Chapter 979

The purple fire hit Ludger’s bare forearms.

There was no armor left to take the punishment. No guard. No metal. No reinforcement plates. Just flesh, bone, mana, and the stubborn refusal to move.

The beam slammed into his crossed arms and stayed there, grinding into him with a pressure that should have thrown him apart instantly. Purple light swallowed his upper body. Heat and force wrapped around his forearms, burning the skin black in jagged lines while the energy dug deeper, deeper, deeper.

Ludger clenched his teeth so hard his jaw ached. His body tried to recoil. He didn’t let it.

The barrier behind him flashed brighter as the beam kept pressing him back, trapping him between the magical wall and Verk’s strongest attack. The pressure was no longer just painful. It was structural. His bones vibrated under it. His muscles tore in small, ugly increments. His skin split and burned at the same time.

Then the beam pierced his forearms.

The purple fire punched through with a wet, scorching sound that vanished beneath the roar of the attack. Two holes opened through his arms, one through each forearm, clean in the worst possible way. Not sliced. Not torn.

Burned through. For a fraction of a second, the beam passed through the gaps and struck his shoulders. Ludger’s eyes widened slightly. Then his shoulders were pierced too.

The energy bored straight through muscle and flesh, tearing two more holes through him before crashing into the barrier at his back. Four wounds now. Forearms and shoulders. Matching lines of destruction carved through him by a weapon built to erase anything foolish enough to endure it.

The beam finally struck the barrier fully. And the world exploded.

The blast tore through the area with a roar that shook everything nearby. Ground shattered outward in rings. Stone and mud vaporized at the center. The remaining barrier screamed as if the magic itself had been wounded, cracks racing across the invisible dome in blinding white-purple fractures.

The shockwave rolled through the capital wall and the land beyond it.

Trees bent. Loose stones launched into the air. The rain was blasted away for several seconds, turned into steam and mist before it could fall.

Verk braced inside his armor as the explosion spread, the suit anchoring into the ground while debris ripped past him. Even from a distance, the force rattled his frame hard enough that the internal stabilizers screamed in protest.

Then, slowly, the smoke and dust began to clear. The impact point was gone.

In its place was a huge crater gouged into the ground, blackened and steaming, its edges cracked like burned clay. The earth had been carved away by force and heat, leaving a bowl of destruction where Ludger had been pinned moments before.

Above it, one third of the magic barrier was gone. Not cracked. Gone. A vast section of the dome had been blown open, torn out by the combined force of Verk’s attack, Ludger’s resistance, and the barrier’s own recoil finally failing under the pressure.

The rest of the barrier remained, but barely in that section. It hung in the air like cracked glass, pale lines spider-webbing across the remaining surface, flickering and shuddering as if unsure whether it should keep existing.

For a moment, there was only smoke.

Dust. Steam. Then Verk saw him. In the middle of the crater, Ludger was still standing. Barely. But standing. His body was in tatters.

Burn wounds covered his arms, chest, shoulders, and neck, some blackened, some red and raw, some still steaming faintly in the cooling air. Blood ran freely down his body, though in places the heat had burned wounds shut before they could bleed properly.

Four holes marked him clearly.

Two through his forearms. Two through his shoulders. The purple fire had gone straight through, leaving scorched tunnels of missing flesh in its path. His arms hung limp at his sides now, fingers twitching weakly but not rising. They looked almost useless.

His breathing came shallow.

Uneven. His knees trembled.

His head hung forward, wet hair hiding part of his face while smoke curled off his ruined skin. And still… he did not fall.

Verk stared. For several seconds, he did not speak.

The armor’s sensors swept over Ludger again and again, reading damage, heat, blood loss, mana instability, muscular failure, skeletal strain. Every report should have been enough to confirm what any sane man could see.

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The kid was breaking apart.

Slowly. Piece by piece.

His body had reached its limits. Not metaphorically. Not dramatically. Physically. His legs shook because they could barely hold him upright. His arms hung limp because there was not enough structure left to make them useful. His breathing was ragged because every part of his body was screaming for collapse.

Verk watched him from the edge of the crater, eye slits glowing faintly beneath the rain and fading smoke.

Ludger swayed once. Then steadied. Somehow. Verk’s jaw tightened. The boy looked like a corpse that had forgotten to finish dying.

And yet he was still standing.

Ludger tried to move his arms. Verk flinched. He hated that he did.

The reaction came before pride could stop it, a tiny instinctive twitch inside the runic armor as Ludger’s ruined shoulders shifted and his limp hands gave the faintest sign of life. After everything—after the purple fire, the broken guards, the four burned holes through flesh and muscle, Verk still reacted like the boy might suddenly do something impossible.

