Chapter 966

Ludger’s eyes narrowed behind the mask as he stared into the mist-drowned capital.

The runic guardians should have their own way to find him through this mess. There was no other explanation that fit. The poison cloud had distorted his magic senses badly enough that tracking anything clearly had become a headache, but those machines were still reacting with far too much confidence whenever he moved.

So the mist was helping them. Or at least not hindering them enough to matter. That alone was irritating. Their numbers also shouldn’t have been that high. Not for machines built like that. Not unless the Regent had emptied half the Empire’s treasury into this lunacy.

Which meant they were probably split throughout the city, spread out in key sectors to keep him contained instead of massed together in one giant formation. Patrol grids. Ambush points. Overlapping routes. Enough to keep him boxed in no matter which direction he pushed.

Ludger clicked his tongue softly. He had never expected to see the enemy with so many more people on their side using guerrilla tactics against him.

Against him.

A single guy. The thought was absurd enough to be almost funny. Almost. Because it meant they were taking him seriously now. Fully seriously. No more pride, no more neat formation warfare, no more pretending strength and rank would settle things cleanly. They were using the city itself, using concealment, poison, staggered pressure, and hidden movement to grind him down the same way small, weaker forces normally harassed something much larger than themselves.

Only here, the roles were reversed.

And that said a lot. A sharp itch flared from one of the wounds along his side, then another near his shoulder. Ludger’s expression tightened for half a heartbeat.

The poison. Or whatever secondary effect that mist was carrying.

It was getting into the open flesh and making the damaged areas burn and itch in a way that made his nerves crawl. A lesser fighter might have wasted focus on it, scratched at it, cursed it, let it get under the skin in more ways than one.

Ludger endured it. Pain was pain. Itching was just a more annoying version. He needed to focus. Because now there were two problems in front of him, and both mattered.

First, he needed a plan to deal with this containment. Not just survive inside it, but break the pattern. Force the runic guardians and whatever else Alphonse had hidden in the mist to stop dictating the pace.

Second, he needed a way out of the capital. Tonight. Not after another hour of this. Not after the poison settled deeper and his mana dipped even lower. His jaw tightened slightly. He did not want to let the Regent escape. That part still sat in his chest like a stone.

The idea of Alphonse walking away from this, after the frame-up, the emperor’s death, the barrier, the armies around Lionfang, the poison flooding the capital, was enough to make Ludger’s eyes turn colder.

But it was obvious that one hell of a trap would be waiting for him in the castle. Of course there would be.

That was where men like Alphonse nested. Charging the castle now would be exactly what the Regent wanted. A wounded target. Low mana. Distorted senses. Poison in the air. A battlefield already shaped against him.

No. Not yet… Ludger exhaled slowly through the mask and looked out over the silent, poisoned city.

The Regent wanted him tired, angry, and impatient enough to choose the obvious path. Which meant the obvious path was suicide. Then he would need a different one…

While Ludger fought through the poisoned night above, Varik walked the underground shelters with the calm of a man who understood that fear spread fastest in enclosed places.

The capital had not built those shelters for comfort. That much was obvious the moment one stepped inside them.

They had been carved and reinforced recently, fast enough that parts of the stone still looked too clean compared to the older sewers beneath the city. Timber supports stood where permanent work had not yet been finished. Vent shafts had been forced upward through layers of earth and masonry with more urgency than elegance. The passages were wide enough to move people in groups, narrow enough to feel crowded even when half-empty, and lined with chambers that now held far too many civilians packed together beneath the weight of a city at war.

Varik moved through them with measured steps, hands clasped behind his back, dark cloak hanging neatly despite the damp chill underground. Every now and then he stopped to check conditions personally.

Water stores. Ventilation. The placement of lamps. The distribution of blankets and food. The positioning of guards at choke points. There was no glory in work like this. Only necessity. And necessity was what held frightened masses together when the world overhead started sounding like it was tearing itself apart.

The inhabitants watched him as he passed. Some with gratitude. Some with unease. Some with the hollow, stunned look of people who still had not fully accepted that the city above them had become a battlefield in a matter of hours.

Children clung to mothers who tried to look calmer than they felt. Elderly men muttered low prayers or bitter curses under their breath. Merchants sat beside hastily dragged crates containing whatever they had deemed important enough to save. Servants and laborers huddled shoulder to shoulder with minor officials and artisans, all of them reduced to the same underground waiting by danger they could neither see nor influence.

Varik checked their condition without rushing. Not merely because it was his duty. Because perception mattered. If the people saw a man like him moving with confidence, without panic, without even the smallest visible crack in discipline, then many of them would borrow that calm whether they realized it or not. That was how cities endured. Not through truth alone. Through managed emotion.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

A tremor rolled through the stone.

It came from above, heavy enough to shake dust loose from the ceiling and make a few lantern flames twitch inside their glass covers.

Several people flinched immediately.

A little girl started crying. A pair of older women gasped and clutched each other’s arms. Somewhere down the corridor, someone muttered that the barrier had failed before another voice harshly told him to shut up.

Varik did not look up. He simply kept walking until the panic had room to breathe and then die. That too was part of the work. Soon enough, the people settled again.

The shaking above, the distant thunder, the muffled roars of something enormous breaking in the streets, none of that was random destruction in the minds of those below.

