The Villain Professor's Second Chance
Chapter 769 - 769: Half a Face, Half a History (1)

"Swear you'll avenge my mother," she pressed, swallowing the quake in her voice. "Swear you'll end what started beneath this valley."

Around them, the scouts moved in slow silhouettes: one securing a tent flap against the wind, another murmuring over the morning cook-fire, the youngest sharpening a blade that would probably never be sharp enough to answer what lay beneath the fissures. Yet every head angled subtly, every ear tuned. Even Korin's lantern seemed to lean closer.

Draven's jaw set. Not refusal—assessment. He looked past Sylvanna to the split horizon, where the frost-crusted peaks speared the pale sun. Snow flurries sifted from a slate-grey sky, spiralling like parchment scraps torn from an unreadable book. He inhaled once, a soundless measure of the dawn's thin air, then exhaled words older than most kingdoms.

"Eva'rel lun thar."

He spoke the vow in ancient Sylvan, each vowel rolled with precision, each consonant struck like a steel edge kissing whetstone. The promise fell into the snow at their feet and seemed to burn a pattern only the wind could read.

For a long second neither moved. The valley pulse rose again—amber light climbing ridges, painting Draven's cheekbones gold, skating across Sylvanna's tear-bright eyes. They stared at one another over the slow drum of that subterranean heart. She felt the charm warming anew, stitching heat into her braid like a second bloodstream.

She nodded—once, sharp, sealing the pact. In the hush that followed, Raëdrithar's feathers settled with a rustle that sounded strangely like relief.

Draven turned away, but the motion jerked—caught, as if memory snagged on unseen briars. His pupils dilated for an instant, the color of mercury flooding with something darker. Sylvanna saw his shoulders tighten beneath the cloak, ribs flexing against fresh bindings, and she almost asked what vision gripped him.

He blinked, and the moment shattered like thin ice underfoot. Without breaking stride, he resumed the patrol. Snow whispered closed behind his boots.

Sylvanna exhaled, frost ghosting from her lips. She felt… steadier, in an unsettling way—as if the vow had shifted the ground beneath her yet somehow balanced her weight. The name Syalra-Sylvanna echoed through her skull with the resonance of a bell struck at dawn, continuing to hum even after the sound had fled.

She tucked the braid beneath her collar, palm lingering against the charm one second longer. The heat there felt different now—less like a warning brand, more like a lantern she carried inside her chest. She turned, tracking Draven's silhouette until it merged with ragged spruce shadows.

Forty-seven seconds crawled by.

Another flare climbed through the fissures, staining frost and ash with a molten glow. It lit the carved name-stick of the missing scout, making the etched letters look momentarily alive—then the light faded, and wood became wood again, fragile and cold.

**

Kilometers north, the river pass howled under iron-edge winds. Vaelira's cloak whipped like torn banners as she braced on an ice-slick outcrop. Her breath silvered in the dusk, catching lamplight from the fort's ramparts.

A shriek carved through the storm noise. Shadows spilled from the water—root-wraiths, slick and grey, shapes that formed themselves out of river mud and memory residue. They crawled onto rocks, jaws yawning wide as caves. Engineers shouted, steel rang, but when lanterns flared in synchronized bursts the creatures froze, limbs splayed mid-lunge, mud-flesh crystallizing into brittle stone.

Lantern light retreated. The wraiths cracked, collapsed in quiet heaps, sludge washing back into the current.

Vaelira's jaw tightened. "It rides the water," she breathed, voice trembling not from fear but from the enormity of the equation sliding into place. "The pulse rides the water. Every crest, every ripple—a carrier wave."

Her second, a thin-faced captain with wind-raw cheeks, waited for orders.

"Weave iron-reed cages in the current," she said. "Stack them stern-to-bow the width of the pass. We filter the river's memory before it reaches the orchards."

"But the metal—"

"Will corrode. Then we weave more. Move."

The captain snapped a salute and vanished into the blizzard of torch sparks and blowing snow. Vaelira took one final look upriver, where the water bruised itself against ice floes. She reached inside her gauntlet and unlatched a raven cap. The bird jutted its beak into the freezing wind, glossy feathers quivering.

"To Draven," she whispered, tying a parchment strip to its leg with frozen fingers. "Cut the source. River compromised."

