The Villain Professor's Second Chance

"Columns ready," she reported. Her voice rasped—throat raw from days barking orders into winter wind—but her will radiated the crispness of tempered steel. She glanced at the map Draven had etched. "Leave it," she told him. "The snow will cover within the hour."

"And if Iron Justiciars sweep the ridge before then?" he asked.

She sniffed. "Let them copy it. Without your numbers it's just lines." She met his gaze, something like reluctant respect flickering there before duty shuttered it. "See your task done, Dravis Granger. Or die where you stand and spare me explaining failure."

His mouth twitched—not a smile, but an understanding straight line. He kicked snow over part of the plan regardless, blurring the finer runic notations. Then he wiped the dagger on his thigh, sheathed it with a muted click.

Night deepened, a wet ink bleed over the marsh. Columns began to move, whispering forward like segments of a long black serpent. No torches—only shield-mounted glowstones muted under leather covers, enough to prevent spears from tangling in the dark, not enough to give their position away. Vaelira rode back to take her place among the vanguard, her horse's breath rising in twin plumes that made her look briefly like a myth riding out of legend.

Sylvanna adjusted the quiver at her hip, checking each arrowhead's rune alignment by running a fingertip over the etchings. Static popped under her nail. She whispered a snippet of the lullaby she still only half remembered—words lost, melody intact. Raëdrithar, perched on a twisted cedar trunk, echoed the tune with a soft metallic trill. Frost glittered off its feathers like shattered stars.

Draven scanned the departing lines one last time, tallying headcounts by silhouette. He noted the wobble in a rear guard's gait—knee injury hidden from medics—and stored that away in the ledger of future liabilities. Then he turned north-east, where a stand of drowned alders hinted at the sub-sluice entrance. His cloak flared as he moved, swallowed quickly by shadows. For all his solidity he left almost no imprint in the snow.

Sylvanna watched him vanish. Something twisted inside her chest—a knot of anticipation and something more tender, threaded with fear's silver. She reminded herself that lightning belonged to the sky; to tether it to earth invited burn scars.

Korin drifted to her side, lantern bobbing. "Do you think he ever sleeps?" the boy asked in a small voice, like confessing a secret worry.

She considered before answering. "He rests differently," she said. "Not sleep. More like… storing sharp edges until needed."

The boy nodded as if that made perfect sense. Perhaps, she thought, to a child who listened to stones speak, it did.

Another pulse, heavier again, rolled underfoot. Thirty-seven seconds. No, slower—thirty-six and a half. She felt it in the tension of her bowstring, in the rise of Raëdrithar's feathers. The sea's hidden heart beating faster now, rousing—

Captain Marrin shouted the march in. Staccato. Urgent. Sylvanna tightened her leather hair tie, wiping snowflakes from her cheek. She spared one last glance toward the black where Draven had gone. There was nothing—only frost haze and distant ice cracking under unseen weight.

"The sea… it's singing the same note the root sang," Korin murmured again, lantern trembling.

Draven's outline emerged briefly atop a low hummock, moonlight flashing on one blade as if in acknowledgment of some silent vow. The vapor on the horizon rose a fraction higher, shimmering like a ghost tide.

"We strike before midnight," he called across the distance. The words carried, sharp and certain. The phrase sounded less like a plan and more like a verdict.

Sylvanna drew a breath that tasted of lightning and snow. "Three fronts," she echoed, a promise to herself and to the storm at her back.

Draven knelt once more, carving final vectors into the crusted earth before the wind could steal the previous lines. Vaelira's banner already dipped beyond the next ridge, leading seventy hearts into blue-lit dark. Sylvanna's pulse quickened—matching, synchronizing, merging with the secret engine of the sea.

When she tied back her hair with that strip of leather, her hands stopped trembling. Purpose flooded in, drowning doubt.

"And you?" she asked, voice pitched low, the intimacy of a confession in enemy night.

"Tunnels. Sub-sluice. Collapse charges." He wiped frost from his brow with a thumb, leaving a pale streak. "If Orvath's in there, I end it."

She reached out, fingertips lightly brushing the back of his gauntlet. "You're going alone?"

Draven's answer hung in the air like hoarfrost caught between gusts.

"I don't need help."

No echo followed—only the soft hush of drifting snow and the brittle creak of ice settling in the marsh below. Sylvanna felt the chill settle under her breastplate, a thin blade of winter sliding clean between bone and lung. Yet she said nothing. His attention had already wheeled away, grey eyes aligning with dark horizons, plotting angles no one else could see. He moved off the ridge with the muted efficiency of a migrating shadow, cloak swallowing moonlight.

