Arslan released him just enough to grab him by the shoulder and guide him toward the road back to the city.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get breakfast before taking a break.”
Ludger glanced at him, then at the paper in his hand, then finally allowed himself to be steered along with only minimal resistance.
Maris watched father and son head back toward town. From behind, the resemblance was almost irritating. Same height. Almost the same build.
Broad shoulders, steady stride, that same grounded physicality that made both of them look more suited to breaking walls than talking politics. And yet, despite all that, the sight of them together did not really feel like father and son.
Not in the usual way. They looked more like an older and younger brother walking side by side. One rougher around the edges. One sharper. But unmistakably cut from the same stock.
At her side, Elira yawned again and stretched her back until her shoulders gave a faint pop.
“I need sleep too,” she muttered. “At least until noon.”
She had already started to turn when Maris called her.
“Elira.”
Her daughter stopped and looked back.
Maris held her gaze for a moment before asking, quieter now, “Are you certain Ludger killed the guardian?”
Elira blinked once, then nodded without hesitation.
“Yes.”
There was no drama in the answer. No doubt either. Maris’s eyes narrowed slightly, not because she distrusted Elira, but because part of her still seemed to be adjusting to the words themselves. Elira exhaled and rubbed at one eye.
“The fight was crazy,” she said.
That was putting it mildly. Her expression shifted a little as memory returned in sharper detail.
“The guardian could speak,” she added. “Actually speak. And it could summon strange weapons. The second pair wasn’t made of stone like the first ones. They were… different.” She frowned slightly, searching for the right way to describe them. “I think they drained mana. Or affected it somehow. They pulled at the air around them. Something about them was wrong.”
Maris said nothing. Elira continued.
“Anyone who went in there without knowing that kind of challenge beforehand wouldn’t have much of a chance.” She paused, then looked toward the road where Ludger and Arslan were already getting farther away. “But Ludger was used to it.”
That was the part that still felt the strangest. Not that Ludger was strong. Everyone already knew that. Not that he had won. Even that, absurd as it was, had started feeling possible the longer she watched him.
No, the strangest part had been the way he adapted to the guardian as though fighting intelligent monsters with bizarre weapons and shifting combat patterns was simply another problem to solve. He had treated the guardian’s intelligence, its taunting, and its unnatural swords the same way he treated everything else.
He observed. He adjusted. Then he broke it. Elira let out another quiet breath.
“I’m going to sleep,” she said.
Maris did not stop her this time.
She only stood there for a moment longer, watching the direction Ludger and Arslan had gone, while the morning sun kept climbing over the hill and the entrance to the labyrinth behind them felt, for the first time in over ten years, a little less heavy.
Ludger could still hear the two of them talking behind him as he walked back with Arslan. Not every word. But enough.
Elira’s tired voice. Maris’ controlled questions. The weight behind them.
Then, little by little, Ludger went quiet while Arslan kept talking about something beside him. Breakfast, probably. Or sleep. Or how absurd this whole mess had been. His father’s voice continued on in the background, but Ludger’s attention had already drifted elsewhere.
To the guardian. More specifically, to the end of that fight. The truth of the matter was simple enough on the surface. He had killed it. That part was not in question.
The problem was that the creature had not acted in its last moments the way most things acted when they were truly cornered and dying. It had been damaged. Broken. Pulverized, even. But there had been something off about the way it collapsed. No panic. No desperate lashing out. No final frenzy of an intelligent beast refusing death.
If anything, in those last moments, it had looked... unconcerned.
Not calm exactly. Not accepting. Just not particularly bothered. That irritated him. There were still too many things Ludger did not know about labyrinths.
He understood more than most. Enough to exploit them, adapt to them, and profit from them. Enough to know they were not merely holes filled with monsters and treasure. They were systems. Structures. Wounds. Doors. Sometimes all at once. He already knew, at least in part, that a labyrinth was connected to another world.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
And at the end of the fight, when he had smashed the guardian into the far wall, he had seen something else.
A hole. Not a crack from impact. Not simple structural collapse. A real opening. For the briefest moment, before the stone closed again, he had seen a path on the other side. Not deep enough to study properly. Not long enough to examine. But it had been there. That was enough.
Enough to confirm that the guardian’s chamber had not simply been the end of a route. It had been covering something. Connecting to something. And the way the wall had sealed itself afterward made it even less likely that he had imagined it.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly as he kept walking. That changed things.
Not immediately. Not in a way he could act on this morning while tired, irritated, and still sweating from an all-night fight. But eventually, yes. It changed things.
Still, that was not information Maris and Elira needed right now. Not for now.
