The Villain Professor's Second Chance

Cut two—silencing the chorus.

He stepped deeper, shoulder brushing robes slick with spectral ink, and drove the first sword straight through the glimmering glyph at the collarbone. Sparks burst in oily purple light. The entire Titan seized, robes twisting into featherweight ash. Its spine folded, and the lumbering mass crumpled like paper doused in black fire.

Sylvanna was already targeting the ironclad giant. Her fingers danced across the bowstring, weaving a runic cadence. The shock arrow she chose glowed with jagged cobalt veins. She inhaled once—steady, measured—then released.

The arrow streaked beneath the soldier Titan's guard and punched into a seam where dented greaves met thigh. Lightning detonated, not outward but inward, flooding the amalgam with discordant energy. Helms clattered as the creature's march faltered, knees locking and hips twisting unnaturally.

Draven capitalized on the stagger. He dropped low, sliding across churned soil, and let momentum carry his right boot into a skidding stop beside that smoking knee joint. The upward thrust that followed pierced the rune etched into brittle iron. A war's worth of fury funneled out in one explosive exhale. The Titan's torso sagged inward, collapsing onto itself like a pyre deprived of air. Its armor tinked to the ground in useless fragments.

Only the child remained.

It stood motionless, eyes murky pools of grief, small hands trembling. The sobs turned to hiccupping gasps, each one tugging at Sylvanna's chest like hooks. She lowered her bow a fraction.

The child extended an arm, palm upward, and all the lights in the chamber seemed to dim. A hush settled, oppressive and fragile at once.

It looked at Draven—no, pleaded. Even the Grove, primal and wounded, held its breath.

Sylvanna whispered, "Draven, wait—"

"Don't name it." His voice carried no anger, only command. "Naming makes things linger."

Yet he, too, hesitated. Half a step. That single heartbeat stretched, soundless. The sob sounded painfully human—too real, too close to memories no blade could cut.

Sylvanna's knuckles tightened. Resolve clenched inside her ribs. She drew the frost arrow she'd saved for last chance, for last cruelty. The fletching brushed her cheek; her heart hammered twice; she released.

Blue fire bloomed across the child's borrowed flesh, icing tears mid-fall and turning sorrow to crystal. The figure froze with arms still extended, locked in the posture of seeking comfort.

Draven stepped forward, breath steady, and lifted his blade. His cut was swift—no flourish, no hesitation this time. Steel whispered through glyph and grief alike. The frozen sob fractured along the seam of reality. As the anchor rune shattered, the Titan exhaled one word, soft as a dying candle.

"Vaerentis."

Not in praise.

In plea.

The single word slid across the chamber like a dying breath. The child-Titan's crystal skin fractured, each shard reflecting a different moment of the Grove's stolen future—beds left empty, branches cut before blossom. Then the construct crumpled, knees buckling inward. It crashed to the root-littered floor, scattering petals of frozen grief that hissed to steam where they landed.

An instant later the forest moaned. It was a guttural, marrow-deep sound, as if the trunks themselves tasted blood. Sap lights along the ceiling flickered, gutters of amber flame winking in sudden wind.

Vaerentis screamed.

Every mask clinging to his bark-flesh peeled away at once. Faces curled like burning parchment and drifted off in curls of gray. Clara's timid smile dissolved first, leaving droplets of light that popped against the air. Roth's crooked grin tore free, the laugh behind it shredding into static. Vaelarien's glare shattered into a thousand shards of emerald glare before fading to black.

What remained at the center of that unwinding storm was hideous and simple: a body of raw root and jittering tendon, wrapped in emptiness. Black luminescence leaked through cracks in the wood, casting strobe-flashes across the chamber walls. He was a wound given legs. A negative echo of life.

He didn't negotiate this time.

He struck.

