At first, Elira had assumed he was joking.
Then she had realized he was perfectly serious.
And now, seated across from him in the low underground chamber while faint runic light glimmered along the rough-cut walls, she was trying to follow instructions that should have taken far longer to absorb than they actually did.
She had learned Mana Bolt in five minutes of practice. Five.
Not because she was talented, though that certainly helped, but because Ludger’s teaching had become absurd. His Teacher-class development had reached a point where words no longer felt like mere explanations. They felt structured. Weighted. Built to fit directly into the other person’s understanding.
He would describe a mana path once. Demonstrate it once. Correct one angle, one breath, one instinct. And something that should have taken repeated trial and error instead snapped into place as if the concept had always been waiting for the right wording.
Mana Wall had taken her half an hour.
Half an hour of explanation, demonstration, failure, correction, and immediate adjustment. By the end of it, she had been able to raise a proper wall of condensed mana sturdy enough to make Viola stop pretending not to be impressed.
That alone should have been ridiculous. Now they were working on something far deeper.
Elira sat cross-legged in front of Ludger, arms resting lightly on her knees, brow faintly furrowed as she followed his instructions with unusual seriousness. The playful edge she often carried had been stripped away by the difficulty of the task. Her mana moved in slow circulations around her body, condensing and dispersing in pulses as she tried to guide it inward rather than simply use it outward.
Ludger watched her calmly.
“Not there,” he said. “You’re letting the flow climb too high before turning it inward.”
Elira exhaled through her nose, irritated.
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Yes. Now, shut up and focus.”
That was all he gave her. Elira glared at him for half a second, then closed her eyes again and tried to follow the path he had described. Ludger’s teaching here was even more precise than before. He was not merely telling her to gather mana. He was breaking the process into manageable truths.
The pressure needed. The inward spiral. The moment where loose circulation stopped being motion and began becoming center.
The difference between compressing mana around the body and persuading it to accept a true seat within it.
And because his teaching ability had reached such a ridiculous level, it worked. Not instantly. But far too quickly. Elira’s breathing steadied. Her mana stopped flaring outward in impatience. The circulation around her body grew smoother, tighter, more obedient.
Ludger could already tell this would not take long.
She was too suitable.
Cryomancy, precision, mobility, long-range focus, all of it meant she already possessed the sort of control most people spent years trying to fake before they truly understood it. What she lacked was not finesse. It was direction. Internal architecture. A proper push across the threshold.
And thresholds were exactly the sort of thing Ludger had become disturbingly good at helping people cross.
A few meters away, Viola groaned and rolled onto her side.
“Are you seriously making more progress teaching her underground in a hole beneath the capital than most people make in years?”
“Yes,” Ludger said.
Viola stared at the ceiling. Elira, eyes still closed, managed a faint smile despite the concentration the process demanded.
“Elira,” he said, “your problem is that you still think of mana as something you command from outside yourself.”
Her brow tightened.
“You need to stop shaping it like a weapon for one moment and let it settle like a foundation.”
He raised two fingers, and a small, dense knot of mana formed between them, not projected, not flung, not armored into structure. Just present. Stable. Compressed in a way that suggested stillness rather than force.
“Outward use teaches movement,” he said. “A core requires residence.”
Elira’s breathing shifted slightly. She was getting closer. Ludger could feel it now in the way her mana stopped resisting the concept and began circling around it instead. The room itself seemed to lean a little tighter around her as her flow condensed, not with wasted pressure, but with deliberate internal pull.
A small pressure gathered in the center of her body—not visible to the eye, but obvious to anyone with the senses to notice it. A denser point. Not yet complete, but no longer abstract. Something was forming.
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly in approval.
“Yes,” he said. “Now hold it there. Don’t chase the sensation. Fix it.”
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Elira obeyed. The pressure trembled. Tightened. Almost slipped. Then stabilized. Only slightly. But enough. Her eyes opened a moment later, sharp and bright and not entirely steady.
“That…” she began, then stopped, clearly trying to sort out what exactly she had just felt.
Ludger nodded once.
“Yes.”
Elira stared at him.
Then at her own hands. Then back at him again. For once, she seemed to have no clever line ready. Viola let out a low whistle.
“Right,” she said. “That’s insane.”
Ludger did not disagree. Because it was.
And perhaps more importantly, it confirmed what he had already started suspecting: his Teacher-class potential had crossed into territory far beyond simple tutoring. It was becoming something strategic. Foundational. A force multiplier in the ugliest and most useful sense.
Which meant, later, when this mess with the capital was done, he would need to test it more thoroughly. He kept his attention on her for another heartbeat, sensing the early shape of the spiritual core taking hold while she remained focused, eyes closed, shoulders tense but controlled.
That was when Luna returned.
Ludger felt her before he fully turned.
