Chapter 964

Ludger adjusted his plan immediately.

The moment the runic guardians finished shifting into shield-and-spear formations, he stopped thinking in terms of endurance and started thinking in terms of breaking one point hard enough to destabilize the rest.

He lowered his stance.

Rain slid down his bare shoulders and along the wounds covering his chest and arms while his breathing remained rough but controlled. Across from him, the runic golems advanced through the soaked streets and rooftops with mechanical precision, shields forward, spears angled, their heavy frames turning the ruined district into a tightening kill zone.

Then mana began to hum on his bracers. Not loudly. But sharply enough that the air around them seemed to tighten.

The runic golems noticed it at once. Their lines shifted. Their heads adjusted. Somewhere inside those layered bodies, sensors must have caught the spike immediately.

But they still charged. Their orders definitely didn’t include fear. Ludger’s eyes flicked across the advancing line and picked his target. One on the left. Slightly ahead of the others. Shield raised properly, but not perfectly aligned with the support angle of the unit beside it.

He dashed.

The rooftop cracked under his feet as he launched forward, rainwater exploding outward behind him. The nearest golems adjusted instantly, spear tips angling toward his path, but Ludger was already committed.

At the last moment, a massive splash of water erupted around the target. Not a simple burst.

A whole mass of rainwater and gathered moisture surged upward in a violent wave, wrapping around the runic golem’s upper body and shield arm in a heavy, rushing coat. Water crashed over metal, filled gaps, soaked joints, and clung to the layered plates like a second skin.

Then Ludger punched. With all his might. His bracer blazed with enhanced, water-attuned mana as his fist drove forward, and the instant it connected, the impact cracked through the district like thunder trapped inside iron.

The runic golem stopped. Completely.

The water coating its frame turned from liquid to ice in a violent rush, cryomancy and impact forcing the freeze through every drenched surface at once. Frost spread over its body in a growing shell, climbing from the point of impact outward while the armored section he had struck began to crack.

Then the cracks spread. Spider-webbing outward from the center of the blow, racing through frozen metal and rune-lined plating alike.

Ludger smirked.

So that worked too… He had no time to enjoy it.

Two spear thrusts shot toward his head from opposite angles so fast they nearly crossed in front of his face. Ludger’s smirk vanished as he snapped both arms upward, bracers raised just in time to block. The impacts hit like charging beasts. Metal screamed against reinforced guards. Pain shot through his forearms as the force drove through his stance and shoved him backward across the rain-slick surface. Then a shield slammed into him. A full-body charge from another runic guardian crashed into his side before he could fully regain balance, and the impact launched him off his feet entirely.

Ludger flew backward through the rain and smashed into the wall of a nearby warehouse hard enough to blast apart wood, stone, and old support beams in a violent burst of splinters and debris.

The whole structure shuddered from the hit. And inside the settling wreckage, Ludger forced himself upright again. Ludger emerged from the rubble grinning. Not wide. Not crazed. Just that small, sharp grin of someone who had already seen the end of the fight before the other side realized it had started.

Broken wood and shattered stone slid off him as he stepped out of the half-collapsed warehouse, rain pouring over his bare skin and blood-streaked torso. His left shoulder hung wrong, the joint knocked out of place from the earlier hit, but he barely seemed to care.

It was a minor issue. Painful, yes. Annoying, yes. But minor. Compared to everything else he had taken that day, a dislocated shoulder was barely worth mentioning.

His eyes stayed on the runic guardians. And the grin remained. Because he had already won. The machines did not know it yet.

They began to move again, shields raised, spears lowering as they advanced to finish the fight at close range. Heavy feet crushed through soaked debris. Their formation tightened, trying to box him in once more with mechanical discipline and brute weight.

Then their movements stiffened. Only slightly at first. A spear arm adjusting half a beat too slow. A shield angle correcting with a faint jerk. A heavy step landing harder than it should have, as if the joint beneath it had not responded cleanly.

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

They kept moving. Insisted on moving. That was the almost funny part. They pushed forward as though nothing was wrong, as if whatever internal systems guided them hadn’t yet recognized the problem.

Ludger watched them come, rain sliding from his chin, grin deepening just a fraction.

One of the nearer guardians tried to lunge. Its motion hitched mid-step. Another tried to rotate its torso to bring the shield around faster and produced an ugly grinding sound from inside its frame. A third’s spear arm twitched once, then dragged through the movement with visible resistance.

At last… they began to notice. Not in the human sense.

Their optical lights flickered. Heads adjusted. Rune-lines inside their bodies flared strangely, likely rerouting power or attempting corrections. And in that moment, they finally caught what Ludger had been letting build the whole time.

