Chapter 969

The giant earth golem was easily fifty meters tall.

A towering creation of earth and stone, it rose above the poisoned capital like a moving cliff forced into the shape of a warrior. At that size, the walls of the city looked laughably small. Towers that had once dominated the skyline now seemed like children’s toys placed around its feet. Even the grander buildings of the capital lost their presence beneath its shadow.

It made everything in the city look small.

Its shoulders were broad enough to blot out whole sections of street from sight. Its arms looked like siege towers given joints. Every step it took sent a deep tremor through the capital, not because Ludger wanted spectacle, but because something that massive simply could not move quietly.

And yet, despite its size, it did not collapse into the ground.

That alone would have confused most people watching.

Given its weight and sheer scale, the golem should have sunk the moment it tried to stand. The streets of the capital, already damaged, rain-soaked, and unstable from battle, had no business supporting something like that. A normal mage creating a construct of that size would have made nothing more than an expensive disaster, a giant statue that buried itself in mud and rubble before getting torn apart.

But Ludger knew better than that.

He had studied the dreaded Square Cube long enough to understand that making something big was not the same as making something useful. So he hadn’t built the giant like a fool.

Inside the massive body, many sections were left hollow. Not fully empty, not just filled with air, but structured with internal gaps, braces, and supporting frames that reduced needless weight while preserving stability. Parts of the torso were layered rather than solid. The limbs held reinforced channels instead of being one dead block of earth. The frame distributed pressure downward and outward so the construct’s full mass didn’t simply crush the ground beneath it all at once.

That was the difference between a giant and a weapon. From the outside, it looked like a mountain in human form. Inside, it had been shaped with just enough sense to move, endure, and fight.

And the outer shell… that was where Ludger had shown no mercy at all. The external parts were insanely hard.

He had poured earth-attuned mana into every outer layer, compressing and reinforcing them until the surface looked more like fortress plating than stone. Rain slid over it without softening anything. Poison mist clung to it uselessly. The outer armor had been hardened to a ridiculous degree, then pushed even further by the gloves on Ludger’s hands, gloves that amplified his earth magic enough to make the whole construct denser, tougher, and far more resilient than it had any right to be.

It was not elegant. It was not refined. It was simply built the way Ludger built things when he needed them to survive being hit by an empire. Hard on the outside. Smart enough inside.

And towering over the capital like a second disaster. The runic guardians sensed the movement immediately. That much was obvious from the way their heads turned, their optical lights flaring sharper as the fifty-meter earth giant shifted its weight and sent another deep tremor through the capital.

But sensing it and understanding it were two very different things. And that was where the machines stumbled. They had been programmed to hunt humans.

Fast targets. Small targets. Targets that bled, hid, ran through alleys, rooftops, and poison-covered streets. Their tactics, their sensors, their response patterns, all of it had been shaped for that purpose.

Not this.

Not some weird giant creation striding through the capital like a moving fortress pulled out of a child’s nightmare and built by a monster who understood engineering far too well for his age.

For a moment, the runic guardians hesitated. Not out of fear. Out of confusion.

Their heads adjusted. Their limbs shifted. Their formations tried to recalculate around a target too large, too strange, and too structurally different from what they had been meant to contain. Some raised weapons. Others spread out. A few started repositioning as if searching for weak points, but their movement lacked the immediate certainty they had shown while hunting Ludger on foot.

That was enough.

Standing at the top of the earth giant, rain and poison-mist sliding around him, Ludger saw the opening at once. Then he made the giant kick.

The massive leg moved with brutal force, not elegant, not fast in the way a human strike was fast, but fast enough for something of that scale. It swept forward and slammed into one of the runic guardians before the machine had fully finished recalculating.

The impact was monstrous. The sound echoed through the capital like a giant hammer striking a cathedral bell. The runic guardian left the ground instantly. One moment it was a deadly machine of rune-metal and weapon systems.

The next it was a spinning chunk of armored scrap sent flying through the air, spiraling wildly as it tore across the district and smashed through the upper floors of a distant building in an explosion of stone, wood, and shattered supports.

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The whole city seemed to feel that hit. And the movement did something else too. The kick, the shifting mass of the giant, the sheer force of displaced air and disturbed terrain sent the poisonous mist rolling away in great waves around the area. Curtains of pale poison peeled back, swirled, and twisted under the giant’s motion, revealing shapes that had been hidden moments before.

Ludger’s eyes sharpened immediately. That gave him a much better idea of where the others were.

The mist moved enough for their silhouettes, positions, and rough spacing to become clearer. He could see where some had tried to circle. Which rooftops they were favoring. Which streets held more of them. Which angles they had been preparing to use once the poison softened him enough.

Still, even as he used the opening, Ludger could feel the strain digging deeper. He clicked his tongue softly and muttered to himself while maintaining the giant’s posture.

