Ludger leaned back slightly after reaching that point in his planning. Now he just needed to make the lie heavy enough to live on its own for a while.
The next five days passed slowly. Not because Ludger lacked work. If anything, there was too much of it.
Reports to review. Team assignments to confirm. Training schedules to approve. Quiet preparations for the false expedition. Small details to place in the right order so that by the time he actually disappeared, everyone would already believe they knew where he was. On top of that, he still had regular guild matters, the endless friction of administration, and the mild but constant irritation of having to look normal while planning something very much not normal underneath it.
So he stayed busy. That was not the problem. The problem was waiting.
Once Ludger had decided on a course of action, the time between decision and execution always felt slower than it should. He disliked dead space. Disliked standing in the gap while circumstances caught up to intention. Even when he was using the time well, some part of him remained aware that the real work had not started yet.
Still, the alibi developed nicely.
The announcement about taking some of the newer guild members into the labyrinth for intense training spread exactly as expected. Nobody found it strange. In fact, a good portion of the guild looked either excited for the chosen members or quietly relieved they had not been chosen themselves. Preparations were visible enough to feel natural, and the idea settled into conversation on its own. By the fourth day, people were already talking about it like a fixed event.
That was what he needed.
Then, on the third day, Yvar knocked on the door to his office and entered with the expression of a man delivering a problem while trying not to look as though he already knew it was one.
Ludger glanced up from his desk. And then he facepalmed. A new visitor had arrived at the guild, and Yvar had led her straight to his office.
It was Elira.
Ludger let his hand slide down his face and sighed once he saw her standing there, smiling as she stepped inside like she had every right in the world to appear without warning and disrupt his increasingly fragile peace.
She noticed his reaction immediately.
“How rude,” she said. “Is that how you welcome your new ally?”
Ludger lowered his hand and looked at her flatly.
“What are you doing here?”
Elira shut the door behind her and came farther in with that same composed, mildly entertained smile that already made him regret the entire conversation.
“You should be at home,” Ludger said, “helping the teams I sent adapt to your labyrinth.”
That was not even sarcasm. It was a perfectly reasonable question. If their guilds were already moving into joint operations, then Elira should have been useful there. Monitoring the early adjustments. Helping her people coordinate. Making sure the transition did not become a complete mess. All of that sounded more important than showing up here uninvited.
Elira, however, looked entirely unbothered.
“My mother is handling that,” she said.
Of course she was.
Elira folded her hands loosely in front of herself and added, “I came to buy some runic gear. As you promised.”
Ludger stared at her for a second. Then he sighed again. Not because the reason was invalid. It was, unfortunately, perfectly legitimate. He had offered product access and favorable terms as part of the alliance, and Elira had clearly decided to move on that immediately. Which meant this was not really nonsense.
It was just inconvenient nonsense wrapped in a proper excuse. Yvar, standing off to the side, had the decency not to say anything. Ludger looked from Elira to Yvar and then back again.
She was still smiling. Naturally. That made it worse.
Because she looked far too pleased with the fact that she had managed to insert herself into his office, into his schedule, and into what should have been a quiet stretch of preparation. There was an energy to her that suggested she found his annoyance at least mildly rewarding.
Troublesome girl. Ludger leaned back slightly in his chair and let out a breath through his nose.
“Fine,” he said. “Then tell me exactly what you came to buy.”
Elira’s smile widened just a little, like that had been the answer she expected from the start.
And that, more than anything else, annoyed him.
Elira clasped her hands behind her back and said, with entirely too much ease, “I’ll take my time shopping, then. But it would help if you could give me a proper look around the city.”
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Ludger did not even pretend to consider it.
“I’m too busy to act as your tourism guide.”
Elira let out a soft, disappointed sigh that was not disappointed at all.
“As expected,” she said. “You really are too boring.”
Ludger had no argument against that one he cared to waste aloud. Honestly, he expected her to leave after that.
Not dramatically. Not offended. Just with some mildly annoying comment about doing everything herself and then disappearing into the market district to spend guild coin on practical equipment. Instead, she stayed. And worse, she took her time. Ludger noticed it in pieces at first.
A report from someone near the rune workshop mentioning Maris’ daughter asking too many questions about product lines. A casual remark from a patrol member who had seen her near the market stalls comparing weapon fittings. Another mention from someone else saying she had walked past the guild quarters without looking nearly as nervous as most visitors did.
By the time it became clear she was not simply buying what she needed and leaving, Ludger was already annoyed enough to stop pretending otherwise.
