The hammer hit where he had been. Stone, dirt, and chunks of decorative garden wall erupted upward in a violent ring.
No pause. No roar. No mechanical delay.
The armored giant turned through the follow-up with unnerving precision, hammer sweeping low to high in a motion far too clean for something that was supposed to be an empty shell. Ludger ducked under it and stepped in hard, one claw slashing for the thing’s midsection.
The mana edge screamed over black metal. Sparks burst.
His strike carved a glowing line across the armor’s side but did not bite nearly as deep as it should have. Dense runes flared beneath the plate, drinking part of the force and throwing the rest back through the structure. Before Ludger could press the opening, an armored knee drove toward his stomach.
He caught it on his forearm and still felt the world lurch. The blow folded the ground beneath him. Ludger slid back a meter, then two, his boots crushing stone as he bled off the momentum.
His eyes narrowed. That wasn’t golem behavior.
He had fought enough constructs to know the difference. Most of them were dangerous because of durability, brute force, or preset attack patterns. Even the smarter ones still carried a certain rhythm. This thing didn’t. It flowed. Adjusted. Pressured openings. It had the ugly compact efficiency of a real fighter wearing too much steel.
The giant stepped in again. Hammer thrust. Not swing. Thrust.
Ludger’s confusion deepened even as he moved. He slapped the haft aside with one claw and slipped inside the reach, driving a kick into the thing’s knee joint with enough force to shatter lesser monsters.
The impact echoed like a battering ram slamming into a fortress gate. The armored leg bent a fraction. That was all. Then a gauntleted fist came down at Ludger’s face.
He barely got his claw up in time. Metal crashed against condensed mana and the shock ran through his shoulder like a hot spike. He turned with the hit, rolled off it, then lashed upward with his other hand. The claw raked across the helmet, tearing sparks from the visor slit and snapping the head slightly to the side.
Any normal opponent would have staggered. The armored thing just rotated with the motion and brought the hammer around in a short brutal arc aimed at his spine.
Ludger jumped.
The hammer passed under him and demolished a stone bench, half a flower wall, and part of the path behind it in one sweep. He landed on a tilted fragment of masonry, launched off it instantly, and came down from above with both claws driving toward the giant’s shoulders.
This time the thing reacted by dropping one hand from the hammer and catching his wrist mid-descent.
Ludger’s eyes widened. The grip was real. Not random. Not a machine simply happening to intercept him.
Five armored fingers clamped around his forearm with the timing of someone who understood grappling.
Then it slammed him into the ground. The garden cratered beneath his back. Air burst from his lungs. The warhammer rose overhead.
Ludger jammed both claws up and rolled a heartbeat before it dropped. The hammer smashed into the earth beside his head and split the ground apart, broken stone punching into his side hard enough to bruise even through reinforcement. He kicked off the armored torso, tore free from the grip, and skidded away while the giant ripped the hammer back out of the crater in one smooth motion.
That smoothness again. Too smooth.
Ludger circled, breathing once through his nose, mana claws flexing wider.
There had to be someone inside.
The way it fought was too responsive. The way it changed angles, shortened swings, used knees, fists, and catches between hammer strikes, none of that looked like some oversized runic puppet blindly following a combat script.
And yet...
He couldn’t feel anyone inside. That was the part that made his skin crawl.
His senses brushed over the armor and found pressure, power, layered runic pulses, dense enchantments running through the frame like artificial veins. But behind all that, there was no clear living presence. No heartbeat of intent he could isolate. No soul-like weight sitting in the center piloting the shell.
It felt occupied and empty at the same time. The thing charged again before he could pull that thread further.
This time it feinted high. Ludger saw the shoulders rise, read the overhead crush, and shifted to the outside… Only for the hammer to stop halfway, dip, and reverse into a savage side blow aimed at his knees.
He threw himself upward and blocked with both claws anyway.
The hit landed. Pain flashed through his arms.
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Not sharp enough to cripple him, but deep, heavy, ugly pain that spread through bone and muscle together. The hammer drove his guard up into his own chest and launched him backward again. He hit the remains of a marble statue hard enough to shatter it, stone fragments bouncing off his shoulders as he pushed away just before the armored giant crashed through the rest of it with a shoulder-first rush.
Ludger answered with speed. Earth rose under his feet.
A platform kicked him sideways and another launched him back in at an angle. He blurred around the giant’s flank, claws carving at joints, neck seams, waist lines, every place armor usually hated being touched. Sparks sprayed. Runes flashed. Plates dented. One slash tore a deeper groove along the elbow, making the arm jerk a fraction slower on the next motion.
Finally.
Then the hammer head slammed backward without warning. Not a full swing. Just a short reverse smash, blind if it had been done by an ordinary fighter. It caught Ludger across the shoulder and side.
The world turned sideways.
