At the moment Verk fired, the sky above the manor split open with raw mana.

  The comThe pressed spheres in his palms collapsed inward before detonating downward in a spiraling pillar of spiraling blue-white energy. It wasn’t light, not exactly, more like condensed force given color. A cylindrical blast, rotating violently, drilled toward Ludger and the manor beneath him.

  The air screamed as the beam fell. Within a heartbeat, the pressure wave hit the courtyard. Loose stones shattered midair. The manor’s shattered windows imploded in unison, glass pulverizing into dust before it even touched the ground. Roof tiles ripped upward in swirling arcs as the atmosphere twisted into a vortex around the descending blast. Even the sound lagged behind, an unnatural silence trailing the energy for a breath before reality caught up.

  Then the world erupted. The impact hit with a sound that wasn’t a sound at all,

  a wall of force so immense it slapped the senses clean out of anyone within kilometers.

  A circular shockwave tore outward from the manor, flattening the courtyard in an instant.

  Dust erupted skyward in a towering plume, ballooning like a volcanic eruption. Every scrap of debris, splintered wood, broken stone, shattered furniture, was flung upward and outward, fed into the churning storm of energy. The shockwave hit the manor’s internal defenses next, shredding through them with contemptuous ease.

  The last flickering remnants of the mana barrier flashed a sickly blue, and shattered like glass. Fragments of mana light scattered uselessly as the blast ripped through every structural support the manor had left. Walls folded inward, then were instantly obliterated. The entire estate, stone halls, servants’ quarters, fortifications, the reinforced underground vaults—were reduced to nothing. Not ruined. Not cracked. Erased.

  The city around the manor shook violently. Tiles slid from rooftops. Lantern posts toppled. People were thrown from their feet as the ground itself quaked. Windows shattered in a ring spanning hundreds of meters. Animals bolted. Alarm bells rang with panicked, overlapping clangs.

  At ground zero, the force didn’t just destroy, it excavated. A massive crater carved itself into the earth, perfectly circular and impossibly deep. The edges were rimmed with molten stone cooling into black, glassy streaks. Chunks of the manor, the few that hadn’t been vaporized, lay scattered around like broken teeth.

  The center of the crater still glowed faintly with residual mana, the air distorting above it with leftover heat. The manor of Councilor Verk, decades of wealth and power built into its walls, no longer existed. In its place was nothing but a smoking void, an open wound in the earth, and the lingering thunder of the explosion rolling out across the city like a storm that refused to end.

  Steam poured from Verk’s armor in long, hissing jets as he slowly descended toward the scorched crater. The runic engines sputtered with each downward meter, their once-smooth hum replaced by strained whines and grinding vibrations. Overclocking them for that final strike had pushed the suit far beyond its intended cycle limits. Mana lines glowed erratically along the plating, some flickering, others dimming entirely.

  His boots touched the ground with a soft, almost gentle thud, completely at odds with the devastation around him. The dirt beneath his feet was still hot enough to warp, shifting under the pressure. He took a moment to steady himself, feeling the internal cooling runes struggle to bring the armor back under control as steam vented from the joints in thick, white bursts.

  “…Excessive,” he muttered, though there was no regret in his tone. If anything, there was a sharp edge of satisfaction beneath the words.

  He had never needed to push the armor this close to its limit before. Not in training. Not in demonstrations. And certainly not in the few real battles he’d been forced to participate in. The suit had been designed as a countermeasure, something meant to match the strongest warriors, the guildmasters, the continent’s peak fighters. But he had never truly tested the upper layers of its power.

  Until today. And the results spoke for themselves. The entire manor had been annihilated. The ground beneath had been shredded into a crater large enough to swallow a city plaza. Any defensive measures that had remained, mana barriers, reinforcement wards, hidden shielding, had been dissolved in an instant.

  He exhaled slowly, visor scanning the smoking pit. The dust hung thick, heat twisting the air into shimmering waves. But there were no bodies. No armor fragments. No trace of a mana signature. No lingering presence. Not even the faint imprint of a soul-core struggling to hold together.Nothing. Only emptiness.

  Verk crouched at the rim of the crater, analyzing it with the same detached intellect he used for dissecting financial reports. The readings were clear. The raw mana from the blast was so overwhelming it had erased everything within its radius, physically, magically, and energetically.

  “If even your mana imprint was obliterated…” he murmured, rising again with a faint hiss from the armor’s hydraulics, “then you were reduced to nothing.”

  The invader, whoever he had been, was gone. No corpse to investigate. No identity to decode.

  No evidence left behind. Just as Verk had intended.

  Verk’s visor flickered as he scanned the crater again. The readings scrolling across the inner lens were a scrambled mess, lines of distorted mana signatures collapsing into static and ghost-imprints that refused to stabilize. Residual mana still hung so thick in the air that his built-in analyzers couldn’t differentiate species, nature, or even elemental affinity.

  Annoying. He had hoped to salvage something, some trace of the intruder’s magic, some fingerprint of technique or attribute to connect him to who find him. Instead, the atmosphere was a soup of violently mixed energies, swirling like the aftershock of a dungeon core meltdown.

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  Still, the fight itself had given him ideas. He replayed the earlier clash in his mind: the assassin charging into a mirrored punch and detonating a rune at point-blank range. Crude. Insane. Inefficient. Yet… undeniably effective.

  “The application of a close-range explosive sigil is surprisingly viable…” Verk murmured, half to himself. “If I engraved layered runes directly onto the palms, the suit could weaponize the discharge without relying on projectiles.”

  He flexed his damaged arm, watching sparks crawl along the malfunctioning plating.

