Sigrid turned to her people and barked at the order like it was a normal drill.
“Inside,” Sigrid commanded. “Now. Start training.”
The northerners hesitated for half a heartbeat, just long enough for the fear to show.
Then they moved.
One by one, they stepped into the glass tank using the molded stairs, boots splashing, water climbing up their legs, then waists, then chests. They hissed at the cold. They tightened straps. So muttered curses like profanity could keep water out of their lungs.
Sigrid stood at the edge, arms crossed, watching like a judge. Ludger stood opposite her, equally still. The first pair squared off underwater, trying to stance the way they did on land.
It lasted one second.
One shove, one misstep, and both of them drifted sideways in a ridiculous tangle of limbs and bubbles.
A few northerners laughed.
Then soone swallowed water and coughed hard enough to remind everyone that this wasn’t funny.
Sigrid’s voice cracked like a whip.
“Again!” she shouted. “You don’t drown in a practice tank. You learn!”
Ludger watched the chaos begin to turn into motion. ssy. Clumsy. Angry. But it was a start. And soon enough, when they learned to fight without trusting the ground…
Ludger would give them the real problem: A golem that didn’t care whether they could breathe.
Ludger watched the first few minutes play out with the sa calm focus he used in a fight.
Knees bending underwater like the water was mocking them. Boots lifting when they expected weight. Bodies tipping and drifting the mont they tried to step hard. Every instinct they had, push forward, plant, drive, betrayed them.
Sigrid stood beside him with her arms crossed, expression hard enough to keep the whole town disciplined by proximity. Ludger glanced at her.
“Why these ones?” he asked. “What did you choose them based on?”
Sigrid didn’t look away from the tank. “Adaptability,” she said imdiately.
Then she added, without rcy, “And how much less stupid they are.”
Ludger’s mouth twitched faintly.
Sigrid continued like she was listing tools. “So are strong. So are brave. That ans nothing if they keep doing the sa foolish thing after it fails.”
She finally looked at him, eyes sharp. “These ones change. Fast. With the right incentives.”
Ludger nodded once, accepting it. His gaze returned to the tank.
Even the “less stupid” northerners were having a hard ti. A few were trying to fight the water like it was an opponent they could intimidate. Others were overcorrecting, moving too carefully, floating upward and then panicking when their feet left the floor.
One warrior attempted a lunge and drifted sideways into another man like a drunk trying to dance. Sigrid made a disgusted sound. Ludger didn’t. He just raised his voice.
“Rage Flow,” he said.
Several heads snapped toward him. Even underwater, the words carried—if not the sound, then the aning.
A few looked offended. Ludger pointed at the water, then mid a hard driving motion with his hand.
“Use it,” he said, blunt. “It will make this easier.”
Sigrid’s brows rose slightly, but she didn’t argue. She understood what he was doing: using the northerners’ own tool to bridge the gap until they learned proper movent.
A couple of the chosen ones hesitated, then let the familiar anger-path ignite. The change was imdiate.
Their bodies tightened. Movents got sharper. The “float” turned into sothing closer to controlled force, because Rage Flow didn’t just boost strength, it boosted focus. The will to push through resistance.
A man who had been drifting suddenly drove downward, boots finding the floor with a solid stomp. Another who had been flailing steadied his shoulders and moved like the water was thicker air instead of a trap.
It wasn’t perfect.
But it was progress. Ludger watched, eyes half-lidded, mind asuring.
If Rage Flow helped them control their bodies underwater… Then it wasn’t just an emotional surge. It was a stability tool, when used right.
Sigrid leaned slightly toward him, voice low. “You’re turning their bad habit into training wheels.”
In the tank, bubbles rose, bodies collided less, and for the first ti, the northerners started to look like they might actually learn to fight in a world that didn’t give them ground.
Ludger nodded to himself. Adaptable. Less stupid. Fast learners with incentives. Sigrid had chosen well. Now he just had to keep them alive long enough to prove it.
As the northerners stopped fighting the water like it was an insult and started moving like it was simply another terrain, Ludger found his mind drifting, briefly, into an idea that had no right to exist in the middle of such a plan.
An aquatic park.
Not a “bathhouse,” not a training pool, an actual place built for water and laughter. Slides. Deep tanks. Platforms. A controlled lake with clear water and stupid gas that let people forget monsters existed for an hour.
He had the skills to do it. Earth shaping for structure. Glass for walls. Water conjuration for filling. Drain channels. Flow control. Even wind to keep the air moving so it didn’t stink like damp stone.
It would probably be a blast.
He pictured it for a second, kids screaming with joy instead of fear, adults acting like idiots on purpose, northerners trying to wrestle underwater and losing badly. A place where “drowning” wasn’t a threat, just an embarrassing mont.
