The three of them regrouped near the center of the dungeon.
For a moment, none of them said anything.
They just looked at each other in the dim light, surrounded by frozen guards, broken chains, half-dead prisoners, and the constant distant tremors of Ludger tearing through the castle above. The air felt colder now, heavier too, as if the dungeon itself had realized their plan had already gone wrong.
Because it had. Ludger had given them a clear mission. Interrogate the prisoners. Get answers. Leave without leaving traces behind.
Clean. Efficient. Controlled. They couldn’t do any of that. Not properly.
The prisoners were drugged, tortured, drained, half-conscious at best. The guards inside had already been frozen solid. Luna had cut down the ones outside. Chains were shattered, locks broken, doors opened. Even if they left right now, the idea of “without leaving traces” was already dead and buried.
Viola’s jaw tightened behind her armor. She hated that.
Not because the mission had become impossible to hide. That part had probably already been decided the moment Ludger started blowing apart castle walls like he had a personal grudge against architecture itself. No, what bothered her was worse than that.
They had failed the clean part. And if they failed the clean part, then the useful part had to count. So she forced herself to move again.
“There has to be at least one who can still speak,” Viola muttered.
She turned away from Rufas and started checking the deeper cells one by one, her eyes moving quickly over the broken bodies chained to the walls. Most were in terrible shape. Some were clearly too far gone. Others looked empty enough that even waking them would probably get nothing but pain and nonsense.
Then she found him. A man alone in a cell farther in. Even at a glance, he looked worse than the others.
Older than Rufas. Gaunter. His body was a map of injuries layered over each other with almost methodical cruelty. Bruises dark enough to stain whole sections of skin. Cuts that had only half-closed. Signs of deeper wounds beneath torn clothes. His head hung low, breathing so shallow it was almost hard to see.
By far the worst prisoner in the dungeon. Viola had never seen Gustav before. But she didn’t need anyone to tell her who he was. That kind of attention from interrogators usually only went to the person they hated most. Or the one they needed the most. In this case, probably both.
“That has to be him,” she said.
Luna and Elira moved closer.
Viola stepped into the cell immediately and crouched in front of the broken man. She didn’t wait for approval. There was no point. If Gustav was still alive, then he was the best chance they had left.
Her hand rose and touched him carefully. Healing Touch flowed from her palm into his ruined body.
The response was immediate enough to make her frown. There was too much damage. Too much weakness. Too much of him that had already been pushed to the edge and left there. Her healing could stabilize him, maybe pull him back enough to speak, but not quickly. Not neatly.
Still, she kept going. She had to. If she could get even a few minutes of coherence out of him, then maybe this disaster of a mission still had teeth left. The dungeon trembled again as something massive collapsed somewhere above.
Dust drifted down. Elira watched the corridor. Luna listened to everything. Viola kept feeding healing mana into Gustav, her focus narrowing until the rest of the room faded to the edges of her awareness.
Then it happened. A sound. Small. Sharp. Metal scraping against metal. Every muscle in the room locked at once. The entrance.
Someone was unlocking the dungeon entrance. Time seemed to stop.
Not literally, of course. The dust still fell. The castle still groaned. Viola’s mana was still flowing into Gustav’s body. But in that instant, all motion felt suspended under a single cold realization.
Someone was coming in. Not stumbling down by accident. Not a random patrol checking too early.
Unlocking.
Entering on purpose. Viola slowly raised her head. Elira’s fingers tightened around her crossbows. Luna’s knives lowered into a killing grip without a sound. And across the dungeon, the echo of that unlocking mechanism cut through everything else like a blade…
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Outside the castle, Ludger had already pushed all the way into the gardens.
The path behind him looked less like a battlefield and more like the aftermath of a natural disaster that had developed a personal grudge. Broken walls, torn-up stone, craters, shattered weapons, and bodies scattered across the grounds. Some guards had been thrown hard enough to crack masonry. Others had been cut down so quickly they had probably died without even understanding what had happened.
Dozens.
He had already thrashed dozens of them. And still, there was no sign of the imperial guards. That was what bothered him.
The Armandis men were everywhere. Too many of them. More than enough to make the castle feel like it belonged to the Regent’s faction rather than the Empire itself. But the actual imperial guard? The ones who should have been impossible to miss in a situation like this? Nothing.
