Chapter 948

Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

He looked across the crowd at once, trying to find the source. Faces. Mouths. Positions. The voice had come from somewhere behind the first layer of civilians, maybe mixed among the guards, maybe not. He tracked the ripple of reaction it caused, but not the speaker.

He couldn’t find it. That alone told him enough. Someone was directing this. Not openly. Not with banners or commands. Just with the right words dropped into a frightened, grieving crowd at the right moment.

Someone was trying to build an army of useful idiots. And it worked. The hesitation broke almost immediately.

Another voice shouted, “He murdered the Emperor!”

Then more followed.

“Kill him!”

“Don’t let the monster escape!”

“For His Majesty!”

The crowd started moving again.

Civilians pushed forward from multiple sides, some with the reckless courage of men who had convinced themselves numbers alone made them safe, others with the blind fury of people who needed revenge more than truth. They spread wider, trying to surround Ludger with a tightening ring of bodies and improvised weapons, all of them throwing themselves into the same ugly purpose.

To avenge the Emperor. Ludger watched them come, expression flat. He did not want to kill people indiscriminately.

Not fools with sharpened farming tools, kitchen knives, and iron rods who had been fed the right lie and pointed in the right direction. Most of them weren’t true enemies. Just angry. Stupid. Grieving. Easy to move.

But he was not going to risk his life for idiots either. If they forced the issue, they would die. That was the simple truth of it.

And the ones hiding behind them, stirring them up, knew that perfectly well. That was part of the plan too. If Ludger killed civilians, the story around him would only grow uglier. If he hesitated, he would be buried under numbers until the real killers got their chance.

Filthy. His grip tightened on the captured whip.

The foreign warriors hung back just enough to let the civilians push in first. The guards did the same, some out of caution, some out of cowardice, some perhaps because they had been told to let outrage soften him before the steel closed in.

Ludger clicked his tongue inwardly. So that was how they wanted to play it. Fine. Then he would make sure the real lesson reached everyone watching.

His eyes swept over the closing ring one more time, cold and measuring, already sorting who could be crippled without dying, who could be thrown aside, who would need to be broken fast before panic spread through the rest.

He shifted his stance. And waited for the first idiot to step close enough.

Ludger wrapped the chain around his left arm in one smooth motion, letting the length of the weapon coil tight enough to stay controlled while leaving enough slack for use.

It felt wrong in his hand.

Not unfamiliar in the sense of concept, he had fought against strange weapons often enough, but wrong in the way all borrowed tools felt when they had been made for someone else’s rhythm. Still, wrong was usable. And usable was enough.

The civilians moved first. With panic, fury, and numbers.

Stones flew at him from different angles. Rusted knives spun end over end. A hatchet came awkwardly through the air with all the force of a laborer trying to become a killer in one morning. Someone hurled a broken spearhead. Another threw a hammer meant for carpentry. The air around Ludger filled with crude projectiles and desperate intent.

He didn’t waste movement. A slight tilt of the head let one knife hiss past his cheek. A shallow lean avoided a stone aimed at his temple. He twisted his neck just enough for another sharpened bit of scrap metal to miss his throat by a breath, then stepped half a pace to let a thrown rod crash into the rubble behind him.

Then he started spinning the whip.

The metallic chain lashed outward and began circling him in fast, controlled arcs, the pointed end and linked body blurring into a rotating perimeter. It cut through the incoming storm with sharp ringing impacts, knocking stones aside, batting knives from the air, slapping thrown tools off course hard enough to send them spinning harmlessly into walls and debris.

It worked better than it had any right to. Not because Ludger had any love for the weapon.

Because he had fought people who used things like this before. Long flexible weapons were never really about strength alone. They were about timing, spacing, and letting momentum become a defense of its own. He understood that much well enough to steal the principle on the spot.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

The chain spun faster. More precise. Projectiles clattered off it in every direction. A thrown axe met the rotating metal and was ripped away sideways. A cluster of stones shattered apart. A knife got caught for half a heartbeat and flung back into the crowd, sending the civilians in that direction stumbling away with shouts.

Then Ludger fed mana into it. The weapon changed immediately.

A pale, dangerous glow ran along the chain and over the pointed metal head, turning the whole spinning motion sharper, heavier, more alive. The air around it distorted, not from heat, but from compressed force building through the movement itself.

Then he used Wind Swing.

The spinning chain snapped outward with a violent burst of mana, and a blast of cutting air and pressure erupted around him in a wide circle. It wasn’t a precise blade. It was a sweeping wave, dense enough to shove bodies, weapons, and panic away from him all at once.

The civilians closest to him were thrown back first.

