A guard captain with a heavier shield and layered armor roared and came straight at him, likely thinking rank and force would stabilize the line.
Ludger met him head-on. The captain slammed his shield forward. Ludger caught it with both clawed hands.
For one instant the heavy barrier held between them, steel whining under compressed mana. Then Ludger’s fingers tightened, and the mana claws bit in. Metal split in four screaming lines. The shield came apart in the captain’s hands.
The man’s expression changed too late.
Ludger drove a clawed palm straight through the front of his armor and lifted him half off the ground.
Then threw him aside like refuse.
Behind the first line, more guards were arriving now, drawn by the explosions and the sudden collapse of the wall sector. Good. Let them come. Let them see something impossible standing in the smoke over torn men and broken red-bear shields.
Let Armandis’ dogs understand exactly what had come to their gate.
Ludger flexed the glowing claws once, blood and mana light running together over their edges, and stepped forward into the next group with the kind of calm that made the whole thing feel worse.
He had wanted to be bait. Now he had an audience. One spear came straight for his chest. Ludger did not dodge. He raised his left hand, fingers spread just enough for the mana claw to catch the thrust on its inner curve. Steel screeched against condensed mana. The point of the spear stalled half a handspan from his body, trembling under the sudden stop.
Then Ludger closed his grip. The mana claw bit through the shaft with insulting ease. Wood cracked. Metal bent. The weapon split in his grasp. At the same instant, his right hand moved.
No wasted motion. No flourish.
The other mana claw swept across the first guard in a brutal horizontal line. It cut through the man’s shield first, splitting reinforced wood and iron as though they were damp bark. Then the claw bit into armor. The breastplate opened with a harsh tearing sound, the metal parting around the glowing edge. Flesh offered even less resistance.
The slash passed through all three layers, shield, armor, and body, in one clean, merciless motion.
For a fraction of a second, the guard remained standing. Then blood burst across the broken wall stones, and the man collapsed dead before he even fully understood he had been opened apart.
The others shouted and lunged at once. Spears thrust from three angles.
One low. One high. One from the side meant to catch him between the first two. Ludger stepped into them instead of away. His hands snapped shut.
The mana claws closed like jaws, and in that instant the long glowing edges smashed through the incoming spearheads and shafts together. Metal cracked. Wood exploded into splinters. The thrusts died in his reach before they could even become real threats.
Then he kept moving.
A short forward step. His left claw drove into the nearest man’s face and tore downward through helm, brow, and throat in one savage rake. His right claw punched into another guard’s ribs, dug in, and ripped sideways hard enough to spill the man out of his armor. He pivoted on the third before the soldier could retreat, slammed a knee into the inside of his leg to ruin his balance, then hooked a mana claw through the gap under the shoulder plate and tore the arm nearly free.
The guard screamed once. Ludger’s backhand ended it. Blood hit the rubble in hot arcs. Broken weapons clattered around his boots. More men were closing in now, but the front rank had already turned into bodies and red slicks over cracked stone. The line that should have held the breach looked like it had been fed into some grinding mechanism one man at a time.
And for anyone who truly knew Ludger, the sight would have felt wrong. Not because he was incapable of this. Because of how cold it looked. No dry annoyance. No sharp little remarks. No measured restraint.
Just efficient killing. The truth of the matter was simple. Ludger was tired.
Tired of building his life while always having to consider what his enemies might do next. Tired of living under the shadow of the regent, always measuring risk against unseen hands in the dark. Tired of being forced to think around traps, schemes, hidden orders, and the quiet filth of people who smiled in daylight while ruining lives behind curtains.
He was tired of all of it. So he did not care anymore whether these guards knew what their masters were doing in the dark. That question meant nothing now. If they came at him with killing intent, they would die. That was all.
Another guard rushed him with a heavier spear and a broader shield, roaring more to steady his own courage than to intimidate. Ludger caught the spear under one claw, twisted it aside, and drove the other hand straight through the shield’s center. The mana edge punched through, then through the man’s chest behind it, and came out wet on the other side.
He ripped it free. The body dropped. Two more tried to flank him.
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Ludger turned with them, his claws leaving pale arcs in the smoky air. One slash took a man across the waist and nearly folded him in half. The return stroke opened the second from collar to sternum, scattering metal, flesh, and blood together across the fallen masonry.
The guards around him were finally starting to understand. This was not a saboteur to surround. Not a single infiltrator to pin down with numbers. Not a loud distraction to weather until stronger forces arrived. This was a butcher standing in their breach with no intention of pretending otherwise.
Ludger flexed his mana claws once more, bright edges dripping dark in the firelight, and stepped into the next wave before fear could fully settle into their formation. If they tried to kill him, they would fall. And that was it.
Soon, more armed guards reached the breach.
