The castle, distant, but visible.
Massive even from here, a dark shape of stone and authority rising above the capital like the Empire’s hand pressed into the earth. Towers, walls, layered structures, and enough guarded pride to make the whole place feel heavier than the buildings around it.
Ludger stood at the rooftop’s edge and took a deep breath. The castle lay there in the distance. Good. His eyes narrowed slightly.
Then he began working.
Earth mana flowed outward from him and condensed in the air nearby. Stone and packed mineral mass gathered with harsh precision, pulled together by his will into shape after shape. Dense spheres formed one after another, each one heavy enough to break masonry on impact. He did not leave them smooth. He pushed spikes from their surfaces, short brutal protrusions meant not for elegance, but for damage, for catching, biting, tearing into structure instead of simply bouncing off it.
More. Then more.
A cluster of them hung around him, dense and ugly in the dark, each one carrying enough weight to matter. Then Ludger began adding the rune. Explosion. Inscribed by mana and control.
Each sphere took the rune into itself differently, the pattern burning inward under his guidance until the payload inside each lump of crafted earth became far more dangerous than its shape alone suggested. He worked quickly but not sloppily, fingers moving in small precise motions while the spheres hovered around him like a quiet orbit of buried violence.
Soon there were enough. Enough to make a statement. Enough to shake stone. Enough to start the night properly. Ludger set his stance, rolled one shoulder once, and began throwing. The first sphere left his hand with a vicious burst of force. Then the second. Third. Fourth.
One after another, the spiked masses shot across the night sky toward the castle walls, cutting through the dark with high-pitched screaming sounds that rose as the enchanted weight tore through the air. Not whistles. Not clean projectiles.
Something harsher. Like the night itself objecting to what had just been launched through it.
The spheres arced outward in brutal lines, fast enough that anyone below would only have time to hear them before impact. And then the first one hit.
The first explosion shook a good part of the district hard enough to make windows rattle and loose dust rain from rooftops.
Then the second one struck.
And the third.
The night tore open under the chain of impacts.
Fire burst outward in violent blooms against the castle walls, orange and red for an instant before thick black smoke began rolling over the stone in heavy waves. The force of each detonation hammered against the defenses with enough violence to send shock through the surrounding air. Even from his rooftop, Ludger could feel the pressure of it in his chest, hear the deep, ugly thunder of reinforced masonry taking punishment it had not expected to take all at once.
A barrier of mana flashed into visibility around the wall where the blasts landed.
It had likely been there all along, hidden until forced to respond, but now it shone in wide trembling arcs of pale light, vibrating under the assault like a struck sheet of glass. The barrier distorted the explosions, caught part of the force, dispersed some of it upward and sideways, but not all of it.
Not nearly all of it.
The next sequence of impacts came before the defense could fully settle.
More spiked spheres slammed into different sections of the outer structure and detonated in rapid succession, each explosion feeding chaos into the last one’s smoke and flame. The wall shook. The barrier flickered. The sound rolled across the capital in layered peals of destruction that no one with a functioning brain could mistake for anything small.
The city woke up at once.
Shouts rose in the distance. Doors slammed open. Lights flared into life across windows and balconies. Somewhere farther away, bells began sounding, then more of them, the alarm spreading in ragged urgency as people jerked awake thinking exactly what Ludger wanted them to think.
That they were being invaded. That the capital itself was under attack. The castle barriers still held in parts. But holding was no longer the same as functioning properly.
The repeated impacts had done what Ludger intended: they had forced the magical defenses to absorb too much too quickly while the stone beneath them was being broken, displaced, and torn out of alignment. The mana shell around the wall wavered violently, brightening in some sections, collapsing dimly in others, whole lines of it stuttering as if uncertain whether they were still attached to the structure they had been built to protect.
And then parts of the wall began to fail. Not all at once. In pieces.
A corner section cracked open first, the stone beneath the barrier too damaged to keep supporting the layers above it. A moment later, half of that stretch sheared away and crashed downward in a roar of broken masonry. Elsewhere, a tower-side outer line splintered, blocks dropping free through smoke and sparks as another explosion hit too close to a weakened seam.
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The barriers reacted badly.
Instead of recovering cleanly, they began glitching across several damaged sections, flickering in jagged bursts while trying to repair themselves and defend at the same time. Mana lines crawled erratically over open gaps, brightened, failed, reformed, then snapped apart again when the damaged wall beneath them shifted too much. In some places the protective shell half-appeared over empty air. In others it blinked off entirely for a second or two before struggling back.
Ugly.
Perfect. The castle was no longer a sealed, stable structure.
