Chapter 962

Ludger bared his teeth and shifted his stance, pain still pulsing through the reopened wounds.

“All right…”

If their bullets weren’t normal… Then he would stop treating those things like normal enemies.

The earth club began to come apart under the barrage. Just piece by piece.

Small chunks first, blasted free by repeated impacts. Then deeper cracks spreading through the reinforced mass as those monstrous rounds hammered the same sections again and again with enough force to shake Ludger’s arms numb if he let them.

He didn’t let them.

The moment a section started to splinter too badly, Ludger forced more mana into it. Earth attunement surged through the weapon, compressing what remained, hardening weakened spots, dragging loose fragments back into place before they could fully shear off. Cracks sealed. Density returned. The club reshaped itself in his hands even while bullets kept slamming into it hard enough to throw sparks and stone shards into the air.

But he didn’t stop there.

While one club held the front line, Ludger tore more earth from the broken rooftop and surrounding walls. Stone and dust surged upward in twisting streams, condensing under violent pressure until a second club took form beside him. Then a third. He let them go.

The instant they left his hands, mana snapped tight through them like invisible tendons. Before long, the giant earth clubs were spinning around him in brutal arcs, orbiting his position with enough speed and mass to swat bullets out of the air or intercept them with dense, reinforced stone.

The night filled with impacts. Metal hammered earth. Sparks burst.

Chunks of shattered stone rained across the rooftop as the rotating clubs intercepted round after round, their motion turning Ludger into the center of a moving fortress of heavy bludgeons and compressed earth.

The runic golems adjusted almost immediately.

Their barrels tracked new angles while their heavy frames began rotating around the district, trying to spread out and find blind spots in the defense. Some advanced through the streets below while others shifted farther out, changing elevation and line of fire, looking for gaps between the spinning clubs.

Ludger had expected that.

And his plan worked. Because the orbiting weapons were not fixed shields. They were moving walls.

The moment one angle grew vulnerable, he shifted their paths, tightening one arc, widening another, changing the rhythm just enough to keep the golems from finding a clean lane. Their bullets still hit hard enough to shake the clubs and blast fragments away, but the continuous rotation denied them the simple kill pattern they wanted.

Ludger stayed low at the center, eyes cold and calculating, reading their movements through the barrage. If they wanted to turn the fight into a contest of angles, then he would simply give them too many moving pieces to solve cleanly.

One of the bullets ricocheted off a club at a bad angle and spun down across the rooftop instead of vanishing into the rubble below.

Ludger caught it before it hit the ground.

Even with everything happening around him, his fingers closed around the round with sharp, practiced precision, and he immediately felt the weight of it.

Too heavy. Too dense. His eyes narrowed as he sensed the tip. Not ordinary metal. Not even ordinary enchanted metal. The front of the bullet was made of the same magic silver alloy used in Viola’s weapon and in his father’s sword.

Alien metal. Absurdly effective.

Maybe even the same type of material Drarc’s scales had been made from. That thought sharpened something in him instantly. So that was why the rounds had bitten deeper than they should have.

The Regent had equipped these things with ammunition designed to pierce defenses that common weapons had no business challenging. Ludger tightened his grip on the round for half a second, then let it drop.

The orbiting earth clubs continued to spin around him, smashing bullets aside in ringing bursts of force while the runic golems kept repositioning through the streets, searching for weakness.

Ludger’s expression flattened. They had come prepared. That meant whatever they were protecting, or whatever they expected him to do next, mattered enough to spend rare materials on… And that meant breaking them would probably be worth the effort.

Then, all at once, the runic golems stopped. No more gunfire. No more shifting angles through the ruined streets.

They simply froze in place around him, metal bodies standing motionless beneath the night sky while the engine-hum inside them dropped into a lower, stranger tone.

Ludger did not relax. Not even slightly. If anything, his focus sharpened. Because machines like that did not stop attacking out of fear. They stopped because they were changing something.

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The spinning earth clubs continued circling around him, grinding through the air with heavy arcs while dust and stone fragments settled across the rooftop. Ludger stood at the center of it all, breathing controlled, eyes moving from one golem to the next.

They looked… wrong. Thinking. Or at least, doing the closest thing those things could do to it. As if they were trying to understand what was going on.

As if their current attack pattern had failed badly enough that another sequence was being selected.

Ludger’s jaw tightened. A moment later, the answer came.

The runic golems moved their arms again, but not to aim the same barrels as before. Plates shifted with sharp metallic clicks. Segments of armor folded back. Internal runic lines brightened. Entire sections of their forearms and shoulders opened like blooming steel flowers, revealing hidden structures buried beneath the outer plating.

