Ludger crossed his arms, the runes on his suit pulsing faintly as he thought.Option one:

  Pick off the fringe players. Cut off Verk’s supply lines. Force him to panic. Maybe flush him out.

  Option two:

  Infiltrate the fortress. High risk. High reward. Might uncover everything in one move, or die horribly.

  Option three:

  Wait. Gather more intel. But that gave Verk time to notice his missing pawns and retaliate. He rolled his neck, bones cracking.

  “…Annoying.”

  Ludger hated political webs. Hated noble schemes even more. Especially ones stretching into both countries.

  And now there was a time limit too. He dragged his fingers through his hair under the hood, thinking.

  He needed: A way inside the fortress. A tool to disable runic alarms. Something to counter heavy golems. A method to cut off escape routes. Proof tying Verk to the operations. And a way to kill the bastard without drawing attention He let out a quiet sigh.

  “If picking a fight on his turf is too much…” He paused.

  “…then perhaps I’ll just change the turf.”

  Ludger dragged the unconscious merchant behind a stack of crates, propped him against the wall like discarded trash, then straightened and let his thoughts churn.

  The simplest solution was obvious.

  He could end this entire problem, Verk, the network, and corruption, in a single move. Just one.

  A chunk of earth the size of a block. Drop it from the sky. Collapse the entire estate in an instant.

  He had the mana. He had the accuracy. He had the class levels and the control. He could pulverize a mansion into dust before anyone inside realized what happened. Easy. Too easy.

  His fingers twitched at the thought. The raw efficiency of it. It was tempting. But, Ludger exhaled slowly.

  “Yeah… no. That’ll scream my name louder than Kaela after six drinks.”

  He leaned against a crate, arms crossing. “How many geomancers in this continent can manipulate earth on that scale?”

  Two. Him… and Gaius. Which meant every investigation, every whisper, every trace would narrow down to the Lionsguard immediately. To Torvares. To Arslan. To him.

  Even a hasty noble tribunal would connect the dots. And then? The Empire would ask questions. The League would ask questions. Everyone who feared the Lionsguard’s influence would use it against them. He clicked his tongue in irritation.

  “That’s why I can’t use any of my real skills. Not here.”

  He couldn’t leave mana residue. He couldn’t leave seismic signatures. He couldn’t leave earth attunement traces, it was like a fingerprint.

  Killing Verk was easy. Killing Verk without leading the world to Ludger? That was the challenge.

  He pushed off the crate and began pacing, the runic suit whispering faintly as it adjusted to his movement.

  “If I want to stay clean,” he muttered, “I need a method they won’t track. A weapon no one links to me. An identity that leaves no trail.”

  Using fire magic? Suspicious. Wind magic? Suspicious. Earth magic? A death sentence.

  Ludger stepped out of the ruined warehouse and into the cold Corian mist, the air thick with metallic tang and night grime. His footsteps made no sound, his cloak swallowing his presence whole. But behind the mask, his teeth were grinding. Because the truth had finally sunk in:

  He had never once fought while hiding his best skills, but he has to…

  Every major fight, every dungeon run, every life-or-death moment, he had always been free to go all-out, to twist the battlefield to his will, to bend stone and mana like they were extensions of his own limbs. But now?

  Now he had to fight like someone else. Like a shadow. Like a killer without a name. He hated it.

  “Tch… should’ve diversified earlier,” he muttered.

  He should’ve leveled the classes he’d ignored: Rain Sorcerer. Rune Mage. Assassin.

  Anything that didn’t scream geomancer from a mile away. Hell, if he’d actually invested in Rain Sorcerer properly, he could’ve solved this within minutes.

  A single cumulonimbus storm over Verk’s manor. A lightning barrage. No fingerprints. No mana signature tied to geomancy. But no… he’d been obsessed with tunnels and earth shaping. Too efficient to focus on anything else.

  “Damn it. That would’ve been clean.”

  He sighed, annoyed at himself. Still… he wasn’t out of options.

  He couldn’t crush the manor with stone. He couldn’t pierce it with Sage spells. He couldn’t suffocate everyone with earth dust, it would still leave a trace. But he could test their defenses. Because no matter how fortified the place was…

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  Every fortress has something it fears. A new intruder. A new unknown. A new threat they can’t predict or understand. And that’s exactly what Ludger planned to be.

  He leapt onto the nearest rooftop, his movements silent and precise. The mist swallowed him instantly, the runes on his suit dimming to absorb light.

  His vision sharpened. His heartbeat slowed. His mind cleared into perfect killing calm.

  “Time to make history,” he whispered to himself, voice altered and cold.

  Not by killing Verk tonight. But by showing the entire northern district of Coria that something had slipped through their perfect defenses. A shadow with no magic signature. A nightmare that made their runic alarms useless.

  Ludger reached the northern district of Coria just as the mist thickened, swallowing the tall buildings and glowing runic posts like a blanket of smoke. This part of the city wasn’t just rich, it was engineered to flaunt it. Wide stone roads, metal railings shaped into geometric spirals, and towers traced with faintly pulsing runes made the entire area feel like the heart of an industrial empire.

  But even among all that polished excess, Verk’s manor stood out as easily the most arrogant building in the district. Ludger crouched on the edge of a rooftop opposite the estate and let his eyes sweep over the entire block. What he saw made even his experienced instincts lock into full alert.

  The manor wasn’t a residence. It was truly a fortress. A massive square complex, its outer walls nearly four meters tall, made of blackstone reinforced with bands of silversteel that glowed faintly every few seconds. The glow pulsed like a heartbeat, feeding power into a barrier network woven throughout the perimeter. Above the wall rose a three-story structure with sharp, angular architecture. Every support pillar, balcony, and roof edge had glowing glyphs etched into them. If the average noble house tried to look elegant, Verk’s manor tried to look untouchable.

