Chapter 982

Viola felt something cold settle in her chest. So they knew. Or feared enough to talk like they did. Let them be afraid. Before their uncertainty could settle into cleaner coordination, Viola moved.

She charged.

Mud and rainwater sprayed under her feet as she drove forward with her hardened earth sword held low, mana tightening through her limbs as she committed fully to the attack. She did not wait for them to recover from surprise. She did not give them another moment to speculate about Ludger, the capital, or failed plans.

As she ran, she shouted over the storm,

“Silva, run!”

The direwolf hesitated only for the briefest instant, then moved, peeling off at speed through the rain as Viola closed the remaining distance with the advancing golems and Luna vanished into the angle they had already agreed on.

Silva obeyed the order.

The direwolf lowered his body for only an instant, pale eyes flicking between Viola and Luna as if making sure this was truly what they wanted. Then, with Lord Torvares still strapped across his back, he turned and ran.

He didn’t hesitate after that.

His massive body blurred into the rain-dark landscape, paws hammering across the soaked ground with terrifying speed as he carried the old lord away from the approaching danger. Within seconds, his silver-gray fur was already fading into the curtain of heavy rain and gathering darkness.

That left Viola alone. Or at least, that was what the enemy thought. Viola inhaled once, tightened her grip on her sword, and then surged forward. She moved faster than the wind.

The rain parted around her as her mana burst through her body and reinforced every step. Mud exploded behind her boots. Her cloak snapped violently in the air. She didn’t charge like a knight in polished formation. She charged like someone who had already spent too many hours running, worrying, and enduring, and had finally found a target worth hitting.

The enemies reacted instantly.

A line of runic armored soldiers, older models, less refined than the nightmares Ludger had described, but still dangerous enough for normal people, raised their arms and locked onto her. Light gathered along the barrels embedded in their gauntlets and shoulders.

Then they fired. Mana bullets tore through the rain in bright streaks. Viola sidestepped the first volley.

Her body twisted with practiced speed, one burst of mana carrying her left, another driving her right as the glowing projectiles punched through the space where she had been a heartbeat earlier. The impacts burst against the ground behind her, throwing up sprays of mud and hissing steam.

She did not slow. The second volley came tighter, better aimed. Viola leaned low, pushed off one foot, and let the bullets pass over her shoulder and past her hips, close enough that the heat brushed her skin through her wet clothes. Her eyes stayed calm.

She could tell almost immediately.

The firing patterns were familiar. The delay between acquisition and release was obvious. The predictive tracking was decent, but not overwhelming. She had fought the runic golems inside the frost labyrinth before. Too many times, really. Enough to know their habits, their blind spots, and the ugly little pauses hidden inside their supposedly efficient movements.

Compared to those monsters, these things felt… manageable. Viola reached the first target before it could finish recalculating. Her sword swung in a brutal horizontal arc, but not edge-first. She struck with the flat of the earth-attuned blade.

The impact landed against the side of the construct’s helmet with a deep, heavy crack, the sort of sound made when steel met reinforced plate with far too much force behind it. Earth mana pulsed through the blade at the moment of contact, multiplying the weight of the strike.

The runic soldier’s head snapped sideways. Its whole frame shook. Its upper body flinched from the impact, servos whining and runes flickering along the joints as the sudden blow scrambled its balance and interrupted its aim.

Viola stepped in immediately, not letting it recover. But the others had already adjusted.

The surrounding runic soldiers spread out in a rough arc, trying to box her in. Their arms lifted again. Barrels tracked her. Shoulder units rotated into place. A barrage of mana bullets began to gather at once, their formation clearly intended to erase her through sheer volume if precision failed.

Viola saw it. Too many angles. Too little room. She tightened her grip on her sword and prepared to force her way through the first opening before the barrage fully formed… Then the enemies stopped.

Not all at once.

A strange hesitation rippled through the formation as several targeting units shifted backward, their attention dragging away from Viola toward something behind the first soldier she had struck.

Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

A flash. That was all it was at first. A blur of movement so fast and clean it almost looked like light reflected in rain. Then Luna appeared.

She came out from behind the first target like a knife pulled from the dark, her body low and fast, her soaked hair whipping around her face as she moved through the opening Viola had created. For a heartbeat she seemed almost weightless, a pale streak cutting through smoke, rain, and flickering rune-light.

The first runic soldier tried to turn. Luna’s knives were already there. One plunged into the gap beneath the arm. The second slid into the thinner seam near the neck. Not wasted strikes. Not broad attacks against the armor.

Precise thrusts aimed where metal ended and flesh, or whatever still counted as flesh inside the suit, began. Then Luna yanked them back. Hard. The motion was vicious.

