The giant thing slid. Not much. But enough. Enough for Ludger to feel the shift in weight and know it could be moved.
So he moved it harder.
His feet blurred across the floor, Overdrive snapping around him in jagged discharges. Punch. Elbow. Palm. Low kick. He flowed through the sequence with vicious economy, each strike landing before the previous shock had fully died.
A straight punched the guardian’s sternum.
A left palm strike hammered into the flat of one sword and bent the guard inward just enough to open space. A heel kick crashed into the creature’s thigh. A right cross slammed into the opposite blade with such force that a metallic-stone shriek tore through the chamber.
The guardian gave ground again. Ludger was on it instantly.
He stepped diagonally inside the reach of both swords, forcing the monster to shorten its cuts. His forearm smashed one blade aside. His fist drove into its throat. His elbow cracked across its jawline. Then he spun and whipped a back kick into its abdomen hard enough to make the enormous body rock.
Its swords came back in a blur. Ludger met them head-on. His left fist struck one blade near the midpoint. His right heel smashed into the other near the guard.
The impacts rang like bells struck with hammers. The first visible crack appeared. Thin. Jagged. Running along the fuller of the left-hand sword.
Ludger’s eyes sharpened.
There. The guardian attacked harder, sensing the shift.
Both blades carved toward him in alternating arcs meant to box him in. Ludger slipped the first slash by twisting his torso. The second scraped sparks from his bracer as he knocked it aside. Then he stepped through the middle of both lines and unloaded a savage combination directly into the weapons themselves.
A short punch into the cracked blade. A descending elbow onto the other. A stamping kick to the guardian’s front shin that forced its body up just slightly. Then another straight punch.
This one landed on the damaged sword with enough focused force to deepen the fracture. The crack spread in a sharp branching line. The weapon shrieked. The guardian answered with a thrust from the second blade, but Ludger swayed off line, caught the flat on his bracer, and smashed a knee into the creature’s sword arm.
The limb lurched. His fist crashed into the blade again. Another crack. Then a kick. Then another punch. The entire exchange turned ugly.
No finesse now. No probing. Just Ludger driving forward like a compact storm of fists, elbows, knees, and kicks, every strike either smashing into the guardian’s body or crashing into its swords whenever they came between them. The throne room echoed with impact after impact, a relentless chain of heavy collisions that left no room for breath.
He punched one sword near the tip and made it tremble. He kicked the other near the base and forced it to grind sideways. He hammered the cracked blade with a vertical fist from above, then slammed a hook into the opposite weapon before the guardian could reset its guard.
Stone and metal screamed. The cracks spread. Both swords were beginning to fail now. The guardian finally tried to create distance, taking a heavy backward step while drawing both blades into a tighter guard.
Ludger lunged with it. His lead foot hit the ground like a shot. A straight punch detonated against the first sword. An elbow smashed into the second. A spinning back kick crushed into the guardian’s abdomen and shoved the huge body farther back.
Before its heels had fully settled, Ludger stepped in and unleashed a brutal four-hit sequence that landed so fast the sounds overlapped.
Left fist. Right fist. Left kick. Right punch. By the end of it, the cracked blade shattered. Fragments of dark stone-metal burst across the chamber in a spray of broken pieces and mana sparks.
The guardian did not pause. It swung the remaining sword in a murderous horizontal cut. Ludger met it with both hands.
His left palm slapped the flat aside. His right fist shot forward. It hit the weapon dead center. For one frozen instant, the sword bent around his knuckles.
Then it exploded. The second blade burst apart in a ringing blast of shards. Now the guardian’s chest was open. Ludger planted himself and drove one final punch into the monster’s torso. Not wide. Not wild. A brutally clean shot delivered with his whole body behind it.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
His legs rooted. His hips turned. His back and shoulder aligned. Overdrive and Rage Flow poured through the strike in one savage line. His fist sank into the center of the guardian’s chest.
A high-pitched sound screamed through the throne room. Not from Ludger. Not from the floor. From inside the monster. A sharp, unnatural ringing like a crack racing through the heart of a massive bell. Then the guardian flew.
Its huge body tore backward across the chamber, armored stone plates breaking away from its form as it went. It slammed into the far wall with enough force to shake the entire hall. The impact split stone, sent fractured pillars trembling, and dropped chunks of ancient masonry from the ceiling.
