The Villain Professor's Second Chance
Chapter 757 - 757: The Unfinished Business (4)

The battle seemed to inhale and hold.

The golem's body was patchwork: heartwood beams knotted with sinew roots, armor of scabbed bark fused to quivering moss. Faces—dozens—pushed up beneath its surface, mouths opening in silent screams before sinking back. It towered a full two men above Vaelira. Each step snapped smaller trees like twigs.

The corrupted elves fell back—strings cut—clearing space, obeying a silent order. Raëdrithar screeched overhead, but even the storm chimera faltered, wings beating once, twice, before retreating to a safer perch.

The soul-wisps orbiting the glade pulsed, some retreating, some vibrating with agitation. One drifted low, hovering near Vaelira's shoulder. Its shape flickered—an elven warrior in older armor, face half-remembered. Recognition flashed in Vaelira's eyes—a breath, a name unsaid.

The golem roared. It sounded like every death-cry Draven had ever heard, layered atop one another, slowed to a monstrous pitch. Sap-smoke puffed from its mouth. One clawed limb—half-root, half-stone—swept forward, smashing a path through corpses and moss.

Draven's brain clicked. The entity hunted memory. It drank echoes of presence. Lines of tactic aligned. He turned to Sylvanna, chin dipping once. She read the look, already reaching for an arrow etched with heavier runes.

He slid his sash free—storm-silver cloth now darkened with dried sap—and tucked it into his belt, out of sight. Then he drew a breath, suppressed thought, and dove into a technique ugly and seldom used: mental scouring. He pared himself down, shaving memory into the barest knife of will. Names, faces, reasons—all filed away behind steel doors.

To the entity, he would be an empty ledger. A void.

The golem lumbered forward. Draven sprinted to meet it, blades flashing. The world narrowed: sap reek, thud of root feet, the hiss of molten amber crushing under iron soles. He slid under its first swipe, carving twin crescents across its calf. Resin spilled in sticky ropes.

The monster hesitated—blinked, sensing him but finding no echo to read. Draven capitalized, throwing himself up in a rising slice that peeled bark-skin from knee to groin. Sparks flared where sap hit blade-runes.

Behind, Sylvanna notched the storm arrow. Raëdrithar shrieked, wings snapping wide as it disgorged a torrent of charged air into the arrow shaft. Electricity danced between feathers and wood, welding rune grooves into white heat.

Vaelira rallied the warriors, pushing them around the golem's flanks, sabers and spears driving the remaining corrupted into a perimeter fight. Lantern children knelt at safe distance, raising their lights high, guiding lost spirits out of combat paths.

Draven ducked a hammer-fist—missed him by inches, cracked ground where he'd been. He scaled the creature's side in three rapid lunges, blades anchoring. Each plunge carved deeper than the last. He felt its core—a resonance like a gong struck underwater—vibrating near the spine of twisted heartwood. He wedged his right sword and locked it there.

"Sylvanna! Now!" he shouted, voice hollow in his own ears—memories sealed away.

She loosed the arrow.

Time slowed. The shaft streaked, trailing a comet tail of white-blue. Raëdrithar banked behind it, a thunderclap foil. The arrow speared the same crevice Draven's blade had wedged, burrowing into ragged heartwood. Lightning detonated inside.

White light bloomed through cracks. Sap superheated, exploded outward in showers of glassy amber. Draven flung himself clear, rolling across charred moss as the golem convulsed. Splinters and embers rained. A scream—every voice, no voice—echoed once, then cut off.

The heartwood entity sagged, spine unraveling into smoking tendrils. It hit the soil with a sound more sigh than crash. Roots recoiled underground. Molten resin cooled to amber shards. The faces on its bark stilled into peaceful relief before dissolving into mulch.

A hush flowed across the grove. Soul-wisps hovered, pulsing brighter, then drifted skyward and winked out like distant stars.

Vaelira knelt beside a fallen warrior—his face bark-scarred beyond recognition. Her palm pressed to his chest; she whispered rites older than monarchy. Tears carved lines through the grime on her cheeks, but her voice remained steady.

Sylvanna crossed to Draven. Blood—his—seeped from a tear just below his shoulder plate. She tore a strip of cloth, bound it tight. "Lost in your own head?" she asked, half-smile trembling.

"Just misplaced," he answered, memories flooding back. Pain sharpened as they returned. He ignored it, scanning the blackened trunk. A single thread of golden light—memory residue—flickered at a root hollow. He retrieved it, twining it around two fingers. Images stuttered: Orvath, cloak tattered, racing west through crags, scroll tubes clutched to chest.

He handed the thread to Vaelira without a word. She closed it in her fist, rising slowly, a new purpose igniting behind damp eyes.

"There will be no second chances if we hesitate again," Draven warned, voice pitched just loud enough to carry across the gutted grove. His tone held no anger—only the flat weight of arithmetic, as though he had already tallied every life they could still lose and found the margin perilously thin.

