Chapter 950

The blade matched the armor, dark, layered, and slightly organic in its formation, as if it had grown alongside the creature rather than been crafted separately. The edge wasn’t clean like forged steel. It carried faint irregularities, subtle jaggedness that suggested it didn’t need perfect sharpness to cut.

The weight of it alone was absurd. And yet the creature held it with ease. The purple aura didn’t vanish. It settled.

Cloaking the transformed guardian in a thin, shifting layer that bled off its body like heat from a forge, distorting the space around it in faint, constant waves.

Ludger’s guard tightened slightly. Even he hadn’t expected it to stabilize that fast.

The creature stepped forward once.

The ground cracked under its weight.

And now… there was no mistaking it.

Another labyrinth guardian stood before him.

The dark purple sword glinted in the morning light, its surface catching faint sparks of mana that crawled along the edge like restless lightning.

The blade looked less like something forged by a blacksmith and more like a piece of a living nightmare that had decided to take the shape of a weapon. Every pulse of purple mana running through it made the air near the edge distort slightly, as if the sword rejected the idea of existing alongside ordinary matter.

Ludger watched it for a moment, eyes narrowed. He couldn’t help but wonder why he had never run into labyrinth guardians like this before.

Until recently, the ones he had met were dangerous, yes, but still closer to what he expected from the creatures born inside those cursed places. Strong. Strange. Intelligent, in some cases. But this...

This was different. A guardian who could hide among people, wear a human face, stand in the middle of a noble gathering, and only reveal its real shape when it chose. And now he had found two of them almost back to back.

Drarc first. Now this one. That wasn’t coincidence. Not in a capital drowning in conspiracies and shadows. Still, the thought only lasted a moment.

Because the transformed thing lifted its sword slightly and called his name.

“Rebellious Duelist….”

Its voice came out deeper now, harder, with a metallic undertone that made it sound like something was scraping inside its throat with every word.

“Today,” it said, “I will split you in half.”

Ludger stared at it for a second. Then he answered in the same calm tone he might have used while discussing weather.

“That’ll be difficult.”

The guardian’s eyes narrowed faintly behind the helm.

Ludger adjusted his stance a little and let his gaze flick once over the surrounding streets, the watching guards, the civilians still frozen between fear and confusion, the foreign warriors trying not to look too surprised by what their ally had become.

“Still,” he said, looking back at the transformed enemy, “thanks for showing the capital what sort of allies the Regent keeps.”

A brief silence followed. The creature stood there, sword in hand, purple aura rippling around its armored frame while the shattered street remained quiet enough for the words to settle. Then it spoke again.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Its tone held no hesitation. No embarrassment. No need to deny anything.

“This,” it said, lifting the sword slightly as sparks of mana ran brighter along the blade, “will usher in a new age.”

The aura around it thickened.

“And when that age arrives, sights like this won’t be unusual anymore.”

Ludger’s expression didn’t change. But inwardly, that line settled into place with the rest of the filth he had seen since entering the capital. So that was how they saw it. Not as compromise. Not as a hidden alliance they needed to conceal forever. As the beginning of something larger.

A future where labyrinth things walked openly among men, or above them. A future where monsters stopped hiding because the people in power no longer needed them to. Ludger rolled the stolen whip once around his arm again while keeping his other hand free, his breathing still heavy but steady enough.

“Sounds annoying,” he said.

And then he stepped forward. The guardian lowered its center of gravity and assumed a fighting stance.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Even in that hulking armored form, the movement wasn’t stiff. It was practiced. Deliberate. The long purple sword angled slightly downward at first, then rose just enough to threaten without overcommitting, while the thing’s clawed feet adjusted over the cracked stone with the kind of balance that came from long familiarity with killing.

Then Ludger saw its back shift. A pair of wings burst out.

Not feathered. Not cleanly draconic either. They looked monstrous in the same way the rest of the armor did, half grown, half forged, built from dark carapace-like plating stretched over layered structures that opened outward with a wet metallic snap. Purple mana ran along the veins of those wings in jagged pulses, and when they spread, they cast a broad, ugly shadow over the ruined street.

That gave Ludger a bad feeling immediately.

Not because wings were surprising by this point. The capital had already proven it was infested with things that should have stayed in labyrinths. But because the creature had revealed them now, before the clash properly began, as if it didn’t fear what added mobility and momentum would do to the gap between them.

Without thinking, Ludger reacted.

A mana sword formed in his hand at once, dense and compact, and he poured reinforcement into it immediately. He didn’t bother with refinement beyond what mattered. He simply hardened it as much as possible, condensing the structure until the blade looked almost solid enough to be mistaken for real metal.

