Chapter 951

Ludger blocked another slash.

The impact came in heavy and upward, a brutal rising cut that crashed into his mana sword and carried enough force to lift him clean off the ground. Stone broke under the guardian’s feet. Ludger’s body left the ruined street and was thrown backward into the air, dust and broken fragments spinning beneath him.

His expression didn’t change. Even now. Even while airborne with his chest still tight and his arms ringing from the clash, his focus stayed on the weapon in his hand.

The mana sword. He narrowed his eyes slightly and looked closer at the way the construct reacted. The enemy blade wasn’t draining it. That was the first clear realization.

It wasn’t pulling mana out of the sword. It wasn’t feeding on the mana in the air either. There was no visible siphoning, no hollowing, no weakening through loss of energy the way a proper anti-magic weapon or devouring artifact would behave.

So had he mistaken its nature?

That thought flashed through his mind while the world spun around him, while the ruined street opened below, while the distant shouts of the city rose higher. He could hear the population panicking. Not just the guards and fighters nearby.

The civilians too.

They had seen it now. Seen the so-called murderer of their Emperor fighting a towering humanoid monster in the middle of the capital, broad daylight exposing what the night had hidden too well. Fear rippled through the surrounding streets. Screams echoed from windows, alleys, rooftops, and broken plazas as more and more people understood that something far worse than a simple assassination was unfolding.

For a brief moment, that panic swelled. Then it ended. The guardian flapped its wings. The sound cracked through the air like torn metal. Then it shot forward. Insanely fast.

No warning, no buildup, just a sudden burst of murderous acceleration that erased the distance between them before Ludger could complete the thought about the sword. The creature reached him mid-air and grabbed him by the neck with one clawed hand.

The force of it stole the breath from him instantly.

Ludger’s eyes widened slightly as his throat compressed under the guardian’s grip, air stopping in a harsh gasp while pain shot up the sides of his neck. The thing’s fingers tightened with monstrous strength, nearly crushing his windpipe outright as it carried him through the air.

And with its other arm… it thrust the sword toward his stomach.

Not a slash this time.

A clean impalement.

Ludger reacted on instinct, dragging his left arm down between the blade and his body. The captured chain weapon came up with the forearm guards, wrapped metal and froststeel bracing together in a desperate stopgap barrier.

The purple sword hit… And the chains were cut with ease. Not broken apart by force. Cut.

The wrapped links parted almost effortlessly, severed in a line so clean it made the result worse. Metal segments flew apart in glittering arcs while the remains of the chain fell uselessly away from his arm.

The forearm guards took the next part of the thrust… and Ludger felt immediately that this was about to get much worse.

Ludger forced mana through his body despite the crushing grip on his throat and released a blast of wind between them.

The compressed burst detonated in the narrow space separating his stomach from the incoming blade, violent enough to stop the thrust for a fraction of a second even while both of them were still hanging in mid-air. The impact shoved against the guardian’s arm and twisted the angle just enough to keep the sword from punching straight through him.

That small delay was all Ludger needed. His eyes snapped downward at the remains of the chain whip as broken links spun away through the air.

The damaged section caught his attention immediately.

It had been cut too cleanly. Not torn. Not melted. Not shattered from overwhelming force.

Cut in a way that made the material itself look wrong, as if the metal had briefly stopped being whatever unknown alloy it originally was and had instead become something far easier to part. The severed edges were smooth in places where they should have been ragged, the damage carrying a strange unnatural neatness that didn’t fit the violence of the clash.

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Ludger narrowed his eyes despite the burning in his lungs and throat. Was that an effect of the sword? Or the purple energy running through it?

He couldn’t tell yet.

But whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t simple sharpness. The weapon wasn’t just cutting through things by force alone. It was doing something else to whatever it touched, something that changed how resistance worked at the moment of impact.

That made it more troublesome.

And more interesting.

The wind blast still howled between them, buying Ludger a sliver of time as both their bodies hung in the air above the ruined capital.

Ludger twisted in the air and landed hard on the broken street, boots skidding over loose stone as he forced balance back into a body that still felt one bad motion away from tearing itself apart.

Across from him, the guardian landed a breath later.

