Chapter 952

The guardian didn’t wait. It swung again. Another purple blade shot out. Then another. Then another.

The bastard started spamming the move, each swing of the sword sending a crescent of dense purple mana screaming through the battlefield. Some came high, some low, some angled, some nearly straight, forcing Ludger to keep shifting, stepping, leaning, and cutting around them while the ruined capital behind him suffered the rest.

Buildings were carved apart.

Walls opened in smooth, terrible lines. Roofs collapsed after support beams were sliced through with obscene ease. One slash passed through a townhouse front and kept going through the next structure behind it. Another tore through a stone archway and split the base of a bell tower far down the street.

The destruction was too clean.

And as Ludger watched those attacks tear through the city, he understood it better.

It was the mana. Not just the blade. Not just the physical weapon. The power came from the purple mana itself.

That was what gave the sword its unnatural cutting force. The metal wasn’t simply special on its own. It was acting as a conduit, shape, and anchor for that mana, letting it carry a property that ordinary reinforcement didn’t have. The purple energy wasn’t draining, devouring, or dissolving things in the usual sense.

It was making resistance meaningless. Or close enough to it.

When it wrapped the blade, or flew out as a slash, it altered the relationship between the weapon and what it struck. Stone stopped behaving like stone. Metal stopped behaving like metal. Chains stopped behaving like chains. They were still there, but they no longer mattered in the way they should have.

Alien logic.

Ludger didn’t move. He watched… And he thought.

The purple mana gathering into the sword pulsed again, heavier this time, like a heartbeat that didn’t belong to anything living. The pressure in the air thickened, distorting the space between them, but Ludger forced himself to ignore the instinct to react immediately.

Think first. Move second. He replayed everything. The chain being cut. The ground splitting like soft clay. Buildings pierced cleanly by those ranged slashes.

And his mana sword… enduring.

Not perfectly. But far better than it should have. That was the key. Ludger narrowed his eyes. So the purple mana wasn’t stronger in the normal sense. It wasn’t overwhelming through raw force alone.

It was… bypassing.

Or something close to it. It didn’t break resistance. It ignored it. At least partially.

That was why physical materials failed so easily. Stone, metal, armor, those things relied on structure, density, and resistance to hold against force. But if the mana interfering with them told the world that resistance didn’t matter in that moment, then they behaved like something far weaker.

That explained the cuts. But his mana sword… His mana sword wasn’t a physical object. It didn’t rely on density in the same way. It was a construct.

A shape held together by will and mana flow. Which meant the purple energy couldn’t “ignore” it the same way. Not fully. Still caused instability… But it didn’t erase the resistance outright.

Ludger’s breathing slowed slightly despite the burn in his lungs.

So that was it. The purple mana was similar to his elemental attunements in principle… An applied property layered over mana to change how it behaved.

Fire burned. Wind cut. Earth reinforced.

And this… This one altered interaction. It told the target that defense didn’t matter the way it should. That was why physical things failed so easily. And why his mana blade held.

A faint realization clicked into place behind his eyes. If that was true… Then trying to block that next attack like a normal strike would be suicide… unless he had the right card in hand.

Ludger exhaled slowly.

The enemy’s sword was almost fully charged now, the purple aura condensed so tightly around it that the air itself seemed to recoil from the edge.

He understood enough. Now he just had to survive what came next.

Ludger stepped long to the left as another blade screamed past his shoulder and cut through a half-broken wall behind him. Now he knew what he was really dealing with.

Not a sword that was impossibly sharp. Mana that told the world to stop acting like itself. And that meant it had rules. Ludger kept moving between the purple mana blades, but now his eyes were calmer.

That cutting property that turned stone, metal, and structure into something almost meaningless.

All of it was tied to mana.

He had seen enough now. Drarc’s full form had collapsed once the damage and blood loss mounted too far. This bastard’s strength was being maintained by that same wrong kind of power, only expressed through a different shape. If the mana feeding the transformation thinned enough, the form would likely fail. And even if it didn’t collapse outright, the first thing to weaken would probably be the purple cutting effect.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

That was enough. So Ludger decided to make the idiot spend more. He ducked under one slash, stepped over another, and called out while the guardian’s next blade carved through a collapsed roof behind him.

“Is this it?”

The armored monster’s eyes narrowed behind the helm. Ludger smirked faintly despite the pain in his chest.

“I thought after all that dramatic talk, you’d be stronger than the oversized lizard I just beat to death.”

That got a reaction. Not a full loss of control. But enough. The next swing came a little harder, a little sharper, a little less measured.

Another purple blade screamed past Ludger and split a section of street far behind him. He clicked his tongue.

“You people really do love pretending your ugly transformations make you special.”