Not because she made noise, she never did, not when it mattered, but because the atmosphere in the chamber shifted slightly with her arrival. A presence moving in from the tunnel mouth, quiet, cold, and carrying information.
She stepped into the dim runic light with dust on her boots and a more serious expression than before.
Viola noticed immediately and straightened from where she had been half-sprawled against the wall. Elira’s concentration wavered for a fraction of a second, but Ludger raised one finger toward her without looking away from Luna.
“Hold it,” he said.
Elira clenched her jaw and obeyed. Only then did Ludger turn fully toward Luna.
“What is it?”
Luna looked at him, then at the others, and said, “The execution platform is already ready.”
The chamber seemed to tighten around those words. Luna continued in the same even tone, which somehow made it worse.
“They’re using a guillotine.”
Viola’s posture changed immediately. Her arms crossed over her chest, and a dark expression settled over her face in a way Ludger had not seen from her often. Not ordinary irritation. Not the hot frustration she wore when someone annoyed her.
Something colder. Older. Ugly in a more real way.
“It’s been decades,” she said, voice low, “since the Empire executed anyone like that.”
No one interrupted her. Because she was right.
Even when executions happened, they were usually managed in cleaner, quieter, more distant ways. Hanging. Beheading out of public focus. Noble poison. Quiet disappearances. The guillotine was different. It was not only death.
It was theater. Viola’s eyes narrowed further as the thought unfolded.
“And they can’t kill all of them at once with it,” she said. “Which means they’ll force some of them to watch.”
Her jaw tightened.
“They’re going to make parts of that family see the others lose their heads first.”
The chamber went silent for a moment after that. Even Elira, still trying to keep hold of the forming spiritual core inside her, had gone still in the wrong way now, her focus split between internal pressure and the image those words created.
It was cruel. Not because it was especially efficient. Because it wasn’t. It was designed to do more than kill. It was designed to break. To humiliate. To punish in sequence. To turn the death of one traitorous house into a warning carved directly into the minds of everyone forced to witness it.
Luna nodded once.
“That’s the point,” she said. “A warning.”
Her voice remained calm, but there was no softness in it.
“They want to make sure it doesn’t encourage more people to go against them.”
That was how states thought when fear became policy. Not just remove the offenders. Display them. Slow it down. Make the cost visible enough that anyone wavering would remember the shape of it later.
Ludger’s expression flattened.
Yes. That fit too well.
A family tied to Armandis, now condemned under charges of treason. A public execution method chosen not for mercy, speed, or dignity, but for spectacle. A guillotine placed where everyone who needed the lesson could absorb it. It was not merely justice, then.
It was internal discipline by terror. Viola looked toward the tunnel wall as if she were seeing the platform through the stone.
“That’s disgusting,” she muttered.
Luna did not disagree. Elira finally opened her eyes. Her mana wavered immediately.
Ludger noticed and said, “Hold the center.”
She clicked her tongue in annoyance at herself and forced her attention inward again, but the interruption had already damaged the rhythm. The young core-forming pressure in her body trembled on the edge of destabilizing.
The silence that followed felt heavier than before. Not because they lacked things to say. Because each of them was now imagining the same thing in different forms.
A raised platform. A blade. A crowd. One family fed into it piece by piece so the survivors would have time to understand what was coming before their turn arrived.
Luna was the one who broke the silence.
“They’re doing it in front of the castle,” she said.
No one moved. Her voice remained low and even, but the precision of the details made the air feel heavier with every word.
“At noon.”
That made the picture sharper immediately. Not dawn. Not evening. Not some half-hidden hour when the city was still rubbing sleep from its eyes or hurrying home before dark. The center of the day. The brightest point. The hour when the most people could see, when the sun made everything cleaner, harder, and impossible to ignore.
Luna kept speaking.
“They want everyone to see it clearly. They want it understood that they are not playing around with traitors.”
Her choice of words was calm, but the meaning underneath them was ugly enough on its own. This was no rushed punishment. No private judgment. No noble death handled behind curtains and legal language.
This was a warning nailed to the Empire’s own front door. And because of where it would happen, the implication behind Luna’s last observation settled into place almost immediately.
“As for where they are now…” She paused only briefly. “The prisoners are almost certainly in the castle dungeon.”
The chamber went quiet. A long, dense silence took over the underground room. Not the ordinary kind that came from people having nothing to say. The kind that came when everyone understood the scale of the problem at the same time.
The castle dungeon. Not a city prison. Not some overflow holding site attached to a barracks. Not a noble estate temporarily repurposed for containment.
The castle. The most protected structure in the capital. The center of authority. The place where guards, wards, patrol routes, hidden passages, and political nerves all layered over one another until the difference between security and paranoia stopped mattering.
Ludger’s expression did not change much, but inwardly the board rearranged itself at once.