Chapter 945

The scales flickered strangely, as if the body could no longer maintain the shape properly. The huge four-legged frame started to distort, muscle and mass collapsing inward in uneven waves. The draconic-lion structure shrank, buckled, and twisted back toward the humanoid form it had worn before, though now there was nothing elegant left in it.

Only ruin.

By the time the change ended, what remained of Drarc lay half-human again beneath Ludger, his skull crushed in, face barely recognizable, blood everywhere.

Ludger rose slowly over the corpse, chest heaving once, then again, red aura still boiling under the green.

And for a moment, the ruined garden went quiet enough to hear the blood dripping from him onto the broken stone.

Drarc was still alive.

Barely.

Half-conscious and drowning in his own blood, he lay there in ruined human form, broken beyond dignity, his face so mangled it barely looked like a face anymore. Blood covered everything, his mouth, his chin, his chest, the shattered ground beneath him. A wet, ragged groan slipped out of him now and then, the kind of sound a body made when it had not yet realized it was already finished.

Ludger stood over him with one hand buried in his hair. The fight was over. But Ludger was not done. Not with him. Not with any of this.

He tightened his grip, dragged Drarc’s ruined head up one last time, and for a brief second the guardian’s half-conscious body twitched weakly, some final useless instinct trying to resist what was coming.

Then Ludger drove the head down into his knee. The impact landed with finality.

There was no dramatic struggle after that. No last threat. No final clever line. Drarc’s body jerked a few times on the broken stone, fingers twitching, muscles spasming in scattered, meaningless bursts.

Then it stopped. Completely. Ludger let go and the corpse dropped limply at his feet. His expression didn’t change. Not from relief. Not from satisfaction. Not even from rage anymore. It had gone past that.

This was simply what happened to people who came for his family. For his friends. For the people under his protection.

Mercy had never been cheap. Tonight, it was worthless. If the world wanted to fear him as a monster for this, then fine. Let them. He would still kill every enemy that came for what was his.

Every threat. Every schemer. Every bastard who thought he could use children, poison, assassins, and armies to corner him into submission. If being feared was the price of protecting his people, then that was a cheap price too.

Ludger stood in the ruined garden, drenched in blood under the broken night of the capital, and looked back toward the city with the eyes of something that had already chosen what it would become.

Ludger let the rune collapse.

The moment Rage Flow ×3 was canceled, the red pressure around his body thinned out and broke apart in ragged streams. The heat under his skin dropped sharply, but what came after was far worse.

Exhaustion hit him all at once.

Not like ordinary tiredness. Not like the dull fatigue after training too hard or spending too much mana. It felt as if his body had been held together by force for the last several minutes and had only now been informed that it no longer had to keep pretending everything was fine. His muscles trembled. Pain rushed in from every direction at once. The damage he had been ignoring suddenly became real again.

Making such a technique three times stronger was never going to make him merely three times more tired.

It was worse than that. Much worse.

He had been pushing flesh, bone, joints, and instinct all the way to their limits, forcing his body to move with a level of violence it was never meant to sustain for long. The cost scaled with more than simple numbers. It multiplied through strain, damage, and the desperate healing required to keep himself functional while using it.

His breathing deepened.

For the first time since the fight began, his posture loosened slightly—not from carelessness, but because holding himself together suddenly required effort. The bruises under his skin throbbed. His arms felt heavy. His hands wanted to shake. Even standing there in the ruined garden, with Drarc’s corpse at his feet, felt more difficult than it should have.

Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose and tried to think.

What next? Chase the other foreign warriors? Find the Regent? Get out of the capital? Check the route Luna would have taken? Before he could decide, his instincts stirred.

A gaze.

No… several. But one in particular mattered. Ludger’s head turned toward the castle. Through a broken section of wall and a distant shattered window, he could see it clearly enough.

A silhouette. Standing still. Watching him. Calmly. Even from that distance, Ludger could tell who it was.

The Regent.

The bastard was standing there in the aftermath of all this, watching as if he had merely been waiting for the next move in a game instead of drowning the capital in blood and chaos. Ludger narrowed his eyes. Was that an invitation? It felt like one. Too obvious. Far too obvious.

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The kind of bait only a fool or someone very angry would walk into immediately.

And Ludger was angry. But not stupid. So he did the one thing the Regent probably least wanted right then. He turned away.

Then Ludger stepped into the darkness of the capital and disappeared.

In his office, Alphonse stood by the broken window and watched Ludger disappear into the darkness of the capital.

Not for long, of course. The city was sealed.

“He didn’t fall for it…”

A vast magic barrier covered the entire capital like an invisible cage, layered and reinforced enough that no ordinary escape was possible. It would remain active for two full weeks, and breaching it from the inside was all but impossible. Ludger could vanish into the alleys, rooftops, ruins, and shadows as much as he wanted, but in the end, there was nowhere for him to go.

