The room stared at him. He said it like that was a complete explanation.
Like “with money” was a perfectly normal answer to “how are you planning to distract an imperial structure long enough to hide evidence, secure a rescued dryad, and prevent a political chain reaction.”
Viola blinked once. “That is not an answer.”
“It is,” Ludger said.
“That is two words pretending to be a strategy.”
Yvar’s eyes had already started narrowing in thought, which meant unfortunately for everyone else that he could see the outline of what Ludger meant.
Arslan caught that and looked between them. “Yvar.”
Yvar rubbed at his jaw. “He may mean disruption through markets, contracts, or flow pressure.”
Viola turned to him. “That sounds like a scholar trying to rescue nonsense.”
“It sounds,” Yvar said carefully, “like Ludger intends to make enough profitable confusion in the right places that imperial attention gets dragged sideways.”
Eclaire’s gaze sharpened. “Commercial noise.”
“Yes.”
Aronia looked distinctly unamused. “You’re talking about using trade as camouflage for a kidnapped dryad.”
“Rescued dryad,” Viola corrected.
Aronia gave her a look. “That does not improve the sentence enough.”
Ludger didn’t seem bothered by any of this.
Using deals, supply, guild activity, regional movement, contracts, maybe even deliberate market irregularities to make the Empire look in too many directions at once. Enough friction in enough places, and certainty broke down. Certainty mattered. Certainty was how enemies drew lines between secret events and hidden actors.
If Ludger could flood the map with other things worth attention, then the line from labyrinth breach to Lionsguard might stay blurred just long enough.
Arslan let out a slow breath and looked at his son with the exact expression of a man who was both proud and slightly horrified by how his child’s mind worked.
Ludger left the guild not long after that.
There was no grand closing to the meeting, no clean sense of resolution. Just the natural collapse of a room full of tired people who had learned too much in too little time. The dryad remained hidden below. Aronia stayed behind with the kind of quiet determination that meant she had already accepted the burden even if she was still annoyed about how it had landed on her. Arslan and Yvar had their own work to begin. The others, meanwhile, started to split off to get what rest they could.
It had been a long night. A sealed labyrinth. A hidden guardian. A dryad pulled from its chest. A retreat under darkness. Blood in the forest. A return to Lionsguard with more questions than answers.
Even for Ludger’s group, that counted as excessive. He had barely gotten clear of the guild grounds before he heard lighter steps behind him. Eclaire.
She reached him quickly, moving with more purpose than hesitation, which meant whatever she wanted to say had probably been sitting in her head since the meeting ended. Before she could actually begin, though, she glanced past him, and stopped.
Viola and Luna were there.
Not close enough to pretend they had happened to be walking the same direction by coincidence, but not far enough away to claim they weren’t watching either. Both of them had the sort of suspicious look people wore when they weren’t entirely sure whether they were witnessing a conspiracy, a bad idea, or something more embarrassing and therefore somehow worse.
Eclaire looked at them for a second, then back at Ludger.
“It seems I’m not trusted by them.”
Ludger followed her gaze, saw the pair still watching, and answered without much concern.
“They’re suspicious of me,” he said.
Eclaire raised an eyebrow slightly. “That wasn’t the part I questioned.”
Ludger ignored that.
“It’s because I’m at the age where my father fooled around too much.”
That got a pause out of Eclaire. Not because the explanation didn’t make a certain amount of sense. Because it was such an infuriatingly blunt way to put it.
Her eyes slid toward Viola and Luna again, then back to him. “That is their logic?”
“Partly.”
“And your response?”
Ludger’s expression stayed flat. “I need to make them understand that I don’t have free time for fooling around. Perhaps drawing it would make then get it.”
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That nearly made Eclaire laugh. Nearly.
Instead, she just studied him for a few moments in that quiet, sharp way of hers. He meant it too. Completely. Not as a joke. Not as a defense. Simply as a practical statement of scheduling reality.
He genuinely considered romantic nonsense an issue of available labor hours. Then she let the matter go, because that wasn’t actually why she had followed him. When she spoke again, her voice lost the faint dry edge from before.
“Speaking of your father…” she said. “Are you really going to keep him in the dark about all this?”
That question settled differently. Heavier. Less amusing. Ludger’s gaze shifted away from Viola and Luna entirely. His eyes went toward the distance instead, toward nothing obvious, which usually meant his mind had turned inward and started arranging itself around something less comfortable.
“Only until it’s necessary,” he said.
Eclaire watched him without interrupting.
“And until we can crush the people behind his family’s death,” Ludger added.
That part was simple enough. Not emotionally simple.
He wasn’t hiding it because he thought Arslan was weak. He was hiding it because timing mattered. Because once said aloud, truths like that didn’t sit politely in a house and wait for revenge to become convenient. They altered people. Shifted the way they slept, thought, and looked at the world.
Ludger continued, quieter now.
