The Villain Professor's Second Chance

The colossal warrior's blade descended like a mountain's judgment, meeting Draven's crossed swords with an impact that seemed to bend the night itself. Steel shrieked against steel, the vibration pitching above hearing until it became something felt rather than heard—a teeth-rattling buzz that lanced straight through bone.

Then the world detonated.

A concentric ring of force exploded outward, flattening grass, ripping moss from stone, and hurling corpses skyward in grotesque pirouettes. Living soldiers were tossed like dolls, arms wheeling, weapons spinning from slack fingers. A dead oak—already hollowed by age—shattered into splinters as the shockwave slapped its trunk. Shards of bark whirled through the moonlit haze, glittering like shrapnel.

Vaelira caught the full brunt. Air slammed into her chest, a battering ram forged from displaced magic and raw momentum. Instinct screamed to dodge, but there was nowhere to go; the shockwave was everywhere. Her boots tore twin furrows in the mud as she skidded backward. Pain bloomed along her shoulders where plate straps bit into flesh.

She did not fall.

A single pulse of emerald wind erupted from the soles of her boots, spiraling down into the soil. It wasn't conscious spellwork—just the forest answering her panic. Spectral roots burst from the mud, coiling around her greaves and plunging deep. The ground moaned but held. She tasted copper on her tongue, realized she had bitten the inside of her cheek, and forced herself to breathe.

When the ringing in her ears faded, she found herself staring at the impossible duel unfolding ahead.

The warrior—if that brutish titan could still be called such—lifted his blade for another swing. Crimson mana clung to the steel, flickering like wildfire trapped beneath glass. It surged in uneven bursts, sometimes sputtering, sometimes roaring, as if driven by a heartbeat several sizes too large. Each pulse carried a resonance Vaelira disliked: a war-drum with no sense of rhythm, all volume and no cadence.

Draven, by contrast, was a study in controlled violence. He moved with deceptive languor, feet whispering over churned earth, the dark blue haze around him barely visible unless the moon struck it just so. When the greatsword came down again—aiming to cleave him in two—Draven did not block outright. He turned with the blow, letting one sword glide along the descending edge while the other flicked up to tap the warrior's wrist, guiding the strike inches off course. Sparks showered in a graceful arc. The move looked effortless, almost leisurely, like a painter redirecting a dripping brush.

Vaelira's stomach fluttered in reluctant admiration. Elven duelmasters spent decades learning that kind of redirection; this man wielded it as casually as breathing. And the mana—oh, the mana. It flowed around him like a mountain stream: cool, inexorable, each eddy purposeful. Nothing leaked, nothing wasted. If he'd been born beneath the boughs, some elder would have named him Sword-Singer and taught him ancient forms reserved for the High Courts.

Her reverie shattered at the rustle of cloth behind her. A warning shiver crawled up her spine. She ducked, almost on reflex, wind magic coalescing around her shoulders in a corkscrew torrent. A narrow saber hissed over her head, slicing a strand of hair. Cold air kissed the back of her neck.

She pivoted on one rooted heel—low, tight. Leaf-steel flashed, carving a perfect half-moon. The attacker's throat opened in a crimson smile before he even registered missing. Blood sprayed in a curtain, steam rising where droplets hit the chill air. She let the corpse slump, eyes already back on Draven and the titan.

The giant bellowed, the noise deep enough to rattle ribs. His next swing plowed a trench through the battlefield, scooping dirt, stone, and unlucky bodies into a flying wave. Draven slipped aside, cape snapping like a raven's wing. One blade intercepted the mound of debris, splitting it. Clods of earth tumbled harmlessly around him.

Observing, Vaelira realized, was not passive for Draven. He catalogued. Every time his sword kissed the greatsword he must have felt the weight transfer, the angle of approach, the momentary slack when the warrior over-committed. She could almost see the mathematics in his pale eyes—vectors, momentum, thresholds.

But the enemy was learning too. Red light crawled from plate joints, knitting dents together. The wounds Draven had scored in earlier exchanges glimmered, closed, glimmered again, as though the flesh beneath couldn't decide if it was still alive. Each regeneration left faint cracks of heat in the cool night, turning mist to thin skeins of steam.

