The encirclement did not stop just because Ludger had been blasted through stone and pillars.
If anything, it tightened. That was the ugliest part.
The foreign warriors kept moving with brutal discipline, adjusting positions around the broken center of the hall while the remaining nobles scrambled away in blind terror. Some fled toward the inner corridors. Others dropped to the floor or hid behind shattered pillars, too stunned to do anything but stare. Guards shouted conflicting orders that no longer mattered. The birthday celebration had become a slaughterhouse wrapped in gold.
And in the middle of it, Luna and Viola were still trapped. Luna shifted first.
Her expression had gone completely cold now, the shock burned away beneath focus. She moved one hand toward a weapon, posture lowering by instinct as she measured distances, angles, and bodies. She knew exactly what kind of situation this had become. There would be no polite way out. No order from the capital that would suddenly restore reason. Only survival.
Viola, meanwhile, remained at her grandfather’s side.
She was still pouring healing touch into Torvares’ throat with all the control she could force through trembling hands, jaw clenched so hard it looked painful. Blood had soaked into her dress, into the polished stone beneath them, into the fingers she pressed to the wound. Her breathing had lost all rhythm. Her eyes were wide but burning, full of panic, fury, and desperate refusal.
She was in no position to fight. And the bastards surrounding them knew it. A few of the foreign warriors began to shift their weight forward. Not all at once. Just enough.
Enough to signal the charge before it happened. Luna’s hand tightened further. Viola didn’t even look up.
Then the air screamed.
A barrage of magic swords dropped onto them from above. Not swung. Not thrown in the ordinary sense.
They came down like execution from the sky, gleaming constructs of dense, sharpened mana, each one long and brutal and moving fast enough to blur. The first slammed into the marble beside one warrior’s foot with a thunderous crack. The second crashed down in front of another’s chest. Then came more. Six. Ten. Fifteen. A rain of killing steel forcing the entire encirclement to break formation in an instant.
Several foreign warriors cursed and leapt backward.
Others twisted aside with barely enough room, their movements sharp and ugly as the conjured blades hammered into the ground around Luna and Viola in a staggered ring. Each sword buried itself deep into the floor, and the moment the last few struck, frost erupted outward from the points of impact.
The marble froze. Not gradually.
It flashed white-blue in spreading veins, ice racing across the shattered floor in snapping lines that covered the blood, stone dust, and broken fragments in seconds. A killing chill rolled through the ruined hall, biting hard enough to make breath turn visible. The foreign warriors who had landed too close hissed and retreated again as frost crawled up their boots and locked the ground beneath them in slick, treacherous layers.
For one brief second, everyone paused. Then they saw him. Ludger was walking back toward the throne room through the broken wall he had been punched through moments earlier.
He wiped blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of one hand as he advanced, bits of dust and powdered stone still clinging to his clothes and skin. His injured arm was still bleeding, though more slowly now, and there were marks across his chest and shoulders where Drarc’s punch had driven force deep enough to leave ugly bruising under torn fabric. Rubble cracked under every step he took.
The air around him felt heavier than before. Not just from mana. From intent.
A cluster of half-formed magic swords hovered behind and above him like a moving execution line, shimmering with dense power, edges glowing with that same freezing light that had just forced the encirclement back. Earth mana rolled beneath it all, thick and oppressive, turning the ruined floor under his feet subtly unstable with every step.
He did not hurry. That somehow made it worse. Ludger looked less like someone returning to the fight and more like the fight itself had decided to walk forward in human shape.
One of the foreign warriors cursed under his breath. Another shifted his stance.
Drarc, farther back, watched with open interest.
Luna exhaled once, barely visible relief passing through her eyes before it vanished again beneath cold focus.
Viola looked up only briefly from Torvares, just enough to see Ludger coming back through the wreckage. Something flickered across her face then, something between desperation and grim reassurance, before she returned all of her attention to keeping her grandfather alive.
Ludger reached the edge of the frozen floor and stopped for half a beat. He looked at the warriors surrounding them. At Luna. At Viola kneeling in blood. At Torvares barely hanging on.
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Then his gaze settled on the circle of foreigners who had thought they could finish things while he was still buried in rubble.
His hand dropped from his mouth. The blood on his knuckles looked black beneath the cold light of the frozen blades.
“Go on,” he said.
His voice came out low and steady.
“Try again.”
The civilians finally began to break completely.
What little order remained inside the castle hall collapsed into full retreat as servants, lesser guests, musicians, attendants, and the more fragile nobles abandoned all pretense of dignity and rushed for the exits. Expensive shoes slipped on blood and frost. Dresses snagged on broken stone. People shoved one another aside in blind fear, desperate to get away from the center of the nightmare before it swallowed them too.
