Chapter 961

Ludger’s complaints sounded annoyingly human compared to everything else the city had been forcing him to be all day. But it was true. His body needed it.

Mana mattered, rest mattered, but food and water mattered too. He had pushed too hard, too often, and even with recovery skills and absurd endurance, none of that changed the basic fact that a body fighting this much still needed fuel.

Ludger clicked his tongue softly and glanced toward the lower districts.

There was a decent chance some restaurant or roadside kitchen had been abandoned in the panic. With parts of the population hiding underground and others barricading themselves indoors, not every place would have been cleared properly. He might find water. Bread. Dried meat. Something fast enough to matter.

His mind began sorting possibilities automatically, quieter routes, less obvious districts, places near market lines, locations likely to have food stores without heavy guards… Then the thought vanished. Completely. His instincts screamed.

Danger.

Immediate. Ludger’s body moved before his mind finished catching up.

He twisted hard to the side as something cut through the space where his head had been an instant earlier. A sharp, vicious hiss split the night, followed by the crack of impact behind him as part of the rooftop exploded into fragments.

The Sniper again...

Of course.

Ludger was already moving, boots scraping across the tiles as he dropped lower and shifted angles without pause. His pulse didn’t spike.

The rooftop that had looked like a brief refuge became a kill zone in less than a heartbeat.

His eyes swept the darkness, searching for angle, line, shadow, distance, anything that would tell him where the shot had come from. Nothing obvious. Which only made it worse. He exhaled once through his nose, all traces of hunger and thirst shoved instantly to the back of his mind.

It did not take long for the capital to start sounding wrong again.

Ludger stayed low on the rooftop, eyes cutting through the darkness while the city shifted beneath him in uneasy waves of firelight and shadow. For a few seconds after the sniper’s shot, all he could hear was the usual noise of a city in crisis, distant shouting, crackling flames, heavy steps somewhere below, stone settling after damage.

Then something else joined it. Metallic footsteps. Heavy. Not the uneven noise of armored men running through broken streets. These were too steady. Too rhythmic. Each impact echoed through the capital like a hammer striking the inside of a bell.

Then came another sound. A deeper one. Mechanical.

A churning, growling hum that reminded him of advanced engines struggling beneath armored frames. The noise rose and fell with unnatural precision, runes likely feeding power through systems too refined for ordinary soldiers to understand and too expensive for ordinary officers to waste.

Ludger’s expression hardened. There it was. He had been waiting for when the Regent would use those runic guardians again. A single one of them had already been annoying enough.

Backed by that irritating balance between machinery and runic reinforcement that made them harder to read than living enemies.

And now, judging by the echoing march below and the growing chorus of engine-hum threading through the streets… there were several. Ludger slowly rose from his crouch, every muscle alert as he looked over the edge of the rooftop.

Nothing yet. Just darkness, smoke, and fractured streets lit by scattered fire.

Then all at once… they emerged.

Runic guardians burst from different streets surrounding the district, their metal frames advancing into view with the cold inevitability of things built for one purpose and one purpose alone. Broad armored bodies. Thick rune-lined plating. Heavy limbs that crushed debris underfoot without slowing. Their heads glowed faintly with cold optical light, and embedded across their frames, intricate runic channels pulsed with harsh, controlled energy.

Ludger counted fast.

One.

Three.

Five.

More behind them. Not a squad. A hunting pack.

And before he could even finish the count, the nearest units raised their arms.

Barrels extended from within the armor. Long. Layered. Built not for decoration or intimidation, but efficient murder.

Every one of them pointed straight at him. Then they fired.

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The barrage tore into the night like the sky itself had decided to split apart.

The sound was monstrous, an overlapping thunder of detonations and mechanical recoil that smashed through the capital’s darkness hard enough to make nearby windows shatter from the pressure alone. Muzzle flashes lit the streets below in violent bursts, and a storm of projectiles screamed toward the rooftop in dense, murderous lines.

Ludger jumped instantly.

The tiles beneath him exploded apart as the first volley ripped through where he had been standing. Stone burst upward in a storm of fragments. The rooftop disintegrated in chunks. Dust and sparks filled the air as he twisted away, body moving on reflex and training more than thought.

But the guardians adjusted their aim instantly.

Their barrels tracked him mid-motion with mechanical precision and launched a second barrage before he had fully landed. The air around him filled with shrieking impacts and lethal metal, turning every possible angle of escape into a wall of death.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

Too fast. He had no room to keep dodging cleanly. So he blocked.

