The Villain Professor's Second Chance

Ash drifted across the lowlands in patient spirals, forming pale dunes against the black-veined stone. At every gust the tiny grains hissed along the ground, whispering over weather-shattered pillars and the ribs of ancient walls that lay half-sunken like forgotten fossils. Draven—moving beneath the name Dravis Granger—strode through that muted storm, boots stitching an even cadence across soil that no longer trusted its own solidity.

He did not bother with the brittle parchment map folded in his satchel; the last tremor had rendered its hand-inked ridgelines fantasy. Instead he watched the earth itself. Each time his heel touched down he felt for the shiver hiding beneath the surface layer—three steady pulses, a hush, then a fainter echo that seemed to chase its own tail through the broken substrata. The pattern repeated every twenty-nine seconds, precise as a metronome carved from bone. He filed it under seismic baseline: deviation zero.

A ruin rose to his left: the hollow arcade of a once-grand aquifer, its arches blown apart by pressure years earlier. Moon-slim reeds sprouted from the cracks, leaves rattling together like coins in a beggar's hand. Draven paused at the largest gap and slid two fingers against a support column. The stone was colder than the night wind. That mattered—cool stone conducted tremor signatures with greater purity. He closed his eyes.

The vibration leapt beneath his skin, skittered along the radius and ulna, then branched into five razor-fine vectors that raced toward his collarbone. Convergence node—five arms, he noted. That many fractures meeting implied a buried hub chamber, probably one of the Gate's secondary pressure cysts. Useful to know later when explosives might be required.

From behind a tilted buttress a desert hare scampered, eyes phosphorescent, fur the color of bleached parchment. It froze mid-stride, sensing a predator. Draven's gaze flicked toward it, measured the tension in its hind limbs, the white fog of its breath; a heartbeat later the animal bolted. He tracked the direction. Even prey took predictable routes when the bedrock underfoot thrummed with hidden veins of unrest—it would avoid places where low-frequency shocks travelled fastest. The hare's path, therefore, painted another invisible contour line for him.

A soft chime pulsed at the edge of his vision. Without turning his head, he let the system prompt float into focus: [System Update: Reward Available.] The text glowed an indifferent blue, words crisp as etched crystal. A lesser mind might have welcomed the distraction. Draven dismissed it with a blink. The prompt dimmed but did not vanish, hovering like an overeager servant clutching a sealed letter.

He moved on. Farther ahead the land sloped into a shallow gully where water once pooled; now only fractured clay remained, the surface scarred by worm-tracks of dried lightning. Every few steps he tapped a toe against the crust, listening for the hollow thud that hinted at sub-chambers. Twice he heard nothing. The third tap rang slightly higher, almost a hollow drum. Beneath that spot an underground pocket slept. He crouched, pressed his palm flat.

Again the ground sang to him—three pulses, one pause—but in the shallow void the rhythm arrived sharper, less dampened, as though echoing inside a cracked bell. An underground cavity directly below, maybe ten cubits down. The cyst he had predicted. He marked the spot with a wedge of chalk, an X so small a casual observer wouldn't notice.

The system prompt chimed louder. He exhaled. "Persistent thing," he muttered, voice as mild as winter smoke. When the interface refused to retreat, he let it expand.

[Reward Catalogue Updated: +4 Store Catalogue Options Unlocked] scrolled across first in larger letters. Beneath, four icons rotated in holographic miniature. He recognized them—schematics for monofilament nets, temporal anchor pins, an elven resonance gauntlet, and a chimera nutrient core. All valuable, none urgent.

Another line unfolded:

[Elven First Encounter Arc: Completion Reward Available]

That dragged one pale brow a millimetre higher. He had filed the elves' arrival under "anticipated reinforcement," not "epic milestone." The system disagreed.

A final trio of entries blossomed across the air:

[Claim Now]

(1) Advanced Predictive Combat Modeling

(2) Memory Vault: Personal Archive

He stopped breathing for half a beat. The vault option shimmered, its glow subtly warmer, as if it breathed. Under it flickered a smaller annotation: [Severed Personal Memory Available: Origin Connection].

Origin. The single word rippled over nerves he preferred dormant.

Wind hissed through broken reeds, stirring faint dust devils between his boots. Draven extended a gloved hand and tapped the hovering glyph. Reality tightened.

The lowlands, the ruined aquifer, the ash drift—everything folded outward in a whisper of disassembling light, leaving him in a dark suspension where gravity felt optional. At arm's length a monolithic door revolved into view, surface mirrored to a flawless polish. Fronted by runic braces, it hovered over nothing—no floor, no sky, only black velvet depth speckled with points of starlight that might have been data nodes.

