The rchant’s breath hitched as the shadow lood over him.
He opened his mouth, maybe to plead, maybe to bargain.
CRACK.
Ludger’s boot slamd into the man’s shin with surgical precision. The bone snapped like dry wood.
The rchant scread, clutching his leg, only for Ludger to kick the other one before the sound even finished echoing.
CRACK.
Another clean break.
The rchant collapsed fully, writhing, his voice echoing off the stone walls. “STOP—STOP—! I–I’LL TALK! I’LL TELL YOU EVERYTHING! JUST PLEASE—LET SPEA—”
Ludger stepped forward.
CRUNCH.
His heel ca down on the man’s hand, grinding the bones into the floor. The rchant shrieked, veins bulging in his neck.
“WHY!? WHY AREN’T YOU LETTING TALK!?” he howled, voice cracking with panic and disbelief. “I–I CAN TELL YOU EVERYTHING! I—”
He reached up instinctively with his uninjured arm. Ludger grabbed the wrist. And with a cold, chanical twist.
SNAP.
The arm bent the wrong way. The rchant choked on his scream, convulsing as he curled around the ruined limb. Tears and snot stread down his face. He looked up through blurry vision at the hooded figure towering over him.
“W–Wh—why…? I… I can talk… I can tell you who’s paying… who’s in the capital… I–I can—”
Ludger didn’t answer. He didn’t speak. He didn’t even acknowledge the words. He stepped to the other side. And before the rchant could beg again…
SNAP.
The second arm broke just as cleanly.
The rchant collapsed into a trembling, broken heap, legs twisted, arms ruined, hand crushed, lying spread-eagled like a discarded puppet. He sobbed, coughing, trembling.
“P…Please… why… won’t… you… let … talk…?”
Ludger finally crouched beside him, silent, mask reflecting the faint light of the fallen lanterns. And the rchant realized, far too late, that this wasn’t an interrogation. It was an execution taking its ti.
The rchant tried to crawl. He didn’t even know where, his shattered limbs dragged uselessly across the floor, leaving streaks of blood and sweat. His breath hitched, body convulsing with every movent. He could barely see, tears blurred everything into a trembling haze, but he knew one thing: He had to get away.
He had to. A shadow dropped in front of him. Ludger crouched silently, blocking his escape.
The rchant froze.
Slowly, terrifyingly slowly, the cloaked figure lifted his head and looked straight into the rchant’s eyes. And in that mont, every ounce of pain vanished. Not because he healed. Not because of shock. But because pure, primal terror overwheld everything else.
Those eyes… Those cold, steady, unblinking eyes…
They weren’t angry. They weren’t excited. They weren’t even hungry for answers. They were done. Done with lies. Done with scum. Done with this entire operation.
And the rchant understood, down to the marrow of his broken bones, that the person crouching in front of him wasn’t here to bargain.
He wasn’t here for leverage. He wasn’t here for threats. He wasn’t here for deals. He was here to end things. The man’s voice broke into a whimper.
“H–Help… help …”
No answer.
Ludger’s mask revealed nothing, but his eyes were enough. Those eyes told the rchant exactly what was coming.
More pain. More breaking. More punishnt. And absolutely no escape.
The rchant burst into sobs, body shaking uncontrollably. He understood now. He was going to die here. Slowly, unless he did sothing. His voice cracked as he tried to speak fast enough to outrun death:
“I–I’ll talk! EVERYTHING! I—I swear! No lies! No lies, please! I—I’ll tell you all of it—EVERY NA, EVERY ROUTE, EVERY COIN, PLEASE, just, just don’t, don’t hurt again—!”
He gasped, choking on his own breath.
“If I lie—i-if I even stutter—you can—can do whatever you want—j-just—just let speak—please—please—!”
Ludger didn’t move.Didn’t blink. Didn’t even breathe loudly.
But the rchant could tell, could feel, that the figure in front of him was listening. Judging. asuring whether the truth was worth granting a quick death… or whether he’d be forced to peel the truth out piece by piece.
The rchant sobbed harder, his entire body shaking. There was no negotiation here.
There was only confession, and the faint, fading hope that answering quickly enough might buy him rcy. A rcy Ludger did not look inclined to give.
The rchant gulped, throat bobbing as he forced the words out through tears and broken breath. His voice trembled, not just from pain, but from the raw, suffocating pressure of Ludger’s silent presence.
“V–Verk…!” he blurted, almost choking on the na. “It’s Verk—the head of everything! Verk Delvran… o-one of the most respected councilors in the Velis League!”
He paused to suck in a shaky breath, tears streaming down his cheeks.
“He—he’s the one who started this network. The mushrooms, the trade routes, the buyers, every contact, every shipnt, every bribe, it all leads back to him!”
Ludger didn’t react. Not a twitch. Not a sigh. Not even a blink.
The rchant swallowed hard and continued, rushing to fill the silence before pain returned.
“He’s working with House Roderick… th-the nobles in the Imperial Capital. They, they want to weaken the Empire, s–shatter its influence piece by piece!”
His voice cracked, but he kept speaking, desperate.
“The plan is to undermine the imperial family… cripple their authority… and let the Senate take over little by little. But the Senate—th-the Senate is already under Roderick’s control! Them and three other houses, they’re moving pieces everywhere!”
He coughed violently, blood dripping from his lips as he dragged himself backward an inch.
