Elaine’s eyes narrowed slightly. “No?”
Arslan scratched the side of his head.
“Apparently not. From what I heard, he’s been sparring with the northerners since yesterday.”
That changed the expression on Elaine’s face. Not softer. Not harsher exactly, either.
Just more focused in the particular way that meant she was now deciding which part of that sentence offended her first.
She frowned and asked, “Why?”
Arslan gave a helpless little shrug.
“I can’t understand Ludger’s way of thinking half the time,” he said. “Maybe he wanted a challenge or something.”
That sounded stupid enough to be true. Honestly, with Ludger, it probably was.
Arslan looked back toward the twins for a second, then added, “Either way, he should be getting tired soon.”
He said it with the confidence of a man who understood exactly how miserable it was to keep trading blows with northerners for too long.
“Not even he can fight the northerners for over a day without stopping.”
That was a perfectly reasonable conclusion. Elaine looked at him. Then looked in the direction of the guild. Then back at him again. Her expression remained unconvinced.
Because if there was one thing Ludger had a long and irritating history of doing, it was proving that reasonable conclusions often had no authority over his actual behavior.
The next day, Ludger still hadn’t returned home.
By that point, it had stopped being mildly concerning and had entered the territory of being completely ridiculous.
He was still at the northerners’ camp. Still fighting. Still taking on challenger after challenger like he had somehow decided that sleep, meals, and basic human restraint were optional inconveniences rather than actual necessities.
When Arslan returned home in the afternoon, he barely made it through the gate before he noticed Elaine standing near the entrance waiting for him.
Her arms were crossed. Her expression was calm. That was exactly what made it dangerous. Elaine didn’t need to raise her voice. She didn’t need to glare. She just stood there with that particular look on her face that said, very clearly, do something about this.
Arslan stopped.
For a moment, he considered pretending he hadn’t seen her. Then he immediately discarded the thought because he wasn’t suicidal.
He let out a long sigh, already feeling the burden of someone else’s bad decisions settling onto his shoulders. Or rather, Ludger’s decisions. Which, more often than not, became everyone else’s problem eventually.
Without saying a word, he turned around. Elaine nodded once, apparently satisfied that her husband still possessed at least a basic survival instinct. Arslan began walking toward the northerners’ camp.
As he made his way through Lionfang, hands tucked into his sleeves against the cold, his mind drifted in the way it often did when he was being sent to handle nonsense he hadn’t created.
Back in his younger years, he had honestly believed his type was gentle women. The shy kind. Soft-spoken. Calm. Sweet. The sort that made a man feel needed without making him feel like he was being managed.
Then he thought about his life for about three seconds and nearly snorted. Every woman he had ever been seriously drawn to had turned bossy in the end. Or maybe they had always been bossy and he had simply been too stupid to notice until it was too late.
That honestly seemed more likely. Arslan sighed again as he kept walking. Maybe his real type wasn’t gentle women. Maybe it was women who had the potential to become terrifying once they got comfortable enough around him.
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That… would explain a lot, actually. He rubbed the back of his neck and looked toward the northerners’ town.
“Yeah,” he muttered to himself. “That sounds about right.”
Unfortunately, realizing that about himself did absolutely nothing to save him from the current situation.
So, with the weary resignation of a man who knew exactly how this would go and yet still had to go anyway, Arslan continued toward the camp to retrieve his absurd son before Elaine decided both of them needed a lesson instead.
By the time Arslan reached the part of the northerners’ camp where Ludger was supposedly still training, he almost turned around on instinct.
There were too many people.
The entire area was packed with bodies, laughter, shouting, and enough noise to make it sound less like a sparring ground and more like some half-feral festival. Northerners formed thick rings around the fighting space, with more of them standing on crates, fence posts, wagons, and anything else that gave them a better view. A few people from Lionfang had apparently come over too, either out of curiosity or because news that Ludger had been beating the sanity out of himself for over a day had spread like wildfire.
