Ludger rose to his feet and looked once more toward the distant positions of the scouts.
“I’ll dispose of them first,” he said. “Then we move to the location.”
Eclaire stared at him for half a second.
“Is that your new catchphrase now?” she asked. “Going to ‘dispose of’ someone or something?”
Ludger glanced at her while adjusting his gloves.
“Relax,” he said. “I won’t kill them unless they try to kill me first.”
Eclaire did not look convinced. Not even remotely. Still, she didn’t answer.
At this point, arguing over the exact meaning of words with Ludger felt like trying to negotiate with weather. He would say something horrifying in the calmest tone imaginable, then act mildly inconvenienced when people assumed the worst.
So instead, the three of them watched as he stepped away from the camp and into the dark.
Then he vanished. Not literally. But close enough that the difference stopped mattering after the first few seconds.
Ludger moved with the silence of someone who had long since stopped treating stealth like a separate skill and started treating it like another natural way to travel. Assassin-class abilities wrapped around his body in subtle ways, reducing friction, muting motion, smoothing intent. He chose his path carefully, using the darkness between low rises and broken lines of brush while the night wind slid across the land in the same direction he was moving.
That helped.
The wind carried sound away from his targets and pushed the faint traces of his presence away from them as well. Combined with his steps, his posture, and the tight control he kept over his mana, it turned him into something the night did not bother reporting.
The first scout was positioned where Ludger had expected.
A low rise with sparse brush and just enough elevation to keep eyes on the camp. The man had wrapped himself well and stayed still for long enough that, to ordinary sight, he might have passed for part of the ground if one didn’t look too hard.
Ludger approached anyway. Step by step. Quietly. The scout noticed something only at the very end. Maybe a shift in pressure. Maybe instinct. Maybe the animal part of the mind that woke up right before danger arrived.
The man started to turn. Too late. Ludger flicked his fingers once.
The ground beneath the scout’s feet softened instantly and collapsed into quicksand. One moment he was balanced on firm earth, the next his footing vanished and both legs plunged downward. The scout jerked in shock, arms throwing outward as panic hit faster than understanding.
He opened his mouth. Ludger was already there. The strike landed cleanly against the man’s temple. No wasted motion. No flourish. Just a hard precise blow delivered without holding back.
The scout’s eyes rolled and his body went slack almost immediately, dropping sideways as the quicksand loosened and released him just enough to let him crumple awkwardly onto the ground instead of disappearing fully into it.
While the man was still falling, Ludger looked down at him and said, in a tone far too casual for the moment,
“You’ll feel that for a few days.”
Then he moved on. There were more. Ludger knocked down ten scouts in five minutes. The whole thing was almost insultingly efficient.
One vanished into softened ground and woke up with half his face numb. Another caught a sharp strike to the base of the neck before he could finish turning. A third managed to get his weapon halfway up before Ludger stepped inside his reach and dropped him with a short brutal hit to the jaw. No drawn-out fights. No wasted movement. No dramatic kills in the dark. Just one watcher after another removed from the board before any of them could properly warn the others.
At one point, Ludger paused for half a second and glanced over another unconscious scout sprawled in the dirt. He briefly wondered whether they were all from different groups.
That would have been funny. Messy, but funny. Still, he didn’t care enough to sort them. A scout was a scout. If they were watching the area and could interfere, they went down.
Simple.
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Once the last one hit the ground, Ludger turned back and rejoined the others. Eclaire studied him for a moment as he returned, her eyes flicking once over the lack of visible damage on him and then toward the darkness behind him where ten separate people were now sleeping through the most important part of their night.
The four of them advanced quickly after that, leaving the camp behind and pushing through the night at a pace meant to outrun notice. Ludger kept them moving fast on purpose. If any other scouts were farther out, if anyone woke up too early, or if some guild had layered watchers beyond the ones he dropped, then speed mattered now. The field had already been found. Lingering only increased the odds that someone else would stumble into the same answer.
So they moved.
Fast enough that grass bent and sprang back after them. Fast enough that the night air cut colder against their cloaks. Fast enough that conversation died on its own. Before long, they reached the area in question.
