Chapter 495

Ludger lifted one hand and traced a short, tight pattern in the air.

“I’m going to seal the sound,” he said quietly. “Nothing we do in here will carry outside the labyrinth.”

Viola’s eyes sharpened immediately.

“That means,” Ludger continued, “we work together through the first section. We deal with the runic golems as a group. Cleanly.”

He glanced toward the deeper passage, where the corridors narrowed and the mana density subtly shifted.

“I’ll handle the second section alone.”

Viola’s mouth curved into a grin. Not reckless. Anticipatory.

“Finally,” she said under her breath. “I was starting to think you brought me along just to watch.”

Luna, on the other hand, sighed.

She rolled her shoulders once, expression flat. “I hate direct confrontations,” she muttered. “Too loud. Too many variables.”

“You’ll adapt,” Ludger replied calmly.

He finished the pattern and pressed his palm against the stone floor. The rune didn’t glow.

It

settled

.

Sound folded inward, collapsing back on itself. Footsteps became nothing behind them. Breathing vanished. Even the faint hum of the mana embedded in the walls dulled, as if wrapped in thick cloth.

A private battlefield.

“This only holds for a while as we are near it,” Ludger said. “After that, we will have to make some adaptations.”

Viola drew her weapon slowly, eyes already scanning angles and distances. “So we make it count.”

Luna slipped into motion without another word, posture shifting from relaxed to lethal. She didn’t like this kind of work, but she trusted Ludger’s planning enough to do it anyway.

Ludger took the lead. Ahead, the first runic golem stirred.

Metal plates rotated with a dry, grinding sound that no longer existed. Runes flared faintly along its limbs as it rose to full height, artificial eyes locking onto the intruders. Ludger’s gaze stayed cold and focused.

“Positions,” he said.

And the labyrinth learned, too late, that silence didn’t mean safety.

Ludger didn’t have time to give more orders. He didn’t need to. They weren’t kids anymore. And this wasn’t their first labyrinth.

The moment the runic golem’s core flared and its arm rotated, segments unfolding, runes aligning for a mana discharge, Viola moved.

Fire Overdrive ignited.

Very explosively, but also p

recisely.

Heat snapped into place around her legs and spine, a controlled surge that didn’t burn outward but inward, compressing force instead of wasting it. The sand beneath her boots cracked as she launched forward… faster than the wind.

The golem’s arm barely finished aligning. Viola was already inside its firing line.

She raised her sword mid-sprint, froststeel blade humming as mana surged through her grip. At the last possible instant, she shifted gears.

Fire collapsed. Earth took its place.

Weight slammed into her body, not slowing her, but

anchoring

her. Momentum didn’t disappear. It multiplied. Gravity bent around her strike, dragging everything down with it.

Viola swung. The sword came down like a falling cliff.

Froststeel wasn’t ideal for Fire or Earth. It resisted both, refusing to resonate cleanly. Under normal circumstances, that mismatch would’ve dulled the strike.

This wasn’t a normal circumstance. The blade split the golem’s head cleanly in two.

Runes shattered. Stone plates ruptured. The cut didn’t stop, it continued down through the neck, through the chest, cleaving straight into the torso until the core housing screamed under the pressure.

The golem froze. Then collapsed inward, its upper half sliding apart in silence, mana bleeding out in fractured light that never made a sound. Viola landed in a crouch, sword embedded deep, boots skidding half a meter before stopping. She exhaled once.

Behind her, Ludger watched without surprise. Clean execution. Correct timing. No wasted movement.

The labyrinth had barely registered the intrusion… and it had already lost its first guardian.

Viola straightened and turned, a wide grin already on her face.

“That was too easy,” she said, voice carrying despite herself.

Ludger didn’t even look impressed.

“Don’t get carried away,” he replied calmly. “We haven’t found your boyfriend yet.”

She spun on him instantly. “He is

not

my—”

The words cut off mid-sentence. Viola froze, eyes widening as she realized how loud that had been. She slapped a hand over her mouth and slowly turned her head.

Ludger lifted a finger and pointed behind him. A transparent wall of compressed air shimmered there, barely visible now that she was looking for it. The sound that should have escaped had died against it without a trace.

“I can enforce that up at a moment’s notice,” Ludger said evenly. “But I’d rather not waste mana every time you shout.”

Viola lowered her hand and stared at him. Then she sighed.

“You’re acting like you’re not the problem here,” she muttered.

Ludger tilted his head slightly. “I’m not shouting.”

She opened her mouth to argue, thought better of it, and just rolled her shoulders instead.

Somewhere deeper in the labyrinth, stone shifted. The silence returned.

And Ludger stepped forward again, already moving before Viola finished sighing, leaving her to follow and remind herself that, annoyingly enough, he

was

right. Ludger shifted his attention to Luna.

“How do you want to handle this?” he asked quietly. “Face them directly, or draw their attention and let Viola finish?”

Luna glanced at the shattered remains of the golem, then down at her knives.

“…Fighting those things head-on would be a hassle,” she said flatly. “Metal bodies. Reinforced joints. Bad angles. I’d spend more time chipping than killing.”

She rolled one knife in her palm and looked down the corridor. “I’ll lure them out.”

Ludger nodded immediately. No debate. No second-guessing.

“That works,” he said. “Keep them focused on you. Don’t overcommit.”

