By the time Ludger reached the bridgehead again, the island had started to feel… quieter.
Not safe. Not friendly.
Just quieter in the way a place got when you’d stabbed enough things that wanted to stab you back.
Viola and Luna returned from their sweep first, moving through the web-snarled terrain with the clean, practiced pace of people who hadn’t wasted time. The three beastmen scouts came in from the opposite side soon after, unhurried and annoyingly calm, like the island had been a mild inconvenience.
Out at sea, Rathen’s ship completed one last wide arc around the island, then slowed, holding position at a distance. The circling stopped. The watching continued.
Ludger lifted a hand and reshaped the stone bridge again making it larger, cleanly from the shoreline toward the ship’s approach line. Then he signaled, two sharp motions that meant now. Bridge. Move.
The first Ironhand hands started crossing, followed by the trainees in controlled groups, officers keeping the flow steady so nobody clogged the span like nervous sheep.
While they approached, Ludger didn’t stand around. He went to work.
A stand of trees, thin, half-starved things struggling under web drape, stood just beyond the rocky shelf. Ludger lifted his hand and used wind like a blade.
A clean gust snapped through the trunks with a sharp hiss.
Branches shuddered, then fell. He didn’t topple them in messy crashes, he chopped them, cutting sections clean, dropping them in controlled arcs so they didn’t tear through the cobweb curtains any more than necessary.
Then he split the timber.
Not with an axe. With precise, directed force, wind pressure cracking each log lengthwise into long, straight sticks, each piece shaved into spear-like poles without an edge.
He stacked them neatly near the bridgehead as people began stepping onto the island. By the time the first recruits arrived, Ludger had a pile big enough to make his intention obvious. He pointed at the stack.
“Each of you,” he said, voice carrying over surf and shifting boots, “grab one.”
The trainees hesitated, then moved, lifting the long sticks like they were unfamiliar weapons.
Ludger gestured toward the thick web curtains hanging from nearby rocks. “Wrap cobwebs on the poles. Don’t tear them into shreds.”
Viola raised an eyebrow. “Like cotton?”
“Not cotton,” Ludger said. “Not silk either.”
He gave the pile a brief glance, already calculating volume and storage. “But it stores. We can haul it like that without ruining it.”
Raukor’s earlier warning echoed in his head: the longer without damage, the better the properties.
This was damage-control harvesting. Efficient. Crude. Good enough.
Ludger’s eyes swept the group. “We’re cleaning the island.”
Some recruits looked confused. Others looked excited in that greedy, tired way people got when they realized the risk had a payout.
Ludger didn’t soften his tone. “Camp perimeter first. Then we strip what we can before night. Keep your shields close. If a web twitches, you call it. If you see movement under the silk, you call it.”
He turned slightly, gaze flicking toward the webbed interior.
“It’s time,” he said flatly, “to make this place pay us back for the trouble.”
The trainees and recruits got to work. At first… clumsily. Not because the task was hard. Because it felt wrong.
Touching cobwebs was one thing when they were clean and distant. Touching them when there were still spider corpses nearby, white bodies the size of people, legs folded like broken scaffolding, made the silk feel less like “resource” and more like “evidence.”
A few kids handled the web like it might bite back. Pinching it with two fingers. Flinching when it stuck. Wincing at the faint smell in the air, like old cloth and something faintly rotten.
One trainee muttered, “This came out of a big-ass spider…”
No one corrected him. The corpses were right there. They could all see it. Still, time did what it always did. It normalized the disgusting.
Once they’d wrapped a few lengths around poles and realized the web behaved like silk, stretching, layering, clinging to itself in neat sheets, they stopped treating it like poison and started treating it like work.
Hands got faster. Movements got more confident.
Teams formed naturally, two people holding a sheet steady while a third wound it tight around the pole. Officers kept the flow organized, calling out which areas to strip first, which curtains to leave intact as natural barriers, which strands to avoid because they looked like trip-lines rather than harvestable layers.
Soon the first bundles were stacked in tidy rows. White rolls of web on wooden poles, crude, but effective. The island began to pay. While they harvested, Ludger did his own kind of work.
He walked to a patch of bare rock near the bridgehead and pressed both palms down. Earth responded instantly. He carved downward and outward, not as a pit but as a shaped space, an underground shelter with structural ribs and compacted walls, reinforced enough that it wouldn’t collapse if something heavy moved above.
He made it big. Big enough for everyone to cram inside without suffocating each other. Multiple entrances for emergency exits. Thick ceilings. A raised lip to keep water out if rain decided to be cruel. A clean section for the wounded, a storage corner for gear, and a central corridor wide enough to move a stretcher through.
When he finished, the opening looked like a simple cut in the earth, easy to miss unless you knew where to stare. Rathen walked up as the last supports settled. He peered inside, then nodded slowly.
“That’s enough to hide everyone,” he said. “If the crows hit at night, we can avoid dragging the fight through the dark.”
Ludger didn’t look pleased. He looked… calculating.