At first glance, there was nothing there. Just a stretch of low hills and heavy grass between them. Uneven ground. A few broad rises. The sort of useless rural land that made maps dull and travelers impatient.
But now that they stood close enough, the lie felt clearer. The grass was wrong.
Not obviously wrong. That was what made the illusion good. It matched the place just enough to be accepted on instinct. But the texture of the mana around it, the way the area settled in perception, the subtle mismatch between Ludger’s seismic map and what their eyes showed them, it all confirmed the same thing.
The grass was part of the magical illusion. Beneath that seemingly harmless spread of tall wind-shifting green, something else was being concealed. Eclaire looked over the empty-looking stretch and then at Ludger.
“How do we proceed?”
Ludger didn’t answer with words immediately.
He just smirked. That expression again. The one that meant some poor bastard’s idea of safety was about to stop being correct.
Jennifer saw it and muttered, “I don’t like that face.”
Rowan, staring at the false field ahead, said, “We’re already here. Liking it isn’t required.”
Ludger stepped forward a little, eyes fixed on the disguised ground. The smirk stayed in place. Because illusions were useful things. Useful until they met someone stubborn enough to stop respecting what he was supposed to see.
The smirk stayed on Ludger’s face for a second too long.
He noticed it the way he noticed most things about himself that he would rather not admit existed, quietly, precisely, and with just enough irritation to make it memorable. It wasn’t even the expression itself that bothered him. It was what it implied. That sharp little curl at the corner of his mouth only tended to appear when he was looking at a problem and thinking of the ugliest efficient way to solve it. Not necessarily the bloodiest. Not always the cruelest. Just the method that cut through the most resistance while leaving everyone else wondering when exactly things had stopped being fair.
And lately, he had been doing that more often. He had honestly believed he’d grown past it. Or at least dulled it enough that it stopped surfacing so easily.
Over the last few years, he had worked hard, harder than most people around him realized, to take his surroundings seriously. To stop treating the world like a rough stage built for his own advancement. To stop looking at crises like they were merely puzzles with flesh attached. To stop defaulting to the assumption that if he had the power, then he also had the right to force reality into shape however he pleased.
Apparently that work had not gone as far as he thought. Because the smirk was still there. And more than that, the impulse behind it was still alive. That was the part he disliked.
When he had been younger, he had worn that expression a lot more. Back then, he had barely cared enough about how he looked while doing it. The world around him had felt... not fake, exactly, but softer around the edges than it should have. Easier to push against. Easier to ignore when it complained.
He knew why.
The reincarnation alone would have been enough to distort a person’s perspective if they were stupid about it. Add in a system that gave him absurd advantages, private growth, hidden momentum, skills no one else could match at the same rate, and all the usual little confirmations that yes, he really was operating on a different playing field from most people around him...
And some part of him had grown used to standing apart. Too used to it. He had never fully thought, none of this is real. He wasn’t that much of an idiot.
But he had thought, in ways small enough to excuse at the time and ugly enough to become obvious only later, that reality would bend for him more often than it broke him. That his special circumstances put him outside certain ordinary consequences. That other people’s fear, confusion, politics, or emotional fragility were things he could walk through rather than things he truly had to carry responsibility for.
Not always. Not in every situation. But enough. Enough to become a habit. Enough that looking back on it now made his jaw tighten a little with quiet contempt. Because that kind of thinking was childish in the worst way. Not because it was immature, but because it was selfish while pretending to be practical.
And the really irritating part was that traces of it still remained.
He could feel them now, in moments like this, when a hard problem rose in front of him and his first useful instinct was still too close to amusement. Too close to satisfaction. Too close to the old private thrill of knowing he could break the shape of a situation if he stopped caring what anyone else thought of the method.
He hated that. Or rather, he hated that he didn’t hate it enough to make it disappear completely. Ludger let out a slow breath through his nose.
There was no point standing there in the dark and dissecting his own flaws like a philosopher with too much free time. He wasn’t here to become a better person in the abstract. He was here because a hidden force field lay in front of them, an old great house was likely buried under it somewhere, and the Regent’s hunt was still spreading through the countryside like mold with swords.
He had work to do. So he took the thought and put it where he put all the others that were inconvenient but not immediately useful.
Away. Then he examined the actual problem again. He already had a plan.
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