Not one clear banner. Not one recognizable unit formation. Not one familiar style of response. Ludger’s eyes narrowed behind the darkness covering his face. It wasn’t like he wanted to fight Rufas and his friends.
That would only make the whole situation worse. If they came out to stop him, then he would have to make ugly decisions very quickly, and tonight already had enough of those. But the total absence of imperial guard response was wrong. Not delayed. Wrong.
Either they were being held back. Or something more important than the breached walls was happening inside the castle. His gaze shifted toward the main structure.
Smoke rose in thick plumes from damaged sections of the outer defenses. Firelight flickered over shattered stone and torn earth. Barrier fragments sparked and died like wounded insects across the wall line. The castle had already lost a good amount of dignity, but it clearly had more to lose.
Ludger considered pushing deeper.
If the goal was chaos, then smashing his way into the castle proper would take things to another level. More noise. More panic. More pressure on whoever was coordinating the defense. More chances for Viola and Luna to move where they needed to move.
He took one step. Then his instincts screamed. Ludger moved instantly.
He didn’t pause to think. Didn’t look around first. Didn’t waste even a fraction of a second trying to identify the source. He simply kicked off the ground with explosive force and hurled himself sideways.
A massive shadow dropped into the place he had occupied half a second earlier. The impact was monstrous.
A giant warhammer came down with it and smashed into the ground hard enough to make the entire garden convulse. Stone exploded upward. Dirt and shattered paving erupted in every direction. A crater opened on the spot with brutal force, and the shockwave rolled through the area hard enough to flatten flower beds, crack statues, and throw loose debris into the air like scraps caught in a storm.
Ludger landed in a crouch several meters away, claws spread, boots cutting into churned earth.
Then he looked up. The figure standing in the crater was enormous. Easily three meters tall.
For a brief moment, it looked like some kind of giant in armor, but that impression died almost immediately. The proportions were too perfect, too deliberate, and the way it held itself lacked the small shifts of living flesh. It stood with a heavy, terrifying stillness, one gauntleted hand resting on the long shaft of the warhammer as dust and dirt slid from its frame.
It wasn’t a runic golem.
Ludger knew what those felt like. This was different. It looked more like a suit of runic armor that had somehow been given motion and purpose without ever needing a person inside.
The armor itself was dark iron layered over a thick inner frame, broad and brutal enough to make siege equipment look elegant by comparison. Every plate was oversized and reinforced, with glowing runic lines cut deep into the metal in patterns that pulsed like veins full of light. Those runes crawled over the shoulders, chest, arms, and greaves, each one feeding into the next in a dense network of enchantments that made the whole thing feel less forged and more assembled around a single murderous concept.
A dangerous presence rolled off the thing in waves.
Not the loose aura of a reckless fighter showing off. Not the wild killing intent of a beast. This was colder than that. Heavier. Artificial, but not dead. Like the runes packed into the armor were grinding against one another to create a battlefield presence all their own.
Its warhammer was just as absurd as the rest of it.
The weapon looked less like something meant for battle and more like a block of fortress wall mounted on a handle. The head was gigantic, squared and brutal, wrapped in its own glowing runic circuits. Even resting against the broken ground, it gave off the sense that one clean hit from that thing would flatten most people into a red stain without needing any flourish.
Ludger slowly straightened. Now this was more like it. Not because he was happy to see it. But because this felt closer to the kind of answer the castle should have had prepared. He rolled one shoulder and flexed his mana claws, the edges of the constructs humming faintly in the night.
“So,” he muttered, voice dry even now, “they finally sent something interesting.”
The giant armored figure didn’t answer. It just shifted its grip on the warhammer. And the ground beneath its feet cracked again.
The thing moved.
Not with the stiff delay Ludger expected from something that size.
It exploded forward.
The garden floor shattered under its first step, then again under the second, the giant armored figure crossing the distance between them with terrifying speed for something built like a walking siege tower. The warhammer came up in both hands, not overhead in some wild telegraphed swing, but tight and efficient, the head dragging a screaming line through the air as it angled for Ludger’s ribs.
Ludger twisted sideways and met it with both mana claws.
The impact detonated through his arms.
The hammer never fully landed cleanly, his claws biting into the shaft and pushing the blow off line, but that barely mattered. The force behind it was so absurd that even redirected, it blasted him across the garden. His boots tore trenches through broken earth before he kicked away and flipped backward, landing on a cracked stretch of stone just in time to avoid the second strike.