Chapter 978

The rune dissolved into his body like ink sinking into water. Verk waited for the surge. For the backlash. For the hidden spell activating. But his armor’s magic sensors didn’t pick up anything odd. No massive spike. No unstable mana bloom. No forbidden output rising from Ludger’s core.

Nothing.

For half a heartbeat, Verk wondered if the boy had finally reached the point where tricks replaced actual threat. Then Ludger’s posture relaxed. The tension in his shoulders changed. The uneven strain in his stance smoothed out just enough to matter. His breathing remained rough, his body still broken in far too many places, but something in him settled.

His eyes focused.

Completely. All the noise vanished from them. The pain. The exhaustion. The anger. The pressure of Lionfang. The need to catch Viola and Luna. The hatred of the Regent. The irritation toward Verk.

All of it narrowed into one clear path ahead. One answer. One action. Verk’s grip tightened inside the armor. He didn’t know what had changed. That was the first real problem. The second was that Ludger did.

Verk soon realized he was being too careful. Around Ludger.

Around a boy half-dead on his feet, bleeding in the rain, one shoulder burned open, his forearm guards nearly ruined, his mana scraping the bottom of whatever absurd well he carried inside himself.

That realization annoyed him more than any insult Ludger had thrown. He clicked his tongue. Then charged.

The sand finally fell away from his armor in a scattering rush, shaken loose by pulsing runes and raw movement. Freed from that dragging resistance, Verk crossed the distance like a fired bolt.

The mana sabers screamed. Ludger moved.

The first slash came from the right, wide enough to cut him from shoulder to hip. Ludger stepped inside the arc by a fraction, letting the violent blade pass behind his back close enough to burn the rain off his skin.

The second saber stabbed straight for his throat. Ludger tilted his head aside. The point passed beside his neck. Verk twisted his wrist and turned the thrust into a ripping horizontal cut.

Ludger dropped low.

The blade swept over him and carved through empty air, leaving a glowing scar of steam behind it.

Verk’s knee shot forward.

Ludger shifted his weight to one foot, pivoted around the strike, and slipped past the armored leg before it could crush his ribs.

A kick followed immediately. Then a backhand slash. Then a crossing cut meant to catch him no matter which direction he dodged.

Ludger avoided all of it. Not with big movements. That was the terrifying part. He wasn’t running. Wasn’t desperately throwing himself around like before. He moved just enough.

A shoulder turn.

A half-step.

A lean.

A bend of the knees.

A slight shift of his head while a mana saber passed so close it clipped a few wet strands of hair and turned them to blackened smoke. Verk accelerated again.

The armor answered, runes flaring brighter across the legs and spine as he launched a barrage of attacks faster than before. The sabers came in brutal chains now, white-gold lines slicing through the night from every angle.

High.

Low.

Diagonal.

Thrust.

Reverse slash.

A feint into a palm blast that Ludger avoided before the light even formed properly. Verk followed with a kick meant to pin him against the barrier. Ludger stepped aside before the leg fully extended. The armored boot smashed into the ground instead, blowing mud and stone outward.

Verk turned the impact into a spin, both sabers carving around him in a deadly circle.

Ludger ducked under the first and stepped over the second as it came low, his battered body moving with an eerie calm that looked wrong considering the condition he was in.

No wasted motion. No hesitation. No panic. Verk snarled and attacked harder. A saber thrust went for Ludger’s heart. Ludger’s torso shifted back. A second blade came for his neck.

He leaned forward under it. A palm-mounted burst of light fired from almost point-blank range. Ludger had already moved his shoulder out of the line of fire before it released, letting the blast tear past him and explode against the wet ground behind.

Verk’s helmet eyes brightened.

He tried an overhead cut with one saber and a low sweep with the other.

A simple trap. Effective against most. Ludger spun sideways between both lines, one blade passing above his shoulder, the other missing his thigh by inches.

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For several seconds, the battlefield became nothing but white-gold blades, rain, steam, and Ludger’s body slipping through all of it like he had already seen the attacks before they happened.

Then Verk stopped. Immediately. Not from fatigue. From suspicion.

He planted one foot hard enough to crack the ground and pulled both sabers back into a defensive angle. The helmet turned fully toward Ludger, runes flickering over the visor as the armor began checking something deeper.

Ludger’s mana.

Verk’s eyes narrowed inside the helm. It was expanding in all directions. Not gathering. Not compressing. Not forming into a spell. Expanding.

Thin streams of mana were leaking from Ludger’s body and spreading outward through the rain, the air, the ground, the broken stone, the barrier, even around Verk himself. It was faint in places, stronger closer to the boy, but unmistakable.

He was expelling mana. For some reason. Verk’s first thought was enhanced perception. A sensory field.

That would explain the dodging. Ludger had already proven he could read the armor at close range. If he was pushing his mana outward, perhaps he was trying to expand that reading, turning the nearby space into a web that caught movement before it reached him.

Clever. Very clever. But not enough. Not nearly enough to win this battle.

Verk’s armor remained faster. Stronger. Better protected. Ludger could dodge for a while, perhaps even embarrass him with a few more near misses, but evasion did not end fights. Not against this suit. Not against sabers that only needed one clean line through flesh.