He raised two fingers and traced a compact rune in the air, small, tight, unfinished.

“If things go wrong, I’ll disrupt their mana flow,” he continued. “Short pulse. Enough to desync their cores and stall them.”

Luna’s eyes flicked to the rune, then back to him. “Emergency only?”

“Yes,” Ludger replied. “So don’t try too hard.”

That earned him a faint snort.

“I never do,” she said.

She melted backward into the shadows of the corridor, footsteps deliberately uneven now, just enough noise to be noticed. Just enough presence to be followed. Viola tightened her grip on her sword, excitement tempered by focus.

Ludger watched Luna go, tracking her position through Seismic Sense even as he adjusted his stance. The plan was simple. Which meant the labyrinth would try very hard to make it expensive.

They moved forward at a measured pace, footsteps swallowed by the sealed silence. As they advanced, Viola glanced sideways at Ludger.

“You said you could disrupt their mana flow,” she whispered. “How?”

Ludger didn’t slow. “Runes.”

She waited for more.

“I’ve dealt with runic golems before,” he continued. “In the Velis League. Different construction, same principles.”

That caught her attention.

“Their cores don’t just power movement,” Ludger explained. “They regulate everything. Balance, targeting, output. If you interrupt the circulation, just for a moment, the whole structure desynchronizes.”

He tapped two fingers lightly against his palm. “Runes make it easier. You don’t need to overpower them. You just need to tell the mana to behave incorrectly for a bit.”

Viola grimaced. “That sounds unfair.”

“It is,” Ludger said without hesitation.

She sighed.

“While you were off having all this fun,” she muttered, “I was helping my grandfather manage territory. Meetings. Reports. Disputes.”

She shot him a look. “Not fair.”

Ludger shrugged.

“You chose politics,” he said calmly. “I chose problems that hit back.”

She opened her mouth to retort, then stopped and shook her head instead.

“Next time,” she said, “I’m choosing wrong on purpose.”

Ludger didn’t respond, but the corner of his mouth lifted just slightly as they continued deeper into the labyrinth.

They didn’t leave the bodies where they fell.

After each encounter, Ludger moved first, fast, precise, methodical. He knelt beside the shattered constructs and pried open their core housings, fingers working through cracked metal and ruptured runic frames.

Mana cores came free with a dull, muted pulse. Still warm. He set them aside, then traced runes into the stone floor. Not concealment.

Distortion.

The glyphs bent perception around the area, light, mana sense, even spatial awareness slipping sideways just enough that the eye and the mind refused to focus on what was there. It wasn’t invisibility. It was

unimportance

.

You could look right at it and not register it. Once the rune circle was complete, Ludger placed the cores in the center and fed the array a controlled trickle of mana.

The effect stabilized. The broken golems faded into the background of the labyrinth, swallowed by false depth and misaligned shadow. Low cost. Long duration. Efficient.

That way, he didn’t need to keep pouring mana into it. They took a moment after each concealment. Not resting, but resetting.

Viola leaned on her sword for a breath, chest rising and falling steadily. Luna rolled her shoulders, flexing fingers that still tingled from impact and recoil. Both of them had spent a lot of mana. Overdrive wasn’t cheap, and neither were precision kills against enemies built to absorb punishment.

Usually, it took a full party to clear even the first section of this labyrinth. Frontliners. Casters. Support. Healers. They were doing it with two. And one of them didn’t like direct combat. Still, Ludger kept his Guild Master skills active.

The subtle buffs threaded through them, stamina recovery, mana circulation, focus stabilization. Nothing flashy. Just enough to keep them operating at peak longer than they should’ve been able to.

He watched their breathing normalize faster than expected. Good. Then a thought hit him.

I should’ve forged bracers for them.

Runic enchantments. Cost reduction. Overdrive stabilization. Something to take the edge off.

He’d been too focused on infiltration and silence. Too focused on getting here unnoticed. That was on him. He filed the mistake away. No point regretting it now.

Ludger rose and signaled forward. The first section was almost clear.

And the labyrinth was only just beginning to understand that the usual rules no longer applied.

Two hours later, they reached the entrance to the second section.

The air changed first.

Cooler. Denser. Saturated with mana in a way the first section never was. The corridor widened into a vaulted passage reinforced with ancient stone, the stone darkened by constant moisture.

Ludger slowed. He could see it. The drainage system.

A network of channels carved on the walls and floor. His design. The one he’d worked on with Ironhand engineers to dry out the second section and make delving viable.

It was running at full capacity.

Water streamed through the channels in steady sheets, pulled away into deeper conduits and forced out toward the sea. Pumps hummed behind the walls, mana engines cycling without pause.

And yet… The floor ahead was still wet.

Thin streams crept back across the stone, flowing in from deeper inside. The walls glistened. Condensation clung to the ceiling and dripped in slow, patient rhythms.

The labyrinth was feeding itself faster than the system could drain it.

“Still flooding,” Viola muttered.

“Yes,” Ludger replied. “Which means the internal aquifers haven’t stabilized.”

Or worse, they were being replenished from somewhere else.

He knelt and ran his fingers across the stone. No scorch marks. No fractured plates. No collapsed pillars. No signs of recent battle.

The first section behind them had been untouched before their arrival. And the absence of damage ahead told him something he didn’t like.

No one had pushed into the second section recently.

Which meant… The runic golems were still there.

All of them.

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