Before they settled fully into waiting, Ludger reached beneath his cloak and pulled out the runic crossbows.
He handed them to Elira without ceremony.
“Use them well,” he said. “But don’t get too used to them.”
Elira took the weapons carefully, and for the first time in a while, her usual expression slipped into something much more openly pleased. Not childish excitement. Something sharper. The satisfaction of a specialist being handed tools that immediately made sense in her hands.
She tested the weight first. Then the balance. Then the runic channels.
Her fingers moved over the frame with a level of attention that told Ludger she understood at once that these were not ordinary weapons dressed up with enchantments for show. The construction was clean. The release was smooth. The mana flow had been arranged to support precision rather than brute force.
Perfect for her. Elira glanced up once.
“These are good.”
“Yes.”
That was all Ludger gave her. So she began practicing.
Not by firing wildly, of course. Even underground, even hidden, they were not stupid enough for that. But she moved through the motions, worked the loading, tested the handling, adjusted how the stock rested against her shoulder, and sent a few carefully measured bolts into marked sections of stone where the sound could be controlled enough not to turn into a disaster.
The results spoke for themselves. The bolts flew cleanly. The release was sharp. The runic reinforcement kept the shots stable in a way most weapons simply could not.
Elira’s mouth curved almost immediately. Then, after a few more shots, she could not help it anymore and smirked. Of course she did.
The weapons were genuinely useful. More than useful. Dangerous in the hands of someone like her. Precision, support, ranged pressure, faster adaptation in a defensive role, Ludger had not handed her a convenience. He had handed her a force multiplier.
That pleased her far too much. Viola, watching from nearby, clicked her tongue.
“You look entirely too happy.”
Elira did not look away from the crossbow while checking the next line of aim.
“I am.”
Luna, seated against the wall with her arms loosely folded, watched in silence for a while before saying, “He did warn you not to get used to them.”
Elira finally lowered the weapon slightly and said, “That’s the cruel part.”
Ludger ignored the exchange.
He had not lent her the crossbows to make her happy. He had done it because tonight demanded utility more than possession. Elira would make better use of them in her assigned position than almost anyone else he could have put there on such short notice.
That was reason enough. After the testing was done, the mood in the chamber shifted.
The little threads of humor and irritation thinned out and then disappeared altogether as they began to focus on what was coming. Weapons were checked again. Mana was conserved. Routes were rehearsed quietly in their heads. Timing, posture, likely reactions, fallback points, each of them sank inward in their own way as they waited for night to fall.
The runic lights along the tunnel walls glimmered faintly over faces that had gone much more serious than before.
Viola was no longer restless in the childish sense. Luna was still as ever, but now with that colder, mission-ready stillness fully settled into her. Elira had stopped smiling and was checking the crossbows with the kind of care that only appeared when the cost of failure became real.
And Ludger sat apart just enough to watch the shape of all three of them at once while still running through the operation again in his own head.
This was an important mission. That much had long since moved beyond debate. And because it was important, they could not afford to mess it up. Not in timing. Not in discipline. Not in judgment. Not even once.
Interestingly, none of them asked again how Ludger planned to become the bait. That part had already been accepted for what it was.
Perhaps they understood that asking would change nothing. Perhaps they had enough of their own roles to worry about now. Perhaps they simply did not want to hear the exact shape of whatever madness he intended to unleash on the castle once the operation began.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Whatever the reason, the question stayed unspoken.
And in the quiet of the hidden underground chamber, while night slowly approached above them, that silence felt like another kind of preparation too.
Even so, Ludger could not help worrying a little about whether bringing Elira had truly been the right decision.
That part was irritating.
Mostly because he preferred uncertainty when it still looked like a problem to solve, not when it had already become part of a plan in motion. At this point, the decision had been made. She was here. She knew too much. She had a role, weapons, and enough ability to matter. Doubting it now had no practical value.
And yet the thought remained. Maybe he had gotten too sentimental after Luna’s argument. That possibility alone was unpleasant enough to make his expression flatten further.
Not because he thought Luna had manipulated him. She had not. She had simply been logical in exactly the wrong way for his peace of mind. Still, the timing of the shift was obvious enough that Ludger could not completely dismiss the suspicion that he had yielded a little more than usual, not because the structure demanded it, but because her reasoning had landed closer to the center than he liked.
Annoying. Very annoying.
