Ludger watched it in silence.
Earlier in the fight, before the thing had started speaking like an arrogant corpse-king with delusions of grandeur, a small part of him had considered the possibility of negotiation.
Not a real alliance, obviously. He was not insane.
But knowledge had value, and a guardian that could think, speak, and create weapons like that clearly possessed something worth understanding. The method behind those swords alone might have been useful if properly stripped apart and adapted. If the creature had been the sort that could be bargained with rationally, maybe there had been something to gain before destroying it.
That thought was gone now. It was not worth the hassle of negotiating with a beast who glared at him like that.
Whatever intelligence it had, it had long ago rotted into the kind of thing that only understood dominance and contempt. Talking to it would have been like debating a blade. Possible, maybe. Useful, almost certainly not.
The last support in its torso gave way. Its head slid free.
It hit the ground with a hard, final crack and rolled once through the dust before stopping at an angle, its pale eyes still fixed on Ludger. Behind it, the rest of the body collapsed fully, crumbling into broken stone, shattered armor, and dead fragments of old mana-soaked rock.
But before the last of it fell apart, the guardian spoke one final time. Its voice came out rougher now, weaker, like stone grinding itself into dust.
“Your resistance... is futile.”
Then the light in its eyes died. The chamber went still. No more warped aura. No more dragging pressure. No more old king sitting at the center of the labyrinth pretending the world still belonged to him.
Just silence, rubble, and Ludger standing in front of the remains while steam kept pouring off his body into the cold air. Elira only approached after she had fully confirmed that the guardian was dead.
Ludger was genuinely thankful she had not been stupid enough to jump into the fight midway and create more trouble than help. That alone put her above a surprising number of people he had dealt with lately. Too many would a difficult battle and immediately decided their presence would improve it. Most of the time, it only made things worse.
Elira, at least, had stayed back when it mattered. That was good. Because if she had tried to interfere against that thing while it still had those strange swords and enough intelligence to exploit any distraction, Ludger would have had to waste effort keeping her alive. He had already said as much. Thankfully, she had listened.
So he let the matter rest.
Instead, while steam still drifted from his body and the remains of the guardian cooled into dead rubble across the chamber floor, Ludger crouched near a relatively flat piece of broken stone and pulled out writing materials.
Then he started taking notes. Short lines at first.
He wrote about the guardian’s behavior, the change in phases, the materialization of its weapons, the strange atmospheric pull around the second pair of swords, and the fact that those blades were not to be blocked casually without understanding their effect. He noted the intelligence level, the ability to speak, the tendency to provoke, and the danger of treating it like a mindless brute. He also wrote down observations about the labyrinth itself, the pressure increase by section, the rising combat discipline of the revenants, and the likely resource threshold where standard weapons stopped being cost-effective.
Then he began organizing the useful parts. Suggested team composition. Minimum quality for frontliners. Support requirements. Expected gear wear. Need for proper rotation if they intended to farm the silver rings at scale.
These were things he would need to pass down later to whichever Lionsguard teams came here to gather the mana-enriched silver. If they came at all.
That depended on negotiations, logistics, and whether Maris was willing to let this become a real joint operation instead of just a one-time test. Still, it was better to prepare as if it would happen. Good plans were worth having before people needed them.
Elira came close enough to look over his shoulder. Then she frowned.
“You really are quite the methodical workaholic,” she said.
Ludger kept writing. Even after a fight like that, his hand remained steady. Elira’s eyes moved over the notes again, then back toward the rubble of the guardian.
“Even though you fight like a beast,” she added.
Her voice dipped slightly at the end.
“It is a pity…”
That made Ludger pause.
He looked up at her.
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“What?”
Elira was already smiling by then.
A neat, composed little smile. Too clean. Too controlled. The kind people wore when they wanted to say something without actually saying it.
A poker face. Annoying. Ludger held her gaze for a second longer, trying to judge whether she intended to elaborate. She did not. The smile remained exactly where it was, polite and unreadable in a way that made him immediately suspect nonsense.
He clicked his tongue softly, decided he did not care enough to chase the meaning out of her, and looked back down at the page. Then he resumed writing.
By the time the sun began to rise, pale light was already spilling over the town and reaching the hill where the labyrinth entrance stood.
Arslan and Maris were waiting in front of it.
Arslan had his arms folded, though the posture did little to hide the fact that his thoughts had been spiraling in increasingly unhelpful directions for a while now. At this point, he was more or less praying to the heavens that Ludger had not done anything troublesome.
He should have had more faith in his son. That was the reasonable stance. Unfortunately, reason had to compete with memory. And with genetics.