Fiery chanting rolled across the clearing. Vaelira's gaze flicked past clashing blades to where robed figures traced sigils in the trampled grass. Their hands bled freely, painting runes that crawled outward like veins seeking a heart. Flame leaked from each curve, licking up mushrooming plumes of smoke. The smell—sulfur, copper—clogged her throat.

She cursed. Support casters. If they finished, this duel would tip ugly.

Draven dipped under another brutal sweep, then quarter-turned so the next blow missed entirely, overextended. His counter was surgical: the tip of one sword kissed wrist tendon, the other flicked across a knee joint. Quick. Bloodless, unless you counted the red mana that sprayed. The warrior grunted, but Vaelira saw cunning behind the pain; he was drawing Draven in, trusting regeneration.

The titan swung again, but this time Draven's blades locked the greatsword mid-arc. Their faces were close enough for breath to mingle—one calm and unreadable, the other twisted with fury. Lightning cracked between steel edges, red and blue flares gnawing at each other.

Energy fed back through the warrior's arms. Crimson veins bulged, glowing brighter, and suddenly the ground at his feet buckled. Magic detonated outward in a circular shockwave. Vaelira had braced, yet it still sent her sliding a full pace. Several bodies—dead moments ago—vaulted into the air, limbs flopping.

Draven, unbelievably, used the blast—he rolled with it, letting momentum spin him around the warrior's flank. Both blades flashed, carving shallow x-marks across the giant's plated ribs. Not fatal, but the move announced understanding: he'd mapped every weak seam.

"You cannot kill the cursed!" the warrior taunted again, laugh thundering. Regeneration flared, sealing the cuts with blazing thread.

Draven's tone barely rose above conversational: "Your boast grows repetitive."

He lunged. The right sword struck—wrist severed so fast Vaelira had to blink to be sure it happened. The gauntlet and greatsword thudded earthward. A gasp rose from watching soldiers, whether in horror or awe she couldn't tell.

But the stump didn't gush blood. Instead, red light coalesced into a claw of pure mana, fingers curling, flexing with malevolent grace.

Vaelira suppressed a shiver. The fight was far from over.

Draven's response was clinical in its perfection. His right blade flicked out in a movement too fast for Vaelira's eyes to fully track, and the warrior's right wrist separated cleanly from his arm. The gauntlet and greatsword clattered to the ground, but instead of blood, crimson light snaked from the stump, forming a spectral claw that flexed with malevolent intent.

The severed hand spun end-over-end, scattering droplets of molten mana that sizzled when they struck the mud. The warrior's greatsword, suddenly masterless, cleaved a furrow before its momentum died; it lay there like some fallen monument, red runes flickering weakly along the fuller. For a heartbeat everything seemed to hold its breath—trees, soldiers, even the mist.

Then the stump burned open.

Crimson energy gushed from the jagged bone, coiling upward in twisting ribbons. The ribbons knit together, condensed, and shaped themselves into translucent fingers tipped with talon-sharp light. The new limb flexed once, twice, as if testing range of motion, and the air hummed with an oily resonance that scraped the inside of Vaelira's skull. She tasted iron at the back of her tongue, a phantom flavor of corrupted magic.

A pair of infantrymen charged her left flank, swords raised. Without looking she slid half a step, angled her shoulders, and let one man's blade glance off her pauldron. The clang reverberated up her arm. She rotated her wrist and slashed, leaf-steel edge catching the second attacker under the chin. Blood burst in a bright arc; frost-cold wind followed her sword through the wound, flash-freezing crimson into garnet shards that tinkled on the moss.

The first soldier recovered, feinted low. She parried, drove an elbow into his nose, and finished him with a short thrust to the lungs. Both bodies collapsed at her boots, but her attention was already back on Draven.

He advanced with eerie calm, twin swords tracing lazy figure-eights that batted away the giant's claw swipes. Each counter left a shaving of crimson energy drifting like embers. He was dismantling the titan one gesture at a time—small incisions, ligament taps, misdirected balance—death by a thousand mathematically perfect cuts.