It was one young man against a city of half a million people. That fact alone should have been enough to make the outcome obvious. Alphonse kept his hands behind his back as he stood there in silence, posture straight, expression calm, eyes fixed on the place where Ludger had last been visible.

He did not sigh. He did not curse.

He did not show the slightest irritation over the fact that one of the best warriors he had hired had just died in the ruined gardens below.

Drarc had been useful. Powerful. Expensive. Difficult to replace. And now he was dead. A loss, certainly. But not one Alphonse wore openly.

The office around him was quiet despite the chaos outside. The distant sounds of panic, shouting, and collapsing order still drifted in from the city, softened by distance and thick stone walls until they resembled the muted noise of a storm happening somewhere far below.

Then a voice spoke behind him.

“I told you it wouldn’t be easy.”

Alphonse did not react immediately. He simply turned his head over one shoulder, calm as ever.

There, standing in the office as though he had always belonged in that corner, was an old friend. A man with an utterly ordinary face.

The kind of face that would vanish inside any crowd the moment one stopped actively looking at it. No scar that stood out. No feature memorable enough to cling to the mind. Even the smile he wore was plain, mild, forgettable in a way that almost felt deliberate.

The illusionist.

Alphonse looked at him for a moment before asking, “What are you doing here?”

The man’s ordinary smile widened just a little.

“I came,” he said, “to say I told you so.”

That earned him the faintest shift in Alphonse’s gaze. Not annoyance. Not surprise. Something closer to dry acknowledgment.

The illusionist took a few casual steps forward, hands relaxed, as if he were visiting for conversation instead of walking into the office of a man who had just thrown the capital into a controlled nightmare.

“You always do this,” he said lightly. “You see a dangerous piece on the board and assume that if the trap is layered enough, the outcome is guaranteed.”

Alphonse turned fully now, meeting the man’s eyes.

“And yet the trap still closed.”

The illusionist gave a small shrug.

“Yes. Around the city.”

His smile remained.

“Not around him.”

For a brief moment, silence returned.

The sounds of distant unrest drifted in again, carried through the broken window behind the Regent. Somewhere in the capital, people were still screaming. Somewhere else, orders were being shouted, rumors spreading, guards moving, nobles hiding, and blood drying on marble floors.

And somewhere beneath it all… Ludger was still moving.

Alphonse’s expression remained unreadable.

“He cannot leave,” he said.

“No,” the illusionist agreed. “He cannot.”

Then his smile sharpened just a fraction.

“But that is not the same as saying he is trapped in the way you would like.”

Alphonse watched him without blinking. The illusionist went on, voice mild and almost conversational.

“You locked a city around a boy who now has nothing left to do except break it.”

That made the office feel just a little quieter. Alphonse glanced once toward the darkness outside again, then back at the man before him.

“He is only one person.”

“Yes,” the illusionist said.

His smile did not fade.

“And that is the part I keep telling you not to underestimate.”

The illusionist leaned his shoulder lightly against a pillar, as if settling in for a conversation that had been waiting to happen.

“You know,” he said, tone almost casual, “he would have made a fine ally.”

Alphonse didn’t respond immediately.

“He’s efficient,” the illusionist continued, watching the broken city through the open window. “Pragmatic. Loyal to his own. Not interested in politics unless politics comes knocking at his door with a knife.”

A faint breath of amusement escaped him.

“You could have let him grow. Let the Lionsguard expand. Let the boy build his little frontier haven, enjoy his victories, protect his people, and live his life.”

He tilted his head slightly.

“He clearly didn’t want more than that.”

Alphonse turned his gaze back to the city, the flickering lights and distant unrest reflecting faintly in his eyes.

“That’s where you’re wrong.”

His voice was calm. Measured.

“Anyone with power is never satisfied unless they put it to use.”

The illusionist’s smile thinned just a fraction.

“It’s not about satisfaction,” Alphonse went on. “It’s about inevitability.”

He stepped closer to the window, hands still resting behind his back, posture as composed as ever despite the chaos unfolding below.

“Influence grows,” he said. “Power attracts attention. Attention breeds pressure. Pressure forces decisions.”

His gaze sharpened slightly.

“Ludger was never going to remain a quiet guardian of a border town. Not with what he is. Not with what he’s capable of.”

A pause followed. The illusionist studied him more carefully now.

“You didn’t need to force it this early,” he said. “You escalated.”

Alphonse didn’t deny it.

“I hadn’t planned to go this far,” he admitted.

That alone was more honesty than most people ever got from him.

The illusionist straightened slightly.

“But?”

Alphonse didn’t answer right away.

For a moment, the only sound in the room was the distant echo of the capital unraveling—shouts, movement, the faint rumble of collapsing structures carried through the night.

Then, after a brief silence, he spoke.

“I heard a rumor.”