New weapons. Of course. Before long, several cannons began to emerge from within their frames. But these were not built like the ballistic barrels from before. These were wider.

Layered with complex runic rings and vent-like slits that glowed from within. Then blue light appeared inside them. Ludger’s eyes opened wide. Because he had not been expecting fire of that color. The glow deepened rapidly, bright and unnatural, somewhere between flame and condensed mana, painting the streets below in cold azure light. One cannon came online.

Then another. Then another.

Until several blue-flame cannons surrounded him from every direction, their inner chambers humming with the kind of pressure that made instincts recoil before the attack even launched.

This was not ordinary fire.

The heat rolling off those weapons felt wrong, too controlled, too sharp, like the flames had been stripped of everything chaotic and reduced into pure destructive intent. Blue tongues of fire licked inside the runic chambers without spilling out, contained and compressed by the glowing rings around the barrels.

Ludger lowered his center of gravity immediately, every part of him going taut.

He had seen enough strange mana properties today to know one thing for certain… anything burning that color inside a weapon like that was going to be a problem. The next instant, Ludger disappeared beneath the flames.

The blue fire crashed into the rooftop from every direction at once, not in wild bursts, but in focused streams that swept and crossed over each other with terrifying control. The night vanished behind a wall of azure light as the runic cannons flooded the entire area around him, turning the rooftop into a furnace bright enough to stain the surrounding streets in unnatural color.

Ludger moved inside it.

The spinning earth clubs never stopped.

He forced them around himself in tighter, faster arcs, using their dense mass as moving shields to intercept the streams of blue fire before they could hit him cleanly. Stone met flame, and for a brief moment it worked, the first waves broke against the rotating clubs, splashing and curling around them in sheets of shimmering heat.

Then the stone began to melt.

Not crack. Not burn.

The edges of the clubs softened under the blue flames, glowing, sagging, and dripping molten fragments across the rooftop as if the reinforced earth were nothing more than wax held too close to a forge. Ludger poured more mana into them immediately, trying to harden, repair, and replace lost sections on the fly, but the rate of damage was vicious.

Every rotation cost him more material.

Every block bought him only moments.

The air got harder to breathe almost at once.

Heat pressed in from all sides, but it wasn’t just heat. Something about the flames changed the atmosphere itself. Each breath dragged sharp, dry pain down his throat and into his lungs, making it feel like he was inhaling through burning cloth soaked in poison.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed through the blue haze.

He didn’t know if it was thanks to magic or some form of gas that gave the fire that color.

Maybe both.

The runic cannons clearly weren’t just projecting raw flames. There was some secondary effect mixed into it, something that altered the combustion, the air, or the mana around it enough to make the whole kill zone even worse than simple fire would have been.

Whatever the exact mechanism, the result was the same.

He was in a bind.

The clubs could not hold forever if they kept melting this fast.

The air was becoming more hostile with every second.

And the runic golems had finally found an attack pattern that didn’t care how much pain he caused, how many men he crippled, or how afraid the living were of closing in.

Because these enemies didn’t need courage. They only needed fuel. Soon, Ludger heard it.

Wind. Not natural wind. Not the loose pull of air shifting through ruined streets and burning rooftops. This was directed. A low, rising howl threaded through the roar of the blue flames, and the moment Ludger caught it, his expression darkened.

Then the fire reached him.

Not in splashes slipping past the spinning clubs.

Not in stray tongues licking through gaps.

The entire mass of blue flame surged harder, pushed forward by violent streams of compressed wind that fed the inferno and sharpened its reach. The heat spiked instantly. The pressure changed. What had already been a kill zone became something worse—a furnace with breath behind it.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed as the realization settled.

The runic golems had that kind of weapon as well. Flame alone was dangerous. Wind alone could have been troublesome. But combining both… that was another level entirely.

The accelerated air drove the fire deeper, made it harder to avoid, harder to smother, harder to read. The blue streams stopped behaving like ordinary projected flames and started cutting through the space around him like living things, pressing into every angle with much greater force than before.

It was a layered weapon system. Two different functions made into something far stronger than either would have been alone.

The Regent’s people really had put thought into this. Ludger could appreciate that.

The air around him screamed as the enhanced flames crashed against his spinning clubs. Stone sloughed off faster now, molten fragments spraying outward in bright arcs while the rooftop beneath his feet softened, cracked, and blackened under the impossible heat. Breathing became even worse. Every inhale burned.

And still… something cold and vicious settled behind Ludger’s eyes.

If the enemies wanted to show him that… show him that they could combine weapons, properties, and pressure into something deadlier… then he would show them something too.

That he wasn’t nearly as constrained as they were.