The Villain Professor's Second Chance
Chapter 767 - 767: Lines That Don’t Erase (4)

"Reset."

Then he hurled the vial. It arced—a tiny star past columns of flame—and smashed dead center into the core. For the briefest instant silence punched out everything: no roar, no chanting, no heartbeat, just a suspension of all sound as the failsafe threaded itself through every live rune.

Amber turned white. Glyphs spun backward, characters reordering like frantic birds reversing migration mid-flight. The booming cadence collapsed into a single, resonant thud—then steadied into a slow pulse, calmer than it had been all night. Sap jets smoothed, vents sealed. The furnace inhaled, exhaled, content.

And above, within the vaulted ceiling, an entirely different fracture gave way. Granite plates split with a roar deeper than thunder. Moonlight—cold, silver, almost gentle—poured in through a widening seam, painting the hell-lit chamber with a saintly corona. Dust swirled upward, caught in the beam like spirits fleeing.

On the floor, Sylvanna felt the first pebble bounce against her boot. She looked up just in time to see a block the size of a horse slide free.

"Korin!" she shouted.

He followed her gaze, eyes going saucer-wide. Even as stone thundered down, smaller shards peppered the floor, cracking tiles, severing half-ruined rails. Catwalks lurched; the one Draven occupied juddered sideways. He flung himself to a safer brace, gripping a support strut while the aide stumbled, nearly pitched into open air.

But the furnace—stabilized—held. Its calm pulse became eerie counterpoint to the chaos overhead.

The moment Korin's cry tore across the shattered vault, the sentence felt heavier than stone. "The stones are waking!"—six syllables that clawed under every rib and refused to let go.

A hush followed, eerie in a room still howling with half-collapsed metal. No one needed explanation; they felt it—a second, older pulse strumming through the masonry like a war-drum buried under centuries of dust. Each tremor snapped loose pebbles from archways and sent them skipping across the floor in nervous little avalanches.

Draven's head jerked toward the nearest support column. Hair plastered to his forehead, eyes narrowed to knife-points, he watched rusty glyphs crawl from amber to raw red. That color means ignition, his mind supplied—cold, mechanical—then moved straight to solution.

"Tunnel," he barked, already spinning on a heel. The command wasn't so much spoken as detonated: a single syllable slamming into muscles that obeyed before thoughts could catch up.

Sylvanna grabbed Korin by the collar, nearly lifting the boy off his feet in her haste. "With me, little lantern—now." She pushed him ahead, Raëdrithar swooping low to herd them both. Static trailed the chimera's wing-tips like frayed ribbons of moonlight.

A burst of sparks showered the dais where Orvath had stood moments earlier; the stone cracked, coughing dust in lazy plumes. The magister himself was already skittering across a footbridge of sizzling runes, trailing droplets of blood that steamed on contact with the heated floor. Somewhere he had found the composure to grin—thin, triumphant—as he strapped himself into a glider fashioned from blackened leather and rib-bones. Wings snapped wide with a sound like canvas ripping apart the night.

Draven spared him half a glance. Not enough time to intercept, his brain calculated, not without losing the scouts. Priority triage: survival first, vengeance later. The dagger in his grip—short, utilitarian—stayed sheathed.

"Down that shaft!" he ordered, pointing toward a side corridor whose mouth belched cold river mist. Two surviving scouts sprinted, battered but resolute, their boots hammering the slanted floor as though trying to outrun the quake itself.

The first slab dropped behind them with a noise that felt bigger than thunder. Masonry crushed one of the abandoned soul-cages, releasing a final puff of ghost-light that spiraled upward like a desperate prayer before vanishing in the swirl of falling grit. A beam followed—ironwood charred black—thudding across the escape route just after Sylvanna ducked beneath it.

"MOVE!" the lead scout shouted back, voice cracking from grit and fear. A second later he yelped as the tunnel floor tilted, sending riverwater sluicing around his ankles. Cold as a grave kiss—and climbing.

Korin's lantern bobbed ahead, casting jittery streaks of violet on the walls. Each pulse of the flame answered the waking glyphs behind them, creating nauseating strobe-shadows. "Faster," the boy panted, "they're angry." No one doubted him—not after what the lantern had foreseen already.

Halfway down the corridor, a ceiling beam sagged, showering them in a plume of dust. One of the scouts—mid-stride—slipped. Instinct or courage made him twist, shoulders bracing into the falling timber. The impact drove him to one knee, but he jammed his spear butt into a crack and turned his body into a living scaffold.

"GO!" he roared, face webbed with veins from the strain. Wood groaned against metal armor, splinters peppering his cheeks like burning hail.

Sylvanna's eyes met his—brief, blazing with apology—and she yanked Korin past the narrowing gap. Draven came last. He never paused; he simply pivoted, laid a gloved hand on the scout's bowed helmet in a gesture that said everything words could not, and vaulted the debris. The moment his boots touched wet stone on the far side, the improvised brace gave way. A rush of rubble slammed into the corridor like a fist, sealing the scout—and his final shout—behind a wall of ruin.