He approached, footsteps silent on an invisible platform. His reflection glided to meet him, twin blades at its back, eyes winter-pale. No surprises.

A sigil flared in the door's centre: a child's handprint—tiny, no larger than a sparrow. Light traced its outline, then receded into the silver.

[Accessing Severed Memory…]

Cold stabbed from the glyph up his arm, fracturing outward like hoarfrost. He inhaled. There was a taste—cinnamon and steam, the memory of hearth bread torn open on a winter's morning. He had not thought of that aroma in decades, perhaps lifetimes.

Images flickered. A lamplit kitchen. A laugh that belonged to a small voice, bright and trusting. A hand reaching, fingers sticky with honey—small, familiar—

And then nothing. The fragment shattered, collapsing into white motes that spiralled away before he could parse a face or a name.

Draven's pulse stayed steady, though the cold seeped deeper. The door now displayed two vertical columns. On the left a fractal wireframe formed, eagle-swift calculations branching: algorithms, probabilistic matrices, simulated war tables spiralling in elegant arcs—Advanced Predictive Combat Modeling. On the right, a silhouette blurred by light—human shape, arms outstretched—Memory Restoration.

A timer spun at the top of the vault: 00:01:00. One minute before auto-selection. Of course. The system valued decisiveness.

He considered. The predictive upgrade promised a tenfold increase in real-time combat scenarios, factoring temporal distortion—exactly what Orvath now wielded. The memory? Unknown utility beyond sentiment. Sentiment didn't breach Gates.

The timer rolled to 00:00:45.

He weighed cost. Restoring the memory would mean forfeiting the model—and with it his edge against a foe rewriting physics. Could affection shield the plateau? Unlikely.

00:00:30.

The child's laugh echoed, faint as snowfall. Something inside him wondered whose voice it had been—sister? Apprentice? He imagined explaining to Vaelira why he abandoned strategic superiority for a name long entombed. The thought faded like breath on glass.

00:00:15.

Decision matrix clear. He raised one hand toward the left column. Paused. It would be permanent. He might never know who that laughter belonged to—and perhaps that had been the first cut turning him into the blade he now was.

He touched the wireframe.

Light surged. The right column dimmed, shrinking to a point, then winked out like a star extinguished. A whisper accompanied its demise—half a note of song, paper-thin.

[Memory Permanently Locked.]

Files of gold text streamed down the left side, etching themselves into invisible archives behind his eyes—combat prediction subroutines, adaptive distortion parsing, probability branching for six-layer time shears. The knowledge slotted into neural lattices with surgical precision. Cool efficiency replaced the phantom ache.

He exhaled. "I don't need heart. For now."

The vault dissolved. Stars inverted, the lowlands reassembled like glass shards magnetised into shape. Ash fell again, gentle and indifferent. His boots rested exactly where he had stood. Above, the night sky loomed the same, yet he perceived a thousand new vectors where clouds drifted and pressure cells pulsed—a living map.

Wind tugged a strand of hair across his brow. He brushed it aside, already cataloguing the tremor cadence anew. Three pulses, one pause—still perfect, but he sensed micro-variations now, subtleties exposing further fractures he had missed minutes earlier. The upgrade functioned.

Draven reached for the chalk mark on the clay, pressed two fresh dots north-east and north-west of the X, triangulating a deeper chamber he now understood lay under those points. Efficient.

Ash hissed behind him. He drew a blade in one smooth motion, chambered low. Nothing but the rabbit, returning, nose twitching at storm-tainted air. He sheathed the sword.

In his peripheral vision the reward catalogue icons rotated expectantly, waiting for purchase decisions. He flicked them away. Later. Data first.

He knelt once more, palm flat. The tremor rhythm had changed a hairbreadth, the second pulse lengthening by a quarter second. A shift in pressure lines deeper underground—Orvath flexing his new architecture perhaps. Draven marked that deviation. Small oscillations often heralded big ruptures.

The hare bounded off, disappearing into brush that rustled like dry parchment under moonlight. Draven rose, coat flaring. Somewhere behind a bank of skeletal trees, lightning muttered beneath the horizon—Orvath's signature. Good. Distance approximately nine kilometres, vector south-east. He plotted intercept angles.

He resumed his path, the lowlands stretching ahead under a veil of drifting ash.

Behind him, the child's echo faded entirely, leaving only the rhythmic hush of dust over stone.