The Villain Professor's Second Chance-Chapter 684: The Grove’s Illusion (2)

"Steady," he said—soft, commanding. He might as well have issued the word to the air itself. Gravity buckled again, then settled enough for breath.

Sylvanna's knees threatened mutiny. A bead of sweat slid from her temple, chilled by weightless air halfway down. Draven caught her wrist. His pulse was a metronome—slow, exact. A whisper of mana rode that beat, threading into her veins. Breath found its cadence, heart fell in step. The world tilted upright.

She blinked at him, still gripping his sleeve. He withdrew in the next breath, expression unreadable. No thanks were offered, none requested.

They descended the final ramp. With every yard the cavern's hush deepened, until even the scrape of a pebble seemed intrusive. The crystal veins inside the Heart Tree brightened, reacting to their proximity, as if curious which intruders dared cross its suffering.

Closer now, Sylvanna saw the corpse's armor bore the sigil of the Grove Wardens—spiral-leaf over double root. Once, that crest had guaranteed salvation for lost travelers. Now the emblem was cracked, barely recognizable beneath petrified resin.

"Guardian skewered on its own watchpost," she muttered. "That feels like a sermon."

Draven's gaze never left the hollowed chest. A faint dark vibration—almost a heartbeat reversed—pulsed in that cavity. "Not sermon," he said. "Bait."

Sylvanna's bow dipped toward the corpse. "You think the parasite's awake?"

"I know it is." His mouth thinned. "It's waiting for us to step inside its story."

A sudden twitch jerked the dead Warden's head. Sylvanna flinched. Draven watched, analytical. The chin lifted inch by juddering inch, until the skull's empty sockets stared directly into theirs. No glow, no menace—just vacancy, as hollow as the gap in its ribs. But the movement served its purpose. The air around them folded like leather in a smith's hand.

Vertigo again—harsher. The cavern warped: what had been up now felt behind, what had been down tugged sideways. Sylvanna lurched, nearly pitching over the edge of a root-bridge.

Draven caught her shoulder, fingers biting through cloak and leather. "Anchor," he ordered. "Breath in sets of three."

She obeyed, forcing lungs to pattern with his count. The distortion lessened, but colors around them stretched, oversaturated, as if an unseen artist kept painting over reality in thicker and thicker strokes.

Draven released her once she could stand alone. He slid one hand inside his coat. Sylvanna glimpsed the faint gleam of runic ink along his ribs, strips of cobalt pulsing in a deliberate rhythm.

"Psychogenic pressure," he muttered, more to the air than to her. "Classic opener."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning claws are secondary. It attacks first through the mind." His eyes sharpened. "Brace for hallucination."

He hadn't finished the sentence before the first assault hit.

Sylvanna felt motion at her ankles. She looked down and her stomach iced over. Chimera kits—small, malformed experiments she'd failed and burned years ago—crawled from the shadows, eyes glossy with pain. Scorched feathers sprouted from furless shoulders; mismatched paws dragged useless tails. They mewled, soft and broken, and clung to her boots with charred claws. The smell of singed flesh filled her lungs.

Guilt stabbed so hard her vision blurred. She tried to step back—roots seized her calves. Panic swelled, tightening her chest.

At the edge of her sight Draven shifted. He saw her legs sinking beneath phantom bodies. He reached, clasped her elbow—not gently, but like a piton hammered into stone.

"They are echoes," he said, voice cold enough to frost steel. "Not debts."

His certainty sliced through the nightmare. The kits flickered—once, twice—then collapsed into drifts of ash that dispersed on a breath of nonexistent wind. The smell lingered a heartbeat longer, then faded to cold resin.

Sylvanna sucked air through her teeth, jaw shaking. She managed a nod. Resolve rekindled behind her eyes.

Draven turned to his own attackers.

The air before him shimmered into a long circular hall—stone columns lit by torches too bright. Crimson-robed judges lined the arc, faces pinched in righteous outrage. In the center stood a younger Draven, shackled, head high despite the iron collar digging grooves into his skin. The tribunal's voice rolled, delivering verdicts: traitor, destroyer, butcher.

For an instant real Draven felt the collar's phantom weight. Old shame, sharp as crushed glass, tried to hook into bone.

Then the runes beneath his ribs pulsed. One heartbeat, two. Shame jarred loose, slid down into a mental oubliette he kept for such relics. The phantom collar snapped open and dropped to the floor with a clank only he heard. The judges blurred, their verdicts smearing into static. He walked through them. They dissolved like smoke struck by wind.

Under the Heart Tree the corpse jerked again, ribs cracking wider. Something behind that bone cage growled—an animal sound made of lost voices. The air throbbed with expectant hunger.

Draven's mouth thinned.

Psychological warfare.

The first hallucination struck Sylvanna like a blacksmith's hammer finding soft metal.

A heartbeat earlier the cavern floor had been barren stone; now it teemed with whimpering shapes. Chimera kits—her discarded prototypes—oozed from the cracks, their bodies warped by failed gene-splicing: a kitten's head fused to a lizard's scales, a featherless gryphling dragging wings drenched in raw muscle, a furless fox-serpent that hissed without lungs. They swarmed her calves, tiny claws snagging the hem of her cloak. Sightless eyes seemed to know her face, and their mouths worked in silent appeals.

Terror slid into her chest cavity, quick and cold. Her breath caught halfway to an exhale. Every animal cried with memories she'd shoved deep: the day she injected the wrong serum, the night she burned a barn to cinders to erase evidence, the smell of singed fur that lingered in her hair for weeks. The weight of that guilt tried to shove her knees together.

Draven felt her body go rigid before she voiced a sound. His peripheral vision registered her clenched jaw, the tremor in her bow hand, the white showing above her knuckles. Without hesitation he closed the distance and locked a hand around her elbow, grip unyielding yet measured—strength enough to be a pillar, not a shackle.

"They are echoes," he said. Each word dropped with the precision of a scalpel. His tone held no warmth, no judgment—only fact. "Not debts."

Sylvanna's gaze jerked from the kits to him. The flat certainty in his eyes—an absolute refusal to negotiate with illusion—hit harder than any gentler comfort. She bit down on her trembling lip, forced her lungs to expand, and exhaled through grit teeth. Around her boots the chimera kits flickered, images losing cohesion, as though her breath scattered them like dust. Two heartbeats later the swarm evaporated into charcoal flakes, drifting into dark.

The guilty scent lingered an instant: charred meat, alchemical smoke. Then that memory too dissolved, replaced by the cold resin tang of the Hollow.

Relief felt sharp, almost painful, but she seized it. She nodded once—an unspoken thanks she knew he didn't need—and planted her feet wider, ready for whatever came next.

Draven turned his attention inward, because the parasite did not waste time.

His own ghosts manifested in front of him like a stage play unrolling from stale parchment. Pillars of black marble rose in a sweeping semicircle. Torches guttered with unnatural brightness, carving long spears of light across polished stone. At the arc's apex lounged crimson-robed judges—the Tribunal he had faced in the Tower after the Cataclysm of Rakhal Pass. They materialized fully formed: waxy skin over gaunt cheekbones, righteous disgust curling their lips. Their gavel strikes echoed in his ears though no wood met marble here.

In the dock stood a younger Draven, wrists chained to a post, shoulders straight despite the iron collar biting into skin. His copy's eyes burned with equal parts contempt and exhaustion as the judges' verdicts fell: "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.