Chapter 958

After a while, Ludger clicked his tongue softly inside the helmet.

He had spent enough time circling damaged streets, half-ruined plazas, and key sightlines around the capital to confirm one thing with absolute certainty… the mana in the city was a mess. Too polluted by recent fighting.

His own battles alone would have been enough to leave traces in the area for a while, but that wasn’t the only problem. The barrier blanketing the capital was constantly bleeding pressure into the surroundings as well, saturating the air with a steady, oppressive layer of mana that mixed with everything else until the whole city felt like a lake stirred full of mud. It didn’t let dissipate over a larger area either…

Trying to read it cleanly was like trying to find one specific drop of blood in a river after a slaughter.

He kept walking, helmet tilted slightly as if scanning rooftops, but inwardly he adjusted his assessment.

That explained part of it. Why he hadn’t been found yet.

A normal city under lockdown should have made him easier to track, not harder. His mana pool was far too large to be considered subtle, especially after what he had done. If the enemy had any competent large-scale sensory methods operating inside the barrier, they should have narrowed his position down much faster.

But they hadn’t. Because inside this cage, everyone was drowning in interference. The lingering residue of large-scale combat. The unstable churn left by multiple powerful fighters. The constant pressure from the barrier itself. All of it together turned the capital into a sensory swamp.

Ludger’s presence was still there. It just wasn’t easy to isolate. So he couldn’t complain too much. The same thing frustrating him had also kept him alive. Still, that didn’t make the situation any less irritating.

He turned into another street and let his gaze slide across nearby buildings, patrol routes, towers, and intersections.

Nothing. No suspicious concentrations of guards. No especially fortified district. No area being treated with the kind of paranoid caution he would expect if the barrier depended on important nodes within the city. That part mattered more than anything else.

Even in chaos, armies had habits.

If something vital existed inside the capital, something maintaining a city-wide barrier, then somebody would guard it heavily. Not necessarily with obvious panic, but with enough discipline and structure to stand out.

Not one place in the capital was guarded heavily enough to justify being called a core point of the formation. There were checkpoints, yes. Defensive positions, yes. Search groups, yes. But those were responses to a crisis, not the behavior of people protecting the heart of a system they absolutely could not afford to lose.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly behind the helmet. That left one answer. He clicked his tongue again, quieter this time.

“The anchors are outside,” he muttered under his breath.

It was the only conclusion that fit. Not in some tower he could collapse.

Somehow placed beyond the barrier itself, or integrated into the outer structure in a way that prevented anyone trapped inside from easily reaching them.

If the purpose of the barrier was containment, then of course its core supports would be placed where the thing being contained could not reach them easily.

Ludger kept moving, he turned his head like a man still helping search for a fugitive. If the anchors were outside, then brute forcing the barrier from within would become more expensive. Not impossible. Just expensive. And he hated expensive solutions when a better one existed.

He glanced up once more at the shimmering curve overhead. The capital probably thought that placing the anchors outside made the barrier unbreakable from within. That kind of thinking came from people who mistook inconvenience for impossibility. Ludger had never respected that kind of person very much.

The shift came quietly. Then all at once. Ludger heard it before he saw anything, boots. A lot of them. Not scattered patrol movement. Not the uneven rhythm of search teams wandering without direction. This was focused.

He didn’t turn immediately. Didn’t tense. Didn’t even slow his steps.

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He just listened. Multiple groups. Different directions. Tightening circle. Someone had found something. A faint, almost bored thought crossed his mind.

The body.

The one he’d left buried under rubble after copying the armor. At the time, it had been the most efficient choice, no reason to waste effort hiding what the city itself would eventually bury.

Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose and lifted his head just slightly. His eyes flicked upward. The sun. Still high enough. Not yet bleeding into the horizon. He judged the angle, the light, the shadows stretching across broken buildings.

Two hours.

Two hours before sunset. Before darkness changed the battlefield. Before fear shifted shape.

Even after everything… after the destruction, after the chaos, after two labyrinth guardians falling in the streets… they were still acting like he was the only monster inside the capital.

