It was exactly the sort of place an old house might use if it still had enough loyal structure left to move properly in the dark.
“And staying close to the capital,” Rowan said, “would be even uglier.”
Ludger nodded once.
“If done properly, it becomes the safest place for a short time. Everyone expects flight. So a well-hidden group near the point of escape can survive while the first wave of hunters runs past them looking farther out.”
Eclaire frowned deeper. “That still sounds insane.”
“It is.”
He didn’t even bother softening it.
“But it’s intelligent insanity.”
That drew the faintest reaction from Jennifer, something between amusement and concern. The carriage rolled onward. No one spoke for several moments after that.
The hunt felt different now. Narrower and stranger at the same time. Less like a simple chase and more like a problem of reading someone else’s nerve correctly.
Ludger looked east again, but his thoughts were already circling back toward the capital and the lands around it.
Ten days. Too little border response. Too little certainty in the chase. Too many people spreading outward too quickly.
Yes.
Either the Dalmorens had hidden themselves in a place protected by old influence, or they had stayed close enough to let the Empire exhaust itself searching in the wrong direction first.
And if Eclaire was right about the Regent’s worsening diplomacy, then that only made the first option more attractive and the second more plausible.
Because a ruler who alienated other countries while purging his own houses created exactly the kind of world where dangerous people stopped fleeing in predictable lines.
They started vanishing into the cracks instead.
Eclaire let his earlier answer sit for a while before finally saying, “You still haven’t explained how you’re actually going to find them.”
Ludger didn’t look at her.
“I’m already working on it.”
That sounded like one of his usual evasions. At first. Then, before long, the three of them began to notice something strange.
Every now and then, Ludger would move his nose slightly, almost like he was testing the air. Not enough to look ridiculous, just enough to be visible if someone was already paying close attention. A second later, he would adjust the direction of the runic carriage by a small amount. Not sharply. Just enough to shift the route a little.
Then he would do it again later. And again. Jennifer stared at him for several seconds before glancing at Rowan and Eclaire. Judging by their faces, they had noticed it too.
That was wrong. Ludger should not have been able to do that.
That kind of tracking was supposed to belong to beastmen or those with skills directly built around it. A human wasn’t meant to casually sniff the air and pull a route from old scent traces like some absurd hunting hound in noble clothing.
And yet that was exactly what he was doing. Or something uncomfortably close to it. Of course, Ludger was not exactly normal anymore.
He had learned the Reinforcer class from the beastmen, and after using it extensively during the attack on the capital, the class had leveled further. That alone would have been annoying enough for anyone trying to keep him within reasonable boundaries.
Reinforcer Lv. 28 [+ 05 Dex, +05 Int, +05 Wis per level.]
Skills: Magic Enhancement Lv 41
Mana Coating Lv 31: Covers the user’s limbs or equipment in a thin layer of mana, increasing durability and impact. Useful for reinforcing punches, kicks, blades, bows, and even defensive blocks.
Precision Reinforcement Lv 26: Improves the fine control of mana reinforcement, allowing the user to direct power into specific muscles, joints, or points of contact. Helps reduce waste and makes movement sharper and more efficient.
Burst Step Lv 11: Releases a quick pulse of reinforced force through the legs, allowing for sudden acceleration over short distances. Best used for dodging, repositioning, or explosive close-range engagement.
Soft Coating Lv 11: Covers the user’s special parts of the body to enhance their abilities. Continuous use might cause strain on certain critical body parts and eventual damage.
What made it worse was the new skills that came with it. Soft Coating allowed him to enhance his sense of smell with mana. Naturally. Because apparently the world had decided Ludger did not yet have enough irritatingly useful ways to solve problems.
He drew in a slow breath through his nose again, mana sharpening the input until the air stopped being simple air and turned into layered residue. Soil. Horse sweat. Leather. Old camp smoke. Human movement. Rotting plant matter. Manure from passing carts. Dry dust ground under too many boots.
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Most of it was worthless. The roads carried too much life for ordinary scent to mean much. But not all groups left the same kind of trail. It had been ten days since Rufas and the others fled the capital.
Under normal circumstances, that should have made scent-tracking nearly useless, especially over traveled ground. But conditions had favored him more than they had favored them.
It had not rained in the area during that time.
Not once. So the ground had not been properly washed clean. And the fugitives hadn’t been in normal condition.
They had been prisoners.
Which meant their sanitary state had been terrible. Gustav’s family, Rufas, the other detainees, many of them had spent days or longer chained, beaten, half-conscious, bleeding, drugged, and barely maintained as living evidence. Even after extraction, that sort of filth did not vanish quickly.
They would have carried strong smells with them. Dried blood. Sweat soaked into damaged clothing. Waste clinging to people too weak or too restrained for dignity to matter.
It was ugly. Useful, but ugly. Ludger’s nose twitched faintly again as he tasted the edge of one such trace at a bend in the road.