“Controlling this eats too much mana…”

The words came out low, almost annoyed. Because that was the problem. Not creating the giant. Not really. He could force that much earth together if he had to. The real issue was control.

Keeping something this massive stable, responsive, and combat-capable while also trying to read the battlefield and recover mana at the same time was a different level of difficulty entirely. Every movement mattered. Every balance shift took attention. Every strike risked wasting ridiculous amounts of energy if he didn’t guide the structure properly.

Focusing on controlling the earth giant and recovering mana simultaneously was proving too hard.

Possible, maybe. Efficient? Not even close.

Ludger’s eyes stayed on the runic guardians below while the giant shifted its weight again, rain running over its hardened outer shell.

“I’ll need more practice,” he muttered.

Which was an absurd thought under the circumstances. Most people would have been busy panicking about the giant, the poison, the battle, the capital, the empire trying to kill them.

Ludger was already thinking about how to improve the technique next time.

Then again… that was exactly why the empire was having such a miserable night.

Ludger didn’t stop at one. The moment the first runic guardian went flying and the poisonous mist shifted enough to reveal the others, he made the giant move again.

MK 1’s massive leg rose and came down in another brutal kick, this time catching a second runic guardian as it tried to reposition through the rubble below. The machine’s shield came up too late. The impact folded the entire side of its body inward with a deep metallic scream and launched it across the street hard enough to tear a trench through stone and broken masonry before it smashed through a wall.

A third tried to retreat. Ludger saw it. Mana pulsed through the battlefield below, and the rainwater pooled around the machine froze instantly. Ice surged around its legs and locked its footing in place for one fatal heartbeat. That was enough.

MK 1 kicked.

The guardian tore free from the frozen ground only because the impact ripped it out by force, sending the entire machine spinning sideways through the night like a broken weapon hurled by a giant child.

Then Ludger turned the giant again.

The earth colossus moved with crude, terrifying purpose, each step making the capital tremble while its legs swept through the district like siege hammers given joints. One runic golem tried to move around a collapsed structure for cover. Ludger froze the water under it. Its balance hitched. The giant’s foot slammed into it a moment later and sent it cartwheeling through the air.

Another tried to brace with its shield. The kick caved the shield in anyway. Another tried to jump back. Ice seized the wet stone under its feet. Then it flew too.

All around the district, runic guardians were being kicked, smashed, and launched through the capital one after another, their armored bodies bouncing off buildings, crashing through streets, and skidding through rubble in showers of sparks and broken stone.

The impacts were doing real damage now. Not superficial hits. Not the kind of force their designers would have considered manageable. Their armor had started to dent badly in places. Plates bent inward. Joint sections twisted. Some of the layered rune-lines flickered in ugly, unstable patterns after landing. And more importantly, whatever passed for their internal circuits or control channels was starting to fail.

Several of them tried to stand. That part almost made Ludger laugh.

A machine would hit the ground, struggle up halfway, and then start trembling violently instead of moving properly. One dragged its spear arm a few inches before the limb seized and shook in place. Another got one leg under itself, rose slightly, and then remained there jittering like something caught between commands it could no longer execute.

They were still active.

Barely. But they were not fighting properly anymore. Ludger stood atop MK 1 with rain sliding down his face and smirked.

“Maybe I should just smash the castle with MK 1,” he muttered.

The idea had a certain charm. A giant earth construct the size of a walking fortress stomping through the capital and reducing the Regent’s pretty nest to rubble was appealing in a very direct way. But he clicked his tongue a second later.

That would take time. And mana. Too much of both, if he wanted to do it properly. No, first things first. The barrier had to go. That mattered more than the castle. More than the Regent. More than anything else inside this poisoned city.

Because once the barrier was down… once the capital stopped being a sealed cage… everything changed.

Ludger’s eyes lifted toward the shimmering dome overhead, half-hidden by rain and poison and night.

“First the barrier,” he said quietly.

Then his smirk sharpened into something colder.

“And after that…”

His gaze shifted toward the distant direction of the castle.

“...I’ll play with the Regent until I get sick of it.”

There was no emotion in the words. No shouted threat. No dramatic vow. Just simple intent. The kind that made it clear he fully meant it.

Below him, another crippled runic guardian trembled uselessly, trying and failing to rise as MK 1’s massive shadow loomed over the ruined district.

And somewhere in the capital, behind walls and poison and plans, the Regent was about to learn what happened when the thing he tried to wear down decided it was done being hunted.

Ludger turned MK 1 toward the outer wall and started moving. The giant earth golem responded, but not smoothly. That part was expected.

Its movements were rougher now that he was trying to navigate the ruined capital with something this large. The joints only had simple functions, basic vertical motion, horizontal adjustment, and a little diagonal control where he had managed to brute-force more flexibility into the structure. It was enough to walk, turn, kick, and shift weight with purpose.

Anything more refined than that would have required an actual blueprint. Or more time. Or both.