The Villain Professor's Second Chance

"Bullseye!"

No triumph in Sylvanna's answering nod, only survival—thin and costly. "Climb," she rasped. "Altitude before the forge settles."

Raëdrithar obeyed, wings hammering the wounded air. Sylvanna's vision narrowed to a tunnel rimmed in blue sparks. The lightning sickness regrouped, sending cold knives under her ribs. She tasted blood where she'd bitten through her lip, but she rode the agony, used it to focus. Below her, scorched masonry and dying phantoms boiled together, swallowed by rising steam.

On the plateau, Vaelira felt the air jar as the mirror exploded—pressure change like a giant exhaling. Her shield arm vibrated under another wraith impact; frost crept down the steel boss where a memory-leeching hand had pressed moments earlier. She slammed forward, locking shields with the trooper to her left. Mud sucked at her boots, trying to drag her down. She refused.

"Push!" Her voice shot down the line, flaring lungs already rubbed raw by smoke. "You hold, or you drown!"

The soldiers answered with a guttural roar, equal parts courage and terror. Pike shafts bristled, stabbing into translucent torsos. Each hit burst a firework of stolen images—tavern laughter, an infant's first word, the color of a mother's eyes—then shredded them to nothing before they could leech further.

Helyra, kneeling at the center anchor point, wrestled a glowing quartz rod deeper into fractured shale. Sparks spat onto her sleeves; rune-ink seared tiny holes through the fabric. "Frequency's dropping! We lose resonance and the net collapses!"

Vaelira risked a glance. Fifty paces behind her, another rod shuddered, its light flickering like a dying lantern. If it failed, the spectral tide would pour through the breach in seconds.

"No failure," Vaelira barked. "Stabilize or break—those are your choices."

Helyra's jaw set. She drove a bronze spike home with the pommel of her dirk. The rod's glow steadied, a steady violet hum cutting across the battlefield howl. The line held—barely.

A Brine-Wraith vaulted over the shield ridge, mouth yawning wider than any jaw should. Its scream came out as scattershot nursery rhymes, each word a scalpel aimed at memory. Vaelira pivoted under the sound, blade greeting the thing's chest. Steel groaned—ghost-flesh resisted like rubber—then parted, spraying fragments of ice-blue regret across her gauntlet. The creature collapsed into steam that tasted of salt and childhood summers long gone.

She stole a single heartbeat to snap her gaze skyward. High above, a dark silhouette leveled out—a wyvern haloed in lightning, wings striped by firelight. Relief flitted over her face, too brief to be called a smile.

"Hold," she muttered, planting her shield edge in churned earth. "One more breath. One more step."

The plateau trembled again, this time not from wraith strikes but from something deeper—the distant groan of stone giving way. Helyra drove the last rod into place; its light joined the others, knitting a flickering dome of sound and color across Ironbark's ranks.

For now, it was enough.

Far below them, the bowels of the city roared.

The first valve in the aqueduct ruptured—then the second, third, fourth, each bursting like thunder trapped in iron lungs. Water, held at killing pressure, found freedom in a single heartbeat. It ripped through ducts, scoured soot from centuries-old channels, shattered inspection hatches like brittle shells. The roar raced down service tunnels, swallowed whole alcoves, and hurled itself into Orvath's meticulously prepared fallback corridor.

There, the surge met reinforcement walls of rune-steel. They held for less than a second, long enough to discharge a blinding lattice of blue lightning into the flood—then they split, hurling arcs of molten metal across polished basalt. The corridor became a living river, sweeping debris, shattered pylons, and glowing fragments of the memory-leech ward into a grinding maelstrom.

In that roar echoed a thought—the echo of Draven's clone, etched on every droplet as the ward detonated: Even copies can make choices.

Orvath staggered on the dais, shoulders hunching as raw power whiplashed back through conduits he thought were unidirectional. The skein of sigils woven across the chamber ceiling flashed from gold to ultraviolet, then guttered to a dull, sickly green. Each pulse carved fresh fissures up the basalt plinth, spider-cracks radiating beneath his boots like a map of all the faults in his design.

The storm-key shard in his fist blazed white, then teal so intense the edges shimmered violet; its heat seared half-circles into his fingers, but he refused to release it. The pain grounded him, reminded him he still had purchase on the ritual. He drove his other hand against the plinth to keep upright. When his palm met stone, veins of molten rune-ink slithered away from the contact—as though even the chamber's foundations feared contamination by failure.

All around him the suspension shards lost formation. Some flickered transparent, others flared mirror-bright, spinning end over end until centrifugal force split them into glassy petals. Each fragment reflected a different moment of the battle above: a wyvern banking through fire; a column of water devouring a tunnel; a silver arrow exploding a mirror heart. Together those images stitched a frenetic mural across the vault, a strobing accusation that his lattice of inevitabilities had torn.

"No," Orvath rasped. The word steamed in the chill spray leaking from the widening fracture overhead. "A shadow for a storm? You trade poorly, professor."

High above, the Gate's fused plates screeched—a sound like glaciers colliding beneath the sea. Hairline cracks ran wild, revealing night-dark water foaming on the far side. Foam sprayed inward with every fresh jolt, sizzling where it touched exposed magma channels on the floor.