It was a fortress under sudden stress, its physical and magical defenses both forced into the same bad habit at once, trying to preserve too much while reacting too fast.
And below the fire, smoke, collapsing stone, and screaming alarms, that was exactly the kind of weakness Ludger needed. The first wave of guards reached the damaged section fast.
Good training. Good discipline too.
Even with the wall still shedding dust and chunks of cracked stone, they did not rush in like idiots. They advanced in formation, spears angled forward, shields raised, boots crunching over broken masonry while they checked the shattered stretches of wall and the blackened gaps where the barrier kept stuttering in and out of existence. Mana lamps and emergency lights from the castle behind them cast jagged flashes over armor, smoke, and rubble.
Their heads kept moving.
Left.
Right.
Up.
Across the breach.
They were looking for a siege engine, a second barrage, hidden attackers, anything that would explain the sudden destruction. Then another explosion hit in front of them.
It burst low and violent, throwing up broken stone and a thick wave of dust and smoke that rolled straight into their formation. Several guards tightened instinctively, shields coming higher, spears thrusting toward the cloud as shouts rang out behind the line.
But almost immediately, something felt wrong. The blast had sound. Force. Yet not the same kind of fragmentation as before.
Not a proper impact. Not another projectile detonating against the wall. Something had landed there. The dust curtain shifted. Then a figure stepped out of it.
Dark.
Cloaked.
Too calm.
A powerful aura poured off the body beneath the cloak, dense enough to make the air around it feel heavier, sharper, wrong. It wasn’t just mana. It was pressure. Controlled, compact, and vicious in the way only someone used to real killing could carry it. The edges of the cloak moved in the smoke, and where hands should have been, there were claws.
Not metal gauntlets. Not shaped weapons.
Large mana claws extended directly from the figure’s open hands, long and curved, translucent but dense, glowing with a hard, predatory edge. They flexed once, and the dust around them split slightly as if the air itself had been cut.
That was what Ludger could do when he stopped pretending his hands had to be hands.
When he kept them open and applied the enhancement skills he had learned from the beastmen directly to the shape of his grip, the result was not elegant. It was not even especially human.
The mana reinforcement layered over his fingers and palms, then extended outward into dense hooked edges that turned each movement into something halfway between a blade, a talon, and a tearing weapon made of condensed violence.
The guards saw it. And for a fraction of a second, the line hesitated. Not breaking. Just registering. Because whatever had stepped out of that smoke did not look like a saboteur anymore. It looked like a monster wearing a man’s outline.
Then Ludger’s gaze dropped briefly to their shields.
And he saw the emblem. A red bear’s head.
Armandis.
That settled it. He had planned to be loud. He had planned to be obvious. He had planned to become the shape of the threat and drag as much attention as possible onto himself. Now, seeing that crest in front of him, he decided to go all out for a change.
The pressure around his body thickened at once.
Mana surged harder through his limbs, and the claws extending from his hands sharpened further, growing brighter at the edges while the air around them trembled. The dark cloak snapped behind him in the force of it. The dust around his boots slid outward across the broken stone.
One of the guards shouted something, an order, a warning, it didn’t matter. Ludger moved before the line could finish bracing. He crossed the distance like a violent tear in the smoke.
The first shieldman barely had time to raise his guard fully before Ludger’s right claw came down across it. The mana edge screeched against metal and reinforcement, then punched straight through, carving across the shield face and into the man behind it in the same motion. Armor split. Blood sprayed hot across shattered stone.
Ludger did not stop.
His left hand lashed out immediately after, claws open, and ripped through the shaft of an incoming spear before continuing into the throat of the soldier holding it. The man folded backward with a wet choking sound as the broken spear halves spun away.
The formation tried to tighten. Too slow. A third guard lunged from the side with spear and shield together, clearly trained enough to exploit a flank.
Ludger stepped inside the line, too close for the thrust to develop cleanly, and drove his elbow into the man’s chest with enough force to cave armor inward. The impact launched the guard off his feet and into the others behind him, breaking their spacing at the exact moment they needed it most.
Then the claws came again.
Right hand. Left hand. A crossing tear through shield rims and breastplates. A rising slash that opened one man from hip to shoulder. A backhanded rake that tore another across the face hard enough to send him spinning into rubble.
The red-bear shields hit the ground one after another.
Cracked.
Split.
Useless.
Ludger’s aura rolled through the breach like a living threat, dense and merciless, his open-handed claw strikes turning what should have been defensive lines into meat and broken gear in seconds. There was no hesitation in him now. No dry annoyance. No restraint built for politics or appearances.
Only punishment.