  “Though I would need additional fire-protection layers… Perhaps a secondary channeling plate… one that disperses excess heat…”

  The stone behind him cracked. A sharp, sudden fracture, quiet, but wrong.

  Verk began to turn, but a pair of filthy, dust-caked hands burst from the torn ground behind him. A head followed. A shoulder. A body dragging itself out of the earth, half-crushed, drenched in blood, steam still rising from burned skin. Ludger.

  He moved with silent, predatory speed, too fast for someone who should’ve been dead. Before Verk could fully rotate, Ludger was already on his back, teeth clenched, breathing ragged through blood that dripped from his nose and mouth. Every piece of disguise was gone.

  His cloak had been incinerated. His mask was obliterated, fragments stuck to drying blood. What remained of his runic leather armor hung in flaking scraps, the runes long extinguished. His clothes beneath were torn, scorched, or outright vaporized, leaving him covered mostly in dirt, blood, and charred fabric. His hair clung to his face in soot-streaked clumps, half-singed, half-matted. His skin was scraped raw in places, burned in others, and his right arm hung stiffly, clearly fractured.

  He couldn’t let Verk see him. Not like this. Not identifiable. So he didn’t give the man the chance.

  Ludger’s arm shot around Verk’s nape, locking under the helmet’s underside with vicious precision. He jammed his forearm tight, point of his elbow digging into the soft seam between neck plating and mask, stopping Verk from turning or looking back.

  And with his free hand, he struck. A rapid-fire sequence of blows, faster than Verk’s sensors, could fully register. The power of Bone Breaker and Quick Fists.

  The strikes weren’t fueled by mana, Ludger hardly had any left after using Continental Shield around himself and hardening the earth with Stone Grip as much as possible, but they were fueled by technique, leverage, and raw killer’s instinct. Each blow targeted a vulnerable joint, a pressure seam, or a runic anchor point. His fists hammered into the armor like chisels finding the exact points to fracture stone.

  The entire suit rattled under the barrage. Runic plates warped. Stabilizers glitched. Cooling layers buckled. The damaged arm from before spasmed violently, sparks spraying out as Ludger struck the same spot again and again. It was the only thing he could do with almost no mana left, a perfect marriage of speed, precision, and the tiny windows of structural weakness he’d memorized during the fight.

  Verk staggered forward, caught off balance, forced to brace as Ludger clung to his back like a blood-soaked phantom dragging him down.And for the first time, a genuine note of alarm fractured Verk’s composure.

  Verk tried to turn. Pure instinct, he wrenched his torso, one hand clawing for Ludger’s arm as the other moved to point a palm backward and fire at point-blank. The runes on his gauntlet flared, engines in the forearm whining as they tried to spin up enough mana for a repulsion blast that would simply reduce anything behind him to paste.

  It didn’t fire. The rune sputtered, flashed once, then died in a shower of sparks.

  The earlier overclocking, the crater blast, the damage on his right arm, everything had pushed the armor past its limit. With the reserve cores nearly emptied, the suit’s defensive protocols were crippled. Mana channels clogged, switching from smooth flows to unstable surges that choked before they reached the spell nodes. More cracks snaked across the plating.

  Sections of armor that had seemed pristine a moment ago began to split under the strain. Microfractures crawled like spiderwebs along the torso. The helmet’s internal display flickered with warning sigils: CORE OUTPUT UNSTABLE. STABILIZATION FAILURE. SYSTEM PRIORITY OVERRIDE.

  The armor suddenly felt heavier. Not figuratively, literally. The weight-distribution enchantments faltered, dumping the full mass of the reinforced metal onto Verk’s own muscles. His shoulders dipped as if someone had dropped a millstone across them. His knees tensed just to keep him from collapsing on the spot. His calm composure broke.

  Verk snarled and slammed mana into the leg thrusters. The engines in his boots roared to life with enough force to tear cracks into the ground as they launched him upward. The sudden ascent nearly tore Ludger free, but the boy clamped down harder, forearm still locked under Verk’s helmet, body pressed tight against the armor’s spine.

  They shot into the sky over Coria, leaving a streak of distorted air behind them. Verk started spinning. Not a controlled roll. A violent, full-body, spiraling spin meant to dislodge anything that dared cling to him. The world turned into a blurred circle of gray walls and burning rooftops below, the city tilting and twisting with each rotation.

  The wind howled past Ludger’s ears. His body screamed in protest, bones grinding, muscles straining. His mangled hand should’ve been useless, but he forced it to move, fingers digging into the hole he’d opened in the armor’s back earlier, gripping exposed internal structure. He hung on.

  Even as his vision spot-blacked from centrifugal force. Even as the wind tried to peel him off.

  Even as loose fragments of armor, already cracked, tore free and spun away into the sky. He kept hitting. Blind, brutal, efficient. His free hand hammered into the exposed gap again and again, smashing runes, breaking anchors, ripping out whatever he could tear loose by touch alone. Verk felt it.

  A shiver ran down his spine, not magical, not analytical. Just raw, animal fear. The kind that whispered, If he stays on me any longer, I die. He didn’t hesitate. His hand slammed into a control rune at his hip. Eject.

  The armor responded instantly. Every major plate not hard-bonded to his body blew free in a controlled burst. Chest plating, back armor, arm guards, shoulder pauldrons, each one was blasted away from the core frame by explosive release bolts. The force ripped Ludger’s grip loose and flung him outward, along with large sections of the suit.

  For a split-second, Verk was exposed, no helmet, upper armor gone, only reinforced underlayer and the armored boots still attached.

  He could have turned. He could have looked. He could have taken one clean view of the intruder’s face. But panic won.

  Rather than confirm the threat, he hit the next command. Self-destruct.