Wind Step flickered under him in short bursts, turning his movement into stuttering teleport-like dashes. He used the columns as shields and as weapons, baiting stabs into stone so legs stuck for a fraction of a second, then punishing that fraction with lethal counterattacks.
A spider thrust. Its tip sank into the floor. Ludger’s foot came down on the leg.
He stomped once, hard, cracking the limb like dry wood.
Before the spider could retract, he drove a mana bolt into its head and moved on. Another tried to web his shoulders.
He ducked under it, rolled forward, and came up inside its reach. He didn’t cut it. He punched again, fist smashing into the eye cluster, then he shoved the body into its neighbor to disrupt formation.
The spiders hissed and pressed tighter. Ludger started using their own silk against them.
When a webline flew past him and anchored to a column, he stepped aside so a charging spider ran into it, caught mid-thorax by a tightening strand. It jerked, legs scrambling.
He flicked a hardened pebble, tiny, cheap, into its head and dropped it.
The air stank of silk and broken insect fluid. His coat grew heavier with grime. His fingers burned.
He didn’t care.
He kept spinning, ducking, dodging, movement tight and violent, every defense becoming an immediate counter. He wasn’t fencing.
He was disassembling. Slowly, the chamber began to change. Not because the spiders stopped coming.But because the floor started filling with bodies.
White piles stacked near the columns. Broken legs like snapped branches. Webbing sagging under the weight of the dead. The spiders’ clean movement lanes became cluttered, forcing them to climb over their own casualties.
And that was when Ludger’s rhythm turned even colder.
He stopped reacting and started controlling.
He baited stabs into corpses so legs got hung. He moved the fight into the clutter on purpose. He made their numbers work against them, turning the second section’s “order” into a choking mess of their own creation.
A final webshot snapped toward his chest, thick, close, meant to bind.
Ludger waited until it was almost on him, then spun in mid-step and let it wrap around a corpse instead. The strand tightened. The spider that fired it lunged forward to capitalize.
Ludger met it with a straight punch to the head, Wind Step adding that extra brutal snap.
The head plate collapsed. The spider dropped.
Ludger stood over the growing pile, breathing steady, eyes scanning the wider chamber for the next line. Countless spiders still moved in the shadows.
But now they were moving slower. More cautious.
Because the thing they’d tried to stab and bind and overwhelm had turned their kill zone into a slaughterhouse, without ever letting them touch him for more than a heartbeat.
And Ludger, blood-streaked and stink-covered, looked up into the webbed arches with a flat expression that promised he wasn’t here to survive. He was here to finish.
Ludger didn’t chase them deeper.
He held the line at the start of the second section, planted near the transition corridor like a cork in a bottle. If the spiders wanted to keep feeding themselves into him, fine. Better here, wide floor, clear angles, enough space to dodge without shredding half the webbing.
They kept coming.
At first in waves, five, ten, twenty, then in a steady stream, as if something deeper was sending them on a schedule. White bodies skittered over stone and over their own dead, legs stabbing, silk snapping through the air. Ludger met each push with the same brutal rhythm: dodge, break, kill, move. No wasted motion. No pause long enough for webbing to settle.
Time blurred.
The pile of bodies grew.
The silk lines thickened in the air, then snapped as he severed them. The stone floor became slick in places with dark fluid. His arms burned. His lungs burned. Wind Step flickered beneath his feet until it felt like he was running on hot coals made of air.
Then, slowly, something changed.
The spiders stopped coming in a rush.
One last cluster charged from the shadows, hesitated at the sight of the corpse-choked threshold, and still lunged anyway. only to be dismantled in seconds. After that, there was movement deeper inside…but no commitment.
No more bodies throwing themselves at him.
The corridor quieted.
Ludger stood there for a beat, staring into the dim. Waiting for the next wave. Listening for the scrape of legs.
Nothing.
Only the faint hum of dense mana and the distant, muffled rustle of silk being worked somewhere far beyond sight.
His body finally remembered it was allowed to feel.
Steam lifted off him in thin wisps, rising from his shoulders and arms as if the effort itself had heated him from the inside. His coat clung damply. His fingers throbbed. His knees threatened to wobble.
He bent forward and braced his hands on his knees, chest rising and falling in controlled, heavy breaths.
For a few seconds, he stayed like that, head lowered, eyes still angled forward, because resting in a labyrinth was a luxury that got you killed.
Then he forced in a deep breath, slower, longer. Held it. Let it out.
His spine straightened. He pushed himself upright and stopped using his knees as support, posture locking back into that stubborn calm that made him look less tired than he was.
