Chapter 959

For a few seconds, nobody moved.

The circle held, but its confidence had changed. They still had numbers. They still had him surrounded. But now the image in front of them had shifted from hunted brat to something much more difficult to explain.

A boy standing alone in the middle of the capital, half-broken and still dangerous enough to make armed men hesitate. Ludger exhaled once, slow and steady. Then the corner of his mouth twitched upward in something too cold to be called a smile.

“Go on,” he said.

His voice was quiet. That somehow made it worse.

“I was getting bored.”

The enemies hesitated. That was their mistake. For all their numbers, for all the shouting and steel and killing intent packed into the streets around him, they still froze for one fatal moment. Not because they lacked courage.

Because instinct had kicked in. Because every part of them was screaming that rushing the boy holding a mana-humming stone club the size of a siege weapon was a good way to die badly.

Ludger saw it. And took it. Mana sparked through his legs. A sharp, violent crackle ran from his thighs to his calves as he fed power into his body without restraint. Muscles tightened. The ground beneath his boots splintered.

Then he used Wind Step. He vanished forward.

To the enemies around him, it almost looked like he skipped a piece of reality. One instant he was standing still in the center of the ring, club resting at his side.

The next… he was already inside their line.

The first target didn’t even have time to raise his shield properly.

Ludger’s club slammed into the man’s side with a sound like a wall collapsing. Armor caved in. Ribs vanished into pulp.

The body bent unnaturally before flying sideways into two others hard enough to smash them off their feet. The second man caught the edge of the swing across the hip and lower torso, less a clean hit than a glancing impact, but with that weapon, a glancing blow was still enough to ruin a life.

He spun through the air screaming.

A third enemy tried to retreat and only managed to turn half away before the backswing crushed him across the flank. His body folded around the impact point with a wet crack and bounced off the street in a spray of dust and blood.

The first few targets had their sides smashed apart so fast they didn’t even know what had happened.

There was no duel. No exchange. Just impact. Then fire rained down on Ludger. His eyes snapped upward the instant mana flared overhead. He moved on instinct.

A fireball screamed down toward where he had just stepped and exploded against the street in a burst of heat and shattered stone. Ludger twisted sideways before the blast fully bloomed, cloak and hair whipping as another streak of orange tore past his shoulder. A third followed immediately after, then a fourth, then more… too many.

He sidestepped one, ducked another, cut sharply around a collapsing patch of flame, then launched himself out of the centerline as two more detonated behind him with enough force to shower his back in burning debris.

The street erupted into chaos.

Fire splashed across stone and broken walls. Smoke rolled upward in ugly black sheets. Dust blasted into the air each time another impact struck, turning the whole area into a furnace-choked haze.

Ludger kept moving, but the heat began to wear him down almost immediately.

Not enough to stop him. Enough to irritate him. His lungs, which had only recently stopped burning, tightened again as the air thickened with smoke and pulverized dust. Each breath dragged more grit into his chest. The scorched air scraped at his throat. The temperature kept rising, forcing sweat from his skin even through the lingering chill of the day.

He drove his club through another enemy who had panicked and rushed too close, but his attention had already shifted. This wasn’t random bombardment.

He sprang backward over a ruined stretch of pavement as another pair of fireballs slammed into the ground where he’d been standing, then turned his head toward the source… And saw them.

In the distance, beyond the nearer front line, several squads of mages were spread across elevated positions and protected intersections. Not one or two desperate casters.

Several squads. Launching in sequence.

Some preparing while others fired. Some adjusting angles while others covered. Enough spacing between them to make rushing one group difficult without exposing himself to the next.

Ludger narrowed his eyes through the smoke. That was their plan. Not to beat him in close combat. Not after seeing what that club did to flesh and armor.

They wanted to box him in with bodies, force him to keep moving, then drown him in heat, smoke, and explosive pressure until his breathing failed and his body slowed down enough for the rest to finish him.

Another fireball tore toward him from the side. Ludger shifted half a step and let it pass close enough that the edge of the blast brushed his arm with searing heat before exploding against a ruined wall behind him.

More were already coming. The enemies in front of him still looked shaken, but that didn’t matter now. They had found their nerve again because they thought distance and fire would do the work for them.

Ludger inhaled once through the smoke, felt the burn in his chest, then looked toward the mage squads with an expression that turned colder by the second.

So that was how they wanted to play it…

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

Alphonse stood by the tall windows of his office with his hands clasped behind his back, gaze resting over the capital as though he were merely observing the city settle after an inconvenience.

From this height, the damage looked almost manageable.

Smoke rose in several places. A few districts still bore the scars of shattered streets and broken rooftops, but distance softened ruin. It turned bloodshed into geometry. Disorder into movement. Failure into something that could still be explained away with the right words and the right corpses.

That was what he was waiting for now. The report. Not if Ludger had died. When confirmation would arrive.

The boy had caused enough trouble. Enough destruction. Enough embarrassment. But a sealed capital was still a sealed capital, and one boy, no matter how talented, no matter how monstrous, should have reached his limit by now.

Alphonse’s expression remained calm. A ruler’s face. But beneath that calm, calculation moved without pause.

Once Ludger died, the narrative could harden. The search would become a cleanup. The witnesses could be managed. The more inconvenient truths could be buried beneath fear, law, and public outrage. The foreign elements involved could be trimmed, redirected, or silenced depending on how much they knew and how useful they remained.

