It surged from the broken floor in thick, heavy walls, folding inward in brutal slabs. Stone wrapped around Luna, Viola, Torvares, and Silva all at once, sealing them inside a dense block of reinforced earth before the foreign warriors could react properly. It was not elegant. It was not comfortable. It was a battlefield transport shell, made to endure impact and buy seconds.
The instant the mass finished forming, the enemies moved. Now they understood.
Several foreign warriors lunged at once, abandoning caution the moment escape became the priority. Mana flared. Weapons rose, ready to smash through the construct before it could leave the hall.
They were too slow.
Ludger planted his feet, shoved both hands forward, and fired the entire block of earth with all the force and magic control he could produce.
The launch was violent.
The massive shell tore free from the floor like a siege round being released from a giant ballista. The ground behind it shattered. The ruined hall shook. A high-speed scream ripped through the air as the compressed earth block blasted forward, smashing through broken stone, shattered entrance debris, and the remains of the castle’s front structure in a single unstoppable line.
It crossed the capital like a launched meteor. Fast enough that most eyes could barely track it. One second it was there.
The next it was already a shrinking shape roaring over rooftops and towers, disappearing toward the far side of the city with a trail of dust and sonic force in its wake.
Ludger felt the mana cost immediately. A brutal drain. The kind that hollowed out his reserves hard enough to make his limbs feel slightly lighter in the wrong way. His breathing deepened by instinct as his body adjusted to the sudden loss.
Too much for comfort. But worth it. Because now they had distance. A precious stretch of time the enemy would have to spend chasing rather than striking them immediately.
Ludger lowered his hands slowly and watched the point where the earth shell had vanished beyond the far side of the capital.
Now all he had to do… was survive long enough to make that distance matter.
He turned back toward the foreigners. The hall around him was quieter now in a different way. No more wounded allies behind him. No more one-handed restraint. No more reason to hold back.
Just broken stone, blood, frost, assassins, and the capital that had decided to make itself his enemy. Ludger rolled his shoulders once.
Then he looked at Drarc and the others with eyes that had gone completely flat.
“All right,” he said. “Now it’s just me.”
Ludger’s eyes lifted for only a moment, but that was enough. A magic barrier was covering the entire city.
It stretched over the capital in a vast shimmering dome, faint only because of the distance and the lingering chaos of mana still distorting the air. Under the night sky, it looked like a second skin pulled over the whole city, thick, prepared, deliberate.
So that was part of it too. They had set up a cage. Not just for anyone. For him.
They had expected Ludger to try to flee once the frame was complete, once the Emperor’s corpse hit the floor and the right story began spreading through the capital. A sealed city would make the accusation cleaner. More convincing. A trapped beast always looked guiltier to idiots.
The only problem for them was that they clearly had not imagined he would throw his people across half the city inside a block of earth instead.
Ludger stared at the barrier for one more second. Then he reached up and undid his cloak.
The dark fabric slipped from his shoulders and fell away, revealing the blood on his arm more clearly, the dust on his clothes, and the cold readiness in every line of his body. He let the cloak drop to the broken floor without a second thought.
“Don’t worry,” he said.
His voice carried across the ruined hall with ugly calm.
“I won’t be leaving anytime soon.”
The foreign warriors had already begun tightening again, weapons lifting, mana building, postures lowering as they prepared to jump him now that his allies were gone. But Ludger kept speaking, eyes drifting over them one by one.
“I can’t leave the capital,” he said, “before killing everyone who tried to hurt my friends and my family.”
That made the air heavier. Several of them shifted. A few smiled. One or two looked irritated rather than amused, as if they disliked hearing a death sentence spoken so casually. Ludger’s expression did not change.
“This,” he continued, glancing once toward the barrier above the city, “will be a message.”
His eyes returned to them.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“A big one.”
The mana around him thickened subtly.
“To every country in the world,” he said. “Just the first one.”
That should have been the signal. The foreign warriors were ready. Ludger saw it clearly. Several were a breath away from launching themselves forward at once, probably hoping numbers would bury him before he could bring another blast like that down on them.
Then a voice stopped them.
“Enough.”
Drarc’s tone was not especially loud. It did not need to be. The others froze just enough to show that they had heard something more important than Ludger’s threat. Drarc stepped back into the hall through the blasted entrance, walking through broken stone, powdered masonry, and torn metal like the damage around him had nothing to do with him.
And the bastard looked almost untouched. There was not a single scratch on his armor.
The black-scaled draconic plating covering his body remained whole, dark, and seamless, every layered plate still locked in place as if Ludger’s blast had only inconvenienced him. In the few places where skin remained visible, near the jawline, parts of the cheek, and the edges near the neck, the damage was minimal. A little reddening. A faint tear of flesh. Nothing more.
As expected.