“You think better senses will save you?” Verk asked, voice low.

Ludger stood across from him, rain sliding over his bloodied face, body still damaged beyond reason. But his eyes remained focused.

Verk’s grip tightened around nothing inside the gauntlets as the mana sabers hissed along the backs of his hands. The boy was doing something. He simply had not realized what yet.

The mana spreading from the brat’s body was too faint in some places, too wide in others, and not behaving like any ordinary spell formation. It wasn’t condensing into an attack. It wasn’t gathering into a shield. It wasn’t forming a familiar rune array or elemental pattern.

But it was deliberate. That alone made it dangerous. Verk’s fingers tightened inside the gauntlets.

No. He wasn’t going to wait for it to be ready. Not again.

This brat was too clever to be underestimated, and Verk had made that mistake once already years ago. Back then, he had let pride and anger turn the fight into something personal. He had wanted to prove superiority. Wanted to crush Ludger slowly enough that the humiliation would reverse itself.

It hadn’t. And tonight, he had almost fallen into the same pattern. Enjoying himself. Tormenting the enemy who had humiliated him. Drawing things out because watching Ludger suffer felt good.

A foolish indulgence.

Verk’s expression hardened inside the helmet. Enough. His armor began to glow. Not in scattered pulses now. Not isolated to palms, legs, sabers, or joints. The entire suit lit from within, rune-lines across the chest, shoulders, spine, and arms all flaring in sequence as power redirected toward the helmet.

The mana sabers dimmed. Then vanished. All the light gathered upward. Into the head. Into the eyes. A dense aura formed around the helmet, white-gold at first, then deepening, twisting, growing heavier until the color began to shift toward something darker.

Purple. The air around Verk cracked. Not metaphorically.

Tiny snapping sounds burst through the rain as the pressure around his helmet distorted hard enough to make the falling water bend away before it could touch him. The ground under his feet trembled. The armor locked itself into place, anchoring with a low, grinding hum while power rose higher and higher.

Ludger didn’t move.

Verk’s glowing helmet eyes burned brighter.

The energy gathering there was far beyond the earlier eye-beam. That had been a precise cutting line, fast and dangerous, but still controlled like a weapon meant to punish an opening.

This was different. This was concentrated annihilation.

The purple light condensed inside the helmet’s eye slits until the glow became almost too intense to look at directly. It did not shine like flame. It pulsed like something alive and starving, a pair of narrow suns trapped behind metal, gathering enough pressure that the space in front of Verk seemed to warp inward.

Every instinct in the area should have screamed. Every fighter with sense should have moved. Ludger didn’t even flinch. He simply stood there in the rain, bloodied and bare-chested, broken guards raised slightly, eyes fixed on Verk as if the world had narrowed to a single line between them.

That only infuriated Verk more.

“Disappear,” he hissed.

Then he fired. The world trembled with a BLAAMM. A line of purple fire erupted from the eyes of Verk’s helmet and tore toward Ludger.

It moved so fast that calling it a projectile felt dishonest. One moment the energy was gathered in Verk’s visor. The next, it had already crossed the space and was hitting Ludger head-on, as if reality had skipped the distance between them out of fear.

Ludger still moved his forearm guards up. Barely. Just enough. The purple line slammed into them. The explosion that followed devoured the night.

Purple fire, white shock, shattered rain, and broken air burst outward from the point of impact in a screaming wave. The ground around Ludger split open. Mud and stone vaporized into steam and dust. The barrier behind him flashed fully visible again, its surface rippling in frantic circles as the blast drove him backward.

Ludger’s boots carved into the ground. Then lost traction.

He was pushed back step by step, body locked behind his crossed arms as the beam kept hammering into him with impossible pressure. The forearm guards caught the attack, but they screamed under it, glowing red, then white, then darkening as layers burned away under the violent purple fire.

He gritted his teeth. Muscles shook. His shoulders strained like they were being pulled apart. The blast kept coming. It did not simply hit. It pressed. It shoved him all the way back into the barrier surrounding the capital.

His spine hit the magical wall. The dome erupted in light behind him.

For a second, Ludger was trapped between both forces, the barrier at his back, Verk’s strongest attack in front of him. The magical wall refused to yield. The purple fire refused to stop. He was caught in the middle, crushed from both sides, his body serving as the unfortunate argument between two forces that both wanted him gone.

Pressure folded through his chest. His ribs screamed. The wound on his shoulder burned open again. His knees bent despite every effort to hold. The forearm guards cracked.

A sharp line split across the left one. Then another across the right. Ludger’s eyes narrowed through the blinding light. The guards had taken too much already.

Bullets. Fire. Wind. Punches. Saber heat. Spiral blasts. Now this.

They could not endure forever.

And finally… they gave in.

The left forearm guard shattered first.

A section snapped free and vanished into purple flame before it could even hit the ground. The rest cracked apart in jagged pieces, spilling sparks and broken metal into the explosion.

The right followed half a heartbeat later.

Its surface buckled inward, runic reinforcement failing with a sharp, ugly shriek. Then it broke apart across his arm, pieces tearing away under the pressure until the last layer of protection between Ludger and the beam was gone.

The guards broke. And the purple fire surged forward.