Men sweated through their gear, stumbled over broken ground, and kept glancing toward the next column of smoke with the hollow-eyed look of people starting to suspect they had wandered into a much worse story than the one they were promised.
By the time the sun had shifted far enough to make the light harsher and the shadows longer, the terrain itself had begun to change. The distant mountains between the Empire and the Velis League came into view.
That alone made several people’s expressions darken. Because once the mountains were in sight, the path of destruction stopped feeling random.
It started looking intentional. A route. A push. A retreat. Or bait. None of the possibilities were comforting.
The search groups pressed on anyway, boots pounding over the last stretches of rough land while smoke drifted behind them in multiple dark scars across the sky. Their nerves were frayed now. Their formations looser. Their confidence mostly replaced by the kind of stubborn momentum that kept men moving after sense had already suggested otherwise.
Then someone at the front shouted. Not in panic. In recognition. Heads turned at once.
Far ahead, near the lower approaches leading into the mountain paths, they could finally see them. A large group of people was running toward the slopes.
Not marching. Not moving in controlled formation. Running. Desperately. Like people trying to escape something behind them. Like prey.
The image hit the search groups all at once.
Wounded figures. Cloaks snapping. Guards trying to hold formation while half-dragging the weaker members forward. Panic in the movement. Urgency in every step.
And suddenly everyone understood.
The Dalmoren family. And Gustav’s people with them. There they were. At last. After all the smoke, all the blasts, all the confusion and escalating dread, the fugitives were finally in sight.
For half a second, that realization almost felt like relief.
Something known. Something human. Something they could chase. Then the obvious question followed right behind it:
What in the hells were they running from? No one slowed long enough to answer. The search groups surged forward at once.
Fatigue vanished under the shock of finally seeing a target. Rivalries were forgotten again. Men shouted to one another, adjusted grips on weapons, and broke into a harder run as they rushed toward the fleeing group and the mountains beyond.
Because whatever nightmare had been tearing the land apart all day, the Dalmorens clearly wanted no part of facing it.
And if the searchers reached them first… Then maybe, finally, someone would explain what kind of disaster they had been following across half the countryside.
They were almost at the mountains when the search groups stopped. Not because anyone ordered them to. Because something in the sky made their bodies decide for them.
At first, it looked like a point of light forming above the lower mountain approach. Then that point swelled. And swelled again.
A fireball appeared overhead, hanging in the air like a newborn sun dragged down far too close to the world. It burned with an intensity that did not look natural even by the standards of high magic. Layers of orange, gold, and near-white heat folded into one another while the sphere kept expanding, growing larger and larger as if the sky itself had become fuel for it.
The temperature in the whole area began to rise. Fast. The wind turned hot.
Armor plates warmed. Cloaks stirred in air that felt suddenly dry enough to cut the throat. Men who had been sprinting moments ago slowed to a stunned halt, staring upward with wide eyes while sweat broke across their skin for reasons that had nothing to do with exertion.
Then they saw them. Ahead.
Near the base of the mountain route, where the fleeing fugitives were trying to reach the crest and vanish over to the other side, a few figures stood apart from the chaos.
Four people. And one young man at the center. His arms were raised.
Mana poured upward from him in such overwhelming quantity that even those too weak or untalented to properly sense it could feel the pressure crawling across their skin. The giant fireball overhead continued to swell as he fed more and more power into it, its light reflecting off the mountainside in violent flashes that made stone look feverish and alive.
The search groups froze. Because now they understood. The craters. The smoke pillars. The trail of devastation. All of it. It had not been a guardian. Not a beast. Not some escaped labyrinth horror rampaging toward the border. It had been that.
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That young monster standing beneath a growing sun with his arms raised like he had personally decided the mountain no longer deserved to exist. Some of the fugitives looked back too.
And when they did, panic in their movement became something closer to despair.
They pushed harder toward the peak, boots slipping over loose rock and broken slopes, guards trying to drag the weaker ones faster, all of them suddenly understanding that whatever chance they had left existed only on the other side.
They didn’t make it. Before the last of them could reach the crest and disappear beyond sight… Ludger moved. It was not a dramatic motion. That was the terrifying part. He simply brought his arms down and sent the fireball forward.
The sphere dropped through the sky with the weight of a falling star.
The sound came first, a deep, roaring descent that built so quickly it seemed to crush all other noise under it. Then came the light, bright enough that several people instinctively squinted or turned their heads before the impact even happened.
The fireball struck the mountain near the upper approach.
the world detonated. The impact was not just an explosion. It was annihilation given shape.