Elira spent the day wandering through Lionfang at her own pace. Not carelessly. Not like a noble girl trying to play at adventure.
She moved with that same alert curiosity she always had, watching everything, asking just enough questions to be troublesome without becoming unbearable, and apparently deciding that if Ludger would not show her the city himself, then she would simply inspect it on her own.
Including the northerners’ camp.
That part, more than anything else, made Ludger stare for a while after hearing it. Apparently she had walked through there too.
Not deep enough to start real problems, thankfully, but far enough that several people had noticed and later mentioned it with varying degrees of amusement.
He could already imagine the scene.
A girl from another guild walking around with open curiosity while the northerners watched her the way they watched most outsiders, directly, without much effort to soften the look. And still, she kept going, taking in the rough structures, open fires, broad-shouldered warriors, children wrestling in the dirt, shamans with their usual unsettling air, and all the other things that made the camp feel more like a border tribe carving out permanence than any proper imperial district.
Ludger leaned back slightly in his chair once the latest mention reached him and exhaled through his nose. Sometimes it really did feel like people across the Empire looked at the northerners and Lionsguard the same way they looked at wild animals in a zoo.
Not with true understanding. Not even with equal fear. Just fascination.
A mix of caution, curiosity, and the strange excitement people got when staring at something dangerous from what they believed was a safe distance.
Lionsguard, in their eyes, was probably some frontier guild full of absurd people doing absurd things in a place that had no right to work as well as it did. The northerners were the other half of that image, loud, violent, half-civilized in the way imperial idiots liked to imagine, useful only because someone else had found a way to point them in a profitable direction.
Together, the two groups probably looked like some kind of traveling spectacle to anyone from the interior.
Annoying. Mostly because there was a sliver of truth buried under the stupidity. From the outside, Lionfang likely did look ridiculous.
A rebuilt border town driven by a teeanger vice guildmaster, defended by a guild growing too fast for comfort, tied to a noble house, trading in labyrinth materials, and sharing territory and labor with a people the Empire still barely understood.
Yes.
Viewed from a safe city hundreds of kilometers away, it probably looked like a very entertaining disaster that had somehow learned bookkeeping.
That still did not mean Ludger appreciated Elira treating it like a sightseeing route.
By late afternoon, he caught sight of her personally from the office window, walking back from the market district with a small bundle under one arm and the sort of completely unbothered expression that suggested she had enjoyed herself.
Naturally. She looked up just enough to spot him near the window. Then she smiled and gave a small wave. Ludger did not wave back.
Elira, apparently immune to discouragement, kept walking toward the guild entrance anyway.
One day before the fake expedition, Ludger found Elira standing near the yard of the house, watching the twins train.
They were at it again with wooden swords in hand, moving through simple strikes and clumsy exchanges with far more seriousness than children their age had any right to. Their forms were still rough, but the effort was real. Repetition after repetition, step after step, they kept going with the stubborn little intensity that had started bothering him more than he liked to admit.
Elira had her arms loosely folded as she watched them, looking far too comfortable there for someone who absolutely did not belong in his family’s yard.
Ludger stopped and asked, “What are you doing here?”
Elira glanced at him, not even slightly embarrassed.
“I asked around where you lived,” she said. “And then I found the twins.”
Of course she had. Then, with the same infuriatingly observant look of hers, she added, “It looks like you’re raising them to become addicted to fighting too.”
Ludger frowned.
“I’m troubled that they started doing that recently.”
That made Elira look at him more carefully. Ludger continued, his gaze shifting back toward the twins.
“Before, they’d always cling to me whenever I was around.” His voice stayed calm, but the dissatisfaction underneath it was obvious enough. “Now they want to train instead.”
The words sounded stranger once spoken out loud. Not wrong. Just strange.
He had expected them to grow, of course. Expected them to become more independent over time. That was natural. Useful, even. But some part of him had still assumed that change would come more slowly, less abruptly, and with less wooden sword practice involved.
Elira listened, then said, “Hmm. I wonder why.”
Her tone had a shape to it. Too smooth. Too knowing. Ludger turned his head and looked at her.
She was already wearing that expression again, the one that suggested she had either guessed the answer or understood it long before he had, and now found his confusion mildly entertaining.
As if the reason were obvious. As if he should already know. That annoyed him instantly.
“What does that mean?” he asked.
Elira only looked back toward the twins, who had just finished another clumsy exchange and were resetting their footing with the grim seriousness of tiny idiots trying to become dangerous.
“It means,” she said, still sounding far too thoughtful for someone being annoying on purpose, “children imitate what impresses them.”