A shiver went down Ludger’s back. A deep one.
The kind that came not from fear alone, but from the violent certainty that he had misunderstood the entire scene from the beginning.
Before he could move…
Luna moved first. Ludger heard the violent shift of air beside him, felt the flicker of her mana and body movement as she lunged straight past him, not toward the guard, but toward Halvyr. Her hands shot out with absolute precision, aiming to seize the boy’s arms before he could do... whatever it was he was about to do.
But even Luna was not fast enough. Then the screams started. At first only one. Then several.
Then a wave of terrified voices ripping through the darkness from every direction as people stumbled, crashed into one another, and realized something terrible had happened in the middle of the Emperor’s birthday celebration.
And then… The lights returned. All at once. Brutal in their clarity.
Golden lamps flared back to life. Magic fire returned to the air. Reflected brilliance flooded the garden in a single overwhelming rush, tearing apart the darkness so cleanly it almost felt unreal.
And everyone saw it.
Ludger stood in the center of it all, one arm bleeding freely, fresh red running down from the cut that had nearly split through Mineral Skin and flesh alike.
Behind him…
Halvyr was on the floor. His throat had been cut. A clean, horrifying line of red across the neck of the young Emperor as blood spilled beneath him onto polished stone and expensive fabric.
Luna was caught in mid-motion, body extended forward, hands out, expression cold and sharp with the momentum of someone who had tried to stop him a fraction too late.
For one impossible second, the entire world stopped. No one moved. No one understood. Not the nobles frozen in terror. Not the guards. Not Torvares. Not Viola. Not even Ludger.
His mind locked onto the scene with savage force and still failed to make it fit. His arm was bleeding. The Emperor was dead. Luna had moved to stop him.
The guard had tried to cut through Ludger to reach Halvyr. Halvyr had spoken like he knew exactly what was happening. Nothing aligned. Nothing made sense.
Around them, the silence lasted only a breath before it shattered.
Someone screamed again. This time loud enough to cut through the entire hall.
For one shattered instant after the scream, nobody moved. Then the room exploded. Not into chaos alone. Into direction.
That was the first thing Ludger noticed once his thoughts began moving again.
A wave of people started pulling back in panic, real panic, raw and ugly, the kind that made nobles trip over polished shoes and expensive hems while trying to get away from the spreading blood. Civilians, servants, lesser guests, musicians, attendants, everyone without power or rank immediately started retreating, turning their faces away from the center of the disaster like prey sensing where the predators would feed.
But others moved in. Too quickly. A group of armed men, began surrounding Ludger’s side almost at once, as if they already understood exactly what had happened. As if no explanation was needed. As if the shape of the crime had already been prepared in their minds before the blood had even finished spilling.
That was when the truth hit him. Ludger felt warm blood reaching his boots. Not his own. Too much of it.
It spread around the polished floor in a widening stain, dark red against marble and gold, crawling toward his feet like the final signature on a trap that had been carefully built long before he stepped into it.
And then he understood. This had all been arranged to get him. It was insane. So insane that any reasonable person should have rejected it on instinct. But that did not matter. Because insanity did not stop something from being true.
The Emperor approached him. The lights went out. A guard tried to cut through Ludger’s arm to reach the boy behind him. The boy said something that made no sense. The lights returned.
And now Halvyr lay dead at his back while Ludger stood over him, bleeding.
It was too neat. Too theatrical. His expression flattened.
Then, despite the growing pressure of armed men and horrified stares around him, Ludger spoke clearly enough for everyone nearby to hear.
“So,” he said, voice cold and cutting through the noise, “the lights go off when the Emperor comes to talk to me, and then they return when he’s dead on the floor behind me.”
He slowly turned his head, letting his gaze sweep over the people already closing in around him.
“Does anyone here have enough brains to think maybe someone planned all this to frame me?”
Silence followed. Brief. Tense. Not because they had no answer, but because too many of them had one and did not like that he said it first.
Ludger saw it in their faces.
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Some were frightened. Some looked furious.
And some.. Some looked far too certain. Then a voice cut across the silence from somewhere in the tightening ring around them.
“Did you plan that excuse as well?”
A few murmurs followed immediately after. Too fast. Like dogs rushing toward thrown meat. Ludger let out a long, tired breath through his nose.
Of course. Of course that was the level of the game. Not truth. Not even a believable lie. Just enough noise, enough outrage, enough prepared outrage to drown out thought before thought could begin.
He looked down once at the blood soaking toward his boots, then calmly reached for the sleeves of his shirt and rolled them up.
Slowly. The motion alone made several nearby guards tense.
“All right,” he said.
His voice had gone flat in the worst way possible. Not angry. Not loud. Just stripped down to something brutally simple.
“There’s no point arguing with idiots already being paid by the rot in this capital.”
The words landed like a thrown blade. Ugly enough to make several faces twist on the spot. Viola inhaled sharply beside him. Torvares’ expression turned colder by the second.