He crashed through a section of low garden wall, rolled through torn bushes and broken stone, and came up on one knee with dirt sliding from his cloak. The impacted side of his body throbbed. His reinforcement had saved him from losing the arm outright, but he still felt the sheer vicious weight of that hit lodged inside his muscles.
His expression darkened. He had assumed he was far beyond any runic golem. That assumption had been comfortable… And apparently stupid.
The giant didn’t give him time to dwell on it. It planted one foot, twisted its torso, and hurled the warhammer. Ludger moved on instinct.
He dropped flat as the weapon tore over him like a screaming slab of death, then rolled as the hammer smashed through a tower-like garden monument behind him and kept going until its runes flashed and dragged it back through the air on a recall line of light. The armored figure caught it cleanly without even looking and stepped in again, relentless.
Ludger let out a small sigh.
It was the kind of sound that would have been almost comical anywhere else. Here, in the middle of a shattered castle garden with a three-meter armored nightmare trying to turn him into a stain, it just sounded annoyed.
This fighting style was a pain.
Not impossible. Not even close. But still annoying.
He was used to cleaner things. Punches. Palm strikes. Short bursts of movement. Direct impact. Simple mechanics sharpened until they became monstrous. That was where his body flowed best. Where his instincts felt most natural. Where every inch of timing belonged to him.
Using these oversized mana claws instead meant changing angles, changing range, changing how he intercepted force and applied pressure. The fundamentals were still there, but the expression was different enough to be irritating.
Still, it mattered. If he started fighting too much like himself, then the disguise stopped being a disguise.
And tonight was already messy enough without handing out his identity to every surviving witness in the capital. The aura around him began to change.
It was subtle at first. The mana around his frame tightened, compressed, then thickened into something denser and more oppressive. The edges of the claws deepened in color and mass. His stance lowered just a little, the kind of adjustment that made the air itself seem to brace in response.
The armored thing ignored all of it. No hesitation. No caution. It charged again immediately, hammer rising with the same merciless efficiency as before.
That was another thing about it. It lacked fear. Not courage. Not discipline. Fear.
There was none of that instinctive recoil most living things had when facing something dangerous and unfamiliar. No moment of recalculation after a close call. No disruption in pressure after taking damage. It simply continued, relentless and empty, like the concept of self-preservation had either never existed in it or had been carved out and replaced with orders.
The hammer came down.
Ludger stepped into it. Vitality Well kicked into overdrive.
Stamina surged through his body in a hot violent wave, flooding his limbs with raw output. Muscle, bone, mana, and skill aligned in a single brutal instant as he threw both his weight and his reinforced frame into the interception.
His clawed hand shot up and caught the warhammer before it could smash him.
The impact was enormous.
The shock blasted through his arm and shoulder and straight into the ground beneath him. The earth under his boots groaned, then gave way, collapsing several inches under the sheer force pressing down on him. Cracks tore outward through broken stone and churned soil. Dirt erupted around his legs.
But the hammer stopped. Completely. For the first time since the fight began, the armored giant’s advance was truly halted.
Ludger didn’t waste that opening.
His other mana claw expanded instantly, swelling wider and thicker as he poured more power into it. The construct warped from a cutting shape into a brutal grasping one, large enough to engulf the enemy’s helmeted head.
Then he grabbed it.
The armored figure tried to wrench the hammer free, but Ludger’s stance locked harder. His planted feet sank further as the ground kept yielding under the pressure, yet he ignored all of it. His left hand held the warhammer dead in place while his right claw clamped around the enemy’s head and began to crush.
Metal screamed.
The helmet dented inward with a harsh grinding shriek. Runes flared wild and angry under the pressure as the claw bit deeper, fingers tightening one piece at a time. Ludger could feel the armored shell resisting in layers, outer plate, inner frame, reinforced enchantment channels, some deeper structure trying to redistribute the force.
Didn’t matter. He squeezed harder. One section near the visor cracked. Then another along the side of the helmet buckled inward.
The armored thing reacted instantly, abandoning the hammer with one hand and driving a fist into Ludger’s ribs. He took the hit and kept crushing. The second punch came harder. Then a knee. Then an elbow hammering into his side.
Vitality Well burned through the damage, pushing recovery and output together so hard it felt like his own body was trying to outpace pain through sheer stubbornness. Ludger’s eyes narrowed.
“Break already.”
The claw tightened again. This time the helmet split further with a vicious metallic pop. And then the sky lit up. A rain of spells screamed into the garden.
Ludger’s instincts fired before thought fully caught up. He felt the mana signatures above and behind him a heartbeat before impact, multiple casters, coordinated release, no hesitation.
Of course. So the artillery had finally arrived. He moved instantly.
Still holding the enemy’s head in one claw, he tore the giant armored body up off the ground with a brutal twist and used it as a shield just as the spell barrage crashed down onto them.
Fire detonated first. Then lightning. Then dense lances of compressed mana and jagged shards of ice.