A rotted whip-tendril lashed from his forearm, not adorned with memory now—just slick corruption. Draven met the attack in a single pivot. His left foot braced, his spine uncoiled, and both swords blurred into intersecting arcs of white. One parried the whip aside, iron ringing as blight hissed off the blade's edge. The second traced a shallow diagonal across Vaerentis' exposed sternum, carving a furrow that oozed viscous black light.

Not deep enough. Draven felt it in the jolt that vibrated through the steel and into his wrist. Too much mass behind that wood-bone shell.

Vaerentis retaliated, hurling a chunk of broken root the size of a desk. Draven ducked beneath the splintering projectile; bark shards skittered across his shoulders. He shifted his stance, right foot landing on a jutting spur that rose at knee-height—nature's foothold, half rotten, half living. In that same motion he vaulted upward, turning his body into a spiral of cloak, muscle, and sharpened intent.

Mid-air he registered the chamber in a heartbeat of details. The floor had grown slick with sap; every other step would skid. The ceiling hung lower on the right—roots sagging beneath rot. Vaerentis' corrupted tendrils dived in looping patterns, always crossing each other every two heartbeats. A rhythm disguised as chaos.

Up, then twist.

Draven let physics finish the rotation. At the apex, his second blade flared as the rune etched near its guard erupted in silver fire. It was a spell he'd saved for precisely this: a disjunction incantation, folded like origami inside the steel until released. Light raced down the fuller, etching runic veins that burned away foul vapor before it could touch the edge.

Below, Vaerentis reared, readying a new strike. His mawless face pulled back into a silent snarl, and thick strands of rot speared up to impale the falling swordsman.

Sylvanna's voice cut through the din—"Left!"—and an arrow roared past Draven's boots. Frost exploded across the ascending tendrils, slowing them to a crawl of creaking ice. Draven altered his descent by a handspan, cloak billowing like a broken sail. He dropped through a gap that existed for the blink of an eye.

He brought the glowing blade down.

One sword—held firmly in his off-hand—caught Vaerentis' final, desperate counterstrike. It wasn't a noise so much as sensation: a vibration of hate sliding along the parrying edge. The corrupted limb ricocheted sideways, slamming into stone with a crack that echoed.

The second sword speared straight into the Soul-Core.

Light erupted, not hot but cleansing. White splinters radiated from the point of entry, spiraling over warped ribs, racing along every grafted root like wildfire across dry grass. The runic flames crawled through Vaerentis' lattice of sin, peeling magic from memory, memory from muscle, until nothing held together.

There was no roar of explosion. No tide of fire. Vaerentis simply collapsed inward, like a tent whose center pole had vanished. Root limbs folded, bark plates sloughed off in wet slabs, and the awful glow dimmed by degrees. A tower losing its keystone.

Draven landed in a crouch, knees flexing to bleed momentum. Sap hissed beneath his boots. He withdrew the disjunction blade, watching black-veined light dribble from the Soul-Core's puncture like ink thinning in water.

No drama. Just the quiet shudder of something finished.

The Grove breathed.

It was audible—every trunk around the chamber releasing tension in a chorus of creaks. A breeze unspooled from nowhere, carrying the scent of rain on dry earth. Thin clouds of silver motes—freed memories—lifted from the fallen debris, drifting upward toward unseen canopies.

Roots that had coiled to cage Draven now withdrew. They slid back with shy rustles, edges smoothing, corruption flaking away like old bark. Walls, once bowed under the parasite's weight, straightened. Foliage brightened from sickly gray-green to lush emerald as color seeped into every leaf.

Sylvanna's knees buckled; she caught herself on her bow. The final arrow, now inert, splintered under its own weight and tumbled to the ground, frost turning to mist. Her breathing was ragged, but her eyes gleamed at the sight of the forest knitting itself whole.

Draven rose, wiping demon residue off one blade with a scrap of cloth already blackened by earlier cuts. He returned the swords to their sheaths—left first, then right—each steel-on-leather whisper sounding like punctuation at the end of a long, brutal chapter.

The Grove groaned once more, but the note was lower now, almost relieved.