Maris had spent over ten years letting the labyrinth rot around an unresolved wound because she could not bring herself to reopen it. Elira had spent years carrying around the weight of a dead father and grandfather tied to that chamber. Telling them there might be more behind the guardian room, another path, another layer, another connection to somewhere worse, would solve nothing today.
It would only create new problems before he knew enough to control them. So Ludger kept that part to himself. For now, the simpler truth would do. The guardian was dead. The pressure on the guild would ease. The family had their answer, at least partially.
Their dead had not come back, of course. Nothing so convenient or kind ever happened. But the thing that had sat at the center of that old wound for more than ten years was gone now.
As far as Maris and Elira needed to know at the moment, that was enough. Beside him, Arslan was still talking, apparently having noticed none of the turn Ludger’s thoughts had taken. Ludger let him.
And as they kept walking toward the city under the rising sun, he quietly filed the rest away for later.
Ludger only slept for a couple of hours at the inn. When he woke up, the room was quiet, and Arslan was already gone. That was probably for the best.
His father had a talent for being unnecessarily energetic in the morning when other people most definitely were not, and Ludger had no interest in dealing with that after spending the entire night inside a labyrinth, killing a guardian, and then getting dragged into the social aftermath of it all.
So he sat up slowly, rubbed once at his face, and let his mind settle. His body still felt the fight.
Not in any serious way. He would recover quickly enough. But there was a lingering heaviness in his shoulders and back, the sort that came after pushing too much force through his body for too long. His mana circuits were better, though. Sharper. More responsive. The fight had been useful for him to get used to that kind of strain or maybe he had gotten stronger enough to endure the strain.
Annoying, but useful. After washing up and eating just enough to stop his stomach from becoming a problem, Ludger resumed working.
Specifically, he resumed working on battle plans for the next Lionsguard teams that might eventually come here to farm the labyrinth.
His notes from the morning were spread out across the table in front of him, with additional sheets set beside them. He reorganized the information from the guardian fight first, then refined the parts relevant to actual deployment.
Ideal team number. Necessary front-line toughness. Expected weapon degradation by section. Minimum support capacity. How much carrying space would be needed if silver recovery became the priority instead of deep clearing.
He also started sketching out role splits. A deeper strike team. A harvesting unit. A reserve line. A courier rotation if they wanted to move the silver efficiently without exhausting everyone.
The more he worked through it, the clearer the picture became. This labyrinth could be farmed profitably. But only if it was treated like a proper operation instead of a normal dungeon run.
It needed planning, discipline, and enough raw quality to survive the third section without bleeding money through broken gear and potion costs. Maris’ guild had clearly been operating below that threshold for a long time. That was understandable. It was also inefficient.
Ludger was halfway through adjusting the section on rotating support mages when the door opened.
Arslan came back in. He looked far too alive for someone who had caused so much nonsense in life. Ludger did not bother hiding his disappointment. Arslan ignored that and shut the door behind him.
“Maris wants to talk with us about the partnership between the guilds,” he said. “While we eat dinner together.”
Ludger looked up from the papers.
Then Arslan added, in a tone that suggested this was somehow helpful, “Elira will be there too.”
Ludger stared at him for a second.
“As if that makes it easier,” he said.
Arslan coughed lightly. Ludger set down the paper in his hand.
“Do you not think there is anything wrong with having dinner with your ex in the presence of your children?”
Arslan frowned.
“That’s not what this is.”
Ludger raised an eyebrow. Arslan pointed at him.
“You,” he said, with far too much conviction, “are my alibi. Your mother will be aware that I didn’t do anything.”
Ludger looked at him. Then he shrugged.
“Mom would skin you alive just for knowing you had dinner with your ex while she was at home looking after the twins alone.”
Arslan visibly paused. Not because he disagreed. Because he knew that was a perfectly realistic outcome. Ludger continued, voice flat.
“In fact, I think the only reason she sent you here alone was because she wanted the situation to become your problem in the most unpleasant way possible.”
Arslan let out a breath through his nose.
“That does sound like her.”
“Yes.”
Ludger looked back down at his papers.
“You are fortunate she loves you.”
Arslan muttered something under his breath that sounded suspiciously like a prayer of gratitude. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down across from Ludger, glancing over the spread of notes on the table.
“You’ve been working this whole time?”
Ludger did not look up.
“Yes.”
“You slept for barely two hours.”
“Yes.”
Arslan stared at him for a moment, then shook his head. Ludger ignored that. He kept writing.
Because whether dinner with Maris became productive, awkward, or actively irritating, the actual problem remained the same: if Lionsguard intended to move on this opportunity, then he needed proper plans before people started making decisions with excitement instead of discipline.