The Villain Professor's Second Chance

Iron Justiciars—two hundred strong—filed from the rows of standing stones that framed the plateau's northern edge. Their polished helms already wore masks of drying salt, proof they had marched the seabed, too. Each held a flame-quencher shield: wide, ridged disks of obsidian-dark alloy treated to smother fire on contact. Their pike-points glimmered blue.

A captain at their front—crest dyed in black ink—raised his fist. "Rebels!" he bellowed across the fifty-pace gap. "Your plague has poisoned the capital! Lay down arms or face pure judgment."

Wind whisked his words into tatters, but their meaning—blame and iron—carried. Just behind Draven, a line of archers shifted uneasily, leather bowgrips creaking.

Vaelira did not parley. She lifted one gloved hand, palm outward. The signal was neither rushed nor delayed; it arrived at the exact moment when every soldier's lungs had half-filled and their muscles not yet fired.

"Now," she said, soft as snowfall.

From her satchel she drew three salvaged automata eyes, metal orbs threaded with hairline cracks. She let them fall. Halfway to the ground a charge inside each sphere flashed brilliant white. The resulting explosion produced no shrapnel, only a corona of light so intense it arrested motion. Ten of the charging Justiciars froze, mid-step, encased by shimmering cages of albino fire. Their momentum robbed, they toppled like statues, faces locked in rictus fury.

A roar shattered across the ranks; first fear, then retaliatory anger. Pike lines dropped and advanced. Vaelira's skirmishers met them, slashing at the shielded bodies, darting back before the quencher surfaces could nullify torch embers hurled like sling bullets from farther behind.

In the melee haze, Edrik—the former Justiciar captain—sighted his old mentor Vrask. Vrask carried the same crescent-topped spear he'd trained Edrik with, but the man's beard held more gray now, and his eyes blazed with wounded conviction.

Neither offered greeting. Vrask lunged, spear whistling a tight arc. Edrik parried with a broadsword he gripped two-handed, sparks splintering from the meeting. They traded blows without breath for politeness—an old choreography turned lethal. Vrask's style remained textbook, perfect lines; Edrik's had grown feral, bent by necessity. Each impact resounded like a smith striking anvils in rapid fire.

Vrask aimed a killing thrust at Edrik's ribs. Edrik twisted, letting the tip rake chainmail, then stepped in close—so close their helms clinked. He drove his blade upward under Vrask's left pauldron. A wet gasp escaped the older man; disbelief flickered, then softened into something almost paternal. He dropped, hands empty, eyes already clouding.

Edrik staggered back, sword black along two-thirds of its edge. One choked sob clawed out of his chest before he slammed a fist to his breastplate in salute. Blood misted the air where he stood. Half the Justiciars still standing faltered at the sight—mentor downed by protégé. Swords dipped. A quarter turned and fled toward the stones; another quarter knelt and laid weapons on the shale. Draven watched them, measuring capitulation's sincerity. Vaelira wordlessly accepted the surrender—they needed bodies more than they needed grudges.

Above, the assault in the sky was just beginning.

Sylvanna mounted Raëdrithar, her wind-wyvern whose hide shimmered indigo in weak moonlight. The creature's wings caught a newly forming thermic column—hot air rising from sun-baked plateau stone—and shot upward. Sylvanna crouched low, knees hugging the saddle etched with binding runes. Her bow, black yew bleached by lightning, rested across her thighs.

Down below, on the slope beyond the plateau, three mammoth mirrors—components of the enemy amplifier—rotated on brass gear-tracks. Their convex faces winked with captured starlight, adjusting minutely to track Sylvanna's ascent the way a predator tracks a single firefly.

She had three storm-glass arrows in her quiver, each tuned to a specific harmonic. Each had to strike a separate mirror during a precise half-breath window when starlight kissed the silver centers. Miss that cadence, and the resonance cascade would reset, doubling in force. Draven had explained it, tapping equations on bone-chalk boards until her eyelids drooped, but the conclusion had been simple: hit all three targets or watch the sea turn inside out.

From Raëdrithar's back the world looked tilted, depthless—cliff, plateau, army, sea, all flattened into a storyteller's scroll. Sylvanna drew her first arrow. Runic rings along the shaft glowed azure, humming against the steady, deeper throb of the wyvern's wingbeats.

"Steady, brave one," she whispered to her mount. Raëdrithar arced, presenting her a near-perfect firing lane across the first mirror.

She released. The arrow blurred, a streak of condensed moonfire. It hit the outer rim dead center; a cymbal-crash of fractured glass rang across the valley. Shards peeled outward and rained down in glittering sleet. The remaining mirrors spun faster, gears shrieking.

