Chapter 968

The Regent had noticed the silence of the night as well.

It was the kind of silence only a battlefield could produce after enough blood had already been spent, a strained, unnatural stillness where every man waiting in power began to wonder whether the next sound would confirm victory… or announce that something had gone terribly wrong.

Alphonse stood near the high windows of his office, one hand resting lightly against the cold stone frame while his gaze moved over the capital below.

The rain, the damage, the drifting poison mist, and the barrier overhead had stripped away much of its grandness. From above, the capital no longer resembled the beating heart of an empire.

It looked like a sealed wound. And inside that wound, one boy was still refusing to die. Alphonse’s expression remained composed, but his mind had not stopped moving for even a second.

The plan had been sound. More than sound. It had been precise.

Wear Ludger down with poison. Force him into motion. Strip away the advantages that had let him survive the earlier chaos. Bleed his stamina. Bleed his mana. Make every breath cost him something.

Then wound him with the stealth mode of the runic guardians. That had been the key adjustment. Not more brute force. Not another direct test of power against someone who had already proven far too good at adapting to straightforward pressure.

No. This stage of the hunt was meant to be ugly and efficient. The poisonous mist should have dulled Ludger’s senses.

That alone was valuable, but it had never been the whole point. The mist did not merely harm the body. It interfered with magical perception, turning the city into a blurred maze where distance, mana, and movement became harder to read properly. A target like Ludger, one who relied so heavily on precise reactions, environmental awareness, and layered mana control, would be forced to operate with missing pieces.

That mattered. Especially because the runic guardians themselves were not crippled by the same conditions. At least, not in the same way. Their magical senses could indeed be blocked or distorted by the poison cloud; Alphonse had accepted that from the start. It was one of the costs of the tactic. But those machines did not rely on magical senses alone.

They had motion sensors. Physical detection. A different kind of awareness entirely.

Which meant that while Ludger’s senses dulled and smeared inside the mist, the guardians could still find him well enough to maintain pressure. Not perfectly. Not elegantly. But well enough.

Well enough to keep him contained. Well enough to wound him from blind angles. Well enough to turn the capital into a labyrinth where every movement became an expenditure and every pause became risk.

Alphonse had expected the rest to follow naturally after that.

Perhaps a forced mistake near one of the prepared sectors. Then confirmation. At last. He had waited for that confirmation in the same posture he wore now, straight-backed, composed, one eye on the city and the other on the clockwork of his own plans.

And yet the silence had stretched longer than he liked. Not because silence was bad by itself. But because silence without a report meant uncertainty. And uncertainty was the one indulgence Alphonse could not tolerate for long.

His eyes tracked the capital below.

The poison mist still drifted through the district lines like a pale infection. The rain had softened to a fine, miserable fall. Here and there, ruined structures stood as black shapes against the dim glow of scattered lamps and emergency fires. The barrier above the city still shimmered faintly, keeping all of it trapped together, the wounded capital, the poison, the machines, and the boy.

Alphonse narrowed his eyes slightly.

Where was the report?

The runic guardians in stealth mode should have been ideal for the task. Hidden movement. Sudden attacks. No need to commit in mass. A thousand cuts instead of one costly clash. If Ludger was as low on mana and as strained as earlier estimates suggested, then the poisoned night should have been steadily dragging him toward collapse. That had been the expectation.

Then he saw it. At first, it was only a distortion in the mist. A darkening. A shape too large to belong where it was. Alphonse’s gaze sharpened immediately. Something was rising inside the capital.

Slowly enough that, for one brief instant, it almost looked unreal, as if the poison haze itself were thickening into form. But then the shape pushed higher, and the mist spilled around it rather than through it.

A shadow. Huge. Emerging from within the city. Alphonse’s hand stilled on the windowsill. The thing kept rising. Above rooftops. Above broken walls. Above the lingering poison.

It did not have the outline of any ordinary machine he had deployed that night. It was too broad in some places, too uneven in others, and far too massive to be mistaken for men or even a normal formation of runic guardians. The deeper darkness of it swallowed what little light the wounded capital still offered, turning part of the skyline into the silhouette of something monstrous.

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For the first time in several minutes, Alphonse did not think in neat lines. He simply watched.

The shadow grew clearer by degrees, its upper shape forcing itself out of the city’s ruined geometry like a giant rising from deep water. Entire rooftops vanished behind it. The mist curled and thinned around its edges. And beneath the silence of the capital, a new sound began to reach even this height… heavy impacts. Steady. Measured.

The exact same giant footsteps that had started echoing through the city and the underground shelters alike. Alphonse’s eyes narrowed further.

That was what the silence had been hiding. Not a collapse. Not a death. Preparation. Somewhere out there in the poisoned dark, Ludger had not been merely surviving the trap.