A pulse rose from the depths—thoom—beneath her boots. Thirty-six and two-thirds seconds this time. Each surge felt fractionally closer, as though the earth's hidden heart were kicking against a rib cage of stone. Sylvanna made herself breathe with the rhythm, slowing her own racing pulse to match. When she blinked, the ridge dissolved for a heartbeat into dream-fog: a long corridor of marble arches, footsteps echoing, a man standing beneath a shattered moon. He was tall, shoulders squared, hair the black of storm clouds pressed to ink. His face turned—but the image smeared like wet paint and bled away before she could grasp it.

Not Draven. Yet the shape of him—rigid, certain—pulled at something deep as marrow.

She shivered, squeezing the braid-charm until silver wire bit her palm. The dream slid back into the dark corner of her mind where it always waited. She would ponder it later, perhaps, if there was a later.

"One foot in waking, storm-sister," Raëdrithar murmured overhead, its voice a crackle of static through feathers. "Dreams weigh more at altitude."

She exhaled, steady. "Then I climb light."

Moonrise was a thin, copper coin when Vaelira's vanguard stepped onto the ancient causeway. Rough-hewn stones humped from the marsh like vertebrae. With each tread they shed hoarfrost in glittering veils. The phalanx locked shields, iron-reed fronts now banded in strips of chalky resin to blunt acid spray. Vaelira carried the forward standard herself; blue lantern-light washed the crest, turning the silver blade embroidered there to ghost metal.

A hiss echoed from ruptured culverts below. The first brine-automaton—a nautilus chassis bristling with articulated limbs—unfolded from the muck, shell runes lighting one by one. It spat a fan of emerald vapour that hit Vaelira's shield wall with a sound like frying meat. Resin plumes burst, neutralising droplets before they could chew through steel.

"Spears, mark!" Marrin shouted.

Forty pikes angled down, tips gleaming with the same alkaline powder. When the line advanced, the automaton tried to retreat, but bolas sailed from the riverfolk skirmishers behind—weighted nets that cracked on contact, powder erupting into brilliant white clouds. The creature froze mid-skitter, appendages locking as veins of corrosion hardened to harmless chalk.

Vaelira kept her banner high, scanning for new vents. The pulses were closer here—thoom—sending ripples through the flooded channels. Each beat made the blue tint in the water dance.

"Hold formation," she barked, voice raw velvet. "Every step we shout with shields, let the machine think a legion stands where only one does."

Below, the echo multiplied, bouncing between broken cribs and tide-posts. The automata, built centuries ago to guard water's memory, heard what they interpreted as invasion. More shells rose, acid jets spraying, clattering onto the causeway like armored crabs.

Vaelira's jaw tightened. They would buy the noise Draven needed.

Beneath the marsh, Draven ran a corridor of dripping stone, steps silent, breath measured to vanish between heartbeats. The tunnel was a throat with iron teeth: rusted valves half-open, barnacled ladders punched through occasional shafts of moon-pale light. Green water plinked from above, carrying rivulets of that ghostly blue glow. He felt every tremor under his soles; instinct traced where weight shifted in the distant machinery overhead.

Two scouts ghosted behind him. He'd chosen them for compact frames and fewer questions, but fear still made footfalls sloppy. He signalled halt with two fingers angled down. Both froze, shoulders rising.

"No light," he whispered. "No sound unless dying."

They nodded—swallowing hard enough he could hear cartilage click. He resumed, knives loose in gloved hands.

Leech chatter began as a distant rasp, like wet sandpaper dragged across slate. Draven smelled them first: brine and rotwood sap. Their new shells gleamed with barnacle armour, natural plates that deflected glancing steel. They poured from vent slits, slime trailing. One scout sucked air through his teeth—too loud. The nearest leech snapped toward noise, leaping in a whip-cord blur.

Draven pivoted, twin blades intersecting mid-arc. Steel kissed soft carapace; the creature split along three planes, segments thudding wetly onto the stone. Acid filament hissed, but he sidestepped the spray as if moving through dance figures.

A roar of water boomed behind them. The second scout, quick-thinking, had slammed a corroded sluice gate just as a pressure surge barreled into the junction. He shoved against the lever with both arms, teeth gritted. The gate buckled, but held—foam spraying around its rims.

Draven touched two fingers to the man's throat: pulse rattling but strong. Just a superficial cut from flying debris across the brow. "Stay," Draven instructed, voice flat stone. "Bleed out if you must. Do not follow."

He left before the scout could stammer gratitude.

Pathways narrowed, smell worsening. Draven's mental map overlaid corridors with invisible red lines: pressure pockets, likely hatch weaknesses, Orvath's sabotage possibilities. Two hundred paces ahead, the central gear axle would cut across the tunnel like a titanic corkscrew; charges needed precise placement to break it without liquefying half the delta. His fingers flexed around detonator phials already counted—six, plus one reserve.

Another pulse. Thirty-six seconds. He didn't need Korin's lantern to measure now; the rhythm walked inside his bones.