A breeze slid between the blackened trunks, tasting of distant brine and wood-ash. It fluttered cloaks, tugged loose strands of hair, and pressed the acrid smoke of some far-off blaze against the back of every throat. A storm was forming somewhere beyond the ridges—none could see it yet, but the air had that prickle, the hush that asks whether thunder intends to speak.

"I know," Vaelira replied. A simple admission, but her eyes roamed the mangled clearing, noting each toppled warrior, counting lantern lights that still burned, flicking back to Draven as if she feared even blink-length hesitation would cost her another comrade. Sap-splattered armor clung to her like wet parchment; a bead of amber slid from her pauldron and fell, cracking when it hit a pebble—one more brittle note in a place already full of broken music.

Draven felt the ground twitch beneath his boots, faint but unmistakable, as though a giant exhaled in the loam below. He pressed a gloved palm to the dirt. Root fibers flexed under the moss—tiny, constant tremors that reminded him of the pulse in a wounded animal's throat. Too rhythmic to be random. Too patient to be merely dying.

They're waiting, he thought, lowering his hand. Waiting until every spear point and nervous heart is exactly where they want it.

A lantern child—no more than ten summers—stood near a toppled log, blue-glass lamp trembling in small fingers. The boy's cheeks were streaked with soot. His eyes, wide and glassy, reflected every shift in the shadows. Yet he did not run. He anchored himself by sheer act of will, breathing shallowly to keep the flame steady. Bravery painted in a color only fear can see.

Because the roots were twitching before they moved. Because they avoided killing the lantern-bearers. Because they waited until we were exactly this deep.

None of it was chance.

A crack boomed—low, resonant—like stone doors grinding open in an ancient crypt. The earth groaned next, louder, a spine unwinding after centuries of bad posture. Every warrior felt the vibration crawl up the bones of their shins, cross the hinges of their knees, settle behind the sternum as a foreign heartbeat. Helmets clinked together when heads jerked toward the sound.

At the glade's heart, the elder tree—a monument of pale wood split by generations of lightning—began to stir. Its trunk had once been wide enough for a dozen archers to stand inside its hollowed core. Now that hollow flexed, ribs of charcoaled xylem expanding and contracting as if drawing breath. The crown, stripped of leaves by blight, rattled with skeletal branches that scraped one another in nervous anticipation.

Roots uncoiled from the ground—thick cables slathered in gleaming sap. At first they crept, cautious as scouts. Then, all at once, they moved, lurching forward like a mass of serpents given a collective command. They bored through soil, ripping up stones, snapping twigs, slapping aside broken shields. Anyone who had not already stepped clear came away with scratches that burned minutes later like acid kisses.

Bark groaned, split, and refitted itself into shapes that had never belonged on a tree. A torso—the width of two oxen abreast—swelled out of the trunk. The "skin" was fused plates of oak and pine, weeping rivulets of amber so hot it hissed when it touched cold moss. Lower, two columns of knotted roots drilled downward, bracing under the creature's new weight. Above, a head bulged, features assembling out of overlapping layers of wood: cheekbones formed by intertwined branches, a jaw carved by lightning scars, and eyes—two luminous knots—opened. They were not eyes in the mortal sense but windows to something ancient and starving. Gold-green sap trickled from the corners, sizzling where it fell.

A golem of tree and soulstuff stood fully born.

It did not simply speak. It screamed.

The howl burst through the clearing like a gale stuffed full of knives. Hundreds of voices braided together—some childishly high, others sepulchral—each vibrating with its own sorrow, terror, rage. Every elf who heard it felt the sound clutch their memories, riffling pages in their minds that were never meant for strangers' hands. A veteran archer dropped his bow, clutching at his temples; a healer bit through her lip hard enough to draw blood.

"Scatter!" Vaelira shouted, already dragging a wounded scout by the collar, shoving him toward the nearest gap in the undergrowth. Her command cut through the shriek like a well-thrown axe.

The warriors obeyed, discipline rising faster than fear. They peeled off in pairs, hauling the injured, covering the lantern children. Boots thumped. Broken branches snapped. A few backward glances lingered on Draven and Sylvanna—two figures who did not move an inch toward safety.

Draven stepped forward. So did Sylvanna, her bow half-drawn, arrow tip humming with contained stormlight. Raëdrithar beat its wings, aligning itself above them, a living lightning rod.

The golem's eyes swung in a slow, deliberate arc. They skipped past Sylvanna's charged arrow, past the chimera crackling with electricity, and locked on Draven with feral precision. No curiosity there—only recognition, as though it smelled the labyrinth of memories inside him the way a shark scents blood.

Of course, he thought. It feeds on memory. Mine is a feast.

"We need to distract it, separate it from the others," he said, calculating angles even while he spoke. Distance to the broken altar: nine paces. Stump cluster on the left: five paces; good cover. Sylvanna's quiver: six arrows left, two runed for burst. Enough.

Sylvanna's jaw tightened. Her gaze flicked to the lantern bearers her people had just saved, then back to the colossal nightmare assembling its joints like a living siege engine. "If it locks onto you alone?" she asked, voice rough, almost pleading though she kept it soft.

"Then he would give it nothing."