Which, knowing this town, it obviously had. Arslan had to push his way in step by step.
A large northerner blocked his path without noticing, forcing Arslan to shove him aside with his shoulder. Someone else nearly spilled ale on him. Another man laughed and slapped him on the back hard enough to annoy him before recognizing who he was and moving out of the way in a hurry.
By the time Arslan finally forced his way close enough to see the center, he already had a headache.
Then he saw Ludger. His son looked… slightly tired. Which, considering the circumstances, was almost insulting.
His face was swollen in a few places, his lips split, bruises dark against his skin, and blood stained the corner of his mouth. His clothes were torn in several spots, and sweat mixed with frost-mist around his body. Steam rolled off him in constant waves, rising from his skin like he had turned himself into some kind of overheated furnace.
He had clearly been doing this for a long time. And he was still going.
At that moment, Ludger was standing in the middle of the ring trading bare-fisted blows with one of Kharnek’s best friends, a massive northerner built like a walking siege engine, with a face that already looked like it had lost arguments with hammers for most of its life.
Neither of them even bothered trying to block anymore. They just stood there and accepted the hits. One landed a clean punch, and the other returned one just as hard.
No dodging. No fancy footwork. No technique beyond stubbornness, balance, and pure violence.
Flesh slammed against flesh with ugly, heavy sounds. Their heads snapped with every impact. Blood dripped from both of their mouths. Their faces were swollen enough that both of them looked half beaten into a new shape already, yet neither showed any intention of backing off.
The northerners around them were screaming like lunatics. Of course they were. Arslan rubbed his forehead.
Ludger took a hook to the jaw that would have dropped most grown men flat, his head turning sharply from the impact. Before the larger man could retract his arm, Ludger stepped in and answered with a short, brutal punch to the ribs. The northerner grunted, spat blood, then returned a straight punch that smashed into Ludger’s cheek.
Ludger answered again. Then again. Then again. There was no rhythm left in it by that point. Just two maniacs seeing who would collapse first.
Then Ludger shifted. Just a little. Barely enough for most people to notice.
He leaned aside from the next incoming strike by a fraction, planted his feet, and drove his fist straight into the northerner’s temple.
It was a clean hit. A very clean hit. The man’s eyes turned white instantly. His body went limp where it stood, and then he dropped to the ground like a marionette with its strings cut.
For half a second, there was silence. Then the northerners exploded.
They roared in celebration, stomping their feet, slamming fists into chests, shouting wildly. They didn’t care who had won. To them, that kind of fight was worth cheering no matter who ended up standing at the end.
Ludger stood there in the middle of it, breathing a little heavier now, steam still pouring from his body. Blood ran from his lip, one side of his face was puffed up, and his knuckles looked like raw meat.
Then, because apparently he had completely lost his mind at some point during the night, he raised a fist into the air and shouted,
“Come on! Who wants to take one hundred diamond coins from me?”
The crowd roared even louder. Several northerners immediately started shouting over each other. One jumped over a bench. Another shoved his way forward. A third had already started taking off his fur cloak as if he were afraid the chance might disappear if he moved too slowly.
Within moments, the next opponent was already stepping into the ring.
Arslan stared.
Then he slowly raised a hand and pressed it against his face. A deep, exhausted sigh escaped him through his fingers. He suddenly found himself wondering how, exactly, he was supposed to explain this to Elaine.
Their son was not a womanizer like his father.
No. Apparently, Ludger had looked at the many terrible paths a man could take in life and chosen a different one entirely.
He had become a gambler and a street fighter.
Arslan lowered his hand and watched Ludger roll his shoulders, spit blood to the side, and beckon for the next challenger with two fingers like this was the most normal thing in the world.
“…I am going to get blamed for this somehow,” Arslan muttered.
And the worst part was, he was almost certain Elaine would make it sound convincing.
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