“Verk and the Rodericks, they’re orchestrating assassinations. Not big, loud ones… n-no… strategic ones. Advisors, suppliers, officers… people t–that keep rival families stable. When they die, th–their houses stagger. Lose funds. Lose backing. Lose power.”
His entire body shuddered.
“It’s been going on for years…”
Ludger tilted his head slightly, just enough to show he was processing every detail.
The rchant felt his heart hamr harder.
“And the draughts!” he cried. “The berserker draughts, they’re handling them too! Th–they supplied the northern tribes… on purpose! To make them addicts! To keep raids frequent enough that the Empire wastes soldiers and resources dealing with ‘barbarian problems’!”
Ludger’s eyes narrowed faintly behind the mask.
“And now, now they’re planning the sa for the southern beastn!” the rchant continued, voice strained. “They’ve been stocking up the mushrooms here, in Coria… loading the caravans little by little. They want the beastn addicted too! Chaos on both sides, north and south!”
Spittle flew from his mouth as he cried harder.
“With the Empire dealing with two addictive-driven fronts… their economy weakens… their military depletes… the Emperor loses authority… and the Senate steps in!”
He sobbed, shaking from the effort.
“It—it’s a slow coup… a shadow coup… spanning years…”
Another shaky breath. His voice lowered to a whisper, trembling like a leaf.
“They… they think no one will see it until it’s too late.”
The rchant dared to lift his head, pleading through his tears.
“T-That’s everything… I swear it… I swear… n-no lies… please…”
He trembled violently.
“Please… just end it… quickly…”
Ludger didn’t answer—not with words, not with breath.
He simply tilted his head.
Slowly.
Softly.
Like a predator examining the last twitch of cornered prey.
The motion was small, subtle… but it carried sothing profoundly wrong. A quiet, curious sadism—the expression of soone who had seen far too much bloodshed for his age and was now deciding how much more to spill.
The rchant froze. His pupils dilated. And then his eyes rolled back as his mind shut down entirely. He dropped limply to the floor, unconscious from pure, animal terror. Ludger exhaled sharply through his nose.
“…I went too far.”
His voice was a whisper, too soft to be amusent, too controlled to be guilty. Just an acknowledgnt that he’d slipped. He crouched again, grabbed the man by the collar, and slapped him. Once. Twice. A third ti—hard enough to rattle bone.
The rchant jolted awake with a strangled gasp, shaking violently.
Before he could speak, Ludger gathered a thin coil of wind as quietly as a breath and pressed it to his own throat. It vibrated his vocal cords, warping his childish voice into a deeper, gravelly rumble, a man’s voice. A terrifying man’s voice.
“Where is Verk,” Ludger asked, no tone, no warmth, no hesitation, “tonight?”
The effect was imdiate. The prisoner gulped so loudly Ludger could nearly hear his esophagus pop.
“In… in the north side of Coria,” the man stamred. “A-at his personal estate—no, fortress! It’s practically a fortress!”
“Details.”
“It, it’s huge! A manor reinforced with runic walls, and, and the guards…” His voice cracked. “Dozens of them. All elite. All equipped with top-grade runic armor and weapons,the kind money can’t normally buy!”
Ludger waited.
“And… and the golems…” The rchant’s voice dipped to a defeated whimper. “Runic golems, fortress models. Heavy plating. Shields. The kind made to fight mages, knights, armies…”
He trembled so hard his teeth clattered.
“No one can sneak in there. Not without being seen. Not without being killed.”
The statent hung in the air. Ludger’s eyes, cold, unreadable behind the mask, did not shift.
He simply stood up. As silent and smooth as a shadow. The rchant dared one last look at him and felt the chill of those void-black eyes boring into him. He whimpered.
“Y-you’re… you’re not thinking of going there… are you?”
Ludger didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. The way the candles flickered as a draft followed him out of the room was answer enough.
Ludger’s palm cracked across the man’s face with a sharp, wet smack. The rchant didn’t even scream, his eyes just rolled, body going limp as he slumped onto the warehouse floor like a sack of rotten grain. A tooth skittered across the stone. Blood dribbled from his lip.
Unconscious. Finally. Ludger exhaled once, slow and steady, then crouched beside the body and grabbed the man’s chin with two fingers to tilt his head, making sure he was truly out. No faking. No twitching.
Good. He released him and stood, the mist around him thinning into nothing. Then he placed a hand on his hip and tapped his masked jaw with one gloved finger.
“…Now what.”
The question wasn’t spoken with frustration, it was pure calculation.
This idiot was one cog in a much larger machine. A mushroom buyer. A middleman. Soone trusted only because he was too cowardly to betray anyone important.
Which ant…
“There are more like him.”
Many more. People who handled transport. Bribes. Falsified ledgers. Enchanted seals. People who bought materials for the draught. People who sold it. People who hid the cartels under the League’s nose. Picking them off one by one would destabilize the entire network…but it would also take ti.
Ti he didn’t have. Verk, on the other hand?
“Councilor… fortress… dozens of golems…” Ludger muttered under his breath, staring blankly at the wall. “Tch.”
Even through the mask, his frown was obvious. A frontal assault would be suicide.
Too many eyes. Too many sensors. Too many patrols. And runic fortresses weren’t like normal estates, they had their own mana fields, layered traps, internal alarms that could detect even slight disturbances.
Even with his best stealth, even with his earth magic… getting in and out unseen would be almost impossible. Almost.
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