Chapter 947

The metallic whip-point snapped toward Ludger’s head again, faster this time, cutting through the dust in a straight vicious line meant to finish what the first strike had missed.

Ludger raised his arm and caught it with the froststeel forearm guard.

The impact rang out like a hammer hitting a bell. The point bit into the hardened metal and held there, stopped just short of his face. For a split second, it looked like a clean block.

Then the enemy didn’t pull back. The whip stayed in place. And lightning exploded through it.

The current surged from the metallic point straight into Ludger’s guard and then into his body, violent and merciless. His muscles locked at once. His back arched. Every nerve in him screamed as the shock ripped through flesh already battered from the night before. For a brief moment, his whole body shook uncontrollably, teeth clenched hard enough to hurt while the smell of ozone and scorched cloth filled the air around him.

The attacker moved in immediately, probably expecting the shock to freeze him in place long enough for the next strike.

Instead, the ground behind the enemy bulged. An earth spike shot up so fast it tore through the rubble with a sharp cracking roar, aiming to impale him from below.

The attacker had to abandon the follow-up and leap away, the whip ripping free from Ludger’s forearm guard in a shower of sparks as he twisted through the air and landed several meters back on a broken stretch of stone.

He landed lightly, one foot sliding half a step over the debris before settling, then looked at Ludger with open curiosity rather than fear.

“How,” he asked, “are you still using magic while being shocked?”

Ludger didn’t answer.

He just glared at the enemy, chest rising heavily, each breath rougher than it should have been. His body still trembled faintly from the lightning, but his eyes remained cold and steady.

There was no point in holding back his magic now. Not anymore. Not after last night. Not while trapped inside a sealed capital that already wanted him dead.

And more importantly… he could hear them coming.

Not one person. Not two. Many. Footsteps. Movement over rubble. Shifting armor. Voices in the distance, still too far to make out clearly but close enough that the shape of the threat was obvious.

More enemies were approaching. Ludger’s gaze shifted past the lanky attacker and swept over the ruined street.

More figures were arriving. Not in disorder. Not like frightened people stumbling onto the aftermath by accident. They were forming a ring.

One by one, then in groups, moving through broken alleys, over collapsed beams, across rooftops half-destroyed by last night’s fighting. Several of them were warriors he recognized from the party, the same foreign guests who had surrounded him before Drarc had claimed the fight for himself. They were armed now without pretenses, no polished masks of diplomacy left, only weapons, killing intent, and the ugly confidence of people who thought exhaustion had finally dragged him down enough.

That alone would have been troublesome. But it wasn’t just them. Imperial guards were there too. A lot of them.

Steel armor, capes, drawn blades, shields lifted, crossbows ready. They moved with more hesitation than the foreign warriors, but they still came, driven by orders, fear, outrage, or some mixture of all three. Their formation wasn’t perfect, too many were nervous, too many kept looking at the ruined buildings around them—but there were enough of them to matter.

And behind those… Civilians. That made Ludger’s expression harden further.

Not all of them looked like fighters. In fact, most clearly weren’t. Shopkeepers, laborers, stable hands, young men trying to look braver than they felt, older men with furious faces, even a few women gripping kitchen knives, iron rods, axes meant for wood rather than battle, sharpened farming tools, broken chair legs, anything that could pass for a weapon if hatred was strong enough.

Handmade weapons. The kind people grabbed when they were angry before they were smart.

Their faces were a mess of emotions, terror, grief, confusion, rage, but the rage was winning. It had already been fed too much during the night. The Emperor was dead. The story had spread. The barrier had closed. The capital had been shaken awake beneath broken walls and thunderous impacts. Now people wanted something simple to hate.

And Ludger was standing right there. The shouts started almost at once.

“There he is!”

“Murderer!”

“Monster!”

One of the civilians raised a rusted spear with shaking hands and screamed, “You killed His Majesty!”

Others picked it up immediately, the outrage rolling through them faster than reason ever could.

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“Beast!”

“Filthy bastard!”

“Hang him!”

“Cut him apart!”

A woman near the back, eyes red from crying, shouted, “He murdered a child!”

That one spread even faster.

“He killed the Emperor!”

“He killed the boy!”

“Monster!”

Several of the guards joined in too, not always with words, but with the way they tightened their weapons and stared at him like the verdict had already been written. A few among the civilians hurled uglier things, obscenities that overlapped in a wave of fury.

“Animal!”

“Piece of shit!”

“Rot in hell!”

“Die, you bastard!”

Someone farther back screamed, “Skin him!”

Another shouted, “Burn him alive!”

The sound grew until it filled the whole ruined stretch of the city, bouncing off broken stone and shattered walls, turning the morning air into something raw and hateful. Ludger stood there in the middle of it, breathing hard, dust and dried blood still clinging to him, forearm guard marked from the lightning strike, eyes cold as he watched the ring close.

