The carriage seemed smaller after that.
Eclaire slowly looked away and toward the tunnel wall, her thoughts moving in sharp uncomfortable circles. Part of her wanted to be angry. Another part, if she was being honest, was too busy measuring the terrifying consistency of it.
Because Ludger was not pretending to be kind. He was not pretending to be noble. He was not promising salvation to the Dalmorens just because they had once protected her or because Rufas had opposed the Regent’s cruelty.
He was putting them where he put everyone else: on the scale. And if they were too heavy in the wrong ways, he would remove them. The fact that he could include her in that same logic without flinching was the part that bit deepest.
As they approached the capital, Ludger changed course.
Instead of remaining underground all the way in and slipping through the hidden routes like before, he guided the runic carriage toward one of the outer exits and brought them back to the surface.
Eclaire noticed immediately.
“We’re showing ourselves?”
“Yes.”
Ludger’s answer was simple. They needed to be visible.
If Lionsguard was going to “accept” the job, then people had to see them doing it. That was part of the point now. There was no value in acting like they were sneaking into the capital to avoid responsibility. The decree had to be acknowledged openly enough that no one could claim they had hesitated or ignored imperial orders.
Appear. Be seen. Let the right eyes carry the message for free. Lionsguard had answered the call. That alone would help shape the narrative before they even spoke to anyone important.
Still, that wasn’t the only reason Ludger had chosen to surface. Long before the carriage emerged fully from the tunnel exit, he had already sensed something.
Movement. A lot of it.
Too much to be normal city traffic, even for a capital still boiling from recent chaos. Through Mana Sense, through the subtle vibrations of Seismic Sense brushing the stone and packed ground ahead, he could feel a broader pattern spreading through the streets like a tightening net.
People moving in groups. Armed groups. Not one or two formations either. That had annoyed him enough to bring them up early.
When the carriage finally rolled out into the open and the streets of the capital came into view, the guess became confirmation almost immediately. Guilds. Different colors, different insignias, different equipment, but all moving with the same clear purpose. Groups of adventurers, retainers, hired specialists, and official escorts were being mobilized throughout the city. Some were receiving instructions in hurried clusters near manor compounds or official posts. Others were already heading out in formation through the gates or toward major roads leading away from the capital.
The hunt had begun properly.
Or at least the performance of it had.
The moment the runic carriage entered the busier streets of the capital, people began to recognize it.
More precisely, they recognized him.
Ludger sat at the front with the same dry, unreadable expression he always carried in public, and the emblem of the Lionsguard was displayed clearly enough on the carriage that no one needed long to connect the pieces. Once the first few whispers started, they spread fast.
“That’s him.”
“Lionsguard…”
“The border guild?”
“What is he doing here?”
The reaction only grew from there.
Lionsguard was famous enough now that even people far from the north had heard the name. A guild operating so far away from the capital, yet growing fast enough to become impossible to ignore, naturally attracted interest. Seeing that emblem here, in the middle of the Regent’s expanding hunt, immediately fed the rumor mill like fresh meat thrown into starving dogs.
A famous frontier guild had answered the call. Its vice guildmaster had come in person. And he was just a child. That alone was enough to make half the capital whisper harder than before.
Still, that wasn’t all people noticed. Soon the murmurs shifted again when their eyes moved past Ludger and landed on the three people riding with him.
Eclaire. Rowan. Jennifer. All three wore cloaks and hoods, but those didn’t actually hide their faces.
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What hid their faces were the masks.
Each mask covered everything except the eyes, and the effect was immediately unsettling. They were not horned or fanged monstrosities. No exaggerated beast features. No wild ceremonial designs. They were humanoid masks.
That somehow made them worse. Because they looked close enough to a human face to feel wrong in all the important ways.
The expressions shaped into them were dangerous, fixed in polished menace. Not theatrical snarls or ridiculous demonic grins, but sharper, colder versions of a face than any actual person should have worn. Tension carved into stillness. Anger without movement. Calm with something predatory buried underneath it. They looked like faces stripped of softness and left with only the part that watched violence without blinking.
Human enough to register as people. Wrong enough to feel like monsters wearing human shape. That contrast did exactly what Ludger wanted it to do. People stared. Then looked away. Then looked back again because their instincts kept insisting they had seen something they shouldn’t have.
The masks had been made by Ludger himself with earth magic. Not rough stone either. He had shaped them carefully, then polished them past the point of ordinary craft until the surface looked almost alive under the light. Smooth in the wrong way. Too refined. Too expressive for shaped earth. The faintest changes in shadow across their contours made it seem, at times, as if the masks might move if one looked for too long.