  And then there were the guardians. Ludger counted in silence, scanning each corner, balcony, and walkway. Twenty-three runic golems. All active. All armed.

  Three-meter-tall constructs stood immobile like statues. Their armor was carved from overlapping plates of runic metal, their cores glowing a deep electric blue. Some held halberds covered in runic channels, others carried tower shields that pulsed with defensive enchantments, and a few had arm-mounted spell launchers ready to fire at a moment’s notice.

  And that was just what he could see from outside. The walls themselves were covered in layered wards: detection runes, barrier reinforcement lines, and thin counterspell filaments designed to disrupt incoming magic. These weren’t ornamental scribbles, this was advanced defensive architecture.

  If Ludger used geomancy here, even a small spike of earth mana. Every single alarm on the property would start screaming. He narrowed his eyes.At the front gate, four guards in runic armor paced with disciplined steps, halberds humming softly with enchantments. None of them looked relaxed. If anything, they looked prepared for something to happen.

  Then there was the air itself. A pressure. A distortion. A faint sensation tugging at his senses. A specialized ward. Whatever its exact purpose was, anti-stealth, anti-teleportation, anti-illusion, it wasn’t amateur work. This place was protected like a labyrinth boss chamber.

  “Damn…” Ludger murmured under his breath.

  Not in fear. In analysis. This wasn’t something he could smash. Not without revealing exactly who he was. But that didn’t mean he was helpless. If anything, it made the challenge more interesting.

  He crouched lower, letting the mist fully swallow him, and continued studying every inch of Verk’s fortress-like estate. If the League wanted to hide its corruption, they had chosen the perfect bunker. But Ludger had come to break into it, and he was already piecing together how.

  Ludger steadied his breathing and let his senses extend outward, pushing past the cold air and thick mist until his awareness brushed against the edge of Verk’s defenses. The reaction was immediate, a dense pressure met him from all sides, as if he’d pressed his hand against an invisible wall surrounding the manor. The first layer of protection wasn’t subtle. It was a mana barrier wrapped around the entire estate, sealing it from every direction, even overhead. No seams, no gaps, no lazy enchantments. This was a perfectly maintained dome of reinforced mana.

  He frowned behind the mask. The barrier didn’t feel like one uniform spell. It pulsed in waves, the rhythm too precise and too stable to be powered by a single core. When he focused more deeply, combining Manal Pulse with the refined perception of Sagecraft, he traced the source. Beneath the manor’s foundation and the walls, connected through a network of runic lines woven through the stone, lay a cluster of mana cores. Eight of them. High-quality, high-density cores that pushed mana into the barrier with the kind of consistency only found in military-grade constructs.

  Each core was protected by its own defensive shell, layers of runic reinforcement designed to absorb impact, redirect force, and trigger alarms the moment anything tampered with them. Even from a distance, Ludger could feel the stability of each one. They weren’t just fueling the barrier; they were continuously repairing it, refreshing it, and maintaining balance between each segment of the dome.

  If he tried to brute-force one of those cores with brute force, the barrier would flare like a beacon. He analyzed the flow again. Every street-level approach was cut off. A frontal attack would be suicide unless he wanted to alert the entire district. Even targeting a single core would force him to break through the reinforced casing, and by the time he managed that, half the city guard would be on top of him.

  The more he studied the defenses, the more obvious the truth became: this manor wasn’t built to protect a noble’s wealth. It was built to protect secrets. Someone this paranoid wasn’t merely safeguarding their home, they were shielding something they couldn’t afford to lose.

  Ludger crouched low, eyes locked on the glowing pulse beneath the manor, the steady thrum of one of the barrier’s cores. He exhaled slowly and raised his hand, letting mana gather along his palms in a thin, precise line. Not enough to be obvious, but enough to test the core’s reaction. If he could just nudge the flow, feel how it behaved under pressure, he might pinpoint the weak…

  A hand clamped lightly onto his shoulder.

  Ludger jerked, mana scattering in a silent burst as he spun around with a killing strike half-formed.

  Maurien stood there, unfazed, one eyebrow raised, Kaela beside him with both hands on her hips.Maurien’s voice was dry enough to scrape stone.

  “Tell me you weren’t about to take down an entire fortress alone.”

  Ludger let out a slow, frustrated breath. He deflated the gathered mana from his fingers and rubbed the bridge of his mask as if nursing a headache.

  “I was only going to test the core’s output,” he muttered.

  Kaela leaned in, whispering loudly, “Translation: he was absolutely planning to take down the fortress alone.”

  Maurien crossed his arms. “You were so fixated on whatever death trap that thing is that you didn’t hear us walking up behind you.”

  Ludger clicked his tongue. He hated how true that was. Normally nothing slipped past his Seismic Sense or his awareness, but this place… the density of mana, the way the barrier hummed through the ground, it drowned out almost everything else.

  “Fine,” he grumbled. “I got distracted.”

  Maurien stared flatly at him. “You were about to poke an eight-core mana fortress… in the middle of a city… while disguised as a murderer… after torturing one of their merchants. ‘Distracted’ isn’t the word I’d use.”

  Ludger didn’t deny it. Kaela smirked, crossing her arms. “For the record, I already told Maurien you’d do something stupid the moment we let you wander alone.”

  “I wasn’t going to attack anything,” Ludger said, voice even. “Not yet.”

  Maurien sighed. “And that ‘yet’ is exactly why we followed you.”

  He glanced toward the manor, toward the glowing wards, prowling golems, and the faint echo of dozens of guards inside.

  “You can’t break that wall without announcing yourself to the entire League. Even if you could win, the fallout would be catastrophic.”