She nocked the second arrow. A cross-draft punched her shoulder, spinning the wyvern two degrees off axis. She corrected, but the wind bent the shot right as it left the string. The arrow scraped the mirror's edge, tipping it into a wild wobble before snapping in half. Even so, the force cracked the glass, spider-webbing fractures from circumference to hub. Not perfect, but enough. Sylvanna exhaled a ragged breath, tasted ozone.

One arrow left.

She reached for it—and a voice slithered across her consciousness. Thick, dark, slick as oil under cold water.

I can lead you to him, little tempest. The father you lost beyond the pale storm. One glance, one answer—just spiral down. Bow lowered, head bowed…

Orvath's whisper wrapped around her like frost creeping into hair. Images surfaced—childhood memories, her father's laugh, subtle and warm, the heaviness of his cloak around her shoulders on nights when thunder made her flinch. The memory's lure twisted into longing so visceral her fingers shook. Raëdrithar felt the tremor and beat his wings harder, crooning a warning.

Below, on the battlefield's ragged edge, Korin's lantern burned through its panels, pulsing brighter than molten metal. The beams struck boiling air, refracting until they formed a single gleaming point directed at Sylvanna like a signal—focus.

She squeezed the arrow's nock until wood creaked, then raised her gaze not to the phantom of her father but to the mirror. The gears aligned—its face shimmered with the exact star glint Draven had predicted. Wind buffeted, her arms trembled, and for a breath she hated the weight of every eye, living or eldritch, upon her. Then the quiver's feather-fletch grazed her cheek, reminding her of Marrin's pyre flame and Draven's voice promising that memory could be forged into steel.

Sylvanna loosed.

The arrow whistled—a perfect E-flat minor chord made tangible—and drove into the heart of the final mirror. Glass shrieked. Crack lines raced outward like lightning veins across ice. All three mirrors—one shattered, one splintered, one impaled—howled in resonance. The collected energy ricocheted between them, rising, knotting. Then a single pulse—violent, invisible—screamed skyward along the tangent of her shot.

It struck Sylvanna square in the chest.

White pain exploded through nerves, overriding thought. For an instant she was light and sound and the thunderclap at the world's dawn. Muscles spasmed; the bow slipped away; consciousness stuttered. Raëdrithar roared, diving instinctively as rider slackened. Yet the pulse had inverted his lift—air peeled away from his wings, leaving them in a cold vacuum. The wyvern tumbled, tail over snout.

Sylvanna's last lucid image was the fractured starlight overhead, shards tumbling in an arc that resembled broken halo pieces around a fallen icon. She tried to call out, to steady the beast, but her lungs burned as though full of sparks. Horizon and plateau traded places in a dizzy carousel.

She fell.

The Conch-throne's first note ripped through the drowned cavern like a newborn hurricane. Stone vaults rang, pearlescent columns vibrated, and a crown of salt crystals shivered off the coral dais before turning to glitter in mid-air. The throne itself—an ancient spiral big enough to cradle a leviathan—flared from pale rose to boiling magenta, each ridge flexing as though the shell still remembered being alive.

Orvath staggered beneath the sudden choir of frequencies. Blood welled in neat lines along the rims of his ears, then trickled down his jaw to paint vermilion vines across his neck. He laughed anyway—high, clear, too bright for so deep a place. The sound bounced around the chamber and returned to him warped, a chorus of slightly later Orvaths, each finding the rising disaster funnier than the last.

On the cavern's seaward flank, the Gate responded. Once a flawless disc of mother-of-pearl, its throat split along jagged seams that glowed sickly teal. Those fissures unzipped in both directions, curling back edges like petals carved from bone. With every new inch of exposure, a roar of pressurized water hissed out—only to be swallowed by a pressure greater still on the far side. The portal was no doorway now but a wounded mouth delirious to feed.

From that wound poured the Brine-Wraith Choir.

They emerged as translucent coils, each the breadth of a river and the length of a merchant galley. Their bodies were woven from revenant echoes—faded voices, forgotten faces, half-sound and half-light braided so tightly that grief itself gained anatomy. Where they brushed the water they left chill scars that steamed in contact with air. Their eyes—clusters of memory fragments—sparkled like shattered mirrors. Every beat of their movement recited a new name of someone long drowned.

They did not swim up the passage; they surged. The cavern's roof bowed outward to let them through, coral ribs bending to the point of creak before snapping back. In seconds they burst into moonlit air, scales of light shedding seawater that hissed into fog the color of mourning cloth.