They didn’t. But the possibility sat in people’s minds anyway. And that was enough. The carriage rolled onward while whispers multiplied around it.
“Who are those?”
“They look like executioners…”
“Are those really guild members?”
“Why would they cover their faces like that?”
Some of the braver, or stupider, spectators lingered long enough to get a better look. Most didn’t. The masks made it difficult to place the three riders properly. Their builds, movement, and posture gave away just enough to confirm they were human, but the rest was distorted by the cloaks and those fixed inhuman faces.
It created the exact kind of discomfort Ludger wanted. No certainty. No clean names. Only the impression that the Lionsguard had not merely sent representatives, but something stranger.
Something ominous. Something from the frontier that maybe should have stayed there. Ludger, naturally, ignored all of it.
He kept his gaze forward while the streets parted around the carriage little by little, the capital’s citizens whispering themselves into a richer panic with every meter. Between the guild emblem, his own presence, and the three masked figures riding with him, the message reached the city before any official announcement needed to.
Lionsguard was here. And unlike most of the eager hunting groups flooding the capital, they did not look like people who had come chasing glory. They looked like something the capital had asked for without fully understanding what kind of answer it might receive.
Inside the carriage, the three of them leaned slightly closer and whispered among themselves.
It was subtle enough not to draw immediate attention from the street, but not subtle enough to escape Ludger if he chose to care.
Jennifer glanced toward the people outside, then back at the others. “They’re avoiding looking at us.”
Rowan gave the smallest nod. “I noticed.”
Eclaire’s eyes moved behind the mask, tracking the crowd. “I expected more curiosity.”
That was the strange part.
For people like them, whose real identities could cause all kinds of trouble if properly exposed, the reaction felt almost backwards. Instead of trying harder to figure out who they were, most of the capital’s people looked once, felt something unpleasant crawl up their spine, and then immediately decided that not knowing was healthier.
It was bizarre. If anything, it should have made people more interested. More suspicious. More eager to peek under the cloaks and masks. Instead, fear was doing the opposite. It was pushing their gaze away and making uncertainty feel safer than discovery.
Jennifer whispered, “For us, whose names alone could turn half the Empire upside down in the wrong room, this is… weird.”
“Very,” Eclaire muttered.
Rowan looked out again as another cluster of people lowered their eyes rather than hold his gaze for too long through the mask.
“I don’t think they want answers,” he said. “I think they want distance.”
That was probably the closest thing to the truth.
The masks, the posture, the silence, the fact that they rode beside Ludger rather than behind him like retainers or attendants—it all combined into something the crowd instinctively chose not to test.
Ludger spoke without turning around.
“The mask is only doing part of the work.”
The three of them went still immediately. His voice remained flat.
“If you keep whispering and fidgeting like morons, it will be useless.”
Jennifer’s mouth tightened under the mask. Eclaire looked away for half a second, annoyed more at being correctly called out than at the insult itself.
Ludger continued.
“Civilians are easy,” he said. “They’ll avoid eye contact if you make them uncomfortable enough. Other guilds won’t.”
That shut down the last traces of careless curiosity in the carriage.
Because that was true too.
A frightened merchant, servant, or city resident could be pushed into looking away. Experienced guild members, mercenaries, scouts, and hunters were different. They watched details for a living. They noticed posture, habits, breathing rhythms, weapon hands, old injuries, dialect slips, and the shape of tension in a body before a fight.
Those people would not be scared off by a polished mask alone.
Ludger finally added, “So be cautious.”
Eclaire nodded first. A real one this time, without attitude. Jennifer followed. Then Rowan. No one joked after that. No one whispered either. All three of them understood the same thing at once.
This was an important mission. Not just because it involved the Dalmoren family, the Regent, or the capital. Not just because getting recognized would be dangerous.
But because every small mistake mattered.
A bad habit. A wrong glance. A familiar voice. A clumsy movement.
Any of that could become a thread, and in a place like the capital, the wrong people only needed one thread before they started pulling.
So the three of them straightened slightly and settled into silence, letting the masks and cloaks do their part while they finally did theirs.
Outside, the carriage kept rolling through the capital streets. Inside, the mood shifted. The strange novelty of concealment faded. What remained was the sharper understanding that they were no longer simply hidden.
They were operating.
And if they wanted to stay useful to Ludger, they couldn’t afford to mess up in any aspect.
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