From the edge of the chamber, Elira watched in silence and began to seriously wonder if Ludger was even human.
That thought would have sounded ridiculous if she had said it out loud. It still felt ridiculous inside her own head. But the more she watched him, the harder it became to reject.
The last time this guardian had been challenged properly, ten of the strongest members of the guild had gone in to fight it. Ten.
Not trainees. Not hopeful fools trying to prove themselves. Veterans. The kind of people whose names were still remembered years later. People who had fought through the deepest parts of the labyrinth when the guild was stronger than it was now. People who had entered this chamber together, prepared, determined, and fully aware that they might die.
Only one of them had come back out. And now Ludger was fighting the same thing alone. Not barely surviving. Not running. Not buying time for a retreat.
Fighting it. Solo.
That alone already felt wrong enough to make her head hurt. But what made it worse was the way he did it. There was no grand heroic posture to him. No dramatic speeches. No effort to look impressive. He just kept moving with that same relentless, practical violence, as if the guardian at the center of ten years of fear was merely an extremely annoying obstacle standing between him and the end of a task.
The guardian attacked first again. Its new swords carved through the air with a sound that made Elira’s skin tighten. Not a whistle. Not a clean cutting hum.
A pulling sound. As if the blades were dragging the air after them. Ludger did not even try to meet the first strike head-on. He moved.
Fast enough that Elira almost lost him despite already watching with full concentration.
The first sword tore down through the space where his shoulder had been a heartbeat earlier. The second swept across immediately after, low and murderous, aimed to catch his legs if he tried to retreat in a straight line. Ludger twisted out of the first line, then sprang over the second, body turning sharply in midair. He landed at the guardian’s flank and drove a savage punch into the side of its ribs.
Stone burst outward in a spray of fragments. Before the debris had even finished scattering, the guardian’s left-hand sword reversed its path and stabbed backward without looking.
Ludger vanished from there. The blade punched through empty space and kept going just far enough to make the air warp strangely around its edge.
Elira’s hands closed.
Yes. That was it.
Those swords had something nasty about them. Something beyond simple cutting power. Ludger had noticed it too. She could tell from the way he fought now. He was not trying to crash through the blades like before. He was treating them like contact itself might be a mistake.
The guardian pressed harder.
Its swords moved in intersecting lines that boxed off sections of the chamber with frightening speed. Long cuts. Tight reversals. Sudden thrusts that seemed to drag the air inward right before they completed. Ludger kept slipping through the attack web by fractions, dodging with as little wasted motion as possible while refusing to let himself get cornered.
A descending cut crashed into the floor.
Ludger stepped outside its line and hammered a kick into the guardian’s knee joint. The stone leg shuddered. The return slash came instantly. Ludger bent backward just enough for the blade to pass over his face, close enough that Elira felt her own stomach lurch. He snapped back upright and drove an elbow into the creature’s abdomen.
A chunk of stone plating burst loose and skidded across the chamber. Then Ludger was gone again.
The guardian advanced with relentless control, its real swords glowing with that warped light, each swing threatening something worse than a clean wound. One blade slashed diagonally downward. The other followed with a thrust meant to herd him into the first line if he dodged wrong.
Ludger planted one foot, pivoted around the thrust by a margin so small Elira almost thought he had been hit, and buried a compact straight punch into the guardian’s upper arm.
The impact blew a jagged slab of stone free. He stepped through the recoil and smashed a round kick into the side of its torso. More chunks flew.
Then the swords came again. Ludger ducked the first. Slipped the second.
A third line appeared as the guardian twisted one blade back through a path that should not have been possible that quickly, and Ludger threw himself sideways rather than risk blocking it. The edge passed through the air he had occupied a moment earlier and left a visible distortion hanging there for an instant, like the space itself had been sliced wrong.
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Elira’s breath caught. Definitely nasty.
Every time he had an opening, he hit the monster hard, hard enough to blast away armor, crack joints, and send dark fragments flying across the throne room, but the second those swords threatened to close around him, he disengaged without hesitation. No stubborn pride. No ego nonsense. Just pure battle sense.
Hit. Move. Avoid. Re-enter. Again.
A short punch into the chest. A heel kick into the hip. A palm strike to the sword arm that knocked the guardian’s posture off center for an instant. Stone splintered. Dust burst outward. Broken chunks bounced and rolled across the chamber floor.