Men and women alike lost their footing and tumbled across broken stone, improvised weapons ripped from their hands as the wave hit. More weapons still in the air were caught in it too, hurled away in useless directions, clanging into walls, roofs, and the street. Dust burst outward. Loose rubble skidded across the ground. The whole ring around Ludger broke open under the force.

When the wave passed, the difference was immediate.

Many of the civilians were down, scrambling, stunned, or too shaken to rush him again right away.

And the ones still standing… the ones who hadn’t been thrown off balance, the ones who had enough grounding, durability, or skill to endure that blast… were exactly who Ludger wanted.

The foreign warriors.

They stood at the edges of the broken crowd with weapons ready, bodies lower, eyes sharper now that the useless cover of civilians had been torn away. Some had guarded properly. Some had braced against the force. Some had simply been strong enough to ignore part of it.

Ludger’s gaze settled on them one by one. Those were the real targets. The chain in his left hand still hummed faintly with mana as he lowered it from the completed swing.

Then he started walking toward them.

Ludger charged the closest warrior without hesitation. The man had a strange aura.

Not overwhelming. Not loud. But wrong in the same way Drarc had been wrong, layered, heavy, carrying a presence that didn’t sit naturally inside a human frame. In his hands was a spear that looked like it had been carved from overlapping scales, dark and metallic with silver lines running along the shaft and blade. It wasn’t forged like ordinary steel. It looked grown. Or harvested.

Another one, Ludger thought. Another bastard of a labyrinth guardian.

If he forced the issue hard enough, maybe this one would reveal his true form too. And if that happened in front of enough eyes, then perhaps even the idiots of the capital would start to understand what side the Regent and the current empire were truly standing on.

Not that Ludger trusted a crowd to think well.

But monsters exposing themselves in broad daylight tended to help.

The spearman saw him coming and jumped back immediately, choosing distance instead of meeting the charge head-on. It was the right choice.

Ludger followed anyway. Fast.

Even with his body protesting, he still cut through the ruined street with savage intent, chain humming in one hand, the stolen whip dragging sparks where its point kissed stone between steps. The spearman kept retreating, boots hammering across rubble while the weird-scaled spear turned slightly in his grip, searching for a line.

Ludger closed the distance.

Then his instincts screamed again. Danger. Not in front of him.

Behind.

His pursuit stopped on the spot. He twisted and threw both arms up instinctively, forearm guards crossing to cover his head and neck. A sharp metallic impact rang against the froststeel a fraction of a second later.

Clang.

Something small, fast, and vicious had struck him dead center on the guard instead of the throat.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He broke off the chase at once and turned his head over his shoulder.

There. Again. The lanky blowgun user. Trying to hide.

Several rooftops away, partly obscured behind broken stone and collapsed timber, he was already shifting back into cover after taking the shot. But this time Ludger saw more than just him.

Leather armor. A cloak hiding his face.

Not standing at ease, not panicking, not one of the civilians or guards blindly rushing toward whatever noise got loudest. He stood with the controlled stillness of someone who knew exactly what role he was playing.

Ludger’s gaze hardened.

The blowgun user was troublesome enough on his own, but throwing himself after a half-hidden sniper through the broken capital without knowing what waited beyond the next roofline was the kind of mistake that got strong people killed in stupid ways. An ambush. A trap. A prepared kill zone. With his body already damaged, that kind of gamble was worse than reckless.

So he held back for half a breath and weighed his options. He didn’t have to wait long.

One of the real targets, the same group of foreign warriors and suspicious bastards who had been backing away from the center whenever things became too direct, raised his voice and shouted for the guards to attack.

Not him. Not the hidden sniper. Ludger.

“All at once!”

That was the answer, then. The real targets stepped back while the guards surged forward. Of course they did.

They didn’t want to be forced into revealing too much. Not here. Not under daylight. Not in front of the civilians they were trying to use as a shield and witness at the same time. If Ludger pressed them too hard, some of them might be forced to transform, to show the same kind of inhuman truth Drarc had shown before dying.

And they clearly didn’t want that.

So they shoved the guards into the front line instead. Cowards. The attack came immediately after. A rain of spells and arrows fell on Ludger from multiple angles.

Firebolts tore through the air in streaks of orange and red. Spears of ice came down sharp and pale, glinting in the morning light as they aimed for joints, throat, and eyes. Wind blades cut low and fast, almost invisible until they bit through rubble and wall. Arrows followed between the spellfire, some ordinary steel, some glowing faintly with enchantments, all launched in overlapping volleys meant to bury him under too many angles at once.

The street vanished beneath the barrage.

Stone burst apart where spells landed. Arrowheads punched through debris and walls. Fire rolled over shattered roofs. Dust exploded upward in thick clouds as impact after impact hammered the area.