Still chasing him. Still focusing everything on a single target. His eyes moved across the distant rooftops, the patrol lines tightening, the tension building as more soldiers flooded toward his general area.

The plan isn’t working.

At least not as fast as he would’ve liked. He had expected more cracks. More people questioning what they had seen, questioning the guardians, the foreign warriors, the things hiding behind polished armor and imperial authority.

But the capital was stubborn. Or controlled. Or both. Fear, when directed properly, didn’t spread. It focused. And right now, all of it was pointed at him.

Ludger adjusted his grip on the spear slightly as he kept walking, the illusion of a searching soldier still intact, for now.

It wasn’t ideal. But it wasn’t a failure either. He had bought time. That was what mattered.

Time to recover. He rolled his shoulders once, subtly testing his body beneath the replica armor. Better. The raw burn in his lungs had faded, no longer clawing at his chest with every breath. The strain from pushing Rage Flow and Overdrive earlier had receded enough to stop interfering with his movements.

And his mana… He could feel it now. Not full. Not even close. Roughly half. More than enough for what came next. The sound of footsteps grew louder. Voices now, too, shouted orders, confusion, anger, someone barking about the discovered corpse, about armor missing, about infiltration.

Ludger’s lips pressed into a thin line behind the helmet. But his eyes had changed. The calm calculation remained. But beneath it… there was something sharper now.

Figures stepped out from alleys, rooftops, broken doorways, and the mouths of side streets, hemming him in from every direction. Soldiers in imperial armor. Adventurers with the tense, greedy eyes of people hoping to cash in on someone else’s problem. A few quieter ones too, wrong in the way they held themselves, too still, too patient.

They had finally stopped searching. Now they were here to kill him. Ludger let the false brown armor fall away without a word.

The earth replica cracked apart first at the shoulders, then the chest, then the helm, collapsing off him in chunks of dull stone and compacted soil. Pieces hit the street with heavy thuds, breaking the last illusion apart in front of everyone.

A few enemies instinctively tensed. Others stepped back half a pace. Because the boy beneath it looked nothing like prey. His face was pale from exertion, smeared with dust and traces of blood, but his eyes were steady. Cold. Awake in the worst possible way.

Ludger rolled the other shoulder once, as if discarding a coat rather than a disguise that had just carried him through a citywide hunt.

Then he crouched slightly and pressed a hand to the ground.

Mana surged. The street groaned.

Cracks raced outward beneath his boots as earth tore itself free from the stone road in thick, violent slabs. Dust exploded upward. Chunks of compacted dirt and shattered masonry rushed together, twisting, compressing, reshaping under his control with brutal speed.

The weapon that formed in his hands was not elegant. It was not refined. It was a giant club.

A thick, monstrous mass of stone and hardened earth longer than Ludger was tall, its head broad and ugly, built not for finesse but for impact. The handle thickened under his grip, layered with compressed ridges to keep it from shattering on the first collision. Weight settled into it like a threat given form.

Then, as if that still wasn’t enough, Ludger poured more mana into it.

Magic Reinforcement. Earth attunement.

The club deepened in color, the surface darkening as mana hummed through it in dense waves. Its already ridiculous mass compressed further, structure tightening, hardening, turning from heavy stone into something closer to a mobile wall shaped into a bludgeon.

A low vibration spread through the air. Not loud. But wrong. The kind of sound that made instincts scream. Several enemies around him visibly flinched.

One swordsman’s grip tightened so hard his knuckles whitened. An adventurer near the back took an involuntary step away before catching himself. Even some of the more composed figures narrowed their eyes, suddenly far less eager to be the first one forward.

Because they understood. If that thing hit them cleanly, armor would not matter much. Bones would not matter much. Technique would not matter much.

And if by some miracle they didn’t die… they would suffer enough to wish they had.

Ludger lifted the massive club one-handed first, just enough to test the balance, then settled both hands onto it and let its full weight rest at an angle beside him. The street beneath the head cracked again from pressure alone.

His expression didn’t change. But the look in his eyes made the meaning clear enough. Come closer.

Please.