The foreign warriors were the most dangerous. The guards were the most numerous. The civilians were the most troublesome. Because the warriors wanted to kill him. The guards wanted to stop him.

But the civilians… the civilians wanted someone to blame badly enough that they would throw themselves into a grinder just to feel like justice was happening.

Ludger did not react to a single word.

Not to the curses. Not to the threats. Not to the grief twisted into hatred and thrown at him from every direction. He let it all crash against him and pass without expression, his attention fixed only on the people who actually mattered.

The dangerous ones. The foreign warriors. The guards with enough training to be useful. The improvised mob that would become a problem the moment the battle spread too wide.

His body still wasn’t right. That much was obvious with every breath. His lungs burned. His joints ached. The exhaustion from Rage Flow ×3 still sat deep in his flesh like poison. He couldn’t rely on his body the same way he had against Drarc.

But that didn’t mean he was helpless.

It just meant he had to fight differently.

Ludger’s eyes moved once over the ring around him, measuring distances, spacing, lines of movement, who stood too close to whom, who trusted their footing too much, who thought numbers alone would keep them safe.

He couldn’t stay here too long. That thought sat in the center of everything. His family was waiting for him. His guild was waiting for him. Lionfang was waiting.

Every second spent inside this capital was another second his enemies had to move against the people he actually cared about.

So this had to end today. All of it.

The foreign warriors. The guards who stood with them. Every obstacle that mattered in this city. The whip user moved first.

Again.

The metallic lash snapped toward Ludger’s head in a brutal straight line, the pointed tip cutting through the air with enough speed to blur. It was a good weapon for chaos, fast, unexpected, difficult to read properly, and deadly if it landed cleanly.

Ludger answered without moving his feet. A fireball bloomed into existence in front of him and slammed directly into the incoming whip-point.

The explosion burst outward at once, a violent bloom of flame and pressure that swallowed the attack mid-flight. Fire rolled over the street in a hot flash, and the force of the blast knocked the whip aside, throwing sparks and fragments of heated stone in all directions.

The attacker’s eyes widened just a fraction. Then they widened more. Because when the explosion cleared, he realized several fireballs were already around him.

Not one. Several.

They hung there in a loose circle, drifting into position with quiet menace, their surfaces roiling with dense heat and compressed mana.

The whip user reacted fast. He tried to jump away immediately, pushing off the rubble beneath him in a sharp sideways burst.

An earth wall erupted in his path.

It rose hard and fast, a thick slab of stone punching out of the broken street and blocking his escape completely. He had enough time to twist in the air and realize he had no opening left.

Then the barrage hit.

The fireballs shot inward one after another, slamming into him from multiple angles in rapid succession. The first blew him off balance. The second folded him into the earth wall. The third and fourth detonated so close together that the street vanished in smoke, flame, and flying rubble. More followed, each impact feeding into the next until the entire section of road became an inferno of overlapping explosions.

Heat rolled outward hard enough to force nearby civilians back with screams.

Guards raised shields too late. The foreign warriors nearest the blast cursed and withdrew a few steps to avoid the edge of it. When it was over, the smoke thinned slowly. The earth wall behind the attacker was blackened and cracked.

His body dropped from the soot and fire-stained stone and hit the ground with a dull sound.

Burned to a crisp.

The flesh was charred beyond recognition, limbs twisted from the force of the impacts, clothing and skin fused together into a dark ruin. Even the smell that followed was enough to make several civilians gag.

His weapon hit the street beside him a moment later.

The metallic whip landed in a loose, ugly coil, the pointed end scraping over broken stone as the last bits of heat and static faded off it.

Ludger walked forward through the settling smoke and picked it up. The weapon felt strange in his hand.

Heavy in the wrong places. Balanced for someone used to killing with angles rather than straightforward force. The metal carried a faint residual hum, something still alive in it, some built-in property that made the thing more than a simple whip.

Now it was his. Around him, the shouts had dimmed for a moment. Not because the hatred was gone. Because people had just been reminded what standing too close to him actually meant.

The civilians hesitated. Just for a moment.

The sight of the burned corpse on the ground, the scorched wall behind it, and Ludger calmly picking up the dead man’s weapon was enough to shake them. Some stepped back. Some tightened their grip on their crude weapons without moving. A few looked suddenly sick, like the reality of what they were standing in had finally caught up to the anger that had dragged them here.

Then a voice rose from somewhere in the crowd.

“Are you going to let him walk away after killing His Majesty?”

It was loud enough to carry. Sharp enough to catch. And just vague enough to disappear among the others before anyone could pin down where it came from.