The Villain Professor's Second Chance-Chapter 685: The Grove’s Illusion (3)
"Failure." "Traitor." "Executioner." The labels slithered through the air, oily and insistent, coiling around real Draven's ears like parasites wanting in.
A living man would flinch. Shame, that resilient weed, tried to root deep. For half a blink, he could feel phantom iron at his throat, cold and unyielding.
But Draven was ready.
Beneath his coat, etched along the ribcage, runes glowed a muted cobalt—self-hypnosis matrices he'd inked during lonely watch-nights months ago. One rune flared, signaling the first mental lock. Compartmentalize. The entire illusion compressed, forced into an invisible box behind his mind's eye. A second rune pulsed: Seal. The box shuttered tight, shame sealed in with it. The collar's sensation disappeared like steam in a gale.
He stepped forward—physically through the hallucinated dock—and the judges dissolved into fog under his boots. Their angry chorus cut to silence halfway through another decree.
A harsh creak yawned above them. Both he and Sylvanna lifted their eyes.
The corpse wedged in the Heart Tree spasmed as though jerked by hidden strings. Splintered ribs splayed wider, resin snapping in sticky threads. Something inside that hollow rose—the parasite shedding its disguise.
The Soul-Grafter tore free with a wet gasp, as though birth had reversed itself. Rot-smelling mist poured from the chest cavity. What emerged had no stable flesh: smoke roiled over stolen memories, a patchwork of faces and torsos blending, separating, screaming in mute agony. A child's laughter fused with an old officer's command. Clara's gentle smile floated outward, merging with Cort's lopsided grin, both warped by a sorrow they had never worn in life.
Where a heart should sit, darkness pulsed—a starless void that drank light rather than cast it.
Draven noted every detail dispassionately. Height: two spans taller than him when standing upright. Mass: variable. Primary limbs: three—no, they shifted, now five tendrils dripping memory residue. Tactical priority: analyze attack pattern.
He freed his swords in a single breath. No flourish, no ceremony. Steel sang low, hungry.
The Soul-Grafter shrieked—an orchestra of ripped voices—and snapped a tendril toward Sylvanna. The ribbon glittered with stolen recollections: a fragment of her mother humming a hearth-song, the silhouette of Draven dueling on a moonlit bridge, a snippet of a deal she once made in a black-market alley. Memories honed to a razor edge.
Sylvanna loosed an arrow in reflex. Two heartbeats in flight, the shaft sprouted rime crystals. On impact the tendril froze solid and shattered, shards clinking like broken glass across the stone. The sense-steal embedded in the ribbon dissipated.
A second tendril snapped for Draven. He moved forward, not back, slipping inside the lash before it fully extended. The passage of smoke brushed his coat hem, but he'd already pivoted, letting the momentum of his step flow into a short, economical slash. Steel bit, slicing through a seam where two mismatched faces met. The cut didn't wound flesh—there was none—but it disrupted mana flow. The severed tip let out a shriek of a hundred overlapping sobs before evaporating.
No wide swings. No grandiose flourishes.
Tight, efficient arcs hammered the air—reverse-crescent cuts that hummed with lethal economy, each stroke severing a lashing strand before it could coil twice. When a cord of anguish darted in at rib height, Draven didn't parry so much as redirect; a single twitch of his wrist let the blade's spine glance the tendril aside, momentum bleeding harmlessly across polished steel. A half-step later he twisted again, stabbing through an after-image where two pilfered faces stuttered out of sync. The point sank into nothing but memory, and the distortion spat sparks of sickly violet before tearing open like wet paper.
The Soul-Grafter bucked at the contact. Smoke contours rippled, then smoothed into Clara's gentle smile—wide, apologetic, too bright at the edges. It was a knife wrapped in nostalgia, meant to slow him for a breath. Draven's gaze flicked across the apparition, registering details the way a locksmith studies tumblers: eye-shine misaligned by a fraction, nostrils that didn't flare when the creature inhaled. False. His answer was silence and a short vertical cut that shaved the image clean away. The mask burst into motes, leaving a hiss of stolen laughter in its wake.