He had been building something. Of course he had.

That infuriating child never behaved like prey for long. Every time the field narrowed, every time the answers around him seemed to reduce down to simple endurance, he found a way to turn pressure into material and time into a weapon.

Alphonse’s expression hardened as the giant shadow rose fully enough that no sane man could dismiss it as illusion anymore.

Whatever that thing was… whatever abomination of earth, frozen machinery, stolen mass, or improvised brutality Ludger had dragged into shape inside the poisoned capital… it was large enough to change the battle all over again.

And if it was what Alphonse suspected, then the earlier silence had not been the quiet before death. It had been quiet before the storm…

A few hours earlier, while the capital had fallen into that eerie silence and the poisonous mist still covered everything like a disease, Ludger had finally stopped moving.

Not because he wanted to. Because he had to.

The city had become a cage of poison, traps, stealth attacks, and mechanical hunters. Running blindly through it while half-drained and half-blind would eventually get him killed, no matter how many enemies he smashed along the way.

So he found a place to sit.

A broken rooftop hidden under mist and rain, half-collapsed and unremarkable enough that no one would think twice about it unless they already knew where to look. Stone was cracked. Tiles were missing. The wind carried that foul chemical sting through the dark. It was the kind of place people died in quietly.

Ludger sat cross-legged anyway. Then he closed his eyes. The capital wanted him frantic. Wanted him exhausted. Wanted him reacting. So naturally, he did the opposite. His breathing slowed first. Then his pulse.

Then the storm inside him began to settle, not because the pain went away, not because the poison stopped burning his wounds, but because he forced all of it into place with the same cold stubbornness he used for everything else. The cuts still stung. The bullet wounds still throbbed. The bruised flesh across his ribs and stomach still ached with every breath.

He ignored it. Then Ludger began to use every Sage skill he had. Not the way most people used support techniques, like convenient little tools they sprinkled into their routines.

He leaned into all of it. Mana Magnet. Meditation. Spiritual Core.

The fine control that came from understanding how to gather energy instead of simply burning through it like an idiot. His mana began to move differently inside him.

Faster. Cleaner. Deeper.

Instead of merely waiting for recovery, Ludger actively pulled at the world around him with the sharpened instincts and control he had built through his Sage path. Even in a poisoned capital under a barrier, mana still existed everywhere, muddy, disturbed, mixed with too many influences, yes, but still there.

And Ludger took it.

He guided it inward in controlled streams, filtering what he could, forcing his channels to work harder, faster, better. His regeneration rose by an insane margin, enough that even he felt the difference almost immediately. The emptiness inside him began to fill again—not all at once, but fast enough to matter.

Much faster than before.

His body responded. A little more strength returned to his limbs. A little more sharpness came back to his mind. Then he used wind magic.

A faint current began to spiral around him, at first no stronger than a breeze, then tighter, more deliberate. He pushed it outward along his skin, stripping away the poisonous mist clinging to his wounds and exposed flesh. The chemical burn did not vanish immediately, but it eased enough to stop distracting him.

Then he shaped the air further.

A thin barrier formed around him, more like a controlled bubble of moving wind than a wall, just enough to keep the poison from settling directly into his face and lungs. Not perfect. Not something he could trust forever. But enough to stop himself from choking while he recovered.

Enough room to breathe. Enough room to think.

And once Ludger had room to think, the capital immediately became a worse place for everyone else. Because the more mana he gathered, the more options returned.

The more options returned, the more irritated he became at the idea of simply running around while those mechanical bastards herded him like prey.

His eyes opened slowly. The poisonous mist still drifted through the city. The runic guardians were still out there. The Regent still thought he controlled the shape of the battle. Ludger stared into the dark for a few long seconds.

Then an idea formed. Simple. Brutal. And incredibly stupid. Which, in his experience, usually meant it had potential.

“The enemies want to kill me with their runic dolls…” he muttered.

His gaze shifted to the surrounding rooftops, the streets below, the stone, the broken buildings, the frozen machines he had already dropped earlier, the debris, the mass, the sheer amount of material all around him.

Then his eyes narrowed.

A smirk appeared on his face.

“Fine.”

If they wanted to send dolls after him, then he would just crush them with one bigger doll. That was fair. Probably.

Ludger rose from his seat, rolling one shoulder as mana continued to gather inside him in thick, controlled waves. Earth answered his call almost immediately, the rooftops and streets around him shifting ever so slightly like the city itself had realized something terrible was about to happen.

His smirk widened a fraction.

“Let’s call it…”

He looked out into the mist-covered capital, already imagining the shape of it.

The arms. The weight. The ridiculous size. The amount of force it would take to make the Regent regret being born.

“Ludger MK 1.”