Chapter 554

Sigrid’s gaze cut through them like a blade.

“You fight,” she said. “You bleed. You come back. You spend. You repeat.”

She tapped her chest once. “That is not building. That is not an alliance. That is not a future.”

Then she looked back at Ludger again, eyes sharp and uncomfortably direct.

“You,” she said. “You build. You plan. You make the groundobey. You make children into soldiers.”

Her gaze slid to Kharnek. “And this one…”

Kharnek’s shoulders tensed.

“…lets his people act like the Lionsguard are a coin purse they can shake whenever they’re hungry.”

The fire crackled. Somewhere nearby, a mug clinked as someone’s hand trembled. Ludger watched Sigrid for a moment, then asked the practical question, the one that mattered most.

“And what do you want?” he said.

Sigrid’s mouth twitched, almost pleased.

“I want them to stop embarrassing me,” she said simply.

Then her eyes hardened again.

“And I want to know,” she added, “whether your guild is truly different… or if it is just another place where men get comfortable and forget to work until the world bites them again.”

Sigrid didn’t wait for permission to continue. She stepped closer, voice cutting through the crackle of the fire like it was made to.

“Why didn’t you use them?” she demanded, gesturing broadly at the camp, at the lounging men, at the wasted strength sitting around in leather and muscle. “Why didn’t you use the northerners to make this place prosper more?”

Her eyes flashed, anger sharpened into accusation.

“You waited for Kharnek to lead those idiots,” she snapped, nodding toward the younger warriors who suddenly found the dirt fascinating, “and by doing that you gave them room to eat, drink, and shit for three years without taking a single step forward.”

Kharnek’s jaw clenched. He didn’t speak. Not because he agreed, because anything he said would make it worse.

Sigrid pointed a finger toward the south, toward where the Empire’s borderlands began to thicken with politics.

“And now the Empire is changing,” she said. “The world is moving. Lords are shifting. New rules, new taxes, new games.”

Her voice rose again, eardrum-tearing, furious.

“And what did they do all this time? They have barely got stronger since the war.”

The camp stayed quiet. Even the fire sounded smaller.

Ludger didn’t react immediately. He let her words land, turned them over, and admitted, privately, that the core of her point was solid.

He’d seen it too. The northerners had settled into routine. A dangerous, comfortable rhythm: raid the labyrinth, earn coin, buy food and booze, repeat. Strong bodies, wasted momentum. And that comfort would get them killed the moment the Empire decided to squeeze the frontier.

Still… Ludger’s eyes stayed calm as he answered.

“I understand your point,” he said. “But I didn’t want to force northerners to do my bidding.”

Sigrid’s eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Because they’re not mine,” Ludger replied flatly. “An alliance isn’t ownership.”

He gestured toward the camp. “Only a small portion of them work for my guild. The rest are here because they choose to be. If I start ordering them like soldiers, I get obedience for a week… and resentment for a lifetime.”

Sigrid stared at him like she wanted to argue that resentment was preferable to weakness. Ludger kept going, voice steady.

“I’m not the type to force others into what I want,” he said. “If someone joins Lionsguard, they choose it. If they don’t, they don’t.”

For a moment, Sigrid’s expression didn’t soften. If anything, it sharpened.

Then she snorted. “That is noble.”

“It’s practical,” Ludger corrected.

Sigrid leaned in slightly, eyes hard. “Practical is making them useful before the world makes them dead.”

Ludger held her gaze. He could feel the camp listening, Kharnek, the warriors, the quiet tension of pride being dragged into the light. He didn’t like being cornered. But he also wasn’t blind.

Maybe he’d been too careful. Too respectful. Too willing to let Kharnek steer his own people at their own pace. Pace was a luxury. The Empire changing meant pressure would come. Soon. Ludger exhaled slowly.

“In the end,” he said, “they still need to choose.”

Sigrid’s eyes didn’t blink. Ludger’s mouth tightened a fraction, and he admitted the last part out loud, because it was true, and pretending otherwise would be childish.

“…But perhaps you’re right,” Ludger said. “Northerners do need someone to make them walk in line.”

Kharnek’s head lifted slightly, as if he’d just been slapped. Sigrid’s expression didn’t change.

“Good,” she said.

It wasn’t praise. It was a verdict. Kharnek finally broke. He leaned forward, big hands opening as if he could physically grab the conversation and drag it back onto safer ground.

“No,” he said, voice low but urgent. “This is insanity.”

Sigrid didn’t even look at him at first. Kharnek kept going anyway, words tumbling out like a man trying to stop a wagon from rolling downhill.

“Ludger,” he rumbled, glaring at him like the boy had personally insulted the gods, “do not listen to her. Letting Sigrid run things here would be worse than letting my enemies take control of the entire Empire.”

A few nearby northerners stiffened. Some looked horrified. Some looked like they wanted to laugh. Most looked like they were deciding whether to hide. Sigrid finally turned her head. Slowly. Like a predator acknowledging a barking animal.

“Run things?” she repeated, tone flat.

Then she scoffed, a short, sharp sound full of contempt.

“I would rather chew rocks,” she said.

Kharnek’s eyes narrowed. “Then stop acting like—”

“I am not running anything,” Sigrid cut in, raising her voice just enough to make everyone’s spine straighten again. “I am doing the bare minimum required to keep idiots from wasting time like they are going to live forever.”

She swept her gaze around the camp, and several able-bodied warriors suddenly found urgent interest in their boots.

