Ludger eventually left his office to stretch his legs a bit.
If he stayed sitting there any longer, he was probably going to end up either redesigning the entire guild structure again out of irritation or actually starting sketches for that arena on the spot. Neither seemed like the best use of the next few minutes.
So he got up and walked. At first, his steps took him underground.
He wanted to check on Aronia and the dryad Amelia, mostly because that situation still sat in the back of his mind more often than he admitted. The guild had enough moving parts already without adding a recovering dryad and Aronia’s increasingly involved care into the mix, and yet somehow that had become part of the daily shape of Lionfang too.
When he reached the door, however, he stopped. There was laughter coming from inside. Not loud. Not forced either. Just… natural.
Enough that Ludger didn’t open the door or knock.
He stood there for a second, listening, and came to the obvious conclusion that things were progressing well enough without his interruption. Aronia and the dryad, at least, seemed to be interacting properly now. Better than properly, perhaps. There was ease in the sound. Familiarity beginning to form.
That was better than silence, tension, or the sort of awkwardness that made healing harder than it needed to be. Still, as he turned away, a quieter thought stayed with him. How long were they planning to remain underground?
That arrangement had made sense for a while. Safety. recovery. caution. privacy. All of that was reasonable. But at some point, eventually, it would stop being temporary and start becoming a lifestyle if no one forced the matter.
Ludger wasn’t sure yet when that point would come. He just knew the question existed now. Leaving that thought alone for later, he made his way back up and out of the guild proper to walk through Lionfang itself.
And once he did, he noticed almost immediately that something had changed. The streets. They were paved with bricks now. Ludger slowed slightly, taking it in.
Not every single stretch yet, obviously. Lionfang was still too rough and too alive to pretend it had become some neat polished city overnight. But enough of the streets had been paved that the difference was undeniable. The roads no longer looked like patched-together tracks between useful buildings and defensive logic. They had structure now. Intent. Shape.
Bricks underfoot. Cleaner lines. Better drainage. Less of the old muddy frontier struggle every time weather decided to remind people where they lived. Teaching earth magic to more people had clearly helped a lot. That part was obvious.
Once the guild and the town had enough hands capable of basic shaping, reinforcement, and material handling, projects like this stopped relying entirely on Ludger’s direct intervention. The work was still slower than if he had personally done all of it, of course. Much slower. But it was happening. More importantly, it was happening properly, through a growing pool of competence instead of one irritatingly overused child fixing reality every time something needed structure.
As he kept walking, he noticed more. A new part of the town was being expanded.
The edges of Lionfang were shifting again, not in chaotic sprawl this time, but with a little more order behind it. There was active work being done where the settlement stretched outward, and alongside that growth, part of the wall was being moved to encompass the new area. Stone, labor, magic, planning, everything was flowing outward in the rough but unmistakable way of a place that had stopped merely surviving and started expecting to keep existing.
That too had its own kind of weight. For a while, Lionfang had been a project tied so closely to Ludger’s own hands that it often felt like if he stepped away for too long, half of it might simply remember it was supposed to be a dying border town and collapse out of spite.
Now, though… Now it was moving on its own. Not entirely. Not gracefully. But on its own.
The guild. The town. The walls. The roads. The expansion. The systems he had hammered into place with effort, mana, stubbornness, and more responsibility than someone his age should have been carrying, they had taken root deeply enough that other people were continuing them without needing him to stand over every decision.
Ludger watched workers adjusting stone lines and earth-shaped supports for a while without saying anything. The guild could continue expanding even without him now. That was the truth of it. Not as quickly, of course.
Certainly not with the same absurd acceleration it had when he was directly involved in every major structure, system, and strategic shift. He was still too central to too many things for the place to pretend otherwise.
But the base he had built was strong enough. That mattered. People would keep shaping the future here, even on days when Ludger was busy elsewhere. That thought should have been comforting. It was. A little.
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It was also mildly irritating, because part of him still distrusted anything working too well without his direct supervision. But mostly, as he stood there looking over the paved streets and the continued growth of Lionfang, he felt the quieter satisfaction that came from seeing proof that effort had become structure.
That what he had built was no longer just his work. It was becoming everyone else’s reality too.
And that, perhaps, was the strongest proof yet that Lionsguard and Lionfang had already passed the stage where they could be dismissed as temporary frontier accidents held together by one talented child.
