The Villain Professor's Second Chance
Chapter 766 - 766: Lines That Don’t Erase (3)

"Your aim is sloppy, mage."

Raëdrithar concurred, unleashing a piercing screech. Static rippled down Sylvanna's braid, feeding the runes carved along her bow. With each breath she drew, the vault's charged air tasted brighter, almost metallic on the tongue.

On the catwalk, Draven met the aide's upward strike with crossed blades. Steel shrieked. Force numbed his arms, but he turned the blow, leveraged her momentum, spun, and hooked her ankle. She back-flipped over the sweep, landed catlike, and thrust with the staff's opposite end—blade now free. Draven parried high, slid inside guard, elbowed her ribs, and felt armor plate flex but not crack. She was trained well.

Below, mages trapped behind his wire screamed for help—or mercy—he could never tell. Not relevant.

Sylvanna noticed the frantic heartbeat of the furnace core speeding. Sap sluice flowed faster, the amber glow deepened to blood-orange. She sensed the gathering turbulence of too many spells colliding. Her next arrow punctured a fuel duct, resin spraying like molten glass. Flames mushroomed, forcing reapers to retreat.

Korin's chant grew louder, words slithering through the ruin dust. Pillars buckled, rune scrolls peeling off and crumbling mid-air. Each failure tugged at the furnace lattice, making it judder like a wagon wheel on broken axle.

"STOP THEM!" Orvath shrieked again.

Then his gaze snagged on the glass vial glinting in Draven's palm as the adventurer maneuvered across the catwalk, heels skimming girders.

Recognition transformed Orvath's fury into something rabid. "You have it. The failsafe." His mask could not hide the sudden twist of desperation. "Then we burn together!"

He spun on the Drakhan aide—or rather, on the duel playing out high above—and barked an order edged with mania.

"Prime the furnace for overload. If I can't have it—"

The masked aide disengaged from Draven with a lightning-fast disengage, pivoted on a heel, and vaulted toward the furnace controls. Draven slashed after her, edge kissing metal, but she was already past him, staff spinning to deflect a follow-up strike. Her boots hammered down a maintenance ladder two rungs at a time.

The magister's control glyphs flared as the aide's gloved palm swept across them, every symbol blooming an angry crimson that raced up the furnace spine like wildfire climbing dry grass. Thick gears deep inside the core answered with a deafening kachunk-kachunk, wrenching pipes and piston arms into a higher cadence. The easy, almost soporific amber pulse that had ruled the room a moment before was ripped apart, replaced by a staccato hammerbeat as frantic as a terrified heart.

Somewhere in that metal labyrinth vents snapped open. A blast of blister-hot breath flooded the vault. Sap vapor hit cold air and condensed instantly, coating gantries in a slick amber film that smelled of pine pitched straight into hellfire. Even Draven's calloused lungs protested, but he filed the sensation under later and sprang for the catwalk, boots hissing on the resin.

The masked aide was already there, staff leveled, stance wide. For the shortest sliver of time the two simply regarded one another across ten paces of trembling steel—she breathing hard, Draven frighteningly calm, as though the rumbling furnace beneath them were an evening hearth rather than an engine on the brink of detonation.

Then they collided.

Her opening strike came in a textbook crescent, staff-blade arcing toward his throat with the discipline of parade-ground drills. Draven angled one dagger to parry, felt the shock rattle bone, slid sideways, and let the second blade glide for her ribs—testing, not killing. Sparks jumped where rune-edged steel kissed lacquered armor.

Up close she smelled of smoldering lavender and old parchment—the scent of a library burned down and worn like perfume. She reversed grip, drove an elbow toward his jaw; he ducked, felt the wind of it, then counter-hooked behind her knee. Floor plates rattled under their boots, jarred loose by the furnace's rising tempo.

A crate overhead snapped a chain and crashed, spilling heart-wood shards across the deck with the clatter of broken bones. Neither spared it a look. Their world had narrowed to blade angles and breaths counted in fractions.

A high feint drew his guard high; her staff flicked low, catching his calf. Pain flared—white, clean. Draven rode it, swiveled, and returned the lesson with a slash that carved a bright groove across her mask. Porcelain splintered. A shard fell away, revealing half a young woman's face—cheek smudged ash-gray, lips blood-slick. A single tear of rage traced the fracture line.

