Chapter 750
Ludger gave him a calm look.
“It’s just you.”
Hroth snorted.
“No, I’m serious.” He gestured vaguely in Ludger’s direction. “Every time I meet you, the situation somehow gets worse. First a tree. Then buried nobles. Then suspicious illnesses. Then your father’s dead family. And now we’ve arrived at an underworld guild full of lunatics.” He shook his head once. “At this rate, next week you’ll tell me the Regent is secretly breeding cursed dragons beneath the Senate.”
Ludger considered that for half a second.
“I hadn’t, but now I might check.”
That earned him a flat stare.
“You see?” Hroth muttered. “This is exactly what I mean.”
The faint humor faded quickly enough, though. Both of them knew the Obsidian Sword was not the kind of name that left room for casual treatment once spoken seriously.
Hroth stepped closer and leaned one shoulder against a raised section of roof tile, his expression turning more focused.
“Fine,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I know. Not because I enjoy helping you dig up disasters, but because I’d rather know which part of the city is about to catch fire before it actually happens.”
Ludger said nothing, which Hroth had already learned to interpret as permission to continue.
“The Obsidian Sword isn’t just one gang with a fancy name,” Hroth said. “It’s more like a structure. Layers. Specialists. Brokers. Cutthroats. smugglers. information sellers. probably curse handlers, if your guess is right.” His voice lowered. “People hire them when they want serious filth done quietly.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly.
“They don’t always act openly under their own name,” Hroth continued. “Most of the time you hear about accidents. disappearances. shipments going missing. someone important getting blackmailed without understanding how their secrets leaked. Then, if you’re paying enough attention, the same shadows keep showing up around the edges.”
He paused.
“And when they do act directly, it tends to be decisive.”
Ludger remained still. Hroth glanced at him.
“That’s the part you should remember. They are not famous because they are loud. They’re famous because when they commit to something, it usually ends with the other side broken before they even understand what angle the knife came from.”
The wind shifted across the rooftop. Ludger’s expression stayed cold and unreadable.
“So,” Hroth said, watching him carefully now, “if you’re really going after them, then this stops being an investigation you can politely sneak through. This becomes a walk into a nest full of professionals who’ve made a living out of ruining people without warning.”
Ludger nodded once.
“That’s why I’m here.”
Hroth stared at him for a second, then sighed again, softer this time.
“Of course it is.”
Hroth was quiet for a few moments after finishing his explanation, then gave Ludger a long look.
“The madman pyromancer,” he said. “He’s your real target, isn’t he?”
Ludger nodded once.
“Yes.”
There was no point pretending otherwise. And honestly, he wasn’t surprised Hroth had connected the dots so quickly. The moment Obsidian Sword and fire mage had entered the same conversation, anyone with half a brain would have seen where this was heading.
Hroth rubbed at his jaw and looked out over the city again.
“Then we’ll need to use our heads properly,” he said after a while. “Unless you want an entire city to burn.”
Ludger remained silent, waiting for the rest. Hroth’s expression flattened into the kind of seriousness that usually meant his next suggestion was either very good or very stupid.
“We infiltrate the Obsidian Sword,” he said. “Then we kill everyone there. After that, we will have to destroy their other hideous as well and everyone in it.”
Ludger looked at him for a second.
“That sounds like something you’ve done before.”
Hroth’s mouth twitched faintly.
“Something similar.”
That was not remotely reassuring. Hroth folded his arms and continued in a tone so casual it almost made the words worse.
“I’ve also been working for them.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed. Hroth raised a hand before he could speak.
“Not for them for real,” he said. “For them in the sense that they think I’m useful. I fed them a little information here and there, sold them some things, let the right sort of people believe I was willing to do dirtier work if the coin was worth it.” He shrugged. “Enough to make them think I was their spy when needed.”
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Ludger frowned. Hroth kept going anyway, apparently deciding the best way to handle suspicion was to pile more fuel onto it.
“So, to summarize,” he said, ticking points off with his fingers, “I’m publicly tied to one faction, secretly from another country, currently working as a bodyguard for a noble house, and at some point convinced a den of underworld lunatics that I was worth using as an informant.”
Ludger stared at him. Then his frown deepened. He was starting to think he had genuinely lost his mind somewhere along the way, because trusting a triple agent should have felt less reasonable than this. And yet here they were. On a warehouse roof. Discussing how to infiltrate an underworld guild through a man who had apparently spent half his life lying to everyone around him on principle.
Hroth noticed the look and sighed.
“Yes, yes. I know how this sounds.”
“It sounds insane,” Ludger said flatly.
“It sounds effective,” Hroth corrected.
“For a man who might decide to sell me tomorrow.”
That made Hroth snort.
“If I wanted to sell you, I’d have done it already. You’re much more valuable alive and useful than dead and briefly profitable.”
Ludger did not look especially comforted by that. Hroth glanced at him sideways.
“Besides, if I actually betrayed you, I’d have to deal with the consequences. Like fighting you again, not worth the hassle if you ask me.”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed.