Earth surged up around his hands as the enhanced club reformed in a violent rush of stone and compressed soil. Magic Reinforcement flared through it at once, deepening its mass, locking its structure, hardening every layer with earth attunement until the weapon felt like a condensed section of fortress wall in his grip.

He swung it into position just as the next barrage hit. The impact was savage.

The club shook under the storm, the force of repeated strikes hammering through Ludger’s arms and shoulders hard enough to make even him feel the vibration in his bones. Sparks and fragments burst from the weapon’s surface as the rounds slammed into it over and over, each hit carrying far more physical weight than the earlier fireballs.

His boots skidded across broken tiles.

The rooftop beneath him cracked. Ludger gritted his teeth and pushed back against the pressure… Then his eyes opened wide.

Because the bullets were real. Not mana constructs.

Not condensed projectiles shaped from spellwork.

Real. Physical. And huge.

One of the rounds that clipped along the side of the club spun away into view for half a second before smashing through a chimney behind him, and Ludger caught enough of it to understand what he was dealing with.

The thing was as long as his hand. A very nasty caliber of a weapon.

Not something made to wound. Not even something made to kill cleanly. Something made to tear through armor, bone, walls, and anything stupid enough to stand behind them.

Another burst crashed into the club, and the whole weapon lurched in his grip as if trying to break free from his hands entirely. Ludger’s expression darkened.

Of course the Regent had armed them with something like this. Cannons pretending to be rifles. Enough firepower to turn a human body into wet debris and chew through defensive constructs by brute force alone.

The guardians kept firing, engine-hums rising and falling beneath the deafening rhythm of the barrage as they advanced through the streets below with perfect, pitiless coordination.

Ludger lowered his stance, muscles tightening as he absorbed another wave through the reinforced club, shards of stone and sparks spraying across his arms and face.

The weapon was holding. But the recoil and repeated pressure were real, and if he just stood there trading durability against that kind of ammunition, eventually even reinforced earth would start to fail.

His mind moved fast.

Several runic guardians. High tracking speed. Heavy ballistic fire. Physical rounds strong enough to punish direct defense. No obvious hesitation. Machines were usually easier to deal once you understood where to break them.

Another barrage screamed toward him.

Ludger shifted behind the club, eyes cold and wide awake now, the shock of that first realization already burning itself into calculation.

Then two more emerged from behind him.

Ludger’s instincts screamed a fraction of a second before the sound reached him, a new set of metallic footsteps cutting through the chaos from the rear, followed by the same ugly mechanical growl of rune-fed engines locking into firing position.

They had boxed him in. The moment the two new runic guardians stepped into view from the broken street behind the rooftop line, their barrels were already raised.

And then they fired.

The barrage hit from a second angle at almost the exact same time, forcing Ludger to react without thought.

He yanked his left arm up and across his body.

The first few bullets slammed into his bracers and forearm guards with vicious, ringing impacts. Sparks burst into the dark. Reinforced metal and enchanted froststeel held just enough to deflect some of the shots away, sending them screaming off into the night or punching through stone behind him.

But not all of them. A few slipped through the narrow gap in timing and angle. And those hit his shoulder. Ludger groaned, the sound ripped out of him despite himself.

Pain flared hard and immediate as the force of the impacts tore into flesh that should not have yielded so easily. His body jerked under the blow, balance breaking for half a step as heat and pressure punched through the old injuries already layered there.

He felt wounds opening again. Not just bruising. Not shallow damage. His eyes narrowed sharply, breath turning harsher for a moment as he forced himself not to lose the rhythm of the fight.

Those were not normal bullets. They couldn’t be. His body should have been harder than that.

Even worn down, even after the day he had already had, even with the strain still sitting in his muscles and lungs, his reinforced flesh, his attuned defenses, and the passive hardness built into him should have shrugged off ordinary ammunition far better than this.

But these rounds were biting deeper.

Too deep.

Carrying not just absurd physical force, but something else, some kind of penetration property, a runic enhancement, a shaped effect designed specifically to punch past resistance instead of merely smashing against it.

The realization hit immediately.

These things had been prepared. Not just armed heavily. Built with the expectation of hitting targets tougher than ordinary humans.

Built to wound monsters. Built to wound him.

Another burst tore past, and Ludger twisted hard, club grinding against a fresh wave from the front while his injured shoulder burned hot enough to make his jaw tighten.

Blood ran warm beneath the damaged armor on his left side.

Not enough to cripple him.

Enough to piss him off.

The runic guardians kept advancing from both directions, their barrels tracking with inhuman precision, giving him less and less room to maneuver as the rooftop around him shattered under sustained fire.