Elira let out a small breath through her nose, the earlier spark in her eyes dimming just a little.
“I don’t have as much mana as my mother,” she said, brushing a loose strand of chestnut hair behind her ear. “I split my focus too much. Cryomancy, mobility, archery, precision control… all of that takes time. Mana capacity doesn’t grow just because I want it to.” Her lips pressed into a thin line. “So no, I probably won’t ever solo this labyrinth.”
She said it with a casual tone, but it felt too practiced. Like something she had already told herself often enough that it came out smooth. Then she huffed and folded her arms.
“And besides, offering support is boring.”
Ludger glanced at her.
“That so?”
“It is,” Elira said immediately. “Useful, yes. Important, sure. But still boring. Standing back, setting things up, helping other people shine while they do the impressive part…” She made a face. “I know support matters. I’m not stupid. I just don’t like the idea of spending my whole life making everyone else look better.”
Ludger looked ahead as another pair of stone revenants dragged themselves out from between broken pillars. Their bodies ground against the floor with a low scraping noise that echoed through the corridor.
“So what if you teamed up with your mother?” he asked.
Elira’s steps slowed. That answer didn’t come nearly as fast.
The girl who had been talking almost nonstop for a while suddenly looked away, her expression losing some of its earlier energy. The ice beneath her boots crackled softly as she drifted a little lower.
For a few seconds, only the distant rumble of shifting stone and the dull sound of revenants approaching filled the corridor. Then she spoke, quieter this time.
“My mother only comes up to the second section now.”
Ludger turned his head slightly toward her. Elira kept her gaze on the ruins ahead.
“She goes in, helps stabilize things, clears what needs clearing, and comes back out.” Her voice stayed even, but the effort behind it was obvious. “That’s it.”
The two revenants closed in. Ludger stepped forward before they could reach melee range. His fist shot out like a hammer and shattered the first one’s jaw. Stone fragments burst outward. He pivoted, drove his elbow into the second one’s neck, and snapped the upper half of its body sideways with a heavy crack. Before either could recover, he crushed their heads with two short, brutal strikes.
The corridor went still again. Elira watched him for a second, then continued.
“It’s been over ten years since she challenged the guardian.”
This time, when she spoke, the words carried more weight. No dramatics. No trembling voice. Just a flat truth that had been sitting in her chest for a long time. Ludger said nothing, so she went on.
“That was part of the reason I wanted to see you do it.”
Her fingers tightened slightly around her bow.
“I wanted to see what it looked like.”
There was no need to ask what she meant.
What it looked like to walk all the way down.
What it looked like to stand before the thing at the bottom.
What it looked like to do what her mother had not tried again in over a decade.
Elira finally glanced at him, and some of her usual sharpness returned, though it was thinner now.
“The rumors about you are absurd,” she said. “Most of them sound made up. But absurd things keep turning out to be true around you.” Her mouth twitched faintly. “So I thought maybe if anyone could just go down there and do it like it was a normal errand, it would be you.”
Ludger looked at her for a moment.
“That’s a terrible reason.”
Elira snorted.
“I know.”
Then, after a pause, she added more quietly, “Still wanted to see it.”
Ludger faced forward again and resumed walking through the buried stone corridor, past headless statues and cracked pillars that looked like the remains of a city that had died angry.
Ahead, deeper in the corridor, more shapes began to move in the dark. Multiple stone figures rose from collapsed alcoves, weapons grinding against old rock, empty faces turned toward the living.
Ludger rolled his shoulders once.
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“Then keep watching,” he said.
The air around him began to tighten. Not explode. Not roar. Just condense, like pressure gathering before a storm. Elira’s eyes sharpened at once. And Ludger stepped forward. Ludger could tell there was some kind of family drama there.
Not the loud kind. Not the kind that exploded into shouting matches or slammed doors. The quieter sort. The kind that settled into habits, limits, and unspoken things people circled around for years until those limits started to look normal.
He recognized it for what it was almost immediately. He also wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.
He had enough problems without getting dragged into whatever old wound existed between Elira and her mother, especially when that wound seemed tied to the labyrinth, inheritance, and the kind of expectations families liked to pretend were reasonable. That sort of mess was annoying even when it involved his own relatives. With other people, it was worse.
A complete waste of energy. So Ludger left it alone. Instead, he looked at the situation the way he preferred to look at most things. As a practical problem.
Elira had precision, mobility, and enough control to make even him pay attention. Her cryomancy was not the broad battlefield type her mother apparently specialized in. It was tighter. Sharper. Built for accuracy, timing, and exploiting openings. That made her far more interesting than some ordinary support mage standing in the back and throwing out predictable spells.
A runic weapon made of froststeel with a freezing enchantment would suit her well. Not a sword. That much was obvious.