Load-stones wreathed in copper cages sparked and died. Each failure dimmed the ritual circle's glow, like candles snuffed in rapid succession. The loss bruised his link to Sylvanna's storm-core; he felt the bond flex, fray, tighten again. The psychic lash stabbed behind his eyes, bright as welding arc. He tasted copper and rime on his tongue—a mingled flavor of blood and deep-sea frost.

He snarled and stepped forward. Fractured calcite tore his robe, carved shallow ravines down his torso. Blood hit steaming stone with a hiss. He pressed his full weight against the plates. Bones grated; the shard in his hand shrilled in delight, channeling fresh force into the split. A pressure wave rolled outward, rattling dead load-stones from their mounts. They shattered on the dais with a sound like iron rain.

"You think this is your victory?" His voice slithered through every still-active conduit, threading itself into the minds of those on the plateau. "I am the fracture. I am the storm."

With that, he let the shard's teal nova swallow him. His outline blurred, broke into radiating glyphs, and vanished through the fissure—leaving only the echoes of his final promise spinning in oily ripples across the air.

The storm will remember you.

Ash drifted over the plateau in hushed curtains, fine as powdered bone. It dusted fractured shields, clung to pitted helmets, settled in cooling sword grooves and shallow footprints filling slowly with gray water. To some soldiers the ash smelled of charred resin; to others it smelled like burning parchment. Draven detected only carbon and faint brine—signals to file, nothing more.

He returned at a measured walk, cloak heavy with seawater. Each step landed where the mud was least likely to collapse; habit placed his boots between hidden sink points without conscious effort. The cold didn't touch him. Calculation occupied every nerve.

Sylvanna slid from Raëdrithar's saddle three paces away, boots squelching in mire. Lightning sickness still jittered under her skin, bright threads of mercury-fire winding her wrist, but her chin lifted at once, eyes skimming for threats. Draven noted the wobble in her left knee—energy reserves dropping to critical—and decided the wyvern should remain on standby for extraction duty rather than reconnaissance. He stored the choice for later.

Vaelira limped across shattered trenches, cloak torn to a ragged hem. Her sword arm hung stiff, gauntlet ringed in frost where a wraith had tried to drink her memories of childhood. She ignored the numbness, saluting Draven with a motion that scraped steel against bone. He returned a nod—approval without warmth.

Azra knelt near the collapsed signal tower, hammer dangling from lax fingers. Grease streaked her cheek in rivulets washed by sweat. She had stacked her remaining charges in a neat row, fuses trimmed, safety glyphs reinforced. Draven's gaze flicked to them, counting yield totals against the plateau's new topography. Acceptable.

Around them, the Ironbark line sagged but did not break. Where pikes had snapped, spare hafts wedged shields into a second tier; where shields lay splintered, soldiers interlocked plasma-quenched bucklers salvaged from fallen Justiciars. The living filled gaps with the dead's equipment, an efficient reallocation of assets. Draven approved—it saved time he would otherwise have spent issuing the order.

No shouts of triumph rose. Instead, soft voices swapped casualty figures, borrowed water skins, shared the strange hush that follows catastrophe. The Gate's thunder had ceased, replaced by the drip of condensed steam off scorched rock. Every ear waited for the sea to resume its breathing and prayed it would not.

Sylvanna wiped ash from her vambrace, white grit streaking silver runes. "Orvath?" she asked, voice low—careful not to spook what little calm remained.

"Gone," Draven said. He delivered the fact like delivering inventory. No tremor of relief, no scowl at unfinished business, merely a line item checked off.

Her jaw tightened. "For now?"

"For now," he agreed. Probability table: ninety-one percent likelihood of re-engagement within three lunar cycles. Unspoken—there was no need to burden morale with numbers.

She followed his eyes to the weblike glow still threading her wrist. "Storm-core's still off."

"We purchased time," Draven replied. "Enough for the elves to erect a resonance lattice. Enough for you to stabilize." Whether she survived the stabilization process was her burden; contingency plans already existed for either result.

Vaelira approached, favoring her right leg. "Your clone?" she asked, tone stripped of softness.

Draven's gaze flicked to the aqueduct's distant plume—a narrow column of mist rising over the city's lower quarter. "Expended," he said. A necessary cost: one construct for strategic flood, city blocks sacrificed for continental survival. He deemed the exchange efficient.

Vaelira searched his face, perhaps seeking regret. She found a mirror's surface instead—cold, precise, reflecting only the next necessity. She gave a curt nod, accepting what couldn't be changed, and pivoted to issue fresh orders to medics still steadying the wounded line.

Draven scanned the plateau a final time—counting pike density, estimating hours before rigor mortis would complicate corpse retrieval, noting which segments of quartz net hummed off-key and would need immediate retuning. Numbers tallied, decisions slotted. He inhaled, tasted ash and salt, and prepared the next directive—

—when a rectangle of blue light winked into existence at the edge of his vision.

No one else reacted; the screen was for him alone. Lines of angular script scrolled across the translucent panel, illegible to any eye lacking the cipher anchored in his cerebral lattice.

Draven's breath left him in a plume of steam. The corner of his mouth curved—not warmth, but the faint click of a puzzle locking into place.

Finally.

The reward I've been waiting for.