The Villain Professor's Second Chance-Chapter 682: The Elven Demon Hunt (End)

One last illusion rose—Clara, small again, eight years old, holding the doll he had carved her from scrap wood.

She smiled, gap-toothed, hopeful.

He did not lift his blade.

He simply walked forward, through her unfurling outline.

As phantom wood shattered into pale sparks, he whispered a word only she would have recognized.

Soft forgiveness.

The image dispersed like breath on glass.

The demon shuddered.

Illusion threads snapped, whip lines of shadow recoiling into its center with explosive recoil, ripping smoky flesh as they withdrew.

It staggered backward, weapon hands trembling.

Sylvanna pressed a fist to her breastplate, breath stuttering with relief and awe.

She knew that posture—enemy pushed past the brink, scrambling to reforge courage from splinters.

Draven's sword lifted, tip steady, shoulders level.

His gaze held nothing but frost-clear purpose.

Each measured slash that followed wasn't random; it was surgery.

He cut at connective shadows, chopped away lingering echoes, excised figments like dead tissue around an infected wound.

Not once did he give the demon the solid target it needed to counter.

Not once did he allow the phantoms to coalesce fully before dismissing them with steel.

Minutes—or maybe heartbeats masquerading as minutes—passed in that disciplined attrition.

Cries thinned to whispers, then to breathy whimpers, then nothing at all.

Faces smeared like rain-soaked chalk, grief diluted to gray streaks on darker fog.

Finally only the demon remained—heaving, blades sagging, smoke skins patched by jagged fissures that bled dim starlight.

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Draven's breathing stayed even.

Every step still matched the Grove's pulse, his boots drumming nature's subdued warbeat.

Across the line Sylvanna exhaled the breath she hadn't noticed holding.

She could see it plain now.

He wasn't losing.

He was exhausting it.

Each slash of Draven's blade wasn't random; it was a physician's scalpel finding sickness, excising it with brutal precision.

Every cut traced a purpose—either clipping a smoke-tendon that still anchored the demon to its crumbling illusions or shearing away the faint rootlets of mana that kept those phantoms alive.

He never hacked or hacked twice.

One slice, exactly deep enough, then on to the next malignant thread.

With each incision the field of memories grew paler.

Faces that had once glared in high-definition accusation now bled into watercolor.

Clara's curls lost their sable shine, drifting apart like pigment in rinsing water; Garen's dented breast­plate became a smear of gray under a dissolving sky.

Cries swooned into echoes, echoes into muffled hums, until even that sorrowful chorus sounded distant, as though heard through thick doors at the end of a long corridor.

Draven's breathing remained measured—precise eight-count cycles he'd practiced in the training pits of the Tower, the cadence drilled to survive tournaments where opponents tested lungs as much as skill.

Every inhale fed his muscles and fed his mind: note angle, note speed, adjust foot placement by a finger's width.

Every exhale pushed out everything else—ghost wails, scorch-smell residue, the slip of old guilt that wanted to climb into his spine.

Stay mechanical; stay alive.

The demon's stolen energy thinned the way wind dwindles at the edge of a storm—first the whistle turns ragged, then the clouds lose shape.

Draven caught the exact moment the creature realized it could no longer bankroll its hallucinations: a quick contraction of its smoke torso, as though every phantom thread had snapped back and punched it in the gut.

It doubled, soundless, and for a heartbeat the clearing hung in expectant hush.

Then it screamed.

An unearthly rip—part kettledrum, part tearing silk—split the air.

The remaining illusions fell away like rotted curtains, dropping into puddles of shadow that soaked into the moss.

What remained could barely be called a body: a writhing knot of half-made hands crawling over shattered faces, each mouth whispering disjointed fragments—Clara's childhood lullaby, Elise's final field order, a hundred regrets looped into meaningless static.

At its center hovered the core.

A molten sphere, no larger than a clenched fist, but bright as smelted iron fresh from forge.

Veins of fire pulsed through the mass, beating in frantic sync—hate, sorrow, hate, sorrow.

Objective identified: Destroy the core.

No need to voice it; the command nested like a hot gem behind his sternum.

The demon evidently read the same calculus, because it exploded forward, all subtlety abandoned.

Tendrils, once thin as whipcord, thickened into tar-dark cables.

They whipped through the air with the crack of siege bowstrings, gouging furrows in earth as they missed.

Draven let the world compress to markers and timing windows.

First strike—high right.

His sword came up in warding cross-guard; tendril struck steel, sparks blasted sideways, lighting a ring of fungus in ghost-blue flame.