Even so, when he forced himself to look at the matter practically, the decision was not bad. Elira’s presence gave the operation something it would otherwise have lacked: proper ranged support in the exact kind of situation where ranged support became the difference between controlled retreat and collapse. The runic crossbows amplified that even further. With them, her value rose sharply. She could pressure approach routes, punish reinforcements, pin down defenders trying to move too quickly, and make the route behind Viola and Luna far less likely to seal shut the moment things went ugly.
And things would go ugly. That part was nearly guaranteed. So no, bringing her had not been a soft choice in the end. It had been a risky one. But risk and softness were not the same thing.
Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose and let that settle. Those two, Viola and Luna, still needed more work for this kind of mission. That thought came next with perfect clarity.
Viola was capable, brave, and difficult in all the obvious ways, but she still leaned too much toward direct instinct when a situation became emotional. Luna was better suited by temperament, but even she had limits in how much covert pressure she had been forced to operate under at once. Neither of them was unfit. But neither had been built specifically for this sort of thing either.
That meant more training later. Specialized training.
Ludger made a mental note to work on that once this was over.
If this was the kind of work he might need to do again, and it probably was, then the people close enough to keep forcing their way into his orbit needed to become less troublesome and more useful when that happened.
That was simply efficient. Then, after that, another thought came and settled even deeper. He needed to become stronger. Not a little stronger. Not just one step, one skill, one class adjustment, one new trick.
Impossibly stronger.
Strong enough that the idea of him making others worry would become absurd.
Strong enough that when he walked into something like this, the concern itself would feel irrational. Strong enough that his presence would no longer be measured against danger in the ordinary way. Strong enough that operations would stop hinging on whether he could survive the chaos and start hinging only on whether the world around him could survive him.
That was the real answer, in the end. Not less risk. Not more comforting words. Not pretending the people around him were wrong to care.
More power. Enough power to make care unnecessary. It was a harsh answer. A selfish one, perhaps. But it fit him far better than softer solutions ever would.
Ludger sat there in the dim underground light while the others focused on their own preparations, and in the quiet of his own head he fixed that thought in place with the same certainty he used for every other serious decision.
He would become that strong. And then one day, the idea of worrying about him would be the truly foolish thing.
When midnight finally came, Ludger got up.
The hidden chamber had gone so quiet by then that even the sound of cloth shifting seemed sharper than it should have. The runic lights along the walls glimmered faintly over stone, weapons, and faces that had long since left casual conversation behind.
Ludger reached for the suit he had prepared and began putting it on.
A dark, fitted set of clothes designed for movement, concealment, and not catching the eye until it was already too late to matter. The material hugged close without restricting him, reinforced where it needed to be, plain enough in color that the night would help erase its outline.
Elira looked like she wanted to comment on it.
Probably because it made him look even more like someone about to do exactly the kind of work she had been guessing at from the beginning. But the words died before they fully formed. Ludger’s aura had shifted again. The faint dryness, the low irritation, the almost-human annoyance he wore in ordinary hours was gone.
What remained was the serious version. The one that made people think twice before speaking.
So Elira stayed quiet. Ludger adjusted the last part of his sleeves and looked at the three of them.
“Get ready.”
That was all. No speech. No reassurance. No unnecessary emphasis. They already knew their roles.
Viola rose immediately. Luna gave one small nod and checked her gear again. Elira secured the crossbows and let the earlier trace of personal amusement vanish from her expression entirely.
Ludger turned and left through the exit of the hideout. The tunnel narrowed briefly, then opened into the concealed passage that led toward the surface. A few breaths later he emerged from the underground and stepped into a dark alley.
The capital at midnight felt different from every other city he had worked in. Even asleep, it did not fully rest.
The air carried the distant echo of carriage wheels, muffled voices, boots on stone far away, the restless breathing of a place too large and too important to ever truly go still. Tall buildings leaned over the alley in layered darkness, their upper windows black or dim, their lower levels closed tight behind shutters and heavy wood. Cold night air touched his face.
Ludger did not linger. He moved. One step to the wall. A push upward. Another.
Then he was on the rooftops, crossing angles of dark tile and stone with the smooth certainty of someone who had long since stopped considering height a real obstacle.
He made for the tallest building in the area, a narrow structure with a roofline high enough to give him a proper view over the district. From there, the city spread outward in darker layers beneath the night, and beyond them…
The castle.