Then reality shoved its elbow into the thought. Not here.
Not in the north where morning water was almost freezing and every breeze carried teeth. If he built sothing like that, it would belong closer to the coast, where the climate was kinder and people didn’t treat warmth like a luxury.
Even then… it would be a hassle. And this wasn’t modern tis.
Most people didn’t have spare coin to spend on anything that wasn’t necessary. Food, housing, tools, protection, that was where money went. Not entertainnt. Not “fun water.” Not a luxury that only mattered when life wasn’t pressing a knife to your throat.
Ludger watched a northerner finally manage a clean underwater shove without drifting sideways, bubbles bursting like laughter. He exhaled through his nose.
Soday, he thought.
Maybe when Lionfang was stable enough that survival wasn’t a daily project. Maybe when trade was steady enough that families had coin left over after paying for winter. Maybe when the Empire stopped trying to drag him across the country with wax-sealed demands.
Soday. For now, he had a different kind of aquatic facility to build, one that taught people how not to die when the world turned liquid. And that, unfortunately, was necessary.
Ludger, over several days, stayed by the glass tank for hours, watching the northerners adapt the way only northerners could, by refusing to accept humiliation as permanent.
At first, the water had owned them.
They floated wrong. Kicked wrong. Tried to plant their feet like the ground would obey them out of respect. Every strike made them drift, every shove turned into a spin, every mistake bubbled up for everyone to see.
Then Rage Flow began to do what it always did when pointed in the right direction. Not just power, assertion.
Bodies stiffened. Movents tightened. The first clumsy flails beca controlled lunges. The chaos began to organize into sothing that looked like training instead of drowning practice.
Sigrid watched it all with the cold patience of a woman who didn’t get emotional about potential.
She got results. The first cuts ca quietly.
A warrior missed the sa basic recovery three tis, kept turning his back in the water, kept drifting upward with panicked eyes.
Sigrid pointed at him. “Out.”
He tried to argue through sputtering breath. Sigrid didn’t care.
“Out,” she repeated, louder, and he climbed out of the tank like a dog that had been slapped by reality.
Another couldn’t keep his head when his lungs tightened, he broke formation, grabbed others, dragged them into the sa panic. Sigrid didn’t even let that one climb out under his own dignity.
Two others hauled him out while he spluttered and cursed.
Sigrid’s voice didn’t soften.
“You will not drown my good fighters with your fear,” she said, and that was the end of it.
Fifty beca forty. Then forty beca thirty.
The pool’s surface cald as bodies thinned. Space opened. The ones who remained were the ones who learned, fast, ugly, honest learning that didn’t care about pride.
Ludger watched, expression flat. Sigrid was ruthless.
If soone looked close to useless for the mission, she cut them. No sympathy. No “maybe next ti.” No wasting oxygen on hope.
Part of Ludger respected it.
Another part of him, quiet, practical, greedy in a way leadership required, wanted to keep more bodies in the pipeline.
Not because he enjoyed dragging weak links along. Because numbers mattered.
More people ant more hands carrying water. More people ant more mana cores harvested from runic golems, more supply moving back and forth, more redundancy when sothing went wrong.
If Ludger had been choosing purely on survivability, he would have been ruthless too.
But he wasn’t choosing purely on survivability. He was choosing on yield. And yield liked numbers.
Still, he didn’t stop Sigrid. Not yet. Because underwater war didn’t forgive dead weight, and he wasn’t about to turn the runic golem route into a corpse line just to increase cargo capacity. When the group stabilized at thirty, Ludger finally nodded to himself.
Good enough.
Now he could begin the next phase.
He stepped away from the tank and walked to a flat patch of ground nearby. With a gesture, he smoothed the earth like a slate, then knelt and began drawing.
Schematics first. Always schematics.
Lines and angles scratched into dirt. Proportions. Joint placent. Core housing. Weight distribution. A golem shape that could be built from stone and reinforced with mana channels, not a real runic golem, not the true labyrinth creature, but a replica with the sa brutal advantages: no breath, no fear, relentless movent.
He marked weak points too, because teaching people to kill a golem ant teaching them where it broke.
He was halfway through the core chamber diagram when sothing changed at the edge of his awareness.
Movent. Approaching. He looked up.
A carriage rolled into view near the gate road, and before it even stopped, two figures dropped down from it like they’d been riding too long and weren’t interested in ceremony.
Arslan. Yvar. They looked tired. Not “long trip” tired. Troubled.
The kind of tired you got when you’d been polite to monsters in silk clothes and co away with teeth marks anyway.
Ludger rose slowly, dirt still on his fingers, eyes narrowing. He didn’t need Seismic Sense to read them. He could tell, instantly, that they hadn’t brought good news. And whatever had happened in the capital… it was already walking toward him.
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