For half a heartbeat, the rain seemed to hold its breath. Then Ludger’s arms failed. They didn’t rise. They didn’t even make it halfway.

His shoulders trembled, burned muscle tensing uselessly beneath blackened skin, but the damage was too much. The motion died before it became anything worth calling movement. His fingers twitched once, then hung again.

Verk stared. Then he let out a slow sigh of relief. A second later, he started laughing. Not the controlled, smug amusement from before. This was louder.

Maniacal.

It echoed across the crater and the ruined stretch outside the capital wall, carried by rain and smoke and the faint hum of the shattered barrier overhead. Verk threw his head back slightly inside the armor, laughter spilling out of him with all the pent-up humiliation and hatred he had been polishing for years.

“There,” he said, voice trembling with satisfaction. “There it is.”

Ludger remained standing in the middle of the crater, head lowered, arms limp, body shaking from the effort of not collapsing. Verk stepped closer. Slowly. Enjoying every pace now.

“This is what you get,” Verk said, “for going against what you don’t understand.”

The mana saber on one arm ignited again, its violent white-gold edge hissing into shape along the back of his hand.

“You were talented. I’ll give you that. Absurdly so.” His voice hardened. “But talent is not enough when you keep biting into powers larger than you.”

Ludger didn’t answer. His breathing was almost too shallow to hear beneath the rain. Then, at last, one thing moved. The index finger of his right hand.

Barely. A tiny motion. Almost pathetic. It traced through the air with the last scrap of control left in his body. One word.

Starfall.

The rune hung there faintly for an instant, pale and fragile compared to the violence that had come before. Its light flickered once.

Verk looked at it. He didn’t understand the character. But he had seen enough magic tonight to know when a spell had strength behind it and when it didn’t. This one barely glowed. No surge followed. No mana spike. No pressure in the air. No sudden change in the battlefield.

Then the light vanished.

Verk’s smile widened.

“Failed?”

Ludger swayed. For a second, he almost fell forward. His knees bent. His shoulders dipped. His whole body leaned as if the world had finally grown too heavy.

But he endured. Somehow. He remained on his feet and merely lowered his head. That annoyed Verk. Even now, the brat couldn’t simply collapse properly.

Verk approached, raising the mana saber higher.

“I’ll take your head myself.”

The blade hummed brighter, long enough and sharp enough to make the act simple. One swing. One clean cut. The story would end there, in a crater outside the capital, beneath a broken barrier and a poisoned sky.

Verk stepped into range. Ludger did not move. The saber lifted. Then Verk saw light behind him.

A glow. High above.

His instincts reacted a fraction too late.

He began to turn his head… And was smashed by a giant boulder.

It came down from the sky like judgment with no interest in ceremony.

Massive, burning faintly along its edges from the speed of descent, the boulder crashed into Verk and the ground around him with an impact so violent that the entire area seemed to detonate. The sleek runic armor vanished beneath it in an instant, swallowed by stone, force, and the roar of the world breaking.

The shockwave blasted outward. The crater widened violently. The capital wall buckled.

Several nearby buildings inside the capital collapsed all at once, their already-weakened frames unable to survive the force transmitted through ground and barrier alike. Towers cracked. Roofs folded. Stone facades peeled away in avalanches of debris.

Underground, panic erupted. The shelters shook as if a mountain had been dropped on the city. Lanterns went out. People screamed.

Huge chunks of ceiling began to fall around them, smashing into floors, breaking benches, crushing supplies, and sending dust blasting through the tunnels. Guards shouted for order, but their voices vanished beneath the thunder of stone giving way. Civilians who had endured hours of distant tremors now finally broke into terror as the underground refuge itself seemed to turn against them.

Above, outside the capital, the blast threw Ludger away like a broken doll.

He had no strength left to brace. No mana left to soften the hit. No working arms to protect himself.

The shockwave caught him and hurled him out of the crater, his body spinning once through smoke and rain before crashing hard onto the ground beyond. He rolled, skidded, and finally came to a stop on his side, blood and rain spreading beneath him.

His eyes remained half-open for a second. Unfocused. The shattered barrier flickered in the distance.

The giant boulder sat smoking where Verk had stood. Ludger’s lips moved faintly. No sound came out. Then his eyes closed.

And at last, after tearing through the capital, breaking its barrier, surviving poison, machines, assassins, and a weapon made specifically to kill his enemy… Ludger fell unconscious.