Arslan watched him for a second and said, “That look is exactly why I’m not going in your place.”
Ludger looked back at him. “What look.”
“The one where you stop looking like my son for a moment and start looking like you’re already planning how to peel answers out of three different people before dessert.”
Elaine smiled faintly into her drink. That was… unfairly accurate. Ludger didn’t bother denying it.
Instead, he said, “Then it’s a good thing I’m the one going.”
Arslan muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like that remains debatable, but he let it rest there. The dinner table settled again after that, the warm peace of the room standing in quiet contrast to the capital waiting for Ludger in two months’ time.
But in the back of his mind, the thought remained. The illusionist. The party. And the chance that, under enough lights and silk and ceremony, someone might finally say something useful.
After another week buried in guild work, Ludger had to admit he was getting tired. Not exhausted in the simple physical sense. That would have been easier to deal with.
This was the duller kind of fatigue. The one that built up when too much of his time was being spent sitting, planning, sorting, writing, correcting, organizing, and teaching in ways that were useful but fundamentally unsatisfying.
He was still training his classes whenever he found a bit of time and enough mana to spare.
That part hadn’t stopped. He kept pushing what he could, testing skill interactions, refining control, advancing little by little whenever gaps opened in his schedule. But lately it had started to feel less rewarding than before, and he knew exactly why.
Classes like Guild Master and Teacher had spoiled him.
Those two were irritatingly efficient in their own way. They gave him passive growth while he worked. He could sit behind a desk, manage the guild, shape other people, improve structures, teach idiots how not to remain idiots, and still feel the system quietly acknowledging that yes, this counted. Yes, he was progressing. Yes, the effort mattered.
Without that? The experience felt thinner. Slower. Harder to care about. Ludger leaned back in his chair and stared at the papers spread out across his desk with the expression of someone being personally insulted by administrative success.
His motivation to keep grinding like this was dropping fast. Because in the end, no amount of paperwork could replace what his body wanted. He wanted movement. He wanted impact.
He wanted the clean, satisfying reality of muscle strain, breath, weight, and force. He wanted to feel improvement in his limbs instead of only recognizing it in charts, systems, and better organizational efficiency. He wanted to test himself against resistance that pushed back instead of against piles of problems that just kept multiplying when he solved them badly.
He wanted to move his body. He wanted to feel, in his muscles and bones, that he was becoming stronger. That mattered. A lot more than he had let himself admit recently.
For all his pragmatism, for all the usefulness of leadership classes and skill growth tied to management, there was still a simple part of him that wanted to train the old-fashioned way. Push harder. Hit harder. Lift more. Fight. Adapt. Improve in a way that left sweat on the skin and strain in the limbs instead of only ink on the desk and structure in the guild.
Ludger let out a slow sigh and muttered under his breath,
“I was wrong.”
The room, unfortunately, did not care. He looked down at the half-finished work in front of him and went on anyway.
“When I said I’d have the chance to focus on myself once I mastered the Guild Master class…”
His mouth flattened faintly. That had been optimistic. Stupidly optimistic, in retrospect. Mastering one class had not freed him. It had just opened the next layer of responsibility.
Because once he understood the role better, he became more useful at it. And once he became more useful at it, there were even fewer excuses to leave the work undone. The guild had grown. The systems needed rebuilding. Squads needed shaping. Trade needed management. Training doctrine needed standardizing. People kept coming to him with things that, annoyingly enough, were often actually worth his attention.
So instead of gaining freedom, he had gained competence. Which the world, naturally, interpreted as permission to hand him even more work. Ludger rubbed a hand once over his face and stared at the ceiling for a moment.
“Yes,” he muttered. “That was stupid.”
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Because the truth was obvious now.
There was no magical point where one responsibility simply ended and left behind open space for selfish growth. Not at this level. Not with a guild this size. Not with enemies this large, politics this rotten, and his own position this central.
If he wanted time to focus on himself, he would have to take it. Deliberately. Aggressively, if necessary. Not wait for responsibility to politely step aside and make room.
That realization irritated him. Mostly because it sounded exactly like the sort of lesson he should have accepted sooner. He lowered his gaze again and looked over the desk, the manuals, the reports, the names, the endless shape of Lionsguard’s growth.
Important work. Necessary work. But still not enough on its own.
Sooner or later, he would need to step away from the desk and remind both his body and the system that he was not just a planner, teacher, or guild architect.