"You," she hissed, voice raw, "broke our names!"

Recognition bloomed on Draven's features, but it was the cold sort, an assassin recognizing a mark, not a sinner facing guilt. "Names survive," he said, short blades crossing to lock her staff, "only if someone lives to remember them."

Steel screamed again, echoing off vault arches like tortured song.

Below, Sylvanna sprinted across a scaffold that shed bolts with every quake. Orvath fled before her, robes flaring, one arm shielding his face as spell-fire blossomed in his free hand. He snapped runes into the air—bright flares that spun like malignant fireflies. They burst near her eyes, each one sloughing a ribbon of green-silver static that blurred depth and distance.

She blinked hard, fought the vertigo. An arrow found her palm by memory alone; she loosed blind. A hollow thud and a choked oath told her it had found the spellbook strapped to Orvath's hip. Parchment shredded, ink spilled in oily blooms across the floor.

"Ask Granger," Orvath panted, voice cracking with something older than hatred, "why your mother died in the dark."

The syllables sliced deeper than any rune. Sylvanna's breath hitched; lightning leapt down her forearms in wild forks, coiling the shaft of her bow. Control shuddered like glass on the verge of spider-webbing. Raëdrithar shrieked above, feeling the surge.

A flare of silver cut through the riot of noise—Draven's warning.

"Sylvanna! Hold the charge!"

His tone wasn't loud, but it carried like a commandment. She forced her knees to bend, sank into a crouch, bow tip buried in fractured stone. Energy bled from her fingers into the floor, hissing through micro-cracks. Sparks scuttled away to die against cooling sap. When she looked up again her vision had steadied, and Orvath was limping, clutching shredded pages to his chest.

High on the catwalk, the aide pressed harder. She wove combinations too intricate for a soldier, signatures of a dancer schooled since childhood: thrust, pivot, overhead arc that blurred staff into halo. Draven shaved each angle by millimeters, every parry a stitch in a pattern only he saw. Yet the furnace's screams grew louder, drowning the fine edge of timing. Sap-steam blurred sight. Heat soaked his cloak, sweat stung the cut below his ribs.

Somewhere beneath that roar he heard Korin chanting, voice thin but unbroken, root-speech syllables latching onto stone like vines. Another pylon buckled; the lattice hiccupped, its crimson glow flickering sickly pink, then bottomed out to a dull, angry orange.

The aide misread the stutter as Draven's distraction. She lunged, blade aimed to take his eye. He slipped half a step, let the point kiss the helm rim, then countered with a pommel strike that caught her mask's cracked edge. Porcelain shattered. Her face fully bared—youthful, eyes bright with a fanatic's devotion, cheek tattooed with a sigil warped into cruelty.

She reeled—but only for heartbeat. Fury steadied her. She slammed the staff butt at his knee. He folded with the blow, rolled over the rail, caught a dangling chain, and swung past a rain of ember sparks.

Below, Orvath raised both arms. Without a spellbook he resorted to glyphs branded into flesh. He raked nails down his forearms; blood ran, igniting runes beneath skin. Sigil-flares spiraled outward, smashing loose crates, flipping stone benches. One flare clipped Sylvanna's shoulder, spraying pain across nerves. She gritted her teeth, drew another arrow. Felt the tremor in her fingers.

Orvath laughed—a ragged sound. "You break bindings but lack will to finish! Let me show you finality!"

He flung both blood-slick hands toward the furnace. The crimson glyphs on its shell flared brighter, syncing to the runes under his skin. The beat doubled—tripled—until walls vibrated like drumheads. Flames leapt emerald, then violet. Stones wept molten seams.

Draven swung onto a service platform, breath shallow in scalding air. Every instinct screamed that the tipping point was seconds away. He reached inside his coat, fingers closing on the glass vial. The seed within thrummed—recognition, hunger, promise of inversion. One chance.

He scanned: Sylvanna knelt, glow fading around her as she wrestled lightning back under skin. Korin's lantern flame whipped pale-blue under furnace draft, face pinched as he held a collapsing pillar's runes in check. Scouts nowhere in sight—either fallen back or dead. Decision crystallized.

He drew a breath filtered through burning pine sap, whispered a single word only the seed could hear:

"Reset."