These were not the ordinary wall watchers from moments ago.
Their weapons were enchanted. Ludger could see the mana lines running through spearheads, sword edges, shield rims, and layered armor as they spread into position around the damaged section of the wall. The glow was not subtle either. Whoever had armed them had not been stingy. Each weapon held active reinforcement, cutting force, or some kind of puncturing property meant to deal with enemies who did not die properly from ordinary steel.
And every single one of them wore the same emblem on their armor.
The red bear.
Armandis.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly.
For guards who were supposedly on castle perimeter duty, there were certainly a lot of Armandis men in the area and not one sign yet of the imperial guard.
That was interesting. Or maybe it wasn’t. Maybe this was some new mixed structure inside the capital. Maybe Armandis had gotten more authority over security than was healthy. Maybe this had become normal in the months he had not been watching the capital closely enough.
Ludger did not know.
He did not know if the red bear had somehow become the new face of the Empire’s force near the castle, and he did not know enough about the capital’s internal politics to say exactly why they were the first ones flooding this sector.
He also did not care. Not right now.
Because the men in front of him were moving like they had been given permission to kill freely, and that was all the information that mattered.
A captain barked something. Then several magic projectiles came at once.
Bolts. Spears of condensed mana. Burning arcs. Compressed shots launched from enchanted gear.
They crossed the night in a cluster of shrieking light, all of them aimed at Ludger’s torso, head, and legs to box him in and tear him apart before he could close the distance.
Ludger expanded one of his mana claws.
The right claw widened and lengthened at once, the glowing edge thickening into something halfway between a blade, a talon, and a jagged shield. He brought it up in front of himself, and the barrage slammed into the reinforced mana construct in a rapid storm of impacts.
Light burst. Mana splashed. The air cracked sharply with each collision. But the claw held.
The attacks broke against it, scattered, or bled away into useless arcs of fading force. One fire bolt exploded into sparks against the widened edge. A heavier projectile struck hard enough to push his arm back slightly, but not enough to stop him. A piercing spear of mana screeched across the claw’s surface and died in fragments of blue-white light.
And Ludger kept walking. Not rushing. Walking. Straight into them while blocking the spellfire like it was bad weather.
That was worse for their morale than if he had simply dodged everything.
He could see it in the way some of their stances tightened. In the hesitation creeping into the next line of spell release. In the momentary pause between “we are suppressing him” and “why is he still advancing?”
Ludger lowered the enlarged claw slightly and took one more step. Then he pushed off with brute force. The stone beneath his foot cratered.
Not cracked. Cratered.
Broken masonry, dirt, and shattered reinforcement exploded outward from the sheer violence of the launch, leaving a hollow in the ground where his weight and strength had hammered down together. The recoil alone sent rubble skidding back across the ruined breach.
A blink later, he was inside their line. Too fast. Far too fast for men who had just convinced themselves range would save them.
His first strike was not even the sharp edge of the claw.
It was the backhand.
A brutal, contemptuous swing with the reinforced mass of the mana construct itself. It smashed into two guards at once, one across the shield and one across the jaw and shoulder. The first man’s guard folded inward and crushed his chest behind it. The second was simply launched, body twisting sideways through the air like he had been hit by a siege engine instead of a person.
Ludger turned with the momentum and hit again. Another backhand. Three more.
The mana claws howled through the air as dense, glowing extensions of force rather than neat cutting implements now. Every impact carried enough raw power to ignore technique. Shields shattered. Weapons spun free. Bodies stopped looking anchored to the ground and started looking like debris thrown by the collapse of a building.
One guard flew backward and hit a nearby wall hard enough to punch into it shoulder-first.
The entire section of masonry gave way a moment later, collapsing inward around him in a roar of brick, dust, and splintered support beams. Another man spun through a shopfront and vanished behind exploding wood and broken shutters.
A third struck the corner of a stone building with such force that the impact cracked the structure from edge to base, and the upper portion sagged, then spilled downward over him in a crash of rubble.
Ludger kept moving through them like a storm given hands. Backhand left. Backhand right. A rising sweep that launched two armored men together. A downward smash that caved one shieldman into the ground so hard the stone burst around his boots and knees.
The red-bear soldiers lost all cohesion.
Their formation had been built for containment, for layered pressure, for controlled magical support and measured spear work. Ludger shattered that structure in seconds by turning every close-range exchange into raw physical catastrophe.
The men nearest him no longer looked like disciplined guards. They looked like objects being struck and flung. And around the breach, the city kept breaking.
Walls collapsed where bodies hit them. Balconies cracked and dropped. Smoke rolled thicker through the lane as dust and fire mixed into a single choking haze.
Still no imperial guard. Still only Armandis. That told Ludger enough to keep going harder.