The Villain Professor's Second Chance

"I speak the language the oppressed remember," he replied, then melted into the undergrowth, body sliding from moon-lit outline to stitched shadow in a breath.

Sylvanna watched him vanish, shoulders sagging with reluctant respect. A moment later she jogged downslope, keeping low. Each step stirred memories of other ruined strongholds, other nights Draven had turned despair into a scalpel. Stay alive, she prayed—or maybe it was a command—then slipped through a breach in the palisade to find the elves.

Up on the wall Harken lifted a lantern, sweeping its beam across the gatehouse. Embers glimmered on his battered breastplate. Sweat carved clean rivulets down cheeks grimed with ash. "Smiths! Where are my smiths?" he bellowed. A scrawny apprentice darted forward with a crate of glowing rivets, nearly tripping over a corpse. Harken snatched a fistful, slammed them into the damaged hinge with bare hands sizzling against hot metal. His disregard for pain marked him as the sort who believed conviction could bind steel. Draven's lip curled in faint amusement—conviction cracked just as metal did, if struck true.

Behind the lieutenant, two ward-mages knelt, chalking fresh circles around a pile of mana crystals salvaged from the burnt ward lattice. The crystals flickered weakly, casting pulses of teal that jittered over stone. They had hours—maybe less—before those reserves ran dry. Panic would come next. Draven tucked away that certainty.

Down in the yard, four guards muscled Serewyn toward the forge pits. Each step she took left scorched footprints, the raw energy leaking from her fingers hot enough to blister the mud. A fifth soldier jogged ahead, carrying a new collar—thicker, double-runed, fitted with a jagged shard of void-glass at the throat. Insurance.

Draven's gaze hardened. He felt the slight sting of vicarious current as Serewyn thrashed, forcing her captors to drag rather than steer. Rage sparkled around her like broken stars. Even drained, she was dangerous—exactly the edge he required.

Sylvanna had reached the pen row now. He saw her duck between cages, head low, cloak hood masking the quick movement of her lips. One elf jerked back in surprise, then leaned forward, hope widening eyes as Sylvanna whispered. Another elf turned, passing the words along through iron bars, the chain of rumor flickering faster than flame along dry grass.

Good.

Draven drew a steady breath, letting scorched air scrape the back of his throat. Each inhalation tasted of ironwood sap and singed cloth; each exhalation left him colder, clearer. The fortress was a chessboard in mid-match—pieces toppled, others hurriedly rearranged by Lieutenant Harken's blunt hands. Draven focused on the commander's posture: the squared shoulders, the clipped gestures that betrayed a habit of drilling raw conscripts into obedient lines. It would take no more than one decisive strike to unravel that rigid certainty—and then the board would belong to him.

He stepped back into the hush beneath the firs, twin blades whispering from their sheaths. The steel reflected only a sliver of moonlight before the surrounding shadows swallowed the gleam. One tilt of his wrist, and the runic filaments etched along each fuller flickered—silent confirmation that the suppressive wards he'd woven earlier still masked their presence. Satisfied, he angled the points downward and vanished into the undergrowth.

"I'm removing Harken from command," he murmured, words offered to the darkness rather than to any listening ear. The forest accepted the promise without comment.

Nightfall descended like black silk thrown across a table, smoothing over the jagged ruin of Ironleaf. At the eastern flank, Sylvanna's fabricated rumor already hissed through the slave pens: The Silent Hunter walks the rafters—watch for the shadow in the smoke. Guards tightened their ranks, glancing upward as often as outward. Perfect. Every tilted chin left a blind pocket in their peripheral vision.

Draven slipped through that blindness.

A crumbling gap in the south wall—fist-wide at sunrise, widened by sabotage at dusk—now offered a silent doorway. He flattened his body, sliding sideways between two warped spars. A loose board snagged his cloak; a slow exhale and a wrist-flick freed the fabric without so much as a creak. Beyond the breach, the barracks passage breathed warm, fetid air. Torch sconces flickered on the far wall, painting zigzag shadows across puddles of quenching oil and shards of shattered shields. Boots clicked in measured cadence somewhere ahead. Two sentries on patrol.