Luna, still half-crouched from her failed attempt to stop Halvyr, did not look at anyone else. Her eyes were on the boy’s corpse, then the guards, then the circle forming around them, moving faster than most people there could think.
Ludger flexed his injured arm once. Blood ran down to his wrist and dripped from his fingers. Pain throbbed through the limb, but it remained usable.
Good enough. His eyes lifted again toward the men encircling them. Toward the nobles who had already chosen what version of the truth they would sell. Toward the men who had moved too quickly.
Toward the whole glittering, poisoned capital that had finally shown its real face beneath the gold.
For a moment, nobody moved. But the tension changed. Because the instant Ludger rolled up his sleeves, everyone there understood the same thing. He was done talking.
Viola was still staring at the scene like her mind had not fully caught up yet.
Which, honestly, was fair. She had always been strong-willed. Stronger than most people gave her credit for. Proud, sharp, and far less fragile than the polished girls filling the capital’s halls.
But that did not change what had just happened. A child had died right in front of her.
Not in battle. Not in some labyrinth where death came wrapped in blood and teeth and survival left no room for softness. Here. In the middle of golden lights, music, and silk. In the middle of a birthday celebration.
That kind of thing shook people differently. Her voice came out lower than usual, stripped of its normal confidence.
“What... is going on?”
It was not a demand. More like the only thought her mind had managed to force into words. Ludger did not answer immediately, because he did not have an answer he trusted yet.
Luna did. Or at least a fragment of one. Her body was still tense from the movement she had failed to complete, one foot planted forward, shoulders tight, her hands half-lowered now that the lights had returned and revealed she had been a heartbeat too late.
“I saw a red glint,” Luna said.
Her voice was quiet, but steady. That alone made several nearby eyes shift toward her.
“A red glint,” she repeated, gaze fixed not on the crowd but on Halvyr’s body. “And then I moved to stop him, but...”
She did not finish. She did not need to. Ludger’s thoughts sharpened instantly around those words. A red glint. He replayed the last few moments in his head with savage speed.
The Emperor’s bright eyes. That cheerful tone. The darkness. The wrongness in the boy’s voice after that. The needle-like sensation in his back.
And now Luna had seen a red glint. Some kind of spell? Control? Compulsion?
Ludger’s gaze dropped briefly to Halvyr’s corpse.
A sweet-looking child. Smart. Open. Curious. Bright enough to lower defenses in ways grown nobles never could.
Would the Regent really sacrifice the Emperor just to get him? The thought itself sounded insane. Too costly.
An Emperor was not some disposable noble brat. Even a child ruler was still the center of the Empire’s legitimacy. Killing him should have sent the entire structure into madness.
So why? Unless… Unless the point was not merely to get Ludger killed. Unless the point was bigger than that. To turn the Empire against him. To make him the murderer of its child ruler.
To make every noble, every guard, every city, every frontier, every allied faction, every rumor network, every mercenary, every foreign court hear the same story:
Ludger from Lionsguard killed the young Emperor.
Not just a crime. A stain. A mark that would follow him everywhere.
And worse than that… the boy had been likable.
Even Ludger, who distrusted this place, had seen it clearly enough. Halvyr had been curious, lively, sincere in a way that made him hard to hate. The kind of child people would want to protect. The kind of death people would take personally.
If Ludger was blamed for killing someone like that, the rage would spread far beyond the capital.
It would not stop at nobles. Monster kills child Emperor. That alone could move half the world.
And still… Something did not fit. Ludger’s eyes narrowed further.
Because the voice that had come from the boy in the dark… That had been wrong.
Wrong in a way that made his skin crawl when he remembered it.
Wow, big bro, you are quite strong... but we can’t let you do that.
It had sounded like Halvyr. And yet it had not.
He was used to reading danger. Used to catching the shape of violence before it fully formed. But this... this was layered filth. A trap inside a performance inside a political execution.
Viola was still pale, though her expression was slowly hardening through the shock.
“A red glint...” she repeated, trying to grasp the meaning. “You think he was controlled?”
“I don’t know,” Ludger said.
That answer came out harsher than he intended, mostly because he hated saying it.
Luna lowered her gaze slightly, thinking.
“It was only a moment,” she said. “I saw it in the dark just before I moved.”
One after another, the foreign warriors invited to the party began stepping forward from the edges of the gathering. Not hurriedly. Not like men improvising under pressure. They moved with ugly confidence, each taking position with the kind of instinct that only came from prior understanding. Some approached from the marble paths. Others descended from the garden steps. A few came straight through the withdrawing nobles, who almost tripped over themselves to move aside and let them pass.
The result was immediate.
Ludger, Torvares, Viola, and Luna were fully surrounded.
Not by shocked guests. By killers. And the message could not have been clearer if someone had carved it into the floor with a blade. Ludger let his eyes sweep across them once, slow and cold… all of them had made the same choice.
He gave a small shrug despite the blood still dripping from his arm.
“So,” he said, loud enough for the circle to hear, “the Empire must be pretty ashamed of its own forces if it has to hire assassins from abroad.”
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