Ludger barely spared them a glance. His eyes were scanning the hall. The shattered walls. The high arches. The balconies. The retreating nobles. The foreign warriors tightening their positions with ugly patience.
And above all else… the Regent. He didn’t see him. Not among the fleeing crowd. Not near the ruined center of the hall. Not on the upper levels. Nowhere. That alone made Ludger’s expression darken further.
The filthiest man in the entire capital was suddenly absent when blood began covering the floor.
The foreign warriors noticed it too, or perhaps they had already known what timing they were working with, because none of them rushed in immediately. They waited. Calmly. Coldly. They let the last of the civilians flee the hall so there would be no more bodies stumbling between them and their target. No more witnesses close enough to get in the way. No more accidental shields.
They wanted room. A clean battlefield.
Ludger rolled one shoulder, mana gathering under his skin while the hovering swords behind him adjusted their angle with subtle motion. He was already preparing himself for the next exchange, measuring who would move first and how many he could break before they adapted…
Then Viola’s voice cut through the tension.
“Ludger...”
He turned his head.
She was still kneeling beside Torvares, both hands pressed to the old lord’s throat, healing mana pouring from her in trembling streams. But her face had changed. The stubborn concentration was still there, yet now it was cracking beneath something worse.
Tears. Actual tears. Just enough to make the sight hit harder than shouting would have.
“I can’t heal him,” she said.
Her voice shook despite how hard she tried to steady it. “I... I can’t. Something is wrong.”
Ludger’s stomach tightened. Luna moved at once.
She crouched beside them, quick and efficient, one glance toward the wound turning into a deeper inspection as her expression sharpened. She did not waste time trying to comfort Viola or soften the truth. Her fingers hovered near the wound, careful not to interfere with the mana already being poured into it.
Then she saw it. And her eyes narrowed.
“It’s rotting,” Luna said.
Viola stared at her. “What?”
Luna’s voice remained cold and precise. “Too fast. The flesh around the wound is decaying.”
Ludger’s gaze snapped fully toward Torvares’ neck. Now that Luna said it, he could see it too. The edges of the cut were wrong. Not merely torn. Not merely bleeding.
The flesh around the wound looked like it was breaking down as they watched, the healthy color giving way to something darker, sicker, as though corruption had been packed into the strike itself and was now eating through him from the neck outward.
Ludger’s eyes hardened.
He asked without taking his eyes off the wound, “Do you know anything that can do that? Any poison?”
Luna answered immediately.
“No.”
No hesitation. No uncertainty. That bothered Ludger more than if she had named one.
Because Luna knew her poisons, knew enough about covert methods, hidden tools, and assassination tricks to recognize most things on sight or at least guess the category. If even she had no idea what this was, then the wound had likely been made with something more specialized.
Or something worse. Ludger’s jaw clenched. He could try to heal Torvares.
That much was true. His healing was better than Viola’s in emergencies, and he had the control to force flesh to mend even under ugly conditions.
But if there was something else in the wound, some mana, poison, curse, or foreign corruption actively preventing proper restoration, then brute healing alone would not be enough. He could pour mana into Torvares and still fail if the flesh simply kept rotting faster than it could close.
Which meant time was collapsing. And the bastards in front of them knew it. Drarc moved. No signal. No warning. Just violent action the instant Ludger’s attention shifted toward Torvares.
The giant launched forward with savage speed, armored body tearing across the frozen floor like a charging beast. Marble cracked under each step. The dragon-shaped plating on his frame caught the golden light in black-red flashes while his grin widened, clearly intending to slam into Ludger before he could get near the old lord and attempt a proper heal.
Ludger’s eyes turned flat.
He did not step back. He did not even brace this time. Instead, he simply opened the palm of his hand. Mana surged.
A dense blast erupted from it in a single brutal release.
A wide, violent torrent of compressed force and elemental power screamed across the hall and swallowed Drarc head-on. The giant had enough time to widen his eyes and throw his arms forward before the attack engulfed him completely, consuming his charge in a flood of explosive light and pressure.
Then it detonated. The blast hit Drarc and kept going.
The entrance of the castle behind him vanished in an explosion of stone, shattered goldwork, and flying debris. The entire front section of the hall shook as if struck by siege magic. Huge chunks of masonry were torn away. The great doors disintegrated. Pillars cracked. Frost, rubble, and blood were hurled into the air together in a storm of white dust and red spray.
A roar thundered through the ruin. By the time the light faded, the once grand entrance of the castle had been blown open into a jagged maw leading into the night, smoke and powdered stone pouring outward through the shattered opening.
Ludger lowered his hand slowly, mana still curling around his fingers. His eyes never left the blast zone.
“I don’t have time,” he said, voice low and murderous, “for interruptions.”
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