomed beneath them, a sunflower of orange ripping a slab from the forge exterior. Turbulence bucked the wyvern; Azra clung with both arms, teeth bared in a snarl. The blast tore open a jagged corridor of air straight to the amplifier mirror just lifting from its cradle.

One breath. Sylvanna sighted, the arrow's runes glowing an answering blue. She exhaled, letting Orvath's false whispers swirl away on the wind.

And then, from her throat to her fingertips, chilled lightning surged.

She loosed the arrow.

Across the sky it cut, a spun thread of silver shrieking through crosswinds. Time went viscous. Sylvanna felt each heartbeat, each flex of sinew in Raëdrithar's wings. The arrow met the mirror dead center. Cracks spider-webbed across the glass—silent at first, then ringing like a cathedral bell struck too hard. Light refracted through the fractures, scattering emerald shards that vaporized before touching water.

The wyvern rolled, diving for open sky just as a wave of concussive force belched upward, hot and hungry. Thunder slapped Sylvanna's back; she tasted blood where she'd bitten her cheek.

She dared a look over her shoulder. The mirror folded inward on itself, imploding along every fracture line. Around it, Orvath's wraiths spasmed, shapes boiling away in sheets of mist. One by one their shrieks guttered.

Azra whooped, voice ragged. "Bullseye! That's one for the ledger!"

Sylvanna only nodded, swallowing nausea. Lightning sickness recoiled, massing for another assault. She couldn't think about that now. The wyvern needed altitude; they had more air to carve, more enemy to burn.

Wind keened around them as Raëdrithar climbed, passing shattered struts spinning like dead leaves. Sylvanna steadied her friend's flight with a pressure of knees and a whispered word. She tasted ash on her tongue—and fear, but she welcomed neither. Below, the forge smoldered. Above, wraith silhouettes tattered against the stars. Somewhere in the deaf roar of battle she imagined she heard Draven's cold mind ticking forward, already calculating what their small victory bought.

Lightning rippled again under her skin, warning her she had stolen only a fleeting moment of clarity. She drew a stabilizing breath, coughed twice, and forced her gaze toward the right flank where Deren fought the crosswind.

"Deren! How's the right flank?" she shouted.

"Still breathing!" Deren called, the words ripped to ribbons by the gale. His boots skidded across the sling-net as Raëdrithar lurched, but the scout flashed a reckless grin all the same—a spark of defiance in a sky ruled by ghosts.

The submerged forge reared up ahead, its bastions half-eclipsed by coils of spectral wraiths. Those revenants—torn banners of memory and sea-mist—spiraled around smokestacks and broken cranes, trailing cries that did not belong to any living throat. For every beat of the wyvern's wings, air pockets collapsed beneath him, stealing lift, then coughing it back as savage updrafts. Raëdrithar fought them with brutal grace, shoulders shuddering, membranes flexing until veins shone amethyst through stretched skin.

Sylvanna felt the twisting forces slam through the saddle frame and into her spine. Lightning spilled uncontrolled along her arms—crackling filaments that seared leather and left hairline scorch marks on the stirrup plates. The sickness rode those sparks, gnawing up from her ribs toward her jaw. She clamped her teeth until they rang, forcing the current down the braided reins and into the wyvern's bronze harness.

Azra leaned forward, breath harsh against Sylvanna's ear. "Charge primed! Your word and we crack this tin can open!"

"Not yet," Sylvanna shouted back. Each syllable tasted like copper shavings. She searched the forge's hull for the seam—one clean line where stone overlay met the amplifier casing. The storm itself conspired to hide it: gusts warped the shimmer, reflections doubled, tripled. A lesser shooter would have called it impossible. She locked her jaw. "Need the seam. Hold altitude!"

Raëdrithar roared—a blast of sound that rattled Sylvanna's ribs—then snapped a wingtip to dodge a wraith-forged spear. The spectral lance missed by arm's length, bursting into shards of half-remembered lullabies that dissolved before they could touch scale. The wyvern's banking turn knocked debris loose from a rusted crane boom. A jagged spar—long as a pike and edged with salt-glass—spun toward Azra.

Deren came off his tether like a comet. One boot hooked a girth strap, the rest of him swinging wide. He slammed the spar with his forearm, redirecting it past Azra's shoulder. Splinters hissed across the wind. Blood spotted his sleeve where shards found flesh, but he steadied himself with a gasping laugh. "Got you!"

Azra shot him a grimacing nod—gratitude wielded like a weapon—and returned to the satchel's rune clamps. Fingers black with soot danced over the arming pins, checking tension, checking again. Sweat streaked the dirt on her brow despite the cutting cold.

Sylvanna forced her storm-sick hands to stillness and inhaled—slow, deliberate—through flared nostrils. Air knifed down her throat, tasted of ozone, salt, and fear-sweat evaporating in the gale. The final mirror rose from the forge's iron blossom, its surface warping every torch and bolt of lightning into molten mercury reflections. It glimmered like an eye that refused to blink. One shot. No second tries.

Below, wraiths closed ranks, determined to swat the wyvern from the sky. Veins of teal light pulsed inside their translucent bodies—echoes stolen from drowning victims—and where those lights converged a scream built, low and grinding. The sound clawed at Sylvanna's thoughts, trying to jam stray memories under her fingernails: birthday candles, her first bowstring snap, Draven's calculating gaze standing beside a winter bonfire. She shook her head once, ruthlessly, until the noise scraped out of her skull.

Azra's hand slapped her pauldron. "Sylvanna, any hotter and this satchel's going to cook us!"

"Wait," Sylvanna hissed. Her eyes, ice-blue and fever-bright, carved the mist for that perfect fissure. Wind hammered her cloak so hard the lining snapped like banners. Raëdrithar's chest heaved, ribs sawing against harness leather, each breath a labor of thunder.

There—the plate seam winked open as a stray arc tore away a sheet of fog. A narrow line, no wider than a knife's spine, ran the mirror's starboard side. She felt it more than saw it, as if her storm-core vibrated in sympathetic relief.

"Azra—blow it!"

Azra's thumb punched the detonator rune. The charge plunged into darkness; half a heartbeat later the world below flowered into orange calamity. Stone peeled away from steel, slagging edges fountaining upward. The concussion slapped Raëdrithar mid-chest, but Sylvanna was ready. "Wings fold!" she barked.

The wyvern obeyed, tucking like an arrow. Gravity seized them, hauling them through the newborn breach before debris could close. Heat scorched Sylvanna's cheeks; trailing scraps of her braid singed to white ash.

Arrow already nocked, she leveled the bow. The unsteady light off the explosion flickered across the storm-glass head, making it glimmer as if alive. Her arms felt carved from glass and tremoring current, but the line of the shot settled, impossibly thin.

The wind howled one last challenge; her heartbeat answered. She released.

The arrow hissed, a single searing note. Air tried to jostle it, but storm-glass bit the slipstream and held true. Sylvanna tracked it with a marksman's devotion—past splinters of girder, past a wraith claw that snapped too slow, all the way into the mirror's exact heart.

The impact rang like struck crystal. Cracks spidered out in silence, then reality caught up, delivering a basso shudder that rattled Sylvanna's sternum. The mirror folded as if punched by an invisible fist, imploding until only shards and green fire remained. They whirled skyward in a corkscrew—the death of an idea made visible.

Shockwaves rolled backward through the wraith swarm. Each revenant jerked as if wires snapped. Some tore apart cleanly; others shrank, dissolving into rain that stank of tears and brine. The shriek that had gnawed at Sylvanna's mind fractured into a hundred fading whimpers.

Azra's shout broke the wind's scream. "Bullseye!"