Chapter 722
Herack stopped at the edge of the churned dirt like he was stepping onto a sparring ring. The Northerners nearby pretended they weren’t watching him. Which meant they were watching him with both eyes.
Two swords at his hips, worn the way real weapons were worn, balanced for drawing, not for show. His aura slid out in a lazy, testing sweep, brushing the air and the bodies around him like fingers skimming the surface of water.
Ludger didn’t move. Didn’t flinch. Just kept the stone tablets in his hand like it was a dagger. Herack looked from the smoothed-out dirt to the faint scratches of letters still visible if you knew where to look… then back to Ludger.
“I came to see what you were making them do,” Herack said, voice dry with amusement. “Heard rumors. Thought it would be something… normal. Training. Work. Maybe you found a new way to make Freyra suffer.”
Freyra, who had not yet left, made a noise that was half-growl, half-threat. Herack ignored it with the ease of a man who’d survived her moods for years.
Then his eyes swept the plaza again, toward the last few Northerners still quietly tracing shapes in the dirt like it was sacred work. He blinked once. Then he barked out a laugh so sharp it cut the tension in half.
“Not even in my wildest dreams,” he said, shaking his head, “did I think I’d walk into a place like this and see a town full of Northerners trying to learn Imperial letters.”
A few of the bigger warriors grunted like they wanted to argue, but none of them actually did. That alone was a miracle. Herack’s grin widened, almost boyish, like he’d stumbled into a joke the world had prepared just for him.
He tipped his chin at Ludger. “So what is this? You planning to do this forever?”
He spread his hands in mock helplessness, then laughed again.
“Because I hate to break it to you, but those muscle heads—” he jerked his thumb at a pair of warriors with arms like logs, “—might take years before they make any real progress.”
The warriors in question glared at him like they were deciding whether to throw him. Herack’s aura flickered in mild satisfaction, like he enjoyed being disliked.
Ludger’s expression stayed flat. He didn’t rise to it. Didn’t argue. He just stared back with that dead, practical patience that made most people feel like they were wasting oxygen.
“Give me a month,” Ludger said.
Herack paused, the laughter catching in his throat for half a heartbeat.
Ludger continued, voice even. “And they’ll be reading just fine.”
Silence. Then Herack’s mouth twitched, and the laugh came back, louder.
“Oh, that’s adorable,” he said, wiping at the corner of one eye like the idea had physically hurt him. “A month. He says a month.”
He glanced at the Northerners again, and his tone softened just a fraction, still mocking, but less cruel, more like a man laughing at a brother he didn’t expect to ever change.
“I’m making fun of them because they deserve it,” Herack added, almost conversationally. “But faith?” He snorted. “No. Not in them.”
His eyes slid back to Ludger, sharp under the grin.
“But I’ll admit…” he said slowly, “I do have some in you. I will be around for a while, so show me something that will make me shut my big mouth”
The way he said it made it clear he didn’t mean it as a compliment. He meant it as a challenge.
Ludger had business piling up like unpaid debts.
A wall section that needed reinforcing before spring melt turned the ground into mud. A new set of delvers arguing about shares like they’d discovered mathematics and decided it offended them personally. Yvar constantly hovering with that look that meant please tell me you’re not about to do something insane again.
And yet… For a full month, Ludger did the insane thing anyway. He taught the Northerners. Nonstop.
Not because it was convenient. Not because he had free time, he didn’t. He carved the time out with the same blunt force he used to carve stone. Morning lessons. Midday review drills. Evening corrections by torchlight when the plaza became a dark circle of bodies and murmured sounds.
If anyone asked why, there were two answers. The first was simple: he’d accepted Herack’s challenge. The second was colder and more practical: Ludger wanted to master Teacher as fast as possible.
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Because knowledge wasn’t just a tool. It was infrastructure. And infrastructure kept people alive.
Teaching thousands at once was… different. It wasn’t like instructing six recruits on footwork, where you watched their stance and adjusted by the inch. This was mass. Momentum. Human weight. But the System didn’t care about poetry. It cared about results.
Every time a Northerner’s eyes sharpened with understanding, Ludger felt it like a faint click in the back of his skull. Every time someone repeated a letter correctly without being prompted, it was another notch. Every time a warrior who could crush a man’s ribs with one hand managed to write a clean, steady line, something inside the Skill purred.
And because there were so many of them, the growth was obscene. It was like shoveling coal into a furnace and watching the heat climb until the metal started to glow.
By the end of the first week, the town had a new sound. Not just steel on steel. Not just children shouting. The sound of Northerners muttering letters under their breath like prayers.
They could write their names.
Not sloppily, either. Their letters were heavy, like everything they did, but legible. Proud. Some added little flourishes the way they added carvings to their clubs, as if even a word had to show strength.