Its feet hit the ground with enough force to crack the rubble beneath them, and almost immediately its wings flared again. The monstrous pair snapped wide, then beat once, twice, driving bursts of air and dust outward while pushing that hulking body forward with frightening speed. What should have been a cumbersome shape only became more dangerous the moment those wings entered the fight. The thing didn’t just run now. It lunged, surged, and accelerated in jagged bursts that made its sword line harder to read.

Ludger watched it come and made up his mind. He couldn’t stay on the defensive forever. Not against this.

Blocking, observing, and waiting had given him some understanding of the sword, but that understanding alone wouldn’t kill the bastard. And this was another one of those enemies that had to die fast if he wanted the rest of this day to become even slightly easier. Every guardian, every hidden monster, every foreign warrior that remained alive was another problem waiting to compound into something worse later.

So this one had to go. The guardian’s sword rose. Its wings beat again. Then it came in with a vicious swing aimed to cut through Ludger from shoulder to waist. This time, Ludger did not simply block. He swung too.

His mana sword carved forward in the same instant, his timing set not to catch the enemy’s blade late, but to meet it at the moment of greatest force. The two weapons collided in front of them… And an explosion burst between them.

Not from simple impact.

From mana forced into the clash at exactly the wrong moment for the enemy and exactly the right one for Ludger. Fire, force, and compressed energy blew outward from the meeting point in a sharp violent flash, scattering debris and distorting the air around them.

The guardian hadn’t expected that.

Its armored body jerked slightly, the sword line breaking just enough for a real opening to appear. For the first time in their exchange, it flinched.

Ludger didn’t. He was already moving through the blast. Before the enemy could fully recover from the surprise, Ludger stepped in and drove his mana sword forward in a straight thrust aimed at the bastard’s centerline.

The guardian blocked in a hurry.

Its huge purple blade snapped across its body just in time to catch Ludger’s thrust before the point could drive into its chest. The parry itself was rough, more instinct than technique, the kind of defensive motion made by something that had realized too late that the attack was real.

Then another explosion went off between them.

It burst from the point of contact with a sharp, violent crack, fire and compressed mana detonating outward in a flash bright enough to wash the ruined street in orange-white light for a heartbeat. The force kicked sparks and debris into the air and made the guardian’s sword arm jolt sideways from the impact.

The enemy clearly didn’t understand what was happening. That much showed in the brief flicker of confusion behind the helm.

Ludger did.

He was using flame attunement.

Not in the normal way, not to simply coat the blade in fire and slash with it like some idiot trying to look impressive. He was forcing the attunement into a mana sword at the moment of weapon contact, turning the instability of the construct into a weapon of its own. A magic sword wasn’t meant to be used like a forged blade. It wasn’t built for prolonged trading of blows, nor for carrying a heavy elemental burn without consequence. The moment too much force or incompatible pressure hit it, the added structure destabilized and started dispersing.

Ludger was making that failure happen on purpose. Every clash became a trap. Every block became a detonation.

He could not maintain the blade for long like this. It would always cost him the construct sooner or later. That was the nature of a magic sword overloaded with flame attunement. It couldn’t be used to trade repeated blows and keep burning at the same time without the mana breaking apart.

But he didn’t need it to last. He only needed it to explode at the right moment. The guardian had now learned that lesson twice. And Ludger intended to make sure the third time hurt much more. After several more clashes and several more explosions bursting between their weapons, the guardian’s patience finally thinned.

The thing’s movements changed first.

Not in speed. In intent.

Its aura surged, the dark purple pressure around its body thickening until the air nearby looked stained by it. The mana no longer clung close to the armor alone. It bled outward in visible streams, curling around the sword, the wings, the shoulders, until the whole creature looked like it was standing inside a storm of its own making.

It was annoyed now.

Good. Annoyed enemies made cleaner mistakes. But this one didn’t make the mistake Ludger expected. It didn’t charge. Instead, it planted its feet, drew the long sword back, and swung.

Not at Ludger’s body. At the space in front of it. A blade of dark purple mana ripped out from the arc of the swing and shot across the ruined street.

Ludger sidestepped immediately.

The attack passed by him with a vicious hum and slammed into the buildings behind.

No… It didn’t slam.

It pierced.

The mana blade cut through walls, beams, and stone like they were stacked sheets of wet paper, tearing a straight line through multiple structures before finally dissipating somewhere deeper in the district.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. So that was what it could do…