There. Weak. Old. Broken up by time and traffic, but still there if he pushed mana through the sense hard enough.
He adjusted the carriage slightly. Behind him, the others were now watching openly. Eclaire was the first to say it.
“You really are sniffing them out.”
Ludger kept his eyes on the road. “Partly.”
Rowan looked out at the dry land around them, then back at Ludger. “Can you follow them cleanly?”
“No.”
That answer came without hesitation. Because no, he couldn’t. Not cleanly. Not continuously.
The smell didn’t run like a bright line through the world waiting for him to follow it. Too much time had passed. Too many other people had crossed the roads. Too many sections had gone dead.
What he could sense came in points.
Fragments.
Places where the group had likely stopped briefly. Rest points. Transfer spots. Short breaks where the smell had settled long enough into the dry air and ground to leave something behind. In those moments, the traces grew stronger and easier to separate from the rest.
Which meant the Dalmorens had moved fast and carefully.
But not perfectly. No one moved a half-dead group cleanly enough to leave nothing at all. Ludger breathed in again, then let the weak scent sort itself apart under mana until the useful part remained.
Blood gone dry. Human stress-sweat. The stale foul residue of people who had not been properly cleaned after imprisonment. He disliked having his senses confirm it so clearly, but it did help.
“I can only catch them at a few points,” he said. “Probably where they took short breaks.”
Jennifer’s eyes narrowed. “So they didn’t stay long.”
“No.”
“Enough to reset the wounded, maybe change support,” Rowan said.
Eclaire looked out over the road, her posture tightening slightly under the cloak.
“That means they were being moved efficiently.”
“Yes.”
Ludger made another small adjustment to the carriage’s course.
The scent had faded almost completely again, but that was expected. He wasn’t following a clear trail as much as reconstructing a chain of likely movement from the places where the hidden group had been forced to leave a little too much of themselves behind.
It was slow. Irritating. And better than guessing. Eclaire watched him for another few seconds.
Jennifer leaned back slightly, still clearly unhappy with how unnatural the whole thing felt. “So we’re just going to follow dried blood and bad prisoner hygiene across half the countryside.”
Ludger gave the smallest shrug.
Rowan, of course, seemed the least bothered. “Does it point east?”
“Mostly.”
That made sense. Or at least enough sense not to be comforting.
East was still the expected direction, but the broken pattern of traces suggested something more complicated than a direct run. Pauses in odd places. Slight route changes. Time gained through preparation. Someone had been guiding them with more thought than desperation.
Ludger lifted his nose slightly again, mana threading through the sense one more time as the carriage rolled forward.
Another faint trace. Off the main line. Not far.
His eyes sharpened and he nudged the carriage accordingly.
Behind him, the three masked figures fell quiet again.
Because whatever weirdness they had just witnessed, one thing was clear now.
Ludger had, in fact, already been working on it.
And annoyingly enough, it might actually work. Eclaire watched him for a while longer before finally asking the question with complete sincerity.
“Is there anything you can’t do?”
Ludger didn’t even glance back when he answered.
“Making the people around me stop acting like I need a babysitter is one.”
Jennifer let out a faint laugh before she could stop herself. Rowan’s shoulders shifted slightly, which was close enough to amusement for him. Eclaire stared at Ludger’s back for a second, then clicked her tongue.
“That is not a real weakness.”
“It’s a recurring one.”
That, annoyingly enough, sounded genuine. After that, the carriage kept moving, and Ludger kept following what traces he could.
For the rest of the day, he used the scent in fragments. Old breaks. Faint turns. Places where the fugitives had stopped long enough for blood, sweat, and the stale ugliness of prison to settle into the dry road and surrounding air. The trail was weak, broken, and irritating, but it existed.
Until it didn’t.
By the time the sun had dipped low enough to stain the horizon and the light had begun to thin into evening, Ludger lost it completely.
Not gradually. Completely. One moment there had still been enough residue to work with, and the next there was simply... nothing.
He slowed the carriage.
Then stopped it.
The four of them got out while the last light of the day stretched long over the road and the nearby grasslands. Ludger stood still for a few seconds, letting Mana Sense and his enhanced smell reach outward again while the others stayed quiet and watched.
Nothing.
He moved through the area after that, first in a straight line, then in wider and wider circles. He checked the roadside. The low brush. The soil. The shallow rises and dips nearby. He even widened the search farther than he liked, tracing likely movement angles and checking whether the group had doubled back, split, or transferred to another route.
Still nothing.
No clean continuation. No secondary point. No break in the gap. Just absence. That made his expression flatten.
It looked like they had prepared to erase the traces of their smell as well.
Not perfectly from the beginning, that part had still given him enough to follow this far, but at some point they had switched methods. Changed clothes, used masking agents, washed what they could, changed transport, or moved into conditions where the old scent stopped carrying usefully. Maybe several of those at once.
And very much the sort of thing an old great house with real preparation would do.
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