The crater near the ruined mountain path was even worse up close.
Far worse.
What had seemed enormous from a distance now looked obscene in scale. The center of the impact zone had been blasted so deep and wide that it barely looked like a product of magic anymore. It looked like the world had simply failed there. Melted stone slumped along the edges. Blackened fragments of rock had fused into ugly glassy shapes. The ground around the crater was cracked and warped, as if reality itself had buckled under too much heat and force at once.
Then someone near the front stopped.
His breath caught.
“There,” he said.
Others followed his stare. And soon enough, they saw them. A few remains. Not bodies. Not even proper corpses. Just fragments.
Small clusters of bone lying in the crater’s outer ruin, scorched nearly white in some places and blackened in others, so damaged and incomplete that it was impossible to tell how many people they had once belonged to. There was no flesh left to speak of. No recognizable shape. No real dignity either.
Just proof.
Proof that living people had been there. And proof that Ludger’s attack had left almost nothing behind. The searchers stared in silence. Several looked sick. One man made a sign of warding almost without thinking. Another stepped back as though getting too close to the bones might somehow draw the same fate onto him.
Still, even those remains didn’t last.
A few breezes swept down from the broken mountain slope, carrying dust and heat across the crater.
The bone fragments shifted. Cracked. Then, before the eyes of everyone watching, they began to come apart. Not dramatically. Not with some magical burst or eerie light.
They simply broke down under the touch of the wind, turning brittle, thinning, and dissolving into pale ash and powder that scattered into the air until nothing meaningful remained. Like they had never existed at all. That was the moment when the fear truly settled in. Not during the explosion. Not even when the mountain lost a piece of itself.
Here.
Watching the last traces of the dead vanish into the wind with no grave, no remains, and no certainty that anyone would ever know exactly who had died in that crater.
Men looked at one another and found the same thing in every face.
Horror.
Awe.
And the sudden ugly understanding that they had witnessed the birth of something they would be telling other people about for the rest of their lives.
Not as a battle. Not as a hunt. As a warning. Because from that day onward, Ludger stopped being just the strange prodigy from Lionsguard, the unsettling vice guildmaster, or the dangerous son of Arslan.
That day, the story changed.
That day, after smoke pillars crossed the countryside, craters followed in his wake, and a mountain was half-erased to bury fleeing enemies under fire so intense even their bones refused to remain… The legend of the Terror of the Lionsguard was born.
Ludger’s return to the capital caused quite a ruckus too.
The city had already begun choking on rumors before he even got close to its gates.
That was how places like the capital worked. Truth traveled slowly when it needed courage, but fear moved fast all on its own. By the time Ludger and the others returned, the story had already spread through taverns, market alleys, guild halls, side streets, noble homes, and the quieter corners of the court where people pretended not to gossip while building entire political positions out of whispers.
The Dalmoren fugitives were dead. A mountain had been blasted apart. The countryside had been scarred by repeated explosions. A boy from Lionsguard had hunted them down and burned the route to ash.
Some versions were exaggerated. Some weren’t exaggerated enough.
Official confirmation of the fugitives’ deaths would still have to come later, of course. There were always procedures. Reports. Inspections. People in polished rooms needing to nod gravely over parchment before accepting what half the Empire already believed.
Still, very few doubted Ludger had done it. Not after the smoke trails had been seen. Not after the search groups came back pale-faced and quieter than before. Not after too many witnesses told versions of the same story with the sort of shaken certainty that made even skeptics uncomfortable.
So when Ludger entered the capital again, the city looked at him differently. Before, people had respected him. Or feared his family. Or distrusted the north. Or whispered about Lionsguard as that increasingly dangerous little faction that kept growing stronger under House Torvares’ shadow.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Now, though…
Now the people looked at Ludger himself. And what they felt was not respect. Not really. It was fear. The kind that lingered.
The kind that made merchants lower their eyes a second too fast when he passed. The kind that made guards stiffen without meaning to. The kind that made nobles behind carriage windows stare for a moment too long before remembering they were supposed to look superior to things they didn’t understand.
Because this was no longer just a matter of talent or reputation.
This was scale. A single boy of fourteen had wiped out that many fugitives, shattered pursuit lines across the countryside, and erased a good chunk of a mountain in the process.
That was no longer the sort of thing people attached neatly to words like genius, heir, or prodigy. Those words became too small.
Looking at Ludger now, many in the capital reached a far uglier conclusion. He looked less like a human boy and more like a monster clever enough to wear one’s shape. Not because he snarled. Not because he lost control. But because he didn’t. That was what unsettled people most.
