Ludger didn’t have time to waste.
Whatever those black-armored guys wanted, it was no longer his problem to solve tonight.
He had already done his part. More than enough of it. The castle was in chaos, the defenders were scattered, and the entire capital was probably one scream away from convincing itself the end had arrived personally. That was enough. Now he needed to get Viola, Luna, and Elira and disappear before the situation grew so tangled that even he couldn’t untie it cleanly later.
Still, before moving, he turned around once and looked at Varik.
The guildmaster had recovered enough to stand among the broken formation of Silver Talons, his silver-and-blue armor dirtied, his face drawn tight as he tried to process the giant armor, the unknown attackers in black, the ruined garden, and the cloaked figure still standing in the middle of all of it.
For a brief moment, the two simply looked at each other. Then Ludger raised one arm. Varik’s expression shifted instantly. He recognized danger, even if he didn’t recognize the man.
Mana surged around Ludger’s lifted hand and the claw expanded again, but this time it did not stop at the usual oversized shape. It kept growing. Condensing. Thickening. The construct stretched wider and longer until the thing looked less like a hand and more like some grotesque beast limb made of pressure and cutting force, large enough that it was bigger than Ludger himself.
A few of the mages visibly stiffened. Without hesitation, Ludger slammed it into the ground.
The impact triggered a violent blast.
Not a focused attack this time, but a brutal wave of force that ripped outward across the ruined garden in every direction. Broken earth erupted. Loose stone, shattered masonry, and chunks of uprooted path exploded away from the center. The shockwave hit everyone nearby at once and hurled them backward, Silver Talons, wounded guards, even debris and broken fragments of the giant armor itself.
Varik threw up a defensive layer too late and was still blasted off his feet.
At the same time, the earth Ludger had struck burst apart into a dense curtain of dust and pulverized stone, the whole area instantly swallowed in a choking wall of gray-brown haze.
Perfect. By the time anyone could see again, he was gone. Inside the dust curtain, Ludger moved without slowing.
Mana Sense spread outward first, sharp and fast, cutting through the chaos above and below like invisible threads. Seismic Sense followed right after, diving through stone, dirt, broken foundations, and buried structures to piece together a three-dimensional picture of the battlefield.
He ignored most of the noise. The black-armored force advancing through the new breach. The defenders scrambling to reorganize. The Silver Talons recovering. All of that could wait.
He searched for the three girls. Then found them.
Viola, Elira, and Luna were already retreating through the underground tunnel. Viola was sealing the openings she had created as they moved, using earth magic to close the path behind them section by section. The rough breaches in the dungeon and approach tunnels were being folded back into walls, stone and dirt compressing into place so the route would not be obvious at a glance.
Smart. Crude by his standards, but smart and fast enough for the current situation. For a brief instant, relief loosened something inside his chest. Then Seismic Sense gave him the rest of the picture.
And his expression flattened again. The dungeon was emptying. Not in the sense of people escaping slowly or guards reorganizing around the prisoners.
No. The prisoners were already out. All of them.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed sharply as his perception traced the now-open cells and the movement patterns deeper inside. Chains broken. Doors opened. Bodies displaced. The people who should still have been inside the dungeon, Gustav’s family, were no longer where they were supposed to be.
That didn’t make any sense.
Viola and the others were retreating, which meant they hadn’t stayed long enough to escort a whole dungeon full of half-dead prisoners out through the tunnels. And even if they had tried, the movement patterns would show it. He would be able to follow the strain and traffic through the underground passage.
But that wasn’t what he saw. The prisoners were simply… out. Removed from their original positions. The realization hit him immediately and hard.
If those black-armored intruders were connected to the disappearing prisoners, then tonight’s operation had just become a complete mess. If the castle had hidden retrieval routes for important detainees, then the internal security was even uglier than expected.
Either way, the answers Ludger had wanted were slipping out of his hands in real time.
He kept moving through the dust, already angling toward the underground route that would let him reconnect with the girls.
Above him, the garden was still in chaos. Behind him, Varik and the others would soon realize the cloaked attacker had vanished. Ahead of him, the mission was no longer just compromised.
It had become confusing in a way Ludger deeply hated.
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And whenever things stopped making sense this badly, it usually meant someone with influence had been planning several moves ahead of everyone else.
Ludger didn’t linger.
The moment he confirmed the girls were already withdrawing through the underground route, he bent his knees, compressed mana into one oversized claw, and slammed it against the broken ground behind him.
The construct didn’t strike to destroy this time. It pushed. The force launched him forward like a catapult.
Earth burst apart under the recoil as Ludger shot through the night in a dark blur, his body cutting across the ruined edge of the battlefield with enough speed that most of the people below only caught a single impression of him before he was gone.
A cloaked figure. A monstrous mana claw. A trail of violence. Then darkness swallowed him.
