Upon returning home, once again, Ludger didn’t really get the chance to relax.
That was becoming less a pattern and more a law of nature.
By the time he stepped inside and settled into actual work, whatever brief quiet he had stolen for himself in the yard was already gone. The image of Arslan teaching the twins still lingered faintly in the back of his mind, but it had no power against reality for long. Reality, as usual, arrived carrying paperwork.
A lot of paperwork.
Ludger sat down and began checking the papers containing the names of the guild members and the information attached to them. The stack was thick enough to be mildly offensive on sight alone. Names, rough combat roles, specialties, prior backgrounds, training notes, growth markers, logistics assignments, patrol fit, potential squad placements, Yvar had clearly been working himself half to death organizing the whole thing into something at least technically readable.
As expected.
That sort of information discipline had Yvar written all over it.
Ludger flipped through the pages steadily, eyes moving quickly from one section to the next. Even when he didn’t stop long on any single sheet, the scale of it was obvious. Lionsguard had grown too much. Too quickly. What had once been a manageable force with clear faces and obvious strengths had become something larger, rougher, and harder to keep properly in hand.
Over a thousand members now. That number was useful on paper. Annoying in practice.
Because once a guild reached that size, individual knowledge stopped being a natural thing and started becoming a resource that had to be organized deliberately or it simply vanished into the mass.
He muttered something under his breath as he separated one stack from another. Yvar’s work was solid, but most of this was only useful in the broadest sense. Basic records. Structural understanding. Enough to know who existed, where they fit, and which general pile they belonged to.
Still, for real decision-making? A lot of it was almost useless.
With more than a thousand members, only the people who truly stood out would have information worth examining in real depth. The rest mattered, obviously. Any guild that forgot its ordinary backbone deserved to collapse. But in terms of leadership development, combat adaptation, logistics optimization, and long-term operational strength, Ludger could not personally spend time memorizing the life story of every mediocre spear user with acceptable attendance and a decent attitude.
That was insanity. He flipped another page. Then another.
Then set aside a smaller cluster with names he recognized immediately, people with clear potential, squad influence, exceptional growth, unusual classes, or traits worth tracking more closely.
That pile mattered. The rest… The rest needed a better system than Ludger sitting here sorting an expanding mountain of names like some overworked administrator being punished by reality itself.
He leaned back slightly and exhaled through his nose.
“Time for the next step,” he muttered.
The words were quiet, but once spoken, they settled with the weight of inevitability. Because yes. It was time.
The guild could no longer keep running its training structure like a scaled-up version of its older self. That phase had ended the moment Lionsguard became too large for direct cultural control to happen naturally. At this size, if the foundation wasn’t updated intentionally, then standards would start drifting. Quality would blur. Good habits would weaken. Useful knowledge would bottleneck in the hands of a few instructors until those instructors became either overworked, outdated, or irreplaceable in exactly the wrong way.
And that was unacceptable. Ludger looked down at the papers again, but his thoughts had already moved ahead of them. The instructors wouldn’t remain instructors forever. That was the heart of it.
Some would grow strong enough to take command positions. Some would shift into field leadership. Some would die. Some would burn out. Some would plateau. Some would simply stop being the best people to shape the next generation once the guild’s needs evolved beyond what they themselves had been trained for.
If Lionsguard wanted to keep growing without turning into a bloated mass of armed optimism and frontier arrogance, then the teaching system itself had to become stronger than any individual teacher inside it.
That was the next step. Not just better lessons. A better structure. One that could reproduce standards instead of depending on talent and goodwill every single time.
He began splitting the papers more decisively now, the earlier idle review giving way to categorization with real purpose behind it.
Combat instructors. Support instructors. Specialty trainers. Field leaders with teaching potential. People good at fighting but useless at explanation. People weaker in direct combat but excellent at structure, discipline, and correction. People who could shape recruits. People who should never be left alone with recruits unless the goal was confusion, injury, or both.
That last category was unfortunately not small. Ludger’s mouth flattened faintly.
The guild needed layers. Basic instruction for all. Intermediate role-path training based on aptitude. Advanced mentorship for those with real growth potential. A way to standardize fundamentals so that every recruit didn’t come out shaped entirely by whichever instructor happened to yell at them first.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
A way to identify future instructors early and train them properly instead of just assuming strong veterans would somehow know how to teach because they had survived long enough to become impressive.
That assumption had ruined more organizations than most people realized. He tapped the edge of one stack lightly against the table to straighten it.
Lionsguard needed a teaching system that could outlive personalities. A system that could scale. A system that produced fighters, squad support, discipline, tactical thinking, and role clarity without requiring Ludger or Arslan to personally fix everything every time growth created a new hole in the structure.
In other words, Lionsguard had reached the deeply annoying stage where success started demanding professionalism instead of just momentum.
Ludger looked over the piles once more, then reached for a blank sheet.