Rebound energy converted into slide-step to the left—balance preserved.

Second strike—low left, hooking for calves.

He hopped, heel snapping up; cloth hem tore but flesh didn't.

In the air he torqued hips, blade tip dipping to sever the predatory limb just above an imagining of a knee.

Smoke ripped like parchment.

The demon shrieked, dragging back a stump that bled ember motes.

Third strike—straight thrust for the chest.

Draven's answer: riposte.

He turned the point aside, overlaid his weight, and punched the longblade forward in a stabbing blur that pierced a mantle of knotting hands.

Molten ichor sprayed; sizzling beads peppered his cloak, leaving smoking pinholes.

He thought in short mantras to keep muscles loose:

Shoulder loose, hips turned, push through knee—cut low, then pivot.

And he did exactly that, rotating under a horizontal sweep and returning with a spinning slash that shaved another tendril near what passed for a thigh.

The demon buckled, its architecture failing in segments.

In panic it tried a gambit: two mirrored hands snapped shut around Draven's sword, phasing from mist to near-solid obsidian to cage the blade.

The pressure could have crushed tempered steel if he'd clung on.

He released instantly, bare fingers brushing the air where the hilt had been—already transferring kinetic intent to his body.

Left shoulder crashed into the demon like a battering ram, all forty-odd kilos of Draven's weight harnessed into one concentrated burst.

Smoke flesh folded; the creature stumbled sideways.

Right hand vanished into his coat, emerged gripping a narrow utility knife—simple black handle, monomolecular edge designed for sabotage, not duels.

He raked it upward just beneath the molten heart, feeling resistance like slicing boil-hardened leather.

Twist.

The blade snapped internal tethers; a gout of fiery paste splurted across his knuckles, searing leather but not skin beneath.

The demon sagged, core wobbling like a lantern in hurricane wind.

Draven discarded the knife—mission accomplished—and yanked his main blade free with a violent twist-snap.

Edge sang, newly hungry.

He sprinted for the finish, footfalls syncing to his pulse—tat-tat-tat, each step perfect geometry.

Halfway through the charge the core flashed, discharging a psychic wave.

Colors inverted: violet moss turned yellow; his cloak looked bone white, then black again.

Pain stabbed behind his eyes like hot needles.

Skip heartbeat, skip heartbeat.

He forced his cardiovascular rhythm to stutter—an old meditation trick—so the psychic pressure passed through a trough instead of striking a peak.

Vision blurred, then cleared.

He was still on line, still inside timing.

One broken root jutted up, jagged as a spear.

He planted, pushed.

Body launched skyward in a clean arc.

Mid-flight the demon panicked, hurling a spray of spike-shadows into the space he'd occupied.

Too late.

He was above them, momentum driving him into a half-twist, cloak billowing like storm wings.

For a single suspended heartbeat—the still point at apex—Draven angled the sword down, blade-grip steady, wrists locked.

Tip aimed dead center at that pulsing forge of sorrow.

Gravity reclaimed him.

He came down like a thunder-bolt, blade spiraling in corkscrew torque.

Edge kissed the core, met magma-heat resistance, then bored through.

He felt the fracture—the sudden surrender—as the steel chewed through molten shell, then into the tender engine underneath.

Once fully buried, he rotated the hilt, grinding, severing the last flaring arteries of emotion that moored demon to world.

A violent shock travelled up his arms, but he held firm.

The core imploded, light collapsing back in on itself with a sound like a breath sucked through broken glass.

In the vacuum left behind every attached tendril yanked free; the demon's patchwork faces froze mid-wail, then cracked.

Web-lines of golden fissures raced across its entire form, weaving so fast the creature seemed cocooned in lightning filigree.

The demon gave a final, shuddering howl—then shattered.

Fragments of sorrow and regret burst outward, drifting like ashen petals on a dead breeze. Faint whimpers echoed, then faded into silence.

Draven landed lightly, blade reversed, standing in absolute stillness.

Balance restored.

He stared at the remains without expression, sheathed his blade with a slow, exact motion.

The Grove heaved a collective breath. Trees straightened. Colors desaturated back from fever-intensity. The world itself seemed to reset, grateful.

Sylvanna approached slowly, warily, her hands loose at her sides.

"One demon down," Draven said simply, his voice cutting through the clearing like a scalpel. "More to dissect."

He didn't look at her.

His eyes were already turned toward the deeper heart of the Grove—where the true puppeteer waited.

Waiting to be unmade.