That earned a few ugly smiles. A few harder looks. And then Drarc moved. There was no warning.
One moment the huge man stood a few paces away with that same calm, layered presence of his, and the next he exploded forward like a siege weapon given flesh. The marble beneath his foot cracked from the force of the launch, his massive frame devouring the distance between them in a single terrifying burst.
He did not draw a weapon. He simply threw a punch. Straight at Ludger.
Ludger reacted on instinct, bringing up his forearm to intercept rather than dodge, because there were too many people behind him and too little room to give ground without collapsing the entire formation.
The impact was monstrous.
A brutal, blunt detonation of force slammed into his guard hard enough to shake his entire body. Pain burst through his bones like a cluster of cracks racing under the skin. His planted foot slid half a step across blood-slick marble. The reinforced muscle and Mineral Skin in his arm held, but only barely, and for a sick instant it felt like the man’s fist had reached through flesh and mana alike to rattle the structure underneath.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed.
No… They widened just a fraction. Because the strength behind that one punch was insane.
It was the kind of raw physical force that turned skill secondary and made every defense feel suddenly theoretical.
Drarc’s fist remained pressed to Ludger’s forearm for half a beat longer than necessary, almost like he wanted him to feel it clearly. Then he pulled back half a step, grinning.
And as he did, something beneath his formal clothes shifted. No. Unfolded.
The fabric over his torso bulged, then tightened as something alive and metallic surged up from underneath, emerging with a rippling motion that looked far too smooth to be normal armor. Silver scales spread across his chest in overlapping plates, each one edged with a faint burnished sheen that caught the golden light like the hide of some ancient beast. The structure flowed over him rather than being worn, wrapping around muscle and bone with predatory precision.
The armor kept forming.
It pushed down his shoulders in layered ridges, thick and curved like the folded base of draconic wings. Segmented plates locked across his upper arms, each one shaped to preserve movement while thickening the silhouette of his already monstrous build. Smaller interlocking scales spread down his forearms, dense enough to look like they could deflect blades outright, while the plating around his collar rose in jagged lines that framed his neck like the beginnings of a dragon’s maw.
His chestpiece took shape next, though “chestpiece” was far too small a word for it.
The center formed into a raised draconic sternum of silver metallic scale, broad and ridged, with faint crimson lines pulsing underneath the seams as if heat or mana was circulating through the armor’s veins. The shoulders thickened further, becoming almost beastlike in contour, high, flared, and slightly horned at the edges, as if the upper body of some dragon had been carved apart and reforged around a human skeleton.
Then came the helm.
It did not fully cover his face, not yet, but the armor crept upward along his jawline and temples in sharp, fitted lines. Small horn-like projections pushed back through his dark hair near the sides of his head, not large enough to be theatrical, but far too deliberate to be decorative. They made him look less like a man in armor and more like a creature halfway through remembering its real shape.
The entire thing settled over him with a low, grinding click. Drarc rolled one shoulder once, smirking as the newly formed armor flexed with him like a second skin.
Now the dragon shape made full sense. It was not armor inspired by dragons. It was armor trying very hard to become one.
He looked at Ludger the way a larger predator might look at a younger one that had finally stopped pretending not to bare its teeth.
“The Empire’s forces,” Drarc said, amused, “would be used for something else.”
The words hit Ludger harder than the punch. For a split second, the entire scene sharpened into brutal clarity. Used for something else. Not deployed here. Not guarding the Emperor. Not containing the capital. Used elsewhere.
His eyes opened wide. Because that meant this was even worse than a frame job. This was a coordinated purge.
And while the capital tore itself apart over the death of a child Emperor, the Empire’s actual forces were already committed somewhere else for some other purpose.
His mind leapt through possibilities so fast they almost overlapped.
Lionfang. His family.
Then his aura changed. It happened without flourish. Without warning.
The air around Ludger simply shifted, turning heavy in a way that made even the foreign warriors’ expressions flicker. The controlled cold rage that had been building in him all this time finally stopped pretending to be contained. Mana rolled off him in dense, violent currents, the floor beneath his boots cracking as earth-aspected pressure bled outward into the marble. His eyes lost their earlier restraint and became sharp enough to look almost inhuman beneath the light.
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The garden felt different immediately. Like a battlefield had been dragged into the middle of a birthday party.
Ludger slowly lowered his injured arm, blood still running from it, and looked at Drarc with an expression so flat it became more terrifying than open fury.
“All right then,” he said.
His voice was quiet. That made it worse.
“Today,” he continued, “the capital will be destroyed.”
For one heartbeat, nobody moved. Then the air itself seemed to tense, as if the city had just heard its own sentence spoken aloud.
Torvares stepped forward before Ludger could move.