The guardian’s wings flexed.

Its aura pulsed heavier.

Ludger kept going.

“Turns out you’re just another bastard swinging borrowed power around and hoping no one notices the difference.”

A snarl escaped the thing this time.

The sword came down again, then again, then again—rapid, forceful, each ranged slash consuming more of that dark purple mana while the creature tried to shut him up through overwhelming pressure.

Ludger slipped aside from the first and let the second pass over his shoulder. The third forced him to jump back from a collapsing wall, but even while doing that he kept speaking.

“Come on. Show me something worth remembering.”

Another slash.

“Or is the real trick just wasting half the capital’s mana budget trying not to die?”

That one hit.

He could tell because the guardian actually took a step forward and swung with both hands, the purple aura around the blade thickening visibly before the next cut tore through three buildings in a row.

Too much.

Perfect.

Ludger narrowed his eyes and kept his tone flat, almost bored.

“You know what your problem is?”

The creature said nothing now, but its sword moved again.

Fast.

Angry.

Ludger leaned away from the cut and answered his own question before the guardian could.

“You believe your own performance.”

Another blast of purple mana ripped down the street.

Ludger kept walking between the attacks.

“You think turning into a monster makes you untouchable.”

Another.

“You think waving that sword around makes you terrifying.”

Another.

“But all I see is someone spending mana faster than he can afford.”

That finally made the guardian roar and launch itself forward, wings flaring to add momentum while it swung twice in the same breath, each strike releasing another ranged blade of purple force.

Ludger avoided both with long, economical steps.

Inside, his mind stayed cold.

Yes.

That was it.

The pressure around the thing wasn’t increasing cleanly anymore. It was starting to fluctuate between swings. Not much. Not enough for the average idiot watching from a window to notice.

But Ludger noticed. The transformation was expensive. The ranged slashes were expensive. And rage made expensive things even more costly. He just needed to keep feeding that rage.

So he kept talking.

“Don’t worry,” Ludger said, voice carrying over the ruined street while another slash chewed through the district behind him. “When that form falls apart, I’ll make sure the people watching know you died uglier than you looked.”

The trash talk worked. Not all at once.

At first the guardian only looked angrier, the way a cornered beast might when it realized the prey in front of it was still talking. But anger in a creature like that wasn’t just expression. It had weight. It had force. And soon Ludger could feel it in the air itself.

The enemy’s mana began to spike.

Dark purple energy thickened around its body in violent surges, no longer flowing with the same measured steadiness as before. It pulsed harder, rising off the armor in dense waves that distorted the space around him and made the broken street tremble under each step. The sword in its hand started to hum louder too, the sound deepening until it resembled a low metallic wail.

The guardian stopped moving forward. That alone made Ludger’s focus sharpen. Then it raised the sword. Slowly. Deliberately. And the moment it did, all of that unstable purple power began to gather.

Not around the whole body anymore. Into the blade.

The aura peeled inward in streams and violent curls, pouring toward the weapon like a tide reversing direction. The sparks of mana running along the edge became thicker, harsher, brighter in that ugly dark-violet way that made the air feel wrong. The wings spread wider behind the creature, not for movement this time, but like anchors bracing the body while it fed more and more power into the sword.

The pressure rolled outward from it in waves. Stone cracked.

Loose debris lifted slightly from the ground, then skittered away.

The people still watching from a distance, guards, surviving civilians, even some of the foreign warriors, began backing off instinctively as if their bodies understood before their minds did that something large was about to happen.

Ludger watched the posture. The gathering mana. The sword rising high. And an unwelcome sense of familiarity touched the edge of his thoughts. He had seen something like this before. Not exactly this.

Not with purple alien mana and a labyrinth thing wearing armor like a living shell.

But the shape of it… the principle… that was familiar.

Lionfang.

No… not the town.

His father’s technique.

The stance. The build. The way power condensed into a single decisive arc instead of spreading outward through repeated blows. It carried the same kind of killing intention Arslan sometimes showed just before bringing down a strike meant to end the exchange in one move.

That made sense.

If the enemy had watched enough human fighters, stolen enough methods, or simply arrived at similar logic through battle, then charging and bringing the sword down in a heavy, overwhelming swing would have been the obvious result.

But Ludger didn’t trust obvious results anymore. Not here. Not against this thing. He stared at the enemy’s posture and felt it clearly. It wouldn’t be exactly like that.

The sword was too wrong.

The mana was too wrong… And the wings… the wings were spread for something more than balance.

Ludger lowered his center of gravity slightly, eyes narrowed, every instinct tightening around the certainty that whatever came next would resemble Lionfang only enough to bait the wrong response.

And if he treated it like his father’s technique… he would probably die.