Dust flooded the room. Broken rock rained down. For a moment, the far end of the chamber vanished behind the cloud. Ludger stood where he had struck it, chest rising and falling, knuckles throbbing, electric discharges still snapping around his body. His eyes stayed locked on the dust.
Alive. He could tell.
The presence on the other side of the chamber had weakened, but it had not disappeared. It was still there, heavy and hateful and far too intact for his liking.
Ludger clicked his tongue softly. No wonder this thing had killed an entire expedition of seasoned adventurers ten years ago. If anything, the old stories had probably undersold it. Behind him, Elira finally found her voice again.
“Do you want a hand?”
Ludger did not take his eyes off the far end of the chamber.
“No.”
The answer came immediately.
Then, after a beat, he added, “Don’t make this thing attack you. I can’t defend myself and you at the same time.”
That shut her up. Because he was not being modest, and he was definitely not being polite.
The guardian on the other side of the chamber was not something he could casually control while also babysitting another person, no matter how talented that person was. Elira might be useful in many situations. This was not one of them. Not unless he wanted the fight to become even more troublesome than it already was.
Ludger drew in a deep breath. His chest rose slowly, then settled.
The crackling flow of Overdrive around him steadied for a moment, tightening closer to his body as he assessed the pressure still bleeding through the dust cloud. The thing was alive. Damaged, yes. But not damaged enough. He could feel it in the aura. It had dipped, then stabilized again in a way that made his instincts itch.
Annoying. That meant it was time for the next step. He rolled his shoulders once and made the decision.
Overdrive x2.
Together with his enhanced Wind Overdrive.
The name was a complete mess. Too long. Too clumsy. Too much like a note he would leave in the margin of a training journal instead of an actual technique worth using in a fight. He needed a better one.
Ludger decided he would think about that later. Preferably after he finished beating this thing to death. At the far end of the chamber, the dust shifted.
Then the guardian stepped out of it.
Its silhouette was larger somehow, not in size, but in weight. In presence. Broken armor plates still hung from its body. Cracks spread through its chest where Ludger’s punch had landed. Stone fragments had been blasted off its shoulders and sides. But its posture remained upright. Controlled. Worse, it had changed again.
This time, the swords it summoned were different. Not stone. Not labyrinth-shaped imitations forged out of dark mana and compressed ore.
Real.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed at once.
The pair of swords forming in the guardian’s hands looked ancient and wrong in a very different way. Long, narrow, and dark as old midnight iron, they carried none of the crude weight of the earlier weapons. Their edges were too clean. Their surfaces too smooth. Faint patterns ran along the blades, not carved into them, but submerged beneath the metal like veins trapped under skin.
Relics. Or something close enough that the distinction hardly mattered. The moment the guardian gripped them, the aura in the chamber changed. Not stronger in the simple sense.
More distorted.
The pressure that had been dense and old until now began to twist, as if the space around the swords had started to pull differently from everything else in the room. A strange glow spread along both blades, not bright, not radiant, but warped, like pale light being strangled under dark water.
Then Ludger noticed the air. It was moving wrong.
Tiny currents of dust and mana drifted toward the swords even when they should have been settling elsewhere. The air around the blades bent inward in faint, subtle streams, like the weapons were drawing it in.
Almost breathing. Ludger’s expression hardened. That was not a good sign.
Any weapon that started affecting the atmosphere around it without a visible release was almost always bad news. It meant compression. Attraction. Distortion. Maybe all three. And if the swords were pulling in air that steadily, then whatever came next was not going to be ordinary cutting power.
The guardian took one step forward. The glow deepened. The strange pull around the blades sharpened just enough for Ludger to feel it brush across his skin. Behind him, Elira inhaled softly, like she had realized the same thing a second later. Ludger exhaled once through his nose.
Of course the thing had a second phase. Of course the overgrown stone king sitting on a throne for ten years would pull out a pair of absurd swords after he broke the first set. Of course his life insisted on being annoying in increasingly creative ways.
He bent his knees slightly and let more power flood through him. Wind mana surged into his Overdrive pattern.
The crackling discharges around his body sharpened, then stretched into finer currents that wrapped around his limbs and back in thin streaks, like electric arcs being drawn into motion. His clothes snapped lightly in the pressure. The floor around his feet rasped as dust began to skid outward from the force building in his stance.
The guardian lowered both real swords. And the chamber felt like it had started holding its breath.