“Calm down,” he said, voice sharp enough to cut through the murderous pressure building in the garden. “This can still be solved if you do not start killing people or destroying evidence.”
The old lord’s eyes were hard, focused, still working despite everything.
Even now.
Even with the young Emperor dead at their feet, assassins from abroad closing in, and the entire capital one scream away from turning into a riot, Torvares was still trying to think three moves ahead.
“Listen to me,” he continued. “If we keep control of this situation, if we preserve the scene, if we force…”
He stopped.
Not because he chose to. Because his body did. His hand flew to his throat.
For half a second, Ludger didn’t understand what he was seeing. Torvares’ fingers tightened around his own neck as if trying to hold something in place, his eyes narrowing in sudden shock.
Then blood burst through the gaps between his fingers.
A violent gush of red spilled down the front of his formal clothes, bright and wet under the garden lights. It came so fast, so suddenly, that for a heartbeat it looked unreal, like someone had thrown a bucket of paint across his chest.
Ludger whipped his head over his shoulder, instincts exploding outward as he tried to catch the angle, the motion, the mana, anything.
Nothing. No clear projectile.
Viola’s voice tore through the air an instant later.
“Grandpa!”
All her earlier composure shattered in a single breath. She lunged toward Torvares as his knees buckled, catching him before he hit the blood-slick marble completely. Her hands were already glowing with mana by the time he sagged into her grasp, panic and fury twisting across her face so openly that even the nobles still watching from afar recoiled.
Ludger’s mind moved savagely. One of the foreign warriors. It had to be.
There was no one else close enough, prepared enough, filthy enough to strike at exactly that moment, right when Torvares was trying to stop Ludger from escalating, right when evidence and control were still possible, right when the last fragile bridge to a rational explanation still existed.
They were cutting every path one by one.
Halvyr. Now Torvares. Anyone who could slow the collapse was being removed.
Viola dropped to her knees, healing mana flooding from her hands into Torvares’ neck with desperate precision. Her control was good, more than good, but Ludger saw the wound clearly enough to know the truth at once.
His eyes narrowed.
He needed Ludger’s healing.
Immediately.
Ludger stepped forward… And Drarc’s voice cut through the chaos like a hammer striking steel.
“You need to focus more.”
The words came with a grin. Then the giant moved again.
His fist came crashing toward Ludger with brutal directness, and this time there was no clean angle to brace the same way as before. Ludger twisted, brought up his guard, shoved mana through muscle, bone, and Mineral Skin all at once…
And Drarc’s punch still hit like a collapsing gate. The impact detonated.
A visible blast erupted from the collision point, a compressed shockwave of monstrous force that exploded outward in a savage ring. Marble shattered beneath Ludger’s feet. Blood, dust, and fragments of polished stone burst into the air. For one violent instant, it felt less like being punched and more like getting caught in the front of a battering ram launched by an avalanche.
Then Ludger was airborne.
He was hurled backward hard enough to tear through the wall behind them in an eruption of stone and powdered plaster. The outer structure did not merely crack, it burst around him as his body smashed through it, chunks of carved masonry and decorative gold trim exploding outward in every direction.
He hit the first stone pillar a moment later. It broke.
The thick support column fractured in a roar of cracking rock, the upper half collapsing as Ludger tore through it and kept going, momentum still carrying him like a projectile. Dust filled his mouth. Broken stone scraped across his skin. Pain lanced through his back and ribs in hot, ugly bursts.
Then came the second pillar.
That one also shattered, split apart by the sheer force of his body crashing through its center. Debris rained down around him in a storm of white-gray fragments and splintered ornament, the once elegant architecture collapsing into ruin in his wake.
By the time he finally hit the ground and skidded across broken stone beyond the hall’s edge, half-buried in rubble and dust, the wall behind him looked like it had been struck by siege magic.
Ludger dug his fingers into the ground and stopped himself.
For one second, everything rang. His bones hurt. His injured arm screamed. His chest felt like it had been hit with a steel beam swung by a giant.
But he was still conscious. Still breathing. Still very much alive.
Dust rolled around him in heavy clouds as fragments of wall and pillar continued crashing down nearby. In the distance, through the torn-open ruin of the party hall, he could still hear shouting, screaming, and the violent confusion of battle on the verge of fully breaking out.
And somewhere inside that collapsing mess…
Torvares was bleeding out.
Ludger slowly rose from the rubble, stone cracking under his boots as his aura thickened again.
The look in his eyes now had lost even the last trace of restraint. They had murdered the Emperor. They had framed him. They had cut Torvares down in front of Viola.
And now they thought they could punch him away from the people he needed to protect.
The dust parted around him as mana surged harder through his body.
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