No. They were becoming something solid. Something that would remain. With him, faster. Without him, slower. But still moving forward.
Ludger eventually climbed up onto one of the walls and sat there for a while, letting the wind hit his face as he looked out over Lionfang and the land beyond it.
It helped. A little.
The town below kept moving in its new, rough rhythm of growth. Workers, guild members, carts, noise, the sound of a place still under construction but no longer pretending it might fail tomorrow.
Then his eyes drifted farther. Toward the northerners’ camp. Ludger stared at it for a second. Then he smirked. There it was.
An endless supply of fighters.
Not polished. Not refined in the way instructors liked to pretend mattered most. But strong, aggressive, stubborn, and more than willing to hit back. Exactly the kind of people he could use to keep his body sharp without needing to clear the same frozen labyrinth for the hundredth time.
So he got up and headed there. By the time he reached the camp, the first person he saw was Kharnek. Naturally.
The huge northerner was sitting there like the living embodiment of poor long-term planning, eating a slab of meat in one hand and drinking booze with the other without a trace of concern on his face.
It was not even noon.
Ludger stopped in front of him and said, “You’re slacking off.”
Kharnek looked up, then burst out laughing. The sound rolled out of him easily, loud and unbothered.
“I finally can,” he said. “Sigrid went to gather more magic water, so she isn’t here to nag at me.”
That explained a lot. Ludger looked at the meat, the drink, the posture, and the complete lack of shame with the flat expression of someone judging a man’s life choices and finding them exactly as stupid as expected.
“She’ll skin you alive once she hears that.”
Kharnek laughed even harder.
“Then I’ll enjoy the last few days off my life first.”
That, unfortunately, sounded sincere. Ludger gave a small shrug.
“Fair enough.”
Then he got to the point.
“Do you want to train with me a bit?”
Kharnek stopped mid-bite. Actually stopped.
The meat stayed in his hand. The drink lowered slightly. His eyes narrowed just a little as he stared at Ludger across the gap between them. Because that was not a casual question.
Not coming from Ludger. Not with that tone. Not when both of them knew that “a bit of training” could mean anything from useful exercise to a public near-death experience with educational value.
For a second, Kharnek just looked at him. Then Ludger added, in the same calm voice as before,
“You’ll get one hundred diamond coins if you beat me.”
That changed everything. Kharnek lowered the meat completely. The camp around them seemed to shift in interest all at once, like several nearby northerners had suddenly developed much sharper hearing.
Kharnek’s eyes stayed on Ludger for another moment. Then his mouth slowly split into a grin. A dangerous one. The kind that belonged on men who enjoyed fighting far too much and saw coin as a nice bonus rather than the real reason to start.
“One hundred?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Kharnek stared at him a little longer, then let out a rough amused breath through his nose.
“Boy,” he said, “either you’re bored out of your mind, or you came here looking to get hit on purpose.”
Ludger’s smirk stayed in place.
“Maybe both.”
That made Kharnek bark out another laugh.
He rose slowly to his feet, still massive, still carrying himself with the loose ease of someone who could go from relaxed to violently dangerous in less than a breath. Even half-drunk and eating before noon, he still looked like the sort of man who could break a wall out of irritation.
Which, honestly, was perfect. Ludger wanted to move. Kharnek wanted an excuse. And now there was money involved too. That practically made it a formal occasion.
They didn’t even make it far before people started following. A few northerners had overheard enough of the exchange to understand the important parts:
Ludger. Kharnek. A fight. Money.
That alone was more than enough to pull attention like blood in water.
And apparently there were far too many people in the camp bored out of their minds, because what started as a handful of curious listeners quickly turned into a growing trail of warriors, spectators, and shameless opportunists who had clearly decided this was now the most important event of their day.
Which, to be fair, maybe it was.
Nothing pulled northerner interest quite like the promise of a proper fight and the possibility that someone might bleed before lunch. If there was enough force, enough noise, and enough pride on the line, they suddenly discovered deep reserves of energy for movement.
By the time Ludger and Kharnek found a large enough clearing to use, a crowd had already formed around the edges.
Not in neat lines, obviously. That would have been unnatural.
They gathered in the rough, shifting half-circle of people who wanted a good view and trusted themselves to jump back fast enough if one of the fighters got launched in their direction. A few were already talking loudly. Others were placing small side bets with the kind of confidence that came only from incomplete information and excessive enthusiasm.
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