He was still a fighter. And if he ignored that for too long, he was going to become the kind of person who told himself he was too important to train properly anymore.
Ludger found that possibility disgusting.
So he sat there in silence for another few seconds, then exhaled through his nose again and let the irritation settle into something more practical.
Fine. If the world refused to hand him time to focus on himself, then he would carve that time out instead. That sounded much more reasonable. Spending almost fifteen years grinding skills and classes had done something permanent to Ludger’s brain.
It had made stillness feel wrong. Just the particular kind of stillness where nothing meaningful was improving.
When that happened, he grew restless fast. Too fast, probably.
Most people would have looked at his current life and called it progress anyway. The guild was growing. His influence was growing. His understanding of systems, structures, and people had deepened. Useful work kept getting done.
But that wasn’t the same thing.
Not to him.
Not after years of watching numbers rise, skills evolve, classes shift, and every hard-earned improvement stack into the next. Once a person got used to that rhythm, effort, growth, adaptation, progress, it became hard to sit quietly while entire days were consumed by important work that still didn’t scratch the same itch.
And beyond simple restlessness, there was another problem.
Ludger still hadn’t forgotten his own plan. His basics. That mattered more than most people around him realized.
He had too many techniques now. Too many useful options, too many things he could do that ordinary opponents couldn’t predict or properly respond to. That was an advantage, obviously. But it also came with an irritating weakness: the more he had to hide, the less effectively he could fight in any open setting where revealing too much would create future problems.
That was inefficient. He disliked inefficiency.
If his fundamentals were sharp enough, if his movement, timing, earth control, close combat, mana shaping, and plain raw combat sense reached a ridiculous enough level, then he wouldn’t need to lean so hard on hidden tools every time a real fight started. He could keep more cards in reserve without making himself meaningfully weaker in the visible exchange.
That was the goal. Not just becoming stronger in abstract terms. Becoming so polished at the base level that secrecy stopped costing him as much effectiveness.
And that kind of refinement didn’t happen behind a desk.
It needed repetition. Resistance. Pressure. Real combat or something close enough to it that the body still learned honestly.
Ludger leaned back in his chair and muttered, “Maybe I should build an arena in Lionfang.”
The idea sounded increasingly reasonable the longer he thought about it. Not some noble arena full of polished nonsense and ceremonial posing.
A practical one.
A place where people could fight him, or fight each other, under conditions useful for actual growth instead of public vanity. He narrowed his eyes slightly, already following the thought forward.
“I could offer money prizes,” he said to the empty room. “That would get people interested.”
It absolutely would.
Lionfang was full of ambitious idiots, hard workers, fighters, guild members, northerners, recruits, and the occasional lunatic who would gladly step into a ring against someone terrifying if there was coin attached to the humiliation.
And if the rules were shaped properly, he could use that.
Different weapon restrictions.
Role challenges. Endurance matches. Controlled sparring with real stakes, just enough to sharpen people without turning the whole thing into a funeral with spectators.
It would help the town.
Help the guild.
And most importantly, help him stop feeling like his body was being wasted while his desk grew stronger than his legs.
He tapped one finger against the arm of the chair. Just heading into a labyrinth again sounded too boring. That was the problem.
Normally, a good labyrinth run could clear the head and sharpen the body at the same time. But the frost skeleton labyrinth? He had cleared it so many times that the whole place had long since stopped feeling like a challenge and started feeling like repetitive labor with colder scenery.
He knew its rhythms. Its enemies. Its terrain. Its tricks.
There was still some value there, sure, but not enough to fix the restlessness chewing at him now. Repeating the same fights against the same enemies inside the same frozen structure would just make him stronger in a narrow, stale way.
He wanted something else. Something more alive. More varied. More irritating, preferably in the way that forced adaptation.
Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose and looked at the mountain of work still waiting on his desk. Annoying. But the conclusion remained the same.
Regardless of how exactly he did it, he had to keep training. One way or another. If that meant carving out time from the guild’s endless appetite for responsibility, then fine. If that meant building a proper arena in Lionfang and using the town’s greed and pride against it, also fine.
If that meant dragging people into structured fights until both he and they improved from the process, even better. Because sitting still while his progress slowed was not something he was built to tolerate for long.
And if the world insisted on handing him leadership, paperwork, and political filth every time he got a little stronger… then he would simply have to make sure his fists, body, and basics kept growing anyway.
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