Immediately another guise flooded into place—Vaelarien this time, eyes blood-shot, lips trembling with betrayal. "You let them gut me," the phantom croaked, voice layered with three different memories spliced into one. A charlatan's puppet show. Draven's mouth remained a hard line. He angled his left-hand sword so the fuller caught the phosphorescent glow seeping from the cavern roof. Light refracted down the blade like a white-hot razor. In that flare the Vaelarien-mask lost cohesion; shadows underneath wriggled, unprepared for the glare. Draven thrust once—no flourish, just a direct puncture through the heart of the lie—and dispersed it like chaff in gale wind.
Emotionless. Icy. Inside those frost-rimmed eyes, calculation ran hotter than forge iron. Every broken memory, every shiver of smoke, fed his map of the creature's rhythm—how quickly it borrowed new faces, how long before energy rerouted past a severed strand, how greedily it lunged for personal trauma.
Beside him Sylvanna fed the momentum. Her entire body became a bowstring: breath short, shoulders loose, hips rotating with each draw. She wasn't just firing arrows; she was programming the battlefield. A whistle—fwoop!—and a shaft tipped with hyaline ice slammed into a ribbon of recollection, encasing it in sub-zero sheath until the weight snapped the fabric of the memory clean in half. Another arrow carried a bead of shimmering azurite; when it struck the Grafter's shifting torso it left behind a marble-sized blue flare. To Draven, rune-trained eyes saw that beacon for what it was: a weakness marker, pulsing like a target reticle only he could decode.
They fought like gears in a brutal clockwork, movements meshing with unsettling precision. When Draven stepped left to draw fire, Sylvanna mirrored with a right-hand angle, setting up a clear lane behind him. When a false Cort lurched forward strapped to a living whip, Draven ducked and rolled under the strike—Sylvanna's next arrow screamed overhead, skewering the whip as cleanly as if it were threaded through a loom. Neither spared breath for praise; the perfection of the timing was its own reward.
The Hollow itself seemed to suffer. Pillars of root and crystal trembled under the strain of clashing energies. Thin rivulets of golden sap slithered up the trunk of the Heart Tree rather than down, drawn by the negative pressure of the Grafter's feeding frenzy. Every time Draven carved a tendril, the cavern screamed—a metallic shriek of torque-stressed wood and overstretched mana lines—but each time the sound died a little sooner, the timber's protest weakening as though grateful someone was finally cutting infection away.
As the duel spiraled, Draven's attention tunneled past the smoke body to the deeper chords beneath. He began charting the unseen: the spectral arteries of power that snaked away from the demon, plunging into the floor, spidering through the same rootwork that fed the tree. The Soul-Grafter wasn't a freestanding organism; it was a parasite plugged directly into the Grove's arterial system, sipping terror, guzzling regret. Destroying masks would never end it. He needed a choke point—one brutal stroke at the arterial neck.
His thoughts raced—faster, perhaps, than the sword—but never outran clarity. In a flash he envisioned the subterranean network: crystal veins looping under the Hollow, the thickest stem forming a primary root just three body-lengths to his north. A single spiral cut there would bleed the parasite dry, rip it off the Grove like necrotic tissue. freёweɓnovel.com
New plan. The certainty clicked into place like a gear tooth seating.
He flicked a glance over his shoulder. Sylvanna, already stringing another arrow, caught the tiny shift in his eyes. She gave the barest nod, jaw clenched. Her role was obvious—buy him seconds, no matter the cost.
Draven pivoted on his heel, blades crossing in a final scissor to shear through two converging strands. Smoke faces wailed as they fell apart. Then he broke into a sprint.
Roots sensed his intent and rebelled—twisting, bucking beneath his boots in an attempt to trip him. Memory-phantoms burst from the air like thrown veils: Roth leaning over a burning map table, eyes furious; Clara reaching out with ghost-pale fingers; a heap of students from his engineering lectures, faces melting into blame. Each specter clawed for his focus.
He ignored them all.