If the instructors weren’t permanent, then the system had to be. That meant doctrine. Evaluation standards. Progression routes. Instructor selection criteria. Rotating assistant trainers. Probably written manuals too, which was its own special kind of insult.
He stared at the blank sheet for half a second like it had personally offended him. Then he started writing anyway. Because relaxing, apparently, remained a privilege reserved for people with fewer than a thousand armed problems under their roof.
Ludger called in the first five people he thought had the best chance of gaining more influence inside the guild.
Not the strongest. Not necessarily the most talented either. That would have been the stupid way to choose.
Strength mattered, obviously. Talent too. But influence inside a growing organization came from a messier combination of things, competence, reliability, adaptability, presence, the ability to work with others without becoming dead weight, and most importantly, the ability to keep functioning once responsibility stopped being theoretical.
The five he picked were:
Derrin, for the spear users.
Mira, for hunting and field awareness.
Taron, for alchemy and runes.
Rhea, for close combat and sheer forward pressure.
And Callen, for water magic.
They had spent most of their recent time helping move goods toward the Velis League. Useful work, necessary work, profitable work, but not exactly exciting. The routes mattered, the security mattered, and the trade mattered even more now, but none of those five had been built to spend too long acting like glorified escorts for moving wealth from one place to another.
Ludger could tell they were getting bored. Not openly mutinous or stupid about it. Just restless.
The kind of restlessness that appeared when capable young people started feeling their growth was being used well enough, but not fully. The kind that turned into either maturity or bad decisions depending on whether someone gave them a better direction in time.
So he called them in.
When they arrived, they came in with enough caution to show they had learned something over the last months. Not too casual. Not stiff either. Just alert in the way people tended to become around Ludger once they had worked with him long enough to understand that him “having an idea” could improve their future or ruin their afternoon with equal efficiency.
The moment they stepped into the room and saw the stacks of papers, Ludger’s expression, and the way he was already looking at them like pieces being measured for placement, they all came to the same conclusion.
He meant business.
Derrin’s eyes flicked over the papers first, then toward Ludger, already looking mildly concerned in the way only practical people could manage.
Mira took in the room quietly and seemed to understand immediately that this was not a routine check-in. Taron looked interested, which was either promising or dangerous depending on what exactly he thought he might get to experiment with. Callen had the weary look of someone who knew the next few minutes were probably about to become more complicated than he wanted, but not in a way he could avoid.
Rhea, naturally, was the first to speak.
“What are you plotting this time?”
Ludger looked at her.
“Improvement.”
Rhea narrowed her eyes.
“That answer sounds suspicious.”
That earned him the faintest twitch from Mira that almost counted as amusement.
Ludger ignored all of them and let the silence sit just long enough to remind them that, yes, he had in fact called them here for a reason and that reason probably involved work.
Before he could start, though, Rhea suddenly tilted her head and said, with all the restraint of a charging beast,
“Before that, are the rumors true?”
The room paused. Ludger did not react immediately. Unfortunately, Rhea had already committed.
“Did you really kill all those people?” she asked. “The ones from the hunt. And destroy part of a mountain.”
Everyone stared at her.
Derrin looked like he wanted to grab her by the shoulder and physically drag the question back into her throat before it finished existing. Mira blinked once, slow and disbelieving. Taron’s expression tightened in a very particular way that suggested he was horrified on principle and fascinated in practice. Callen just closed his eyes for half a second like a man asking the world why Rhea was still allowed near structured conversations.
Rhea, of course, did not care.
She was Rhea. Impulse reached her first and consequences usually had to run to catch up.
“What?” she said when nobody supported her immediately. “Everyone’s talking about it.”
“That doesn’t mean you ask him like that,” Derrin hissed.
“Why not?”
“Because,” Callen said flatly, “most people enjoy living.”
Rhea folded her arms. “I enjoy living. I’m also curious.”
Mira finally sighed. “That much is obvious.”
Ludger watched the exchange in silence for a moment. Then he answered.
“Yes and no.”
That shut them up faster than a shout would have. Five pairs of eyes locked onto him at once.
Rhea leaned forward almost immediately. “That is an incredibly annoying answer.”
“I know.”
Taron adjusted slightly where he stood. “Which part is yes?”
“The part where the capital and everyone around it now believes I killed them,” Ludger said.
Callen’s brow furrowed. Mira’s gaze sharpened. Derrin, predictably, was the first one to follow the real shape of the answer.
“So the other part,” Derrin said slowly, “is that things were… not exactly as the rumors describe.”
Ludger gave a small nod. That alone changed the atmosphere in the room. Not relaxed. Still tense. But more focused.
Because now they weren’t listening to gossip anymore. They were standing in front of a senior figure they respected, feared, and frankly still didn’t fully understand, who had just casually implied that one of the biggest stories in the Empire was real and not real at the same time.
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