He returned without swagger. Without triumph. Without some wild-eyed delight in destruction. He carried himself the same way he usually did, calm, composed, almost annoyingly practical.
As if obliterating people and carving through a mountain was simply another task he had completed because it needed doing.
That made it worse. Much worse. The capital understood something now that it had only suspected before.
Ludger was not frightening because he might become dangerous later. He already was.
And while people also understood now that he stood on the side of the Empire, or at least had acted in its favor this time—that did very little to ease the fear.
If anything, it complicated it.
Because an enemy was simple. An enemy could be hated, resisted, and blamed from a distance. But a monster on your side? A monster who answered to the Empire, walked its streets, entered its halls, and acted under its banners while still feeling fundamentally too destructive to belong anywhere civilized? That was a different kind of terror.
So the capital watched Ludger pass with a silence that followed him like a shadow.
No one rushed to challenge him. No one laughed too loudly near him. And even those who told themselves that his loyalty made him safe could not fully suppress the colder thought beneath it:
if this was what Ludger did to the Empire’s enemies, then no one in the capital wanted to learn what he would do to its traitors.
Ludger went straight to the castle.
He did not slow for the capital’s tension, did not bother acknowledging the stares following him through the streets, and did not alter his pace just because people kept moving out of his way a little too quickly. The city could whisper all it wanted. It could shake in its boots, gossip in drawing rooms, and turn him into whatever kind of monster fit best inside frightened minds.
That changed nothing.
He still had business to finish.
By the time he reached the outer security layers near the castle grounds, the atmosphere had shifted from civilian fear to official discomfort. Guards were already on edge before he got too close. That was understandable. The capital had spent the last stretch of time surviving explosions, executions, rumors, and political rot, and now the boy tied to at least half of that chaos was walking toward the seat of power with three masked figures behind him like a personal escort of bad decisions.
The guards at the approach stiffened the moment they recognized him.
Not all of them knew him well by face, but enough did. And the others had clearly heard descriptions. There were not many fourteen-year-old boys in the Empire who could make grown soldiers suddenly decide that saying the wrong thing might reduce their life expectancy.
Still, protocol was protocol. Or at least the capital liked pretending that was still true. The nearest guard stepped forward and raised a hand.
“Stop there,” he said, forcing more authority into his voice than he probably felt. “State your purpose before approaching further.”
Ludger looked at him. Just looked. The guard held the gaze for exactly long enough to regret having it.
Ludger did not seem tired. That was what made it annoying. He should have looked strained after everything that had happened. He should have looked winded, burned out, or at the very least mildly inconvenienced by the destruction of half a mountain and the death march across the countryside that followed.
Instead, he looked composed. Dusty, yes. Worn at the edges, perhaps. But fundamentally composed. That, more than anything else, made him harder to place in ordinary human categories. The three behind him did not help.
Their masks were still on, strange and unnerving enough that the guards could not easily decide whether they were meant to hide identity, provoke unease, or simply advertise that the north kept producing increasingly irritating people with no sense of decorum.
The one on the left stood with a quiet kind of readiness that suggested she could move very fast if needed. The broader one held himself like a stable threat rather than an immediate one. The last looked almost casual, but there was something in the way she watched the guards that made that casualness feel less comforting than it should have.
And their eyes… Even through the masks, the guards could see enough. Cold.
Not nervous at all.
Ludger let the silence stretch just enough to make the guard sweat, then said, in the same calm tone he might have used to comment on the weather,
“I’ll be waiting for my payment at Lionfang.”
That was all. No explanation. No formal address. No request for entry. Just that sentence, dropped between them with the blunt simplicity of a man informing the world how reality would proceed from this point onward.
The guards stared at him.
They understood immediately.
This was not really a conversation with them. It was a message. A dry, pointed one. Ludger was telling them exactly what to pass along to the Regent: the hunt was over, the job was done, and if the capital intended to uphold its side of the arrangement, then the payment could be sent north.
He was not asking to be admitted. He was not asking for an audience.
He was not going to stand around playing at polite court ritual just so someone in silk and titles could pretend he needed to wait obediently at the gate.
That irritated the guards more than they wanted to show.
Their expressions tightened by small degrees. One looked faintly insulted. Another glanced at the others as if hoping someone more senior would arrive quickly and spare him from having to respond to this with dignity. The first guard’s jaw shifted once before he forced it still.
Because really, what was he supposed to say?
Demand more courtesy from the boy who had apparently returned from erasing fugitives and damaging a mountain badly enough to terrify half the capital?
Insist on etiquette?
That sounded like an excellent way to become a very brief lesson in priorities.