It felt like someone was slowly pressing a needle into his back. Not enough to draw blood. Not enough to cause real pain. Just enough to make every instinct in his body quietly rise.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed almost imperceptibly. The Emperor was still smiling. Still looking at him like an excited boy spotting something he had wanted to see for a long time.
Nothing about the scene should have felt threatening. And yet Ludger could not shake the sensation. It was wrong.
Wrong in the same quiet, maddening way Alphonse’s ordinary aura was wrong. Beside him, Luna noticed first. Her eyes shifted toward him, catching the slight change in his posture. Viola noticed a breath later. Torvares, naturally, had probably noticed before either of them.
The Emperor said something quick to the noble currently speaking to him, then excused himself with another bright smile before beginning to walk in their direction, his two guards following close behind.
Every step he took made the strange feeling in Ludger’s back deepen by just a little. His face remained calm. Inside, his thoughts had already begun moving.
Was it the boy? One of the guards? Someone watching from farther away? A hidden spell? A curse? An item? He did not know.
That was what bothered him most.
The young Emperor approached with the same open expression as before, the same bright anticipation in his amber eyes.
And Ludger, standing in the middle of gold, music, fireworks, and smiling nobles, felt the quiet certainty that something about this meeting was going to be far more troublesome than it had any right to be.
The young Emperor came to a stop before their group with the same bright expression he had shown everyone else.
But unlike the nobles before them, he did not begin with polished courtesy meant for appearances alone. He looked straight at Ludger, and for a moment, the entire scene felt strangely mismatched.
That thought passed through Ludger’s mind quickly, but it lingered just enough to soften something in his expression before he pushed it aside.
The Emperor stopped a reasonable distance away, his two guards remaining just behind him. Too close. That was Ludger’s first impression of them now that they were near.
Their faces remained controlled, their posture professional, and their hands were nowhere near their weapons in a way that could be called openly hostile. But their eyes...
Their eyes gave him a bad feeling. Not because they were glaring. Because they were watching too carefully.
Not just him either. Everything around him. Every movement, every breath, every shift in weight. Like men waiting for a sign no one else could see.
It put Ludger on edge immediately. Still, the Emperor himself looked far too eager to match the tension hovering behind him.
“So you really are Ludger, the Duelist,” the boy said, amber eyes bright with curiosity. “I wanted to meet you.”
His tone was lively, but there was still that deliberate effort underneath it. The conscious attempt to sound composed. Measured. Older than he really was.
Ludger had seen it before. Usually in children trying very hard to convince the world they deserved to be taken seriously.
Torvares gave the proper introduction before anything else could become awkward, Viola and Luna following etiquette smoothly enough to keep the situation clean. Ludger, meanwhile, simply looked at the boy for a second before giving a short nod.
“I’m Ludger.”
The Emperor smiled wider at the simple answer, like that somehow pleased him.
“I am glad you came,” he said. “I heard a lot about you.”
Ludger’s eyes flicked to the Regent somewhere in the distance, then back to the boy.
“That sounds dangerous.”
To his credit, the Emperor laughed. An actual laugh, light and genuine, instead of the forced noble version everyone else here seemed to practice in front of mirrors.
“I suppose it might be,” he admitted.
The conversation should have felt easier after that. And on the surface, it did.
The boy was not stiff like the older nobles. He was curious in a straightforward way, without the layers of poison and caution hidden in every sentence. That alone made him easier to deal with than half the adults in the garden.
Still, Ludger did not fully relax. Not with those guards standing behind him. Not with that faint, crawling wrongness still lingering at the edge of his instincts. The Emperor leaned forward slightly, looking at Ludger with obvious interest.
“Is it true,” he asked, “that you can use all elements?”
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There it was. Not a political question. Not a noble question. A child’s question. One asked by someone who had heard stories and wanted to know which parts were real. Ludger found himself nodding before answering.
“Yes.”
The Emperor’s eyes brightened even more.
“And that you can fire a blast of mana from your hands?”
Ludger nodded again.
“That too.”
Almost without thinking, he let the edge of his posture loosen slightly. Just a little. Not enough to drop his guard, but enough to make the conversation feel less like a meeting with a ruler and more like answering a curious child.
A faint smile touched his face as well.
Small. Brief. But real enough. He wanted to keep some distance. That instinct had not gone anywhere.
Yet the eyes of the two guards behind the Emperor continued to bother him in a way he could not quite explain. Something about them made him feel that backing away too much right now would be a mistake. Not because they would attack. Not because they looked offended.
Because retreat itself might mean something here. Might trigger something. Might reveal weakness, hostility, hesitation, some interpretation he did not yet understand.