Something that matched her range, precision, and preference for high-speed control. A properly balanced weapon with mana channels fine enough to carry her cryomancy cleanly, reinforced with froststeel’s natural compatibility, could raise her threat level by an absurd amount. If built correctly, it could turn every shot into a layered attack, piercing force, cold spread, freezing interference, maybe even delayed internal burst effects if the rune structure held.
That alone would already make her dangerous. Still, another thought crossed his mind. Could he make her form a spiritual core with just a few lessons?
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly as he walked. That would be a far more interesting test. It would not just help Elira. It would confirm something much bigger. The full potential of his Teacher class.
Not just skill transfer. Not just accelerated comprehension. Not just helping people refine what they already had. Something deeper. Something that crossed into fundamental growth. If a few properly structured lessons from him could push someone toward forming a spiritual core earlier than normal, then the value of Teacher would rise even beyond what he had already suspected.
That would be ridiculous. Useful, but ridiculous. Which was precisely why he found the thought appealing. Even so, Ludger said nothing.
Bringing it up now would only make Elira even more difficult than she already was, and she was already hovering near the edge of becoming an outright nuisance. If he hinted at something like that, she would probably attach herself to him like a second shadow and start asking questions until the end of time.
Absolutely not. So he kept those thoughts to himself and continued advancing through the labyrinth.
The second section grew quieter the deeper they went, but it was not a peaceful kind of quiet. It was the kind that felt heavy. Pressed down. Like the buried city itself was listening.
Broken pillars rose at uneven intervals from the stone floor, some whole, most cracked. Headless statues watched from alcoves and collapsed corners, their surfaces worn smooth in places and jagged in others. Ancient walls leaned at odd angles beneath the weight of everything above them, and old streets, or what had once been streets, twisted between ruined structures swallowed by time and stone.
More revenants came. Ludger dealt with them the same way he dealt with the others.
A stone spearman lunged from behind a collapsed archway. Ludger stepped inside the thrust, batted the weapon aside with his bracer, and drove a short punch into its chest. Cracks raced across the creature’s torso. Before it could fall, he pivoted and smashed his heel into its knee, breaking the leg cleanly, then crushed its skull under a descending elbow.
Another one came in from the side with a sword fused to its arm. Elira’s ice dart pierced through its eye socket a split second before it could swing. The head burst apart. Ludger glanced at her.
Her chin lifted slightly. He looked forward again. They kept moving.
The pressure in the labyrinth changed gradually. The revenants became more disciplined. Less like wandering dead things and more like remnants of something that had once known formation fighting. Some used shields. Some held angles. A few even seemed to wait for openings instead of rushing mindlessly.
That made the fights more annoying. It also made the place more valuable.
The deeper a labyrinth went without collapsing into stupidity, the better the resources at the bottom usually were. Stronger monsters, stronger guardian, denser mana, better drops. If the third section maintained this trend, then Maris’ guild was sitting on more than just a difficult stone hole filled with stubborn monsters and useful silver.
That would make negotiations more interesting.
Eventually, the architecture shifted.
The corridor opened into a wider descending path lined with taller columns and shattered reliefs carved into the walls. Old scenes had been etched into the stone, figures in robes, soldiers, towers, circles, kneeling crowds, but age, damage, and labyrinth corruption had erased enough detail that most of it looked like ghosts trapped in rock.
Elira slowed slightly.
“We’re close,” she said.
Ludger had already noticed.
The mana density had thickened. The air felt colder too, though that might have been Elira unconsciously reacting to the environment around them. Either way, the pressure ahead was distinctly different from the rest of the second section.
Not the guardian. But a threshold. A line. Then they passed through a fractured gate half-buried between leaning walls and entered the third section.
Ludger’s gaze sharpened.
The buried-city feeling had changed. The upper sections had felt like ruins. This place felt like a grave that had never finished rotting.
The streets ahead were wider, lined by larger structures with partially intact facades. Stone balconies jutted from ruined buildings. Fallen monuments lay broken across old plazas. Massive statues, cracked from face to base, stood like dead wardens watching over a city that had been entombed with all its bitterness intact.
Even the revenants here looked different. Taller. Heavier.
Their stone bodies were more refined, less crude, and many wore remnants of old armor fused directly into their forms. Some carried long blades. Others held tower shields or polearms. Their shapes looked less like random citizens dragged back from death and more like the preserved remains of a proper military force.
Elira’s voice dropped a little.
“This is the third section.”
Ludger gave a small nod. He could see why her mother stopped at the second and why the guild had trouble maintaining profits down here. This was no longer a matter of brute force alone. This place required quality. The kind of quality most guilds simply did not have enough of.