The Villain Professor's Second Chance-Chapter 678: The Elven Demon Hunt (2)

Draven merely inclined his head. He neither confirmed nor denied, yet the admission hung there like frost.

The path narrowed until shoulder‑thick vines brushed their arms. Thorn tips glittered where light leaked through fissures overhead. Every few steps the soil exhaled packets of spore‑fog that glowed faintly, painting their boots in transient luminescence. Under the hush, Sylvanna could hear her pulse, a little too quick, rattling in her ears.

"Back in that cage," she said quietly. "It singled you out. You think that was chance?"

"Nothing since we crossed the boundary has been chance." Draven's tone was flat, but she detected the razor thread of impatience running beneath it—impatience not with her, but with unseen variables refusing to reveal themselves quickly enough.

Ahead, a cluster of half‑toppled monoliths appeared, each slab draped in spiral vines shot through with dim blue veins. A breeze—oddly warm—gusted across the clearing and set the vines swaying. The motion reminded Sylvanna of entrails rocked by distant footsteps. She fought the shiver.

The stones were carved with glyphs so ancient even Draven paused to parse them. After a moment he grunted—a small, rare sound of genuine annoyance. "Someone took a chisel to the runic structure. Whole clauses missing."

"Which means?"

"Means we're standing on a bridge that forgot where it's supposed to go." He gestured to the vines. "Follow the spiral too far and the geometry folds back on itself. Perfect place to lose a mind—or hide one."

Sylvanna's fingers flexed around her bowstring. "And you still want to push through."

"I don't want to." He met her eyes—flint meeting flint. "I have to. The trail bleeds straight beneath these rocks."

His boot scuffed a furrow through powdery loam. Crimson motes drifted up, drifting like dying embers until gravity reclaimed them. "Recent," he muttered. "An hour, no more."

They stepped between the monoliths. Sound failed almost instantly; their footfalls muffled, breaths stuffed with cotton. Every heartbeat felt amplified, yet separate, like it belonged to someone else.

Sylvanna's shoulders locked. On her left, carved script glimmered and rearranged, showing scenes from her childhood orphanage—wayward chimera kits mewling for food; a younger Sylvanna stitching wings onto a runt goat. The images mutated: kits grown monstrous, their eyes accusing. She jerked her gaze forward, forcing a slow exhale. Draven said nothing, but he angled closer, a silent tether if she needed it.

At the circle's center lay the ruin of an old shrine, its dais fractured and half‑claimed by roots. Moon‑pale fungi cast a wan light across shards of shattered crystal. Draven crouched, brushing aside dead moss to reveal a broken glyph shaped like overlapping crescents. Lightning quick, he pulled a slim knife free, sliced the heel of his palm; dark blood welled, thick and warm. He let three drops fall into the glyph's seam.

The stone hissed—steam dancing upward, coils of harsh violet. Sylvanna felt the air warp, tugging at her, as if unseen hands rifled through her pockets for spare memories.

Draven kept the blade poised over the crack, eyes half‑lidded. "Brace," he warned.

The glyph drank his blood, fused for an instant—then flashed, sending a rolling pulse through the ground. Reality around the dais twitched, threads of color snapping into new positions. Sylvanna bit down on a gasp. It felt like the world had blinked and reopened with a different pupil.

Draven's eyelids fluttered. He staggered a single step—jarring to see from him. Images battered his mind: villages aflame, rooftops twisting into serpents; a Warden dragged by chains across grass that gleamed like green glass. Mirrors shivered, and in every reflection eyes multiplied, watching with cold delight.

Inside the riot of vision, he built a cage—bars of order hammered from stubborn will. Each memory trying to anchor itself was labeled, catalogued, pushed to the side. Not mine. Not now.

Then, through the noise, a whisper threaded in, almost timid: Dravis.

The name was so soft he nearly dismissed it as trickery, yet it resonated along a private chord only he could hear—the echo of an earlier life and the command strings still hanging off this borrowed flesh.

He latched onto it.

A jolt of certainty flexed through Draven's chest like a compass needle snapping to true.

North‑northeast— the tug felt almost physical, a braided thread of blood, memory, and something older than either. His eyelids fluttered open. The cut on his palm had already sealed, the glyph beneath him disintegrating to gray grit.

Sylvanna's voice wavered between impatience and worry. "Well?"

"Found it." His reply was soft, but the edge of steel returned to each syllable.

They started down a narrow game trail that shouldn't have existed, roots writhing aside just far enough to admit a stride. Thorned ferns brushed their cloaks, weeping amber sap that glowed like candlewax. The farther they walked, the more the Grove seemed to distort—colors slightly too saturated, scents layered wrong, day and night jostling for the same patch of sky.

Sylvanna forced a joke to steady her nerves. "Feels like walking through somebody else's fever dream."

"No," Draven corrected, scanning the canopy, "we're walking through its dream. And it's starting to realise we're not supposed to be here."

Five minutes later the air turned syrup‑thick. Each breath tasted of forgotten cellars—damp stone, rotted flowers, a murmur of mold. Sylvanna slowed beside a collapsed log veined with ghost‑white fungus. Something shifted beneath the bark, a low rasp like mismatched bones grinding.

Instinct pushed her hand toward her bowstring, but curiosity won the half‑second. She crouched, peeled back the bark.

A half‑grown chimera slithered into view: feline shoulders, serpentine torso, batlike wings no larger than a sparrow's. Its fur was patchy, jaw undershot, a drool line quivering at its lip. Exactly the malformed kit she had mercy‑burned three winters ago.

Its eyes were wrong—too round, damp with an accusation that speared straight through the armor of her pragmatism.

"You left us," it whispered, the words bubbling around teeth too small for the tongue that shaped them. "You used us."