He raised one finger. A ripple rolled across the floor as a pair of shadow-wraiths slid forward—thin silhouettes that clung to flagstone like spilled ink. The wraiths reached the corner just as the patrol rounded it. A hush, a muffled gasp, then nothing. Draven stepped past the collapsing bodies without spare regard. One smelled of cheap gin—he noted the distillery mark on the flask half-tucked beneath a gambeson, filed it away for future bribery routes, and moved on.

Corridors twisted in disorienting angles—typical of Valaroth fort design, meant to choke invading forces into kill pockets. Draven's memory overlaid a cleaner blueprint onto each turn: two lefts to the old cistern, one right past the ruptured mess hall, stairwell down to the oubliette level. He padded along, boots soundless thanks to the absorption runes stitched into their leather. Every so often he pressed gloved fingers to a wall, judging vibration. Harken's men were herding freed slaves back toward the pens—that thunder of boot heels and clanging bars echoed upward through stone. Good. Most of the garrison lay where he wanted them.

Reaching the service stair, Draven paused. An oil lamp on the landing guttered, half-drowned in its own reservoir. Flame stuttered, throwing frantic halos onto soot-slick steps. He dipped a blade tip to the wick. A touch, no more, and the flame died. Absolute darkness swallowed the well, but Draven's pupils adjusted instantly, alchemically nudged by a potion he'd taken an hour earlier. He descended.

At the bottom, the oubliette passage opened like a stone throat. Unlit cells yawned on either side, barred doors replaced long ago with spiked grates welded to the frame. Char marks on the ceiling told of past rebellions—fireballs flung by desperate captives, quickly quenched by the damp. Now only one chamber still glowed: the holding cell reserved for high-value prisoners. Serewyn.

Draven paused outside the door. Two guards flanked it—one dozing against a polearm, the other polishing a charm plate with nervous speed. They never saw him. A small flick of his wrist, and a throwing pin lodged under the drowsing man's jaw. The victim slumped soundlessly. Before the polisher could glance up, Draven crossed the intervening meters, seized the man's chin, and dragged a blade across his throat in one steady motion. The body eased to the floor, lifeblood spreading in a quiet pool.

Only then did he slide the view-slot aside. Inside, Serewyn knelt beneath a hanging torch, wrists shackled to a floor ring. Sweat plastered silver strands to her temples, yet her eyes burned so fiercely they seemed to cast their own light. Whenever her breathing sped, the collar at her throat flared crimson, siphoning the charge away with a faint sizzle. She muttered to herself in elvish—a litany equal parts fury and focus.

Draven unlatched the grate with a skeleton key procured from a prior raid. It rasped a hair too loud. Serewyn's head snapped up, lightning pooling behind her irises.

He stepped through, raising one finger to his lips. The gesture was unnecessary—the guards already lay cooling—but it bought him a heartbeat to study the collar at close range. Intricate runes snaked across etched brass, converging where a fist-sized garnet thrummed like a second heart. Most of the inscriptions formed a flawless lattice, yet two glyphs—Contain and Suppress—overlapped by a fraction, their lines misaligned. A lazy rune-smith's error.

"Stay still," he whispered.

Serewyn bared her teeth. "Another slaver trick? My stillness costs extra."

Sharp. Even chained she refused to beg. He respected that.

He crouched, necro-null stiletto glinting. The blade's edge shimmered with a faint twilight hue—magic tuned to sever sorcery rather than flesh. Two precise angles, barely brushing metal, and the flawed glyph sputtered. A hairline crack spidered across the garnet. Rune flow stammered, reversed — then imploded with a hiss like steam on snow.

The collar went dark.

A thunderclap of raw power surged through Serewyn. Sparks skittered over her arms, tracing phoenix feathers along the curves of muscle. She inhaled, and the air tasted of a gathering storm. Shackles groaned; iron links bit into stone. With a guttural word and a burst of blue light, she shattered her restraints. Shards whirled outward, embedding in the walls.

Lightning danced on her palms as she rose. Her expression flickered between triumph and wary calculation. "You're different from the others," she said, voice low, probing.

"Observation noted," Draven replied, standing. He slid the stiletto away, twin sabers resting comfortably in his grip.