“I do not want to spend my days arguing with people who think ‘next week’ is a strategy,” Sigrid continued. “I do not want to babysit drunk fools. I do not want to correct the same mistakes until I die of boredom.”

She jabbed a thumb at herself. “I have already wasted enough time dealing with idiots.”

Kharnek’s mouth opened, then closed. For once, he had no clean counter.

Sigrid’s eyes narrowed again, but this time the anger had a different edge, less irritation, more resolve.

“Still,” she said, voice lowering a fraction, “I can no longer sit back and do nothing.”

She looked at Kharnek first, and there was something in her expression that wasn’t cruel. Just tired. Then she looked at Ludger.

“If the world is changing,” Sigrid said, “then we change first. We do not wait for the Empire to push us around like cattle. We do not wait for nobles to decide our worth. We do not wait for monsters to grow smarter while our men grow lazy.”

The fire popped, sending a spark into the air. Sigrid didn’t flinch.

“I am not here to take command,” she finished. “I am here to stop rot.”

Kharnek stared at her, then at Ludger, looking like a man watching two disasters race toward each other and realizing he might be standing in the middle. Ludger stayed quiet, eyes steady. Because Sigrid wasn’t asking for permission. She was announcing a reality.

And if Ludger was honest… reality tended to win.

In the end, Ludger didn’t make a grand declaration. He didn’t “appoint” Sigrid. He didn’t hand her authority. He didn’t insult Kharnek by pretending the northerners were his to reorganize. He just… decided to wait and see.

Sigrid was a problem, but she was also pressure. And pressure could either crack things, or turn them into something sharper.

Ludger still had other work to prepare anyway. The magic spring supply wasn’t starting tomorrow. Not until he had the right gear, the right training, and the right team capable of surviving a half-drowned runic golem labyrinth without turning it into a graveyard.

So he left the camp with his plan intact and his eyes open. And it didn’t take long to notice the changes. The first sign was the silence.

Not peaceful silence,

productive

silence. The kind that came when loud men were too busy working to waste breath.

The second sign was numbers. Three days later, back at the Lionsguard guildhall, Ludger was reading report when Yvar pushed through the doorway with a ledger in hand and that look he got when reality had just become inconvenient.

“Vice Guildmaster,” Yvar said without preamble. “We have an issue.”

Ludger didn’t look up immediately. “Define issue.”

Yvar set the ledger down and flipped it open, tapping a column with a finger.

“Our froststeel stock has tripled,” Yvar said.

Ludger finally looked up. Tripled. In three days. That wasn’t “good work.” That was abnormal.

Yvar watched him carefully. “In the last three days,” he repeated, as if emphasizing the part that should scare him.

Ludger didn’t need to ask who had caused that. He could already see the shape of it. Sigrid. A camp that suddenly stopped wasting time. Northerners who didn’t want to hear that voice again deciding it was easier to work than to be screamed at. Yvar cleared his throat, business snapping back into place.

The northerners probably decided to delve into the frost skeletons labyrinth rather than hear Sigrid’s complaints all day. An overbearing woman’s strongest weapon: nagging. Ludger showed a smirk for the first time in a while. It was also the first time in a while he thought something funny for himself.

“The question is what we do with it,” he said. “We can look for more buyers, move volume while we have it.”

He turned the page. “Or we let the stock increase to maintain the price. Scarcity keeps the market clean.”

Ludger stared at the numbers for a moment, then made the call without hesitation.

“Keep it stocked,” he said.

Yvar blinked. “You don’t want to sell?”

“Not aggressively,” Ludger replied. “We’ll sell enough to keep relationships warm. Enough to keep coin flowing. But we keep reserves.”

Yvar’s brows drew together. “Why? We’ve never held this much.”

Ludger’s voice stayed calm, but his eyes sharpened.

“Because we might need it soon.”

Yvar paused, reading the tone more than the words. “For what.”

Ludger closed the ledger with two fingers and slid it back toward Yvar.

“Gear,” he said. “Repairs. Bracers. Whatever the next phase requires.”

Yvar’s eyes narrowed slowly. “So something is coming.”

“Something is

always

coming,” Ludger replied.

He stood, already feeling the pieces shift into a new configuration in his head. Outside, the guild yard sounded different than it had a week ago. Less idle talk. More hammering. More movement.

Sigrid hadn’t taken command. She hadn’t “run” anything. She’d just made wasting time painful enough that even idiots stopped doing it.

And now, Ludger had a tripled stockpile of froststeel and a growing suspicion that waiting and seeing was going to be… very informative.

Ludger went down to the storage room himself.

Not because he didn’t trust the numbers, Yvar didn’t lie about inventory, but because numbers always felt different when you could see the stack with your own eyes. Froststeel wasn’t coin. It wasn’t grain. It was a strategic resource, and the pile in front of him looked like a future problem waiting to be shaped into a solution.

Chunks of pale-blue metal sat in neat racks, each one cold enough that the air around it felt sharper. Even through gloves, Ludger could feel the faint bite of it, like the material remembered winter.

Tripled. In three days.

He ran his eyes along the racks, already thinking about what that meant: more bracers, better plates, reinforced weapons, specialized fittings… and, if he was serious about the golem labyrinth, gear that didn’t fail when water tried to kill you.

He was mid-calculation when footsteps approached.

Yvar’s voice came from the doorway. “Vice Guildmaster.”

Ludger didn’t turn yet. “What.”

“There are people outside waiting for you,” Yvar said.

Ludger finally looked over. “Who.”

Yvar shook his head once. “Unknown. They asked for you specifically.”

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