Arslan knew Ludger was not like him. Everyone kept saying so. Ludger himself clearly agreed. Elaine definitely agreed. Even Maris had more or less implied it with enough sarcasm to strip bark off a tree. Still, as much as Arslan wanted to trust that fact completely, there was a deeply cursed part of him that feared his bloodline might have chosen the worst possible moment to assert itself.
At this point, he was already half-considering offering up his own head to Maris in exchange for sparing Ludger if things had somehow gone horribly wrong.
A painful thought. A noble thought. A very inconvenient thought. Arslan would have preferred to live a few more decades, personally. He felt that was a fair amount of time to ask from fate after everything he had already survived.
Still, if it came down to it, his son deserved those decades more than he did. At his side, Maris looked ready to unleash hell on him. Not metaphorical hell. Real, personal, highly targeted hell.
Her arms were crossed. Her jaw was set. Her eyes had that sharp, dangerous stillness of a woman who had already lost a good night’s sleep because of a man she did not trust and was now deciding what level of violence would best communicate her feelings on the matter.
Father and son had arrived yesterday. And somehow, within a single night, they had already managed to cost her rest, patience, and peace.
Impressive.
Arslan, wisely, kept most of his thoughts to himself. Eventually, footsteps echoed from within the mausoleum entrance. Both of them looked up at once. A few seconds later, Ludger and Elira emerged from the labyrinth.
Elira was stretching as she walked, one arm raised overhead, the other rubbing lightly at her shoulder while she yawned without much shame. She looked tired, but alive, intact, and disturbingly relaxed for someone who had apparently spent the whole night inside the labyrinth.
Beside her, Ludger was writing something on a piece of paper while walking. Not looking around. Not paying much attention to the dramatic tension waiting outside. Just writing. Maris stared at them for one second, then two.
Then she asked, very flatly, “Why did you take so long?”
Elira lowered her arm and answered before Ludger bothered to look up.
“Ludger went all the way to the end of the labyrinth and defeated the guardian.”
Silence. It lasted only a heartbeat, but it hit hard. Arslan blinked. Maris flinched. A real one. Small, sharp, involuntary. The word guardian had landed before she could stop it, before discipline and habit could smooth her face back into place. For just that instant, something old and ugly had flashed across her expression.
Then she corrected herself almost immediately.
Her posture remained the same. Her face hardened again. Her breathing stayed even. Only the eyes gave away that the first reaction had been real. Elira, either not noticing or simply choosing not to care, went on in an almost conversational tone.
“We could’ve come back a bit earlier,” she said. “But we wasted some time gathering the silver rings.”
Maris stared at her daughter now. Then at Ludger. Then back at Elira. Arslan, meanwhile, looked like he had temporarily lost the ability to decide whether he should be proud, alarmed, impressed, or afraid.
Possibly all four. Ludger finally glanced up from the paper. He looked calm. Tired, perhaps, in the way someone looked after an actual night of work instead of rest, but otherwise completely normal. Which somehow made the statement even worse.
As if defeating a guardian that had haunted the guild for ten years and then staying longer to gather resources was a mildly annoying but productive use of time.
Maris’s voice came out carefully controlled.
“You defeated it.”
Ludger nodded once.
“Yes.”
No embellishment. No drama. Just that. Arslan rubbed a hand over his face.
He had truly been wasting effort worrying about scandal. Clearly he should have spent the night worrying about something else entirely. Like his son casually solving decade-old guild problems before breakfast.
Elira, meanwhile, looked far too awake at the memory despite the yawn from moments before.
“We also confirmed some other things,” she added. “And the silver is worth serious effort if handled properly.”
Maris raised one hand. Elira stopped. Not because she wanted to, but because even she could recognize that her mother needed a second.
Ludger looked back down at his notes and added in the same tone one might use to discuss a shipment ledger, “I wrote down the important parts. The guardian had multiple weapon phases, and the second set was more troublesome. The third section also needs better team composition than your current runs suggest based on what your daughter said.”
Maris stared at him. Arslan slowly lowered his hand from his face. And somewhere in the back of his mind, he admitted that maybe, just maybe, he needed to stop worrying about Ludger inheriting his worst traits.
At this point, the larger issue seemed to be that Ludger had inherited almost none of his limitations at all.
Arslan moved first. Before Ludger could return to his notes properly or Maris could decide which part of this morning she wanted to be angry about first, Arslan stepped in and pulled Ludger into a sudden hug.
It was not graceful. It was not subtle. It was the sort of rough, full-armed grab only a father could get away with without being punched on reflex.
“Thank you,” Arslan said, voice full of completely sincere relief, “for not being like your father.”
Ludger frowned in his arms.
“You’re welcome?”
The answer came out more confused than dry, which somehow made it worse.