The tunnel ahead corkscrewed upward, narrowing until even Raëdrithar had to fold wings tight. Water gushed around their shins now, cold biting through leather greaves, dragging at their steps. Somewhere overhead, night wind moaned through fresh fissures, promising an exit if they could reach it before the place suffocated on its own collapsing lungs.

The last ladder rungs were slick, half-torn from the wall. Sylvanna shoved Korin upward first; the boy scrambled, lantern clenched in teeth, feet skittering on wet iron. Draven waited only long enough to see him crest the top before he planted one hand against Sylvanna's lower back and propelled her after. She surged up, breath ragged, glaive banging against the ladder like a warning bell.

Draven climbed last. Stone quaked again—harder, angrier. A jagged fragment sheared free, clipping his shoulder. Pain flared, hot and immediate, but he kept climbing, counting rungs like heartbeats: three, two, one…

Cool night air slapped his face as he rolled onto open ground. The valley greeted them like a wound: hills laced by glowing fissures, fractures pumping dull amber light into a sky smeared with storm-clouds. The once-placid river coursed through a dozen new channels, each steaming where glyph-sparks met water.

Above this nightmare, Orvath's glider caught an updraft. Bone-struts flexed. He bled freely—silver rivulets raining through the air—but he laughed anyway, the manic sound tumbling down on them like falling glass.

"Enjoy my after-image, Dravis!" he howled, banking toward the darkness at the valley's edge. The crimson search-runes inlaid along the glider's wings left two comet tails in his wake.

Draven watched him recede, face unreadable but for the stark set of his jaw. The Drakhan aide was nowhere—either swallowed by rubble or ghosting away on her own path of vengeance. He felt no triumph, only the faint, poisonous itch of unfinished business.

He drew a single breath, tasted smoke and sap in equal measure, and slid his dagger into its sheath with deliberate finality. "Next time," he whispered—just for the wind—"no survivors."

◇ ◇ ◇

Later, on the ridge, the world seemed held together by nothing but sighs. The wind came in slow gusts, carrying a burnt-honey scent from the heart-wood still smoldering below. Patches of grass around their makeshift camp were dusted white with ash that glowed faintly in moonlight, turning every footprint into a ghostly sigil.

Draven sat against a boulder the color of old coffins. Moonlight silvered the sweat drying on his skin, turned the crusted sap at his temple into a tiny star. He'd said little since the escape, answering the scouts' brief reports with nodded efficiency before sending them to rest. Planning could wait until dawn—what good were strategies if no one could stand tomorrow?

Sylvanna knelt beside him, a strip of linen looped through her fingers. She worked the cloth gently across a shallow cut along his side—one he hadn't even seemed to notice until she tapped it.

"Hold still," she murmured, voice low enough that only the crackling camp-flame could compete.

"I am still," he replied, though the words carried no edge. His gaze was somewhere beyond the valley, weighing distances only he could see.

When the wound was clean, she reached behind her neck and unpinned the braid-charm: a thin coil of silver wire threaded with strands of storm-imbued hair. Under moonlight, the woven metal flickered like distant lightning. She hesitated—thumb brushing the charm as if coaxing courage—then pressed the coil flat against the raw edges of his wound.

A soft hum rose, a note felt more than heard. Veins of blue-white crawled across his skin, knitting flesh the way frost etches a windowpane: swift, intricate, inevitable. Draven's only reaction was a single sharp inhale.

"Storm-child," she said, voice barely rippling the hush, "was I born in thunder or in lies?"

His eyes stayed on the ruined skyline. For several heartbeats the question seemed to hang in the night, untouchable. Finally he answered, each word clean as a blade stroke.

"Thunder. Then lies. Then thunder again. Choose which you keep."

No apology, no comfort. Just truth—raw and spare as winter branches. Yet something in the absolute certainty of his tone soothed her. She leaned back, resting elbows on her knees, and let silence grow until it felt almost warm, a blanket woven from shared exhaustion.

Across the fire, Korin jerked awake, eyes wide. Sweat beaded his brow despite the cold. His lantern—set carefully beside his bedroll—flared purple, casting long forked shadows up his cheeks.

"The altar," he whispered, voice thin as spider-silk yet loud enough to turn both seasoned warriors' heads. "It still beats."

They followed his gaze to the valley floor. Through cracks in the blackened plain, amber pulses throbbed—slow, deliberate, relentless. Like fireflies trapped under glass, like a heart refusing to die. The sight drew an involuntary shiver up Sylvanna's spine. Even Raëdrithar ruffled its feathers uneasily, eyes reflecting twin sparks of that buried glow.

Draven said nothing. But his hand drifted to the hilt of the dagger he'd just sheathed, thumb brushing the worn leather. The gesture, small and silent, spoke all the promise words couldn't carry.

Far below, through cracks in the stone, amber pulses flickered. Fireflies, trapped in the earth.

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