“You say that like it’s a practical concern.”
“It is,” Hroth said. “You’re terrifyingly persistent.”
That, at least, was honest. Ludger folded his arms.
“So they think you’re their spy.”
Hroth nodded.
“More or less. Not at the center. I’m not stupid enough to ask for that much trust. But I’m known around the edges. Known enough that I can hear things, ask certain questions, pass small pieces of information, and not immediately get stabbed for it.”
That made Ludger’s expression turn more thoughtful. It was reckless. Annoying. And extremely useful. Which, in Hroth’s case, seemed to be a recurring pattern.
“So,” Hroth said, “you can keep glaring at me, or we can use the fact that I already have one foot near their mess.”
Ludger let the silence drag for a moment before finally asking, “How close can you get me?”
Hroth’s eyes sharpened. Now they were back to the part that mattered. Hroth looked him up and down once, then asked,
“How are your disguising skills?”
Ludger answered immediately.
“Nonexistent.”
Hroth closed his eyes for half a second, as if physically pained by the answer.
“Of course they are.”
Ludger said nothing. Hroth rubbed at his face and let out a slow breath through his nose before speaking again.
“Then we need to do something about your appearance,” he said. “Because right now, walking you anywhere near most underworld guild routes in the capital would be the same as hanging a bell around your neck and shouting your own name.”
Ludger’s brow lifted slightly. Hroth gave him a flat look.
“Most of the underworld has at least heard of you. Quite a few groups have active reasons to dislike you. And more than one underworld guild has a bounty on your head.”
That made Ludger smirk.
“Really?”
For the first time in a while, there was genuine amusement in his voice.
“How much for my head?”
Hroth answered without pause.
“Two hundred diamond coins.”
That actually made Ludger nearly laugh. The sound didn’t fully escape, but it came close. Some rich people truly wanted him dead. That kind of money wasn’t desperation from petty criminals or angry merchants. That was the sort of bounty people posted when they were either very frightened, very hateful, or rich enough that spending a fortune on murder felt like bookkeeping. Ludger’s smirk deepened faintly.
“I’m expensive.”
“You’re a recurring problem,” Hroth corrected. “There’s a difference.”
Ludger let that pass and went quiet for a while, his eyes drifting over the rooftops beyond them. Two hundred diamond coins. Enough to make greedy men stupid. Enough to make careful men ambitious. Enough to guarantee that any recognizable glimpse of his face in the wrong alley would turn a quiet infiltration into a citywide hunt. Annoying. But not unworkable.
His thoughts moved quickly from there, turning over practical problems. Height. build. mana presence. the scarf. his usual fighting style. the fact that even if he hid his face, anyone who had seen him fight more than once might notice the way he moved. A disguise could not just mean covering his features. It had to alter expectation.
Then, suddenly, a thought clicked into place. Ludger’s mouth curled a little further, and this time he couldn’t help the smirk. Hroth noticed immediately. That alone made him wary.
“No,” he said at once. “I don’t like that expression.”
Ludger looked at him.
“I have an idea.”
“That is exactly why I’m concerned.”
But Ludger was already thinking through it in full now. No disguising skill. No polished underworld cover. A face too recognizable.
“What did you think of?”
Ludger’s eyes sharpened with quiet satisfaction.
“Not a disguise,” he said.
Hroth’s expression darkened.
“That sentence is already bad.”
— —
It was close to midnight when a cloaked figure approached the dark grove, something heavy resting across his shoulder.
The night around him was still in that uneasy way only lonely places managed to be. Not silent, never truly silent, but muted, as if the land itself had learned to keep its voice down. To the south, the scattered lights of a town shimmered faintly in the distance. Farther north, beyond the rise of darker land and broken silhouettes of trees, a thinner spread of lights marked the edges of the capital like cold stars fallen to the earth.
The figure paid neither direction much mind.
He kept moving forward with purpose, boots brushing over dead leaves and damp soil, cloak shifting with each step. The thing on his shoulder looked like a wrapped bundle at first glance, but the way it hung suggested more structure than that. Too narrow in one place, too rigid in another. A carried burden of some kind, though one meant to stay hidden.
The grove ahead looked like little more than a patch of blackened trees crowded too close together, their branches twisted into a canopy dense enough to swallow moonlight whole. From a distance, it seemed empty.
From a distance, that was the point. The cloaked figure slowed. Not much. Just enough for the change to become deliberate. Then he muttered a few words, nearly swallowed by the night itself.
“Where ash kneels, the ember remembers.”
The phrase was so low it was almost illegible, little more than breath shaped into old habit. For a heartbeat, nothing happened. Then the darkness ahead began to thin.
Not like fog clearing in sunlight. More like a layer of shadow peeling back from the world, retreating inch by inch from the ground between the trees. The blackness loosened its hold, revealing lines that had not been there before: a rough stone slope, a recessed cut in the earth, and the shape of an entrance descending underground beneath a root-tangled rise.