It was necessary. Necessary to avenge the emperor. Necessary to cleanse the city of the traitor who had brought death into its heart. Necessary to make sure the monster above never walked free again. ℯℯ𝘭.𝘤ℴ𝘮

That belief had been given to them carefully, fed into the shelters along with food and water and instructions to remain orderly. And now, whenever the ground trembled beneath their feet, most of them returned to normal after only a few breaths, reassured by the same thought.

This was what justice sounded like. Even if it terrified them.

Varik stepped into one of the larger chambers and let his eyes pass over the inhabitants gathered there. The conditions were not good, but they were acceptable under the circumstances. The air was stale, though the vent system still held. Water distribution had been tight but manageable. Fear remained present, of course, but it had not yet ripened into unrest.

A soldier stationed near the chamber entrance lowered his head slightly as Varik approached.

“Sir.”

Varik gave the smallest nod. “Any problems?”

“Only nerves,” the man said. “A few arguments. One woman tried to go back above for her son, but the guards stopped her before she reached the stairs.”

Varik’s gaze shifted briefly toward the civilians.

“She was informed?”

“Yes, sir. That no one returns to the surface.”

“Good.”

No softness entered his tone. There could be no softness now. Once rules were bent in places like this, panic followed quickly after. Another faint vibration rolled through the stone beneath their feet. Less violent than the last one, but enough to make heads turn and shoulders tense.

Again, the people settled. Again, they endured. Varik watched that response in silence. The shelters had been built for exactly this kind of night. For siege. For unrest.

For the kind of urban war the capital’s rulers had long suspected might one day become necessary, even if few among the public had ever imagined it would arrive like this.

He moved on through the next corridor, boots clicking softly over damp stone while guarded lamps threw steady orange light over the walls.

Above them, Ludger was still fighting. Varik knew that much without needing fresh reports every minute. The city’s trembling alone made it obvious.

The boy was proving more troublesome than expected. Much more. But troublesome was not the same as victorious.

Down here, the machine of the capital still functioned. Civilians were contained. Guards held their posts. Supplies flowed. The narrative held. Fear remained controlled.

That mattered. Because wars were not won only by killing what stood above ground. They were won by ensuring everything below it remained intact enough to obey when dawn came.

Varik paused at another shelter entrance and listened for a moment to the muffled sounds of the people within, the whispered conversations, the subdued crying of children too tired to keep crying loudly, the quiet clatter of bowls and canteens.

Then he continued his inspection. Just as the capital needed him to be while justice, vengeance, and poison all worked together above.

He had been informed of this plan a month ago. And ever since then, Varik had felt as if his life had been turned upside down. It had started with a private summons from the Regent.

Not a public meeting. Not some formal call in front of ministers and officers. A direct summons, quiet, deliberate, the kind that made refusal impossible and comfort equally absent.

Varik still remembered the room. The measured light. The silence. The way Alphonse had spoken as though the future were already decided and everyone else had simply not realized it yet.

The Regent had called for him personally to organize this part of the plan. The shelters. The civilian containment. The hidden movement of supplies. The routes below ground. The maintenance of order while the city above turned into a battlefield.

At the time, Varik had understood what that meant even before the explanation finished. The capital had not prepared all this for some ordinary crisis. It had prepared it for blood. For internal war.

For something so severe that the rulers of the Empire expected their own people to need hiding beneath their own streets.

Then Alphonse had explained why. Or at least, what he wanted believed. Lionsguard, he said, had taken the Emperor’s half-sister. Lionsguard, he said, intended to use her.

And Ludger, the too-capable boy standing at the center of too many inconvenient events, was supposedly planning to kill Emperor Halvyr and control the Empire through that girl once the confusion settled.

Even now, walking through the shelters while the city shook around him, Varik could still remember the exact feeling that claim had left in his chest.

“What the hell are you thinking…”

Not disbelief. Not fully. More like resistance. Because he didn’t believe Ludger would do that. Not truly. Not in that neat, ambitious way Alphonse had described it.

It was too clean. Too political. Too much like the kind of lie powerful men invented when they needed monsters to wear human faces. That did not mean Ludger was innocent. Varik was not foolish enough to think in those childish terms anymore.

He knew very well what Ludger had been doing in recent months, or at least, he knew parts of it. Investigating the darkness inside the Empire. Tugging at threads most people either ignored or wisely left buried. Asking questions that crossed lines, moving in places a child his age should not have been able to navigate, seeing things that would have broken softer people.

That much had already been dangerous enough. But then there was Rufas. And Gustav’s family. Once Ludger had helped them escape, the entire shape of things had become harder to read. Varik had understood enough to know that no one made a move like that lightly. He was informed that Ludger had done that, even though there were no clear signs of it… The regent said that they found traces that some people crossed the mountains and headed south, but he didn’t show the evidence…

That was not the act of a power-hungry child trying to grab the throne. It was the act of someone who had seen rot and chosen to move against it. Or around it. Or through it. And that was exactly the problem.

Because once that happened, once Ludger crossed that line, it became far harder to tell what he was plotting.

Was he exposing corruption? Was he building alliances? Was he trying to protect specific people while tearing at hidden structures inside the Empire? Was he simply reacting to danger faster than everyone else? Varik didn’t know anymore.

And that ignorance had only grown heavier with time.