The enemy moved the next instant. No warning.

The wings snapped once behind it, not fully taking flight, just adding a violent burst of forward momentum, and the guardian charged. The street cracked under the force of the first step, then it was already in front of Ludger, its two-meter sword screaming through the air in a brutal diagonal swing.

Ludger jumped away. The blade missed him cleanly. For a split second, that should have been enough. Then the sword hit the ground. And Ludger’s eyes widened. The weapon didn’t crash into the street so much as pass through it.

Stone, packed earth, and shattered foundation split apart under the slash like they were made of wet clay. There was resistance, yes, but barely visible, and the cut line raced through the ground with obscene ease, carving deep and straight before the force behind it exploded outward in a spray of broken rubble.

The street had been sliced open like butter. Not broken. Not smashed. Cut. Cleanly enough to make the result worse than a heavy impact ever would have been.

Ludger landed several meters back, boots skidding over loose stone as he stared at the ruined line carved through the street.

As expected. The weapon was special. Or maybe it was that dark purple energy flowing through it. Possibly both. Either way, it wasn’t something he could casually meet head-on unless he wanted to find out whether his body came apart as easily as the ground had.

The guardian charged again, wings flexing behind its armored back as it came in with violent intent. This time there was no testing swing.

The long purple blade carved through the air in a vicious horizontal cut aimed straight for Ludger’s torso, fast enough that the edge seemed to drag the light itself with it. Ludger brought up the mana sword and met it head-on.

The clash rang out sharply.

Force hammered through his arms and into his shoulders, boots grinding backward over broken stone as the guardian drove through the block without the slightest hesitation. The purple blade slid off, then came back immediately from another angle.

A downward slash. Ludger avoided that one too. Then a thrust. Then another diagonal cut.

The rhythm of the assault turned savage almost instantly. The enemy’s sword never stopped moving, its huge frame pressing forward with relentless momentum while each swing tried to carve Ludger apart through a different line, high, low, left, right, thrusting for the throat, chopping for the shoulder, sweeping for the legs.

Ludger stopped trying to outmaneuver everything.

His lungs were burning harder now, every burst of evasive movement making the pain in his chest deepen like someone had shoved embers into him and stirred them with each breath. If he kept moving too much, his body would start failing before the battle did.

So he planted himself more. Reduced the waste. Met the attacks instead.

The enemy’s blade screamed down again, and Ludger raised the mana sword into it, deflecting the worst of the force while still being shoved back half a step. Another slash came low enough to split his hip open, and he dropped the point of his blade just in time to intercept it. The impact sent a shudder through his wrists. Sparks of purple mana scattered across his forearm guards.

The guardian snarled and kept attacking. A thrust came for Ludger’s face. He turned the mana blade sideways and slapped it off line. A reverse cut came immediately after.

He caught it again.

Then a wing-assisted burst of speed drove the monster in closer, and the next overhead swing hit so hard that the street beneath Ludger’s boots cracked in a spiderweb pattern from the pressure.

Still he held. Still he watched. Because he wasn’t just blocking. He was observing. The guardian’s voice came through the storm of steel in a metallic growl.

“You’re a fool.”

Another slash.

“Trying to use a sword against me…”

Another impact.

“... when it’s not even your real weapon of choice.”

Ludger didn’t answer.

The taunt rolled off him as uselessly as the crowd’s curses had before. He let the thing speak while his eyes stayed on the only part that mattered. The mana sword. He watched how it reacted to every clash.

How the edge held. How the structure trembled.

How the guardian’s purple blade bit into the outer layer of mana and made it distort in small, wrong ways. Not enough to shatter it outright, but enough to teach him something. Each time their weapons met, the purple energy gnawed at the sword’s integrity strangely, less like simple force and more like a property that interfered with the mana construct itself.

Good.

That was useful. The guardian cursed again when another swing failed to cut through Ludger’s defense cleanly. Its sword came down in a brutal chop that would have split a normal fighter shoulder to waist. Ludger raised his blade, caught it, and was driven back in a short slide over the rubble-strewn street, heels digging furrows into dust and broken stone.

Then another attack came. And another. Ludger blocked them all.

Some cleanly. Some barely. Some with his sword, some with his guards when the angle turned ugly. Every impact pushed him back further, but that didn’t matter. Distance could be regained. Information was harder to get.

The enemy mistook his silence for stubbornness.

Ludger kept his breathing controlled through the burn in his lungs and continued watching the way the mana sword behaved under repeated contact.

If he couldn’t overpower the weapon yet, then he would learn how it failed.

And once he learned that… he would kill the bastard holding it.