Then, in the distance, a building collapsed. Alphonse’s eyes narrowed.

The structure didn’t simply give way. It folded sideways in a spray of stone and dust, as though something massive had struck through its lower half with enough force to shatter its frame from the inside. A heartbeat later, the ground trembled faintly even from this far away.

Then another shock followed. Then another. Not large enough to threaten the office itself. Just enough to make the glass hum. Alphonse remained still, but his gaze sharpened. That was not the sound of a corpse being confirmed.

That was the sound of a problem refusing to end properly.

He watched another plume of dust rise between distant rooftops. Figures scattered below like disturbed ants. Then part of a wall buckled inward with sudden violence, followed by a delayed burst of orange fire that climbed above the street line before dissolving into smoke.

The boy was still alive.

Alphonse said nothing. He simply stood there and continued watching as destruction rolled outward in irregular pulses from a district that should have been in the final stage of containment by now.

Fifteen minutes later, there was a knock at the office door.

“Enter.”

A guard stepped in, armor marked by soot and dust, breathing carefully in the way men did when trying not to show they had run faster than dignity allowed. He dropped to one knee immediately.

“Your Excellency.”

Alphonse didn’t turn right away. “Report.”

The guard hesitated only a fraction of a second.

“The target is still alive.”

Of course he was. Alphonse slowly turned from the window.

“How?”

A dangerous question.

The guard kept his head lowered. “Search and engagement units surrounded him after discovering the body of the armored man he impersonated. The target discarded the disguise and engaged directly.”

Alphonse’s gaze remained fixed on him. The guard swallowed once.

“He is killing anyone who approaches him with weapons in hand.”

A pause. Then, more quietly…

“Those who survive the strikes…”

He stopped.

Alphonse’s eyes narrowed. “Finish.”

The guard’s jaw tightened.

“They beg to be killed.”

Silence filled the office. The guard forced himself to continue.

“The weapon he formed is… large. Dense. Reinforced with mana. The men hit by it are not always dying immediately. In many cases, their ribcages are crushed inward.” His voice lowered further. “Internal organs rupture. Limbs break from secondary impact. Some remain conscious.”

He swallowed again.

“The pain is severe enough that surviving victims are pleading for death on the field.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the faint rattle of distant glass as another impact rolled through part of the city. Alphonse turned back toward the window.

Far away, another roofline gave way under pressure. Fire bloomed in the street below it. Dust rose, then spread. He squinted slightly while looking into the distance. The boy was ruthless. That much had been obvious from the beginning.

But this… This was not the work of simple rage. Not a child lashing out. Not a cornered animal killing blindly until it was put down.

This was controlled brutality. Alphonse’s gaze remained fixed on the district where the fighting continued to spread in ugly, rolling bursts. Causing that much pain was not inefficiency.

It was pressure. On the fragile confidence of every soldier, mercenary, and adventurer forced to watch what happened when someone got too close. A clean death could be rationalized. A quick death kept formation intact.

But men screaming for mercy with their chests crushed in? Men begging their allies to finish them because staying alive hurt more than dying?

That stayed in the head. That slowed charges. That poisoned courage. That made the next man hesitate. And hesitation, in a chaotic urban fight against someone like Ludger, was another form of death.

Alphonse’s fingers tapped once against the stone windowsill.

Alphonse did not enjoy admitting competence in enemies, but denying reality because it was inconvenient was the habit of lesser men.

“The mage squads?” he asked.

The guard straightened slightly. “They are continuing bombardment, Your Excellency. They are trying to wear him down with heat, smoke, and pressure.”

“Trying.”

The single word was enough to make the guard tense.

Alphonse kept watching the distant destruction. “And yet the district continues to collapse.”

The guard had no answer for that. Another tremor rolled faintly through the floor. Alphonse exhaled slowly through his nose, eyes half-lidded now.

Ludger was adapting faster than expected. Again. Every answer forced against him became a new variable he used against them. Disguise when needed. Stealth when useful. Open violence when cornered. Psychological pressure when numbers closed in. The boy was not merely strong. He was offensively practical.

Alphonse’s gaze hardened. Then so be it. If the boy wished to behave like a plague inside the capital, he would be treated like one. Containment would no longer be enough. The district would have to be broken harder. Burned if necessary.

The cost would be unpleasant. But costs were only meaningful when they endangered the result.

And Ludger was becoming too expensive to leave breathing.

Behind him, the kneeling guard remained motionless. Alphonse finally spoke, voice smooth once more.

“He wants them afraid.”

The guard blinked once. “Your Excellency?”

Alphonse did not turn.

“He is using pain to fracture morale before sunset. He understands that fear travels faster than orders.”

His eyes remained on the smoke.

“Which means we stop feeding him melee casualties.”

Now he turned, and the temperature in the room seemed to drop with the motion.

“Withdraw any idiot still trying to prove his courage at arm’s length.”

The guard bowed lower. “Yes, Your Excellency.”

“Reinforce long-range magic. Rotate the mage squads so fatigue does not create gaps. Collapse the routes ahead of him, not behind him. Force him to move where we want him.”

The guard nodded quickly.

“And if entire streets must be sacrificed?”

Alphonse’s expression did not change.

“Then sacrifice them.”