So instead of pulling farther away, Ludger held his ground and simply answered the questions as they came, careful, controlled, and more open than he would usually allow in a place like this.
The Emperor seemed encouraged by that.
“Can you really do them all well?” the boy asked. “Or are you only good at some?”
“Depends on what you mean by good,” Ludger said.
The Emperor blinked. “Strong, I guess.”
“That still depends.”
Now the boy looked genuinely puzzled. Ludger exhaled quietly through his nose.
“Using an element and mastering it are different things,” he said. “I can use them. That doesn’t mean I’ve mastered all of them.”
The Emperor listened closely. Actually listened. That alone separated him from most nobles Ludger had met.
“So which one are you best at?” the boy asked.
“Earth,” Ludger answered without hesitation.
That earned an immediate nod from the Emperor, as if that matched the image he had built in his head.
“Because of the mountain?”
“Among other things.”
Viola stayed quiet beside him, probably because interrupting now would ruin the flow. Luna also remained still, though Ludger could feel her attention shifting between the Emperor and the guards behind him. Torvares watched with that same careful calm of his, saying nothing unless needed.
The Emperor, meanwhile, looked almost delighted just to keep asking questions.
“And the mana blast from your hands,” he asked, lifting one of his own hands slightly as if trying to picture it, “is that hard?”
Ludger glanced at the raised hand, then back at the boy’s face.
“Yes.”
The Emperor’s shoulders fell just a little. “Very hard?”
“For most people, yes.”
The boy frowned thoughtfully, clearly turning that over in his head instead of immediately discarding it. Ludger noticed that too. Not just curiosity, then. The boy actually wanted to understand. That made the whole situation more troublesome, somehow.
Because if the Emperor had simply been some spoiled child repeating things he had overheard from adults, Ludger could have answered carelessly and moved on. But this one paid attention. Asked follow-up questions. Tried to treat the conversation seriously.
It reminded him of Arash and Elle again, except this child stood at the center of an empire instead of running around a rebuilt border town.
Which, frankly, sounded like a terrible arrangement for everyone involved. The Emperor opened his mouth to ask something else, but Ludger’s thoughts remained split.
Part of him answered the boy normally. Part of him watched the guards.
And part of him kept feeling that thin, steady pressure between his shoulders, like a needle testing the same spot again and again without ever quite breaking skin.
“Can I call you big bro?”
The question landed so suddenly that, for a brief moment, Ludger forgot about the guards.
He looked at the boy, at Halvyr’s bright amber eyes, at the expectant look on his face, at the awkward seriousness with which he had been trying to hold himself this entire time, and, against his better judgment, Ludger felt the corner of his mouth lift.
It was small. Barely there. But it was real. He gave a short nod.
“Sure.”
Halvyr’s face lit up. And then it all came down. Every light in the hall vanished at once. Not dimmed. Not flickered. Erased.
The entire garden, the castle’s magic lamps, the drifting fireworks, the reflected gold, the polished marble paths, the nobles, the guards, everything disappeared into absolute black.
For one frozen fraction of a second, the world became nothing but air, instinct, and pressure. Then a violent metallic sound exploded through the darkness.
CLANG.
Something hard had been struck.
No. Blocked. Everyone understood that much immediately. Pain came a heartbeat later.
A white-hot line tore across his left arm as something slammed into it with enough force to shudder through his bones. His body reacted on pure instinct, mana surging violently beneath his skin as Mineral Skin flared to its utmost limits. Every layer of hardened flesh, stone-like reinforcement, and compressed mana he could call forth in a split second piled into his arm like a desperate shield.
Even that wasn’t enough. His flesh still split. Blood began to drip down through the dark. Slow. Warm. Real.
Someone was trying to cut his arm off.
No… Trying to get through it. To reach the one standing now behind him.
Ludger’s eyes widened in the pitch black as the shape of the attack became clear in his mind. One of the guards had moved the instant the lights vanished. Not at the crowd. Not at Torvares. Not at Viola or Luna.
At him. Or rather, through him. To reach Halvyr. Ludger’s voice came out low and sharp, carrying more control than the situation deserved.
“What is the meaning of this?”
No answer came. Only pressure.
The guard kept forcing the blade down, trying to carve through Ludger’s reinforced arm with monstrous strength. The metal screeched faintly against hardened flesh and mineralized mana while blood slid from the cut in thin streams. Ludger planted his feet harder, resisting with raw power, trying to understand—
And then Halvyr spoke behind him.
“Wow, big bro,” the boy said lightly, almost cheerfully, “you are quite strong.”
Ludger felt ice crawl up his spine. There was something wrong with that voice. Not the sound. The tone. Too calm. Too delighted. Like this was all part of something amusing.
“But we can’t let you do that.”
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