He wiped a smear of grime from his cheek with the back of his wrist, felt the tacky residue, and didn’t bother trying to clean it further.
His gaze stayed on the second section’s wide, columned darkness.
“This labyrinth,” Ludger said quietly, voice rough with exertion, “is getting more bizarre by the minute.”
Then he took one step forward.
Because whatever was deeper had just stopped sending spiders.
And that felt less like victory…and more like an invitation.
Ludger resumed his advance.
Not at full sprint anymore, Wind Step only in short bursts when he needed to clear distance or avoid being boxed in, but steady, deliberate, pushing deeper into the second section’s widened halls.
The architecture stayed grand and wrong. Columns. Arches. Long corridors that felt built for crowds, not monsters. Less webbing. Fewer eggs.
Every so often, he glanced inward, not at the dungeon, but at the invisible feedback that followed him like a shadow.
His Guildmaster skills. He checked them the way a soldier checked a pulse.
If they ticked up, if any experience fed into them, it would mean his people were fighting outside. It would mean another wave had hit the camp, the ship, the perimeter.
He didn’t want that. But he needed to know. The first time he checked, nothing had changed. The second time, still nothing. Minutes passed. He checked again. No gain. No spike. No sign of stress transfer through the guild’s bond.
Which meant the surface was quiet.
For now.
It wasn’t enough to make him relax.
Quiet didn’t mean safe. Quiet meant the enemy hadn’t chosen to spend effort yet.
Ludger kept his senses wide and his steps cautious, eyes tracking corners, Seismic Sense sampling hollows, listening to the subtle rasp of movement deeper inside.
He let out a slow breath and felt irritation twist into a brief, sour regret. He should have brought the magic water container.
Just a few bottles of that mana-rich lake water would’ve been perfect right now—, recovery, clean refill, less strain on his core while he kept pushing. Instead, he was relying on ambient labyrinth mana and stubbornness.
He clicked his tongue.
Bad planning, he thought, then immediately knew why.
Fighting through the whole night had dulled the edges of his judgment. Not enough to make him stupid, but enough to make him miss a simple optimization. A small oversight that didn’t matter until it did.
He exhaled, tightened his grip, and kept moving.
No self-pity. No mental spiral.
Just a note filed away for later: sleep matters, even for me.
The second section stretched ahead, quiet, wide, and wrong.
And Ludger advanced into it without dropping his guard, because in a place like this, the moment you decided you were safe was the moment the labyrinth decided to prove you weren’t.
As Ludger pushed deeper, he started noticing something that didn’t fit.
Spiders weren’t just appearing to attack him.
Some were… moving. In groups.
Not toward him, away from side corridors, slipping out of shadow and heading in the same direction he was going.
White bodies skittered along the edges of the wide halls, legs clicking softly, posture low. They didn’t charge. They didn’t spit web. They moved with purpose, disappearing around bends ahead like they had somewhere to be.
Ludger frowned.
Were they running away from him?
Or were they regrouping, pulling back to form a larger ambush farther in, where the architecture and angles favored them?
Either explanation made his skin itch.
Because neither explanation was normal labyrinth behavior.
Labyrinth monsters were supposed to be territorial, predictable in their violence, guard corridors, punish intruders, reset after death like pieces on a board.
They weren’t supposed to retreat.
And they weren’t supposed to coordinate like an army that understood time and formation.
Last night’s two-front assault had already been suspicious.
This was worse.
This looked like intent flowing through the dungeon like a command.
Ludger slowed, letting Seismic Sense push ahead in a tighter cone, mapping the density of movement. He felt clusters, lines, pockets of weight shifting deeper.
Not random patrols.
Traffic.
He swallowed irritation and forced himself to think.
Do the sealed labyrinths in the Empire work the same way? he wondered.
Because he’d never heard of anything like this happening anywhere else.
No reports of monsters organizing beyond their section lines. No stories of labyrinth creatures retreating from fights to regroup. No mention of coordinated “surface raids” timed with aerial predators from another source.
Nothing.
Labyrinths were dangerous, yes, but they were consistent. Their danger was something people could plan around.
This one felt like it was adapting. Or like it had been waiting for the right trigger to stop acting like a dungeon and start acting like a system.
Ludger’s jaw tightened. If this was how labyrinths could behave when something changed, when something woke up, then the Empire had a bigger problem than a missing viscount and a troublesome regent.
And right now, he was walking straight toward whatever the spiders were converging on.
He didn’t stop. He just adjusted his grip, narrowed his eyes, and followed the flow. Because if the monsters were moving like soldiers… Then there was something deeper giving orders.
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