Then it spread. They wrote the names of their friends. Their siblings. Their rivals. Their dead. They scratched names into wood. Into stone. Into the dirt outside the bathhouse, where someone wrote Freyra so many times it became a threat to the ground itself.
And Ludger watched their faces when they finished a name correctly, when the shapes held meaning that stayed. There was no cheering. No celebration. Just a quiet, hungry satisfaction.
Like sharpening a blade and realizing it could cut deeper than yesterday. Herack, of course, laughed the first time he saw it. Then he stopped laughing as much. The month ground on. Ludger didn’t let them drift. Didn’t let the excitement die. He made it routine.
Routine turned hunger into discipline. Discipline turned learning into habit. Habit turned “impossible” into “normal.”
And by the end of the month, it worked. Not perfectly. Not elegantly. But it worked.
Adults, big, stubborn, muscle-headed adults, could read simple words. Not long sentences. Not contracts full of fine print designed by Imperials to steal your boots while you smiled. But simple words.
And then the first time one of them read a sign on the guild board without help, the yard went still for a moment. Like everyone had felt the world shift by half a step. Ludger didn’t smile.
He just nodded once and moved on to the next group, because that was how he handled victories, quietly, before they could get soft. The adults were the hard part.
The children? The children were terrifying. They learned like they’d been waiting for it. Adaptability was their weapon. They listened for five minutes, then started correcting each other. They turned letters into games, sang the sounds to rhythms their parents used for marching chants, and somehow made it stick twice as fast.
Where the adults fought every new symbol like it was an enemy, the kids accepted it like it was a toy someone had finally bothered to hand them. By the end of the month, the children weren’t just reading simple words.
They were reading Ludger’s manuals from the library and sounding out the titles with grim determination, brows furrowed like they were planning a raid.
Ludger watched one small Northerner girl trace her finger over a line of text, lips moving silently. She looked up when she realized he was watching, eyes bright.
“I can read,” she said, like she’d just learned magic.
Ludger stared at her for a second. Then he gave the smallest nod.
“Good,” he said. “Now go help your parents learn.”
Herack found him near the yard again, like he’d made it a habit to orbit whatever Ludger touched until he was sure it wasn’t about to explode.
The Auramancer looked over the scene with open disbelief.
Northerners, grown men and women with shoulders like oxen, stood in small clusters with scratched boards and charcoal. A couple of kids were arguing loudly over a letter shape while an adult listened with the tense patience of someone being lectured by a tiny general.
Herack’s mouth hung open a fraction. Then he barked out a laugh, sharp and incredulous.
“I will be damned,” he said, rubbing his jaw like the words tasted strange. “You really wasted an entire month teaching those morons.”
Ludger didn’t even glance up from the slate he was cleaning. His hands moved with steady, practical motions, wiping chalk dust away like it offended him.
“I didn’t waste it,” Ludger said.
Herack snorted. “You could’ve been doing… literally anything else. Building. Scheming. Yelling at your underlings. You know. Vice Guildmaster things.”
Ludger finally looked up. His eyes were flat, calm, the kind of calm that made it feel like arguing was a hobby for people with spare blood.
“I got a lot from it too,” he said. “Even without that.”
Herack’s brow rose. “Oh? Enlighten me.”
Ludger’s gaze slid past Herack to the Northerners, to the way they held their boards, to the way their eyes tracked the letters with the same focus they used to track an enemy’s hands.
“Time wasted helping my friends,” Ludger said, voice even, “is no time wasted at all.”
For a moment, Herack didn’t have a joke ready. That alone was worth noting.
Then Ludger added, blunt as a hammer, “And I didn’t only teach them letters.”
Herack’s lips twitched. “Yeah? You taught them how to stop drooling on the page too?”
Ludger ignored the jab like it wasn’t worth mana.
“I taught them a way to be methodical,” he said. “How to break something down. Repeat it. Check it. Fix it. Again.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, not angry, focused.
“That means they can learn pretty much anything else,” Ludger continued. “Weapons. Runes. Tactics. Trade. Anything that has steps.”
Herack stared at him, the grin fading into something quieter.
“That’s…” he started, then stopped, like he’d almost said something respectful and it offended his pride.
Ludger went back to cleaning the slate.
“I don’t care if they’re muscle heads,” he said. “Muscle is honest. Stupidity isn’t. They’re not stupid.”
Herack exhaled, half laugh, half surrender. “You’re insane.”
Ludger didn’t deny it.
He just said, “And now they’re dangerous in a way they weren’t before.”
Herack looked back at the yard, at Freyra correcting an older warrior’s spelling with the smug satisfaction of someone winnin
g a duel.
His mouth twisted.
“…Fine,” he muttered. “Maybe it wasn’t a waste.”