“I don’t want that affecting him for too long or the whole family.”
That, more than the rest, made Eclaire’s expression shift. Because there it was. Not the anger. Not the plotting. The reason underneath.
Arslan had already lost enough. Ludger knew that. He carried it around like a stone he refused to set down. This wasn’t about preserving some illusion forever. It was about sparing his father from reopening that wound before the knife could actually be used against the right throats.
Eclaire folded her arms loosely.
“I’m not sure that plan will work as well as you imagine.”
Honest. Too honest… Because she understood people too well not to see the flaw. Families noticed strain. They noticed silence. They noticed when someone they trusted started building entire hidden wars just out of sight.
Ludger nodded once.
“I don’t know either.”
That answer seemed to surprise her less than it should have.
He wasn’t pretending certainty where he didn’t have it. He knew the risk. Knew the plan could fail in all the ordinary human ways plans failed, not because logic broke, but because people weren’t clean enough to move around grief without touching it.
Still, he went on.
“But it’s the best way possible not to affect the whole family for who knows how long.”
That was the part he cared about.
Not just Arslan. Elaine. The twins. Everyone.
Once the full truth surfaced, it would not stop neatly at one man’s pain. It would move through the house, through memory, through all the people tied to the dead by blood and by love and by the simple fact that injustice, once named, never really stayed contained.
Ludger headed straight for Raukor’s forge.
If the secret room beneath the guild had felt tense, quiet, and heavy with hidden truths, then the forge felt like the opposite kind of pressure. It was loud. Hot. Alive. The air hit him first, thick with smoke, metal, and the dry furnace scent of things being forced into new shapes through heat and stubbornness.
Then the noise followed. Hammering. Grinding. The hiss of quenched steel. Raukor’s apprentices called for materials, confirming measurements, moving half-finished pieces from one station to the next.
Ludger stepped inside and immediately found the obvious problem. There were too many of them.
Raukor had once said very clearly that he didn’t want more than five apprentices around him at a time. Five was already “too many idiots in one place,” in his words. And yet now there were fifteen of them.
Ludger’s eyes moved across the forge floor, taking in the organized chaos of it. Apprentices worked on weapon heads, fittings, partial runic plates, practice engravings, and stacks of components laid out in disciplined rows. None of it looked elegant. None of it looked like Raukor’s usual work when he was left to himself.
It looked industrial. Ugly in the practical way mass production always was when compared to craftsmanship.
And in the middle of it, Raukor stood with his arms crossed, scowling like a beastman king forced to manage a grain tax office.
He was giving orders more than actually forging. That alone said enough.
Because Raukor liked forging. Really forging. Masterpiece forging. The kind where every strike mattered, every fold had purpose, and the final result came out like a personal insult to everyone else’s definition of quality. He was not the kind of man who dreamed of supervising assembly-line output while apprentices tried not to ruin steel in groups of three.
But Ludger had asked him to mass-produce weapons. And Raukor, despite all his complaining and snarling and habitual contempt for mediocrity, had taken the request seriously.
One of them almost dropped a half-finished piece when Ludger entered. Raukor noticed immediately.
“Eyes on your work,” he snapped without even turning first.
The apprentice straightened like he’d been slapped. Then Raukor turned.
His crossed arms remained exactly where they were. His expression didn’t change much. It rarely did. The usual no-nonsense weight of him sat there as solidly as ever, somewhere between war veteran, master smith, and large predator who had accepted civilization only as a temporary compromise.
He looked at Ludger once.
Then he asked, “Is it time?”
“Yes,” he said.
That was enough to sharpen the whole room, even for the apprentices pretending not to listen.
Raukor’s eyes narrowed slightly. “Good.”
Ludger’s own expression stayed flat.
“Time,” he said, “to flood the market with runic relics.”
That sentence carried a very particular kind of violence. Not battlefield violence. Worse, in some ways. Economic violence.
Raukor understood it at once.
He wasn’t a merchant, but he knew value. He knew scarcity. He knew exactly what happened when rare tools stopped being rare in controlled ways and started appearing in enough quantity to force response. He also knew Ludger well enough by now to understand that when the boy said “flood the market,” he didn’t mean some lazy oversupply of junk.
He meant targeted disruption. Enough quality to matter. Enough volume to be noticed. Enough confusion to force other players to move.
One of the apprentices, not wise enough to remain silent, glanced up and asked, “Master… flood the market?”
Raukor didn’t even look at him.
“You heard him.”
The apprentice swallowed and looked back down very quickly.
“We don’t need masterpieces for all of it,” he said. “We need consistency. Utility. Enough to create demand, enough reliability to keep that demand growing, and enough pieces moving through enough hands that people start asking questions in the wrong directions.”
Now Raukor did grin. Only a little. And not kindly.
“So,” he said, “you finally want to weaponize craftsmanship properly.”
“I want to weaponize greed,” Ludger replied. “Craftsmanship is the bait.”