The blades tore free with a wet sound almost swallowed by the rain, and when they came out, they were drenched in blood. Dark red ran down the metal and mixed with the stormwater immediately, painting her hands and wrists in slick streaks.

The runic soldier took one stiff, ugly half-step. Then it fell forward. Its armored body crashed face-first into the mud with a heavy metallic thud, twitching once before going still.

For a fraction of a second, the battlefield froze. The corner of Viola’s mouth almost twitched despite everything. The surrounding enemies had less time to appreciate it. Luna straightened with bloodied knives in hand, eyes cold and sharp as she looked at the stunned formation around them.

Then the rest of the enemy line remembered they were in a fight. The runic golems recovered from their shock fast. Too fast.

The moment the first armored body collapsed into the mud, the others snapped their targeting arrays toward Viola and Luna and opened fire with both arms. Mana bullets tore through the rain in thick, glowing streaks, some white-blue, others pale gold, all of them screaming through the dark with enough force to tear through flesh and stone alike.

Viola moved first. She didn’t charge straight in again. Not against that many guns.

Instead, she broke to the side at full speed, boots tearing through the wet ground while she zigzagged in sharp bursts to ruin their aim. The rain whipped across her face as she ran in a low stance, sword held tight, every movement quick and disciplined. The golems tried to correct their targeting, barrels tracking her, but the old models had limits. Their aim shifted a fraction too slowly every time she changed direction.

That was enough. Volley after volley chased her and hit nothing. Mud exploded. Grass vanished. Chunks of soaked earth were blasted apart one after another while Viola kept forcing them to waste energy, waste time, waste focus.

Meanwhile, Luna did something far more unreasonable.

She kicked the ground. Mana sparked violently around her boots. Then she vanished. Not metaphorically. Not in the way a fast person simply became hard to follow. One moment she was there with bloodied knives in hand, body low and tense.

The next, she appeared nearly two hundred meters away in the blink of an eye, a streak of crackling motion and compressed wind. The air behind her snapped with a delayed boom, and bright sparks of mana danced around her body before fading into the rain.

Storm Overdrive.

Luna’s version was even more potent than Ludger’s. Part of that was simple talent.

Her natural affinity with wind magic was monstrous. Where Ludger had needed to wrestle with the concept, refine it, and force it into obedience through sheer understanding, Luna moved through wind like she had been born half inside it already. Add her assassin skills on top of that, her balance, precision, killing intent, and instinct for movement, and the technique turned vicious in her hands.

And then there were Ludger’s tips.

All those dry, irritatingly practical corrections he had given her while pretending not to care. How to distribute force through the ankles. How to prevent wasted mana in acceleration. How to keep her center of gravity under control so the speed didn’t tear her posture apart at the end of a burst.

By combining all of that… her talent, her assassin training, and Ludger’s infuriatingly useful advice… Luna could do this. A runic golem turned one arm away from her and toward Viola, trying to fire at the more visible threat.

That was a mistake. Luna disappeared again. A single step. That was all it looked like. One small motion, and she was gone from where she stood, leaving behind only a fading burst of sparks and a ripple in the rain.

Then she was behind another golem. Right on its back.

The machine had barely begun to adjust when Luna landed lightly against the rear plating, one hand gripping a raised seam while the other drove a knife down into the gap beneath the neck assembly. The blade punched through with brutal precision.

The construct jerked. Its arms started to rise. Too late. Luna twisted the knife, then rammed the second blade into a lower seam near the spine where the armor narrowed around a cluster of runic channels. She ripped both knives free in one savage motion.

Blood splashed hot against the rain. The golem shuddered violently. Then its legs gave out and it crashed forward into the mud, mana lights inside the armor flickering out in uneven pulses.

Luna had already moved before it hit the ground.

To the others, she looked less like a person and more like some murderous fragment of stormlight bouncing from one blind spot to another while Viola dragged their fire away from the front.

One golem swung both arms toward Luna.

Viola saw it and cut across the battlefield immediately, not to attack, but to force another decision. She burst from the side, sword flashing, and smashed the flat of her earth blade into the elbow joint of a different construct hard enough to bend its aim upward. The mana bullets that should have cut across Luna’s path instead fired uselessly into the storm-dark sky.

“Focus on me!” Viola shouted.

Several of them did. That was what she wanted. The barrage shifted. And Luna killed another one. The surviving runic golems finally broke.

Their targeting arrays kept twitching between Viola and Luna, trying to decide which threat was worse, but by then the answer no longer mattered. Two of their number were already down, another had been gutted through the seams, and the others had wasted a ridiculous amount of mana firing at ghosts and afterimages.

One of them shouted through a distorted speaker, voice metallic and sharp.

“Retreat!”

Another snapped immediately after.

“Call for backup! These two are stronger than expected!”

That was exactly what Viola had been waiting for.