For a fraction of a second, the point of contact vanished under a bloom of blinding white-orange light so intense that the mountainside ceased to look like stone at all. Then the whole section ruptured outward. Rock exploded in every direction. Vast slabs of the slope were ripped apart and hurled into the air as if they weighed nothing. Cracks flashed through the mountain face faster than thought, and molten fragments sprayed outward in incandescent arcs.
Then the main blast expanded.
A titanic sphere of fire and destruction swallowed the upper path, rolled across the peak, and burst outward with enough force to flatten the surrounding air. It looked like the mountain had briefly become the center of a new sun, the flames boiling upward and outward while torn earth, pulverized rock, and burning debris were consumed inside the expanding inferno.
The shockwave hit a heartbeat later. It slammed into everyone watching with brutal force.
Men staggered backward. Some were thrown off balance entirely. Loose stone, dust, and fragments of scorched earth blasted across the area like a storm of knives and ash. Cloaks snapped violently. Horses screamed. Several searchers hit the ground outright as the compressed wall of force ripped over them.
At the same time, the heatwave followed. Not ordinary heat. Not the warmth of a bonfire or the flare of a battlefield spell.
This was the kind of heat that made exposed skin sting instantly and sucked moisture from the air so hard it felt like the land had been shoved into an oven. Faces burned. Eyes watered. Breathing turned painful. Almost everyone had to throw an arm up over their face or turn away entirely just to avoid being cooked by the blast’s aftermath.
Dust and smoke surged across the lower slopes in a rolling black-red cloud.
For several seconds, no one could see anything. Only hear it. The collapsing roar of shattered stone. The hiss of superheated debris.
The last growl of power bleeding out of the explosion while chunks of mountain continued breaking loose somewhere inside the smoke.
Then, slowly, the dust began to thin. The smoke drifted. The light dimmed enough for the world to take shape again.
And when it did… A good chunk of the mountain was simply gone. Not broken in the ordinary sense.
Gone.
The upper approach had been erased, carved away so violently that the mountain now looked as if some colossal hand had taken a bite out of it. Where there had once been a rising path and a solid ridgeline, there was now a vast gouged-out ruin of broken stone, burning fractures, and freshly exposed inner rock glowing faintly from residual heat. Half-melted sections dripped and cooled in grotesque shapes. Rubble cascaded from unstable edges in long delayed avalanches.
The route to the other side no longer existed.
It had been obliterated.
And standing below that devastation, with the scorched wind still rolling around him and the four others at his side, Ludger looked less like a teenager and more like the sort of disaster people spent generations turning into cautionary legends.
No one from the search groups spoke. No one from the fugitives did either. Because after watching a mountain lose a piece of itself in a single attack, there were not many words left worth saying.
Soon enough, Ludger lowered his arms.
The lingering heat around him twisted the air for another few seconds, then slowly began to settle. Beside him, the three masked figures remained still, their silhouettes sharp against the scorched light and drifting smoke. None of them said anything. There was nothing to say. The mountain had already spoken for them.
Then Ludger turned around. So did the other three. And without so much as a glance back toward the shattered slope, the four of them began walking away from the mountain.
That was somehow worse than the attack itself. No triumph. No declaration. No threat shouted for all to hear.
Just four figures leaving behind a destroyed mountainside and a silence so heavy it seemed to crush the will to move.
The search groups reacted immediately. Not by attacking. Not by calling out. By moving out of the way.
Men stepped aside almost instinctively, opening a path wide enough that none of them could be accused of blocking Ludger’s retreat. Some lowered their heads. Others kept their eyes on him but made sure their weapons remained exactly where they were. Even the bolder among them had no interest in giving Ludger Graves even the faintest excuse to decide that incinerating them too would be a practical cleanup step.
Because after what they had just seen, nobody present had any doubt that he could do it.
Or worse. So the path opened.
And Ludger walked through it with the same calm indifference he carried into everything, the three masked individuals following close behind while smoke and heat rolled off the ruined mountain at their backs.
No one stopped them. No one was stupid enough to try.
Only after the four of them had left the area entirely, after their figures had grown smaller against the scarred land and finally disappeared into the distance, did the search groups begin to move again.
Slowly. Cautiously. Like men approaching the remains of a divine punishment and not entirely convinced it was finished.
They advanced toward the impact site in broken formation, boots crunching over scorched stone and loose rubble. The ground was still hot in places. Some of the nearer rocks had cracked from the heat and now gave off faint curls of steam. The smell was awful too—a dry, seared stink of burned earth, shattered mineral, and something else underneath it that no one wanted to identify too quickly.
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