A wide blast of energy, no matter how violent, was never as dangerous against someone like that if it wasn’t focused tightly enough on a single point. The armor dispersed too much. The structure absorbed too much. And Drarc himself was too durable for that kind of attack to do more than bruise him unless Ludger refined it further.
Drarc rolled one shoulder once, then looked at the others without even turning his head fully.
“He is mine,” he said.
The statement hit the room with territorial finality.
“I’ll kill anyone who interferes.”
That made more than one of the foreign warriors frown, but none of them challenged him. Interesting. Either he had enough standing among them to make that decision stick… or they were just relieved not to be the first ones testing Ludger again.
Ludger watched him silently for a moment. Then he took a breath, let the last of the cloak fall completely from his hand, and assumed his stance.
His feet shifted across the broken stone, settling into a grounded, efficient position. One arm lifted slightly higher despite the wound. The other stayed loose enough to move first. His weight centered. Earth mana sank into the floor beneath him while the air around him trembled faintly from the pressure of contained force. There was no flourish to it. No theatricality. Just the posture of someone who fully intended to beat the thing in front of him to death.
Across from him, Drarc smiled. Not politely this time. Not like the charming foreign guest from earlier. This smile showed teeth. Good, Ludger thought. That was better.
Monsters should stop pretending to be people when it was time to kill them.
Broken stone exploded under their feet.
Ludger and Drarc shot forward at the same time, crossing the ruined hall like two siege weapons fired straight at each other. There was no circling, no testing step, no hesitation. Just distance erased in a blink and then…
Impact.
Their fists met in the middle with a crack that punched through the throne hall like thunder trapped inside stone. The floor beneath them cratered. A ring of shattered marble and frozen debris burst outward in every direction, skidding across the blood-slick ground hard enough to gouge deep lines into it.
Then they were inside each other’s reach.
Drarc’s right hand came first, a brutal hook aimed straight for Ludger’s ribs. Ludger twisted just enough to take part of it on his side instead of cleanly on the center, but the hit still drove through his guard like a battering ram. Pain ripped through his torso. His boots tore furrows into the floor as he slid half a step.
Ludger answered immediately.
His left fist smashed into Drarc’s jawline with enough force to whip the giant’s head to the side and send a burst of dust from the shattered stone under them. Drarc’s armored collar ground against itself with a metallic scream, but before the motion had fully finished, the monster threw another punch.
And another. Ludger met him in kind. Fists blurred.
Bone, armor, flesh, mana, and raw force crashed together again and again at point-blank range. One hit folded into the next so quickly that the exchange stopped looking like a duel and started looking like two disasters trying to occupy the same space.
Drarc’s fist tore through the air and clipped Ludger’s shoulder hard enough to spin him.
Ludger pivoted with it and drove an elbow into Drarc’s chest. The impact boomed. The castle shook.
Cracks raced higher along the nearest pillar, and a chunk of carved stone snapped loose from above and crashed down behind them in a spray of dust and fragments. Somewhere farther back, one of the already-damaged walls groaned like it was being torn apart from the inside.
Neither of them cared.
Drarc stomped forward through the rubble and hammered a straight punch into Ludger’s raised forearm. The blow bent Ludger’s stance for a split second and sent a shudder through his bones, but Ludger used the opening to slam his other fist into Drarc’s ribs, then again into the same spot, then once more, each strike landing with ugly, compact force that made the armored giant’s body jerk slightly with every hit.
Drarc grinned through it. Then drove his forehead forward.
Ludger barely turned in time. The headbutt glanced across his brow instead of crushing straight into it, but even that partial contact burst light across his vision and sent blood down the side of his face.
He didn’t step back. He answered with a punch to the throat. Then another to the sternum.
Then a short, vicious hook to the side of Drarc’s head that made the dragon-shaped armor grind and spit sparks where the force carried through into the metal.
The throne hall kept convulsing around them.
Every collision sent tremors through the structure. Pillars shed more stone. Decorative goldwork snapped and fell. Dust cascaded from the ceiling in pale curtains. Cracks spread wider across the floor beneath their feet until whole sections started caving inward under the repeated shockwaves.
A slab from a half-broken wall collapsed to their right. Drarc ignored it. He punched through it on the way to Ludger.
Stone burst around his arm as his fist came crashing for Ludger’s face. Ludger dipped under it, felt the displaced air scrape his hair back, and buried a compact body shot into Drarc’s side hard enough to lift the armored beast’s front foot off the floor for an instant.
Then Drarc’s knee slammed into Ludger’s stomach.
The breath exploded out of him. His body folded just enough for Drarc to swing downward with both fists clasped together like a hammer.
Ludger threw his arms up. The blow landed. The sound was monstrous.
The floor under him collapsed half a foot, broken marble and stone punching outward around his boots while a nearby pillar split clean through the middle and toppled with a deafening roar.
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