Rathen’s gaze shifted toward the shoreline and the sea beyond. “But the ship will still be exposed.”
Ludger followed his line of sight, eyes narrowing.
The ship sat offshore at a cautious distance, anchored and ready, still a target in open water, still visible, still something flying monsters could find even if the camp vanished underground.
“I can hide the ship,” Ludger said.
Rathen blinked. “Hide it how.”
“With a rune,” Ludger replied, like that answered everything. “Distortion. Light bend. Something similar to Water Mirror. It will cost a lot of mana, though…”
Rathen frowned. “On a ship?”
Ludger shrugged once. “It won’t fool something that’s already on top of it. But it might keep them from spotting it from the sky.”
“And if it doesn’t?” Rathen pressed.
“Then sentries stay aboard and defend,” Ludger said, tone flat. “ They hold the deck. We hold the island.”
Rathen’s jaw tightened. He didn’t like leaving people exposed. But he liked losing the ship even less. Ludger glanced at the growing piles of web rolls on poles, stacked higher with every minute.
“It won’t take long,” Ludger added. “Once the ship is full of material, we leave. We’ll be forced to return to the Empire.”
Rathen exhaled slowly. “So we harvest fast, shelter underground at night, and keep the ship alive long enough to get out.”
“That’s the plan,” Ludger said.
His eyes swept the camp, kids working faster now, webbing being extracted in steady quantity, officers shouting corrections, beastmen moving through terrain like it was made for them.
He didn’t relax. Not fully. Because the island was quiet again. And quiet, here, was never generosity. It was the pause between bites.
Viola drifted over while the web rolls stacked higher and the shelter entrances were being marked with stones and simple signals.
“How long are we staying?” she asked.
She nodded toward the shoreline and the thick draped curtains they were stripping. “Just the material outside the labyrinth will fill the ship. We could leave without ever stepping inside.”
Ludger didn’t answer immediately.
He stared at the island’s webbed interior, expression unreadable, like he was measuring distance in something other than meters. Then he spoke.
“A couple of days,” he said.
Viola blinked. “That’s it?”
Ludger’s eyes stayed fixed inland. “Until I reach the guardian chamber.”
The words hit the group like a cold slap.
Even the nearby recruits, close enough to hear, stilled for a moment. Officers frowned. A few Ironhand hands exchanged looks like they were trying to decide whether to laugh or start praying.
Because everyone understood what that meant.
Reaching a guardian chamber wasn’t an afternoon stroll. It was a long process, sections, attrition, time, planning, supplies, fallback routes, and the kind of repeated pressure that broke inexperienced teams. Ludger said it like he was talking about walking to the next tent.
Viola’s brow furrowed. “You’re serious.”
“Yes,” Ludger replied.
Jorin, overhearing, couldn’t help himself. “Vice Guildmaster… that’s—”
“I know what it is,” Ludger cut in, tone flat.
He glanced at the stacked web rolls, then at the lines of trainees working under supervision. “But don’t confuse my goals with the expedition’s goals.”
The tension eased slightly, replaced by cautious attention.
“The expedition goals are simple,” Ludger continued. “Harvest materials. Fill the ship. Give the trainees and recruits real combat experience without getting them killed.”
He looked over the camp, eyes lingering on the younger faces. “They already got a taste of the sea. They’ll get a taste here. That’s worth more than a clean report.”
Then his gaze returned to the labyrinth entrance, hidden deeper inland, like a mouth waiting.
“The guardian chamber is my goal,” he said. “One step toward deciding what this labyrinth is worth.”
Everyone still frowned, but the shape of it made more sense now. Ludger wasn’t risking the whole operation for a personal obsession. He was separating priorities. He’d reap the profit first. Then he’d take his own measure of the dungeon.
“And after that,” Ludger added, “I decide the future of this labyrinth.”
Viola studied him. “You mean… claim it? Make it a route?”
Ludger shrugged. “Maybe. Maybe we leave it alone. Maybe we burn it out. Depends what’s inside, and what it costs to control.”
His expression tightened for a brief moment, something colder than logistics.
“Also,” he said quietly, “I don’t want to stay away from home too long.”
Viola’s eyes narrowed. “Because of the Regent.”
“Because the Empire is changing,” Ludger corrected. “Fast.”
He looked back toward the sea, where Rathen’s ship and the horizon beyond waited like unfinished sentences.
“And I don’t like being far away when people start rewriting the rules.”
Viola fell into step beside him while the last bundles were stacked and the camp settled into an uneasy rhythm.
“I can help with logistics when we return,” she said. “Trade, buyers, contracts.” Her tone was practical now—less emotion, more Torvares training. “Do you want a list? I can put together possible buyers.”
Ludger didn’t answer right away.
He lifted his head instead and watched the sky. The sun was sinking, turning the horizon orange and bleeding gold across the sea. The white webbing on the cliffs caught the light and glowed like a shroud on fire.
Then he said, calmly, “No.”
Viola frowned like she’d misheard. “No?”
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