The raven leapt, black wings slicing the storm.

**

Miles below, warm as a fever dream, Orvath paced the perimeter of a bunker carved from red stone. Memory-globes—spheres of glass containing swirling ghost-essence—hung from rusted chains, clinking softly with each measured footfall. Their pale radiance painted his sunken cheeks a sickly blue, highlighting veins that writhed with glyph-reflux. Where the green fluorescence met skin, it shimmered through semi-opaque flesh like swamp gas.

Every third step his body jerked, a marionette tugged by invisible strings. Yet he grinned—cracked lips, bloody teeth—because the pain meant the altar listened.

"It sings to us now," he crooned, voice hoarse with sleepless scripture. "Like it remembers its own name. Like it remembers me."

The globes pulsed brighter, sympathetic.

A hiss of metal drew his gaze. Behind him, thin straps slipped free; a mask split along an old fissure. Azra lifted it away, breaths coming in short, deliberate bursts. Her exposed skin gleamed with sweat, her dark hair plastered to her temples where a fresh cut oozed black-red against the incomplete sigil on her cheekbone. Her eyes shimmered—some emotion pulverized into glittering fragments: fury, shame, vindication.

Orvath pivoted, and the globes' glow haloed him like twisted sanctity. He cocked his head, studying the fracture that ran down Azra's mask—a wound echoing the clash above the leviathan geode.

"I saw him," she said, voice raw as scraped bark.

Orvath's grin widened, splitting a scab on his lower lip. Blood beaded. "Did he see you?"

Azra's fingers tightened around the ruin of porcelain. She lifted the mask between them; a thin crack branched across the bridge where Draven's blade had kissed it. "He didn't blink," she said. Each word shook.

Orvath's laugh rasped from deep in his throat, bubbling like tar against flame. He shuffled closer to the map table—an iron slab where fresh glyph lines glimmered, wet with sap-ink. Curved around a central sigil was the stylized figure of a leviathan: ribs arching like cathedral buttresses, a core symbol burning at its heart.

"Petrichor proceeds," he declared, savoring the syllables as if they were wine. His trembling hand danced over the inky lines, tapping points labeled with shard-runes. "The memories are ready. We feed them into the core, and the altar walks."

Azra's gaze drifted to his arms—glyph reflux etched bright along the veins, pulsing in time with the bunker's low hum. She swallowed.

"You're dying," Azra said, and the bunker lights betrayed the truth she tried to bury— the faint quiver in her jaw, the pulse that fluttered too fast at her throat. She kept her posture crisp, shoulders squared in polished pauldrons, but the words scraped out of her like rust loosening from iron.

Orvath answered with a shrug that looked almost boneless, as though tendons had frayed from overuse. "So are you," he murmured, letting his fingers trail along the nearest memory-globe. Wisps inside recoiled from his touch, coiling tight like frightened slugs. "So is the world. But my name will linger." As he spoke, glyph-filaments glimmered beneath his skin—thin violet wires that pulsed with each heartbeat, racing all the way to temple and wrist. He coughed once, and bright sap-tinged blood spotted the back of his hand. He wiped it on the hem of his robe without breaking eye contact.

Azra's jaw clenched. Through the shattered mask in her fist she could see part of her own reflection—one unscarred cheek, one blood-spattered brow, and a single dark eye sharp with doubt. Half a face, half a history. Half a certainty she once believed unshakable. A flicker crossed her gaze—anger first, then a flash of something softer, sorrow maybe, but it disappeared before it could be named.

Behind him, the second mask—smaller, ceremonial—hung on the wall. The hook gave a metallic sigh and the mask slipped free, hissing as the padded straps slithered across aged nails. Leather thongs whispered down the stone until the porcelain clacked on the table. Azra stepped forward and lifted the relic with careful fingers, turning it so torchlight pooled in the empty eye sockets.

"I saw him," she repeated, voice lower this time. Her thumb traced the fracture line that split the mask from brow to chin—a fault Draven's blade had carved only hours ago.

Orvath turned, robes brushing the stone floor in harsh whispers. "Did he see you?" There was amusement in his tone—until he caught the tremor in her shoulders. The smile tugging his cracked lips stuttered, unease sliding in. Draven's reputation haunted even his allies.

Azra held out the ruined mask. "He didn't blink,"