The mana on his bracers.

Freezing. Not only the water around him. All of it. The rain. The soaked stone. The water coating their armor. The moisture lodged in their joints. The liquid forced into their frames earlier when he had drenched the battlefield and broken the flame trap.

Cold air started leaking from the joints of their bodies. Thin streams at first. Then thicker bursts. The runic guardians tried to keep moving anyway. Too late. The frost had already reached inside.

Ludger’s water-attuned strike had not just damaged one unit. It had confirmed what he needed, how the cold interacted with their structure, how the water settled in the right places, how long it took for the freeze to spread if enough moisture had been forced into the battlefield first.

The rain had done the rest. Now the cold blooming from his bracers was finishing the process. Ice spread through the guardians from the inside out. Not as a clean shell over the surface.

As a seizure in the machine. A silent invasion through seams, channels, vents, and joints until the movement systems locked up under expanding frost and the runic flow inside their bodies began to choke.

One guardian froze mid-step. Another locked with its shield half-raised. A third made it one more pace before the leg under it seized completely and the whole machine toppled sideways with a crash heavy enough to shake the street. The others followed.

Each losing the smooth certainty of a weapon and becoming just another heavy piece of metal caught in the wrong kind of winter. Then the mana-lights inside them began to vanish.

First a flicker. Then a dim pulse. Then darkness. It didn’t take long after that. Soon the runic guardians stood frozen in place, locked under rain and ice, their bodies rimed with spreading frost while the light of mana inside them had died completely.

The district went quieter, quieter enough that Ludger could hear the rain again. He rolled his neck once, then reached up with his good arm, grabbed the dislocated shoulder, and slammed it back into place with a wet, brutal pop.

His expression barely changed. The grin faded into something colder. Then he looked over the frozen machines around him and exhaled through his nose.

“Annoying,” he muttered.

But dead all the same. Ludger let out a slow sigh of relief. Not because the situation was good. Not because he was safe. Just because, for one brief moment, the immediate problem in front of him had stopped trying to kill him.

Frozen runic guardians stood motionless around the district like broken monuments, rain still falling over their ice-rimed frames while dead mana-lights slept inside their bodies. The streets were quieter now, the kind of quieter that came only after something expensive had just failed very badly.

Ludger rolled his shoulder once after forcing the joint back into place and clicked his tongue softly. He had used all his mana again. Another stupid plan.

Another one of those moments where the cleanest answer had required dumping nearly everything he had left into a solution that would either work beautifully or leave him in even worse trouble than before.

At least this one had worked. He looked over the frozen machines, then toward the dark, rain-soaked streets beyond them. The enemy would not have prepared for this kind of situation. Because no one had truly seen him using ice magic until now.

That mattered.

The Regent had prepared for the Ludger the capital knew, or thought it knew. Earth magic. Brutal close combat. Overdrive. Rage. Wind Step. Enough raw adaptability to make every simple answer expensive.

But cryomancy? Not as a central answer. Not on this scale. Not in a way that could turn the capital itself into part of the weapon.

Ludger’s eyes lifted toward the barrier overhead, faint and warped behind rain and darkness.

“Maybe…” he muttered, voice rough from smoke, heat, and exhaustion, “if I freeze the whole capital…”

His gaze narrowed slightly.

“That might give me the opening I want.”

It was not a complete plan yet. More like the edge of one. If the streets froze, if movement became unstable, if the barrier supports or patrol lines were forced to react to a city turning into a giant trap of ice and water, then somewhere in that confusion… there might be a way out.

He could already feel the cost of even thinking that way. The scale. The strain. The kind of mana control and output it would take to turn the entire capital into a frozen battlefield under an active barrier while still hunted from every side. Which unfortunately made it very tempting.

Ludger’s thoughts vanished the next instant. Because he heard it again. Heavy mechanical steps. And engines. His expression flattened immediately. The sounds were distant at first, muffled through rain, ruined streets, and the aftermath of the last fight.

Then more joined them. A mechanical procession marching steadily toward him through the wounded capital.

More runic guardians were coming. Ludger stared into the darkness, eyes cold and tired and very much awake.

The Regent would never have sent all of them in the first attack. That would have been too simple. No… men like Alphonse layered their answers the way cowards layered armor: enough to survive mistakes, enough to keep smiling even after the first expensive failure.

The first wave had been a test. Or bait. Or both. And now the next pieces were entering the board.

Ludger exhaled once through his nose, all relief gone as quickly as it had come.

“Right,” he muttered.

Rain ran down his face. His body ached. His mana was low again. And somewhere out there, the Regent was still calmly feeding monsters into the night.