Then Ludger twisted away as both glowing blades crossed through the space in front of him with a shriek of dragged air. He reappeared a step later near the guardian’s rear flank and hammered a vicious hook into the back of its shoulder.
The whole upper section of stone plating cracked. He followed with a knee to the side of its waist, then sprang backward before the left-hand sword could scythe up through his ribs.
The blade missed. Barely. And even from where she stood, Elira could feel something wrong in the path it left behind. A chill ran through her spine.
If those swords cut flesh, what would they do? Tear deeper than they should? Collapse the air in the wound? Rip mana out with the strike? She did not know. But Ludger clearly had no intention of finding out firsthand.
The guardian drove forward again, carving the chamber apart with those strange blades, but Ludger no longer let himself be pinned. He flowed around the monster like a storm with a mind of its own, electric discharge snapping around his body, every dodge impossibly close, every counter brutally efficient.
A fist blasted a piece of the guardian’s chest loose. A low kick smashed stone from its thigh. An elbow shattered part of its jawline. Fragments flew in all directions, clattering across the floor, bouncing off pillars, skidding into old cracks in the throne room stone.
And through all of it, Elira could only stare. Because this was not what she had expected when she said she wanted to see him in action. This was worse. Better at the same time. More terrifying.
The guardian that had once slaughtered an entire expedition was being forced to work for every inch against a single boy who looked like he had decided getting cut by those swords would be inconvenient and was now simply fighting accordingly.
Elira swallowed. No. Maybe “boy” was the wrong word. Because whatever Ludger was, right now he did not look like one.
The first real crack in the guardian did not appear on its body.
It appeared on its face.
Not literally. The thing’s features remained carved and rigid, its expression still trapped somewhere between a dead king’s arrogance and a stone executioner’s calm. But the feeling changed. The longer Ludger kept slipping its sword lines, smashing pieces off its body, and refusing to give the glowing blades a clean opening, the more a different emotion began to bleed through the creature’s presence.
Annoyance. Cold, sharp, growing annoyance. Elira noticed it almost immediately, and her brow furrowed. That alone was strange enough.
A guardian showing irritation like that meant it was not simply reacting on instinct or following some buried combat pattern. It was thinking. Adjusting. Feeling the fight drag in a direction it disliked.
But what happened next shocked even her.
The guardian stepped forward, both swords lowering slightly as the warped glow around them pulsed once. Then it spoke.
“Stop running and fight me, insect.”
The voice was deep and rough, like heavy stone grinding against itself inside a crypt. It did not echo the way a human voice would have. It spread through the chamber in a slow, ugly vibration that made the old walls seem to listen.
Elira froze.
For half a heartbeat, even the fight itself seemed to pause around those words. Then Ludger laughed. Just a little. A short, dry sound.
“I’m not going to fall for that one,” he said.
The guardian’s pale eyes burned at him from across the broken floor.
Ludger rolled one shoulder and kept his stance loose, ready, his Overdrive still snapping around him in jagged currents.
“I’m going to safely dismantle your body,” he said, as if discussing a routine bit of work, “and there is nothing you can do about it.”
Elira stared at him. The confidence in those words should have sounded absurd. Boastful. Reckless. But somehow, coming from Ludger, they did not.
He was not posturing. He was not trying to look fearless in front of her. He had said it with the same tone he might use to explain why a wall needed reinforcing or why a shipment route needed changing.
Simple. Direct. Matter-of-fact. That alone shocked her. But she was even more shaken by the other thing. The guardian could speak. Actually speak. Not howl. Not imitate words. Not spit out some broken phrase like a cursed thing repeating the last sound it remembered from life.
She had heard rumors before, of course. Old stories that drifted around the guild whenever people drank too much and started talking about the breach. Some claimed the guardian had laughed. Some said it had issued orders to the stone dead around it. Others swore one of the men who died that day had been mocked before his head was taken off.
Most people treated those stories like the usual filth that gathered around old tragedies. Drunkard tales. Grief twisted into something uglier and easier to retell.
But now… Now she was hearing it herself. And all at once, the shape of the disaster from ten years ago became much clearer. Her father and grandfather had not died against some mindless wall of stone. They had died against this.
The first cause was obvious. Those weapons.
Even now, just watching the way the strange swords dragged at the air around them made her skin crawl. If the earlier expedition had run into something like that without fully understanding what those blades could do, then they had probably died the moment they treated the guardian like a normal armored monster.
And the second cause was standing right in front of her, speaking with calm contempt. Its intelligence.