From the garden below, the surviving guards, mages, and scattered defenders could only watch him vanish into the night like some unknown calamity that had appeared for no reason other than destruction. He had come out of nowhere, torn through walls, broken soldiers, fought an impossible armored monster, survived mage barrages, and then disappeared before anyone could understand what they had even been fighting.
Let them keep that impression. It was useful.
Meanwhile, Ludger’s thoughts were already moving ahead faster than his body. The prisoners had been freed too quickly. That part was the problem.
Viola knew better than that. Even if emotions got involved, even if she found children in chains, even if the whole place reeked of torture and rot, she still knew the mission. They needed answers. That came first. She would not suddenly decide on her own to evacuate every prisoner before even trying to secure information, not unless the circumstances had turned far worse than expected.
And from what he had sensed, that was exactly what had happened. The timing was too clean. Too fast.
Which meant the most likely explanation was simple enough to irritate him.
The black knights had someone infiltrated inside already.
Someone had reached the dungeon from another route, freed the prisoners, and moved them during the exact window where Ludger’s chaos above had dragged the castle’s attention elsewhere. Then the black-armored force outside used the confusion he created to launch their own move without being cleanly stopped.
His eyes narrowed as he flew. That fit. Too well, actually.
It also meant this wasn’t random opportunism. This had been planned. Not around him, but alongside the same general timing.
Ludger didn’t think his own plans had leaked. If they had, the response would have been different. Tighter. Cleaner. More specifically hostile to the underground approach. No, this looked more like overlapping operations. Another group with its own objective had picked nearly the same window.
Most likely, they had intended to move the following night. That would make sense. The final night before execution. Maximum urgency. Maximum risk. Maximum value for anyone trying to extract people before the guillotine fell.
Then Ludger happened.
He had turned the castle into a war zone ahead of schedule, and the black knights had simply adapted. Annoying. Very annoying.
He let out a long sigh as he crossed another rooftop and dropped into a darker lane beyond the ruined perimeter.
He truly didn’t like leaving without answers.
That part sat badly with him. He had risked too much tonight to walk away with nothing solid in hand. No clean interrogation. No direct confirmation from Gustav. No proper explanation for Rufas being in chains with them. No names dragged out of broken nobles at knifepoint before dawn.
But even so… This was not a total loss. At least the people carrying the knowledge he wanted would not be marched onto a platform tomorrow and executed in public.
At least that knowledge would not be lost forever. As long as Gustav, and the others were still alive somewhere, answers could still be taken later.
That was inconvenient. It was messy. It was absolutely not the result Ludger wanted.
But it was still better than arriving one day late and finding only graves, severed heads, and a crowd already going home. So he kept moving through the night, cloak trailing behind him, expression flat and tired.
The mission had failed in the way he hated most: not cleanly, not catastrophically, but by becoming complicated enough to survive into the future. Which meant this wasn’t over.
Not even close.
Ludger landed well away from the capital.
The spot had been chosen in advance, one of several fallback points he had prepared in case the operation turned ugly in exactly the way operations tended to turn ugly. It sat far enough from the capital’s streets to avoid casual eyes, but close enough that anyone using the underground route could reach it without wasting precious time.
He touched down in a crouch, cloak settling around him as he immediately turned toward the hidden tunnel exit.
It didn’t take long. A few moments later, the concealed earth shifted and the three girls emerged from the underground passage one after another.
Viola came out first.
Her armor was still on, dusty and scraped, her expression tight in a way that made it obvious she had been holding words back the entire retreat. Luna followed behind her, quieter than ever, blood no longer fresh on her knives but still impossible to ignore if one got close enough. Elira came last, hood still half-shadowing her face, crossbows in hand, her usual curious air buried under the remains of tension and adrenaline.
Viola took one step forward. Clearly, she wanted to speak. Ludger raised a hand and stopped her before the first word could come out.
“Later.”
The single word was flat and immediate.
Viola frowned. “But—”
“I’ll seal the tunnels under the capital first.”
That ended the discussion.
His tone wasn’t harsh, but it was final enough that even Viola swallowed the rest. Luna understood instantly. Elira, after a short glance toward the capital, also said nothing.
Ludger turned back toward the hidden entrance and placed one hand against the earth.
The tunnel network beneath the capital connected Torvares Manor to the castle zone. That had been useful tonight. It also meant it had become dangerous now. If the castle discovered the route and managed to trace it properly, the consequences would spread far beyond a failed interrogation mission.
So the tunnels had to disappear.
Ordinarily, sealing that much underground space from a distance should have cost an absurd amount of mana. Enough to leave even strong earth mages drained and stupid afterward.
But Ludger had prepared for that.
For several days, he had quietly worked through the passageways, embedding prepared runnels and responsive structures throughout the tunnels. Dense nodes of shaped earth, pockets of unstable sand, compression points, and trigger lines layered into the walls and ceilings. He hadn’t built those paths like ordinary tunnels.
He had built them like controlled collapse mechanisms waiting for permission. Now he gave it. Ludger flicked his fingers once.
Deep below, the tunnels responded.