They advanced carefully at first—three shadows moving in tense silence. The air inside the tunnel felt heavier with every step, carrying the stale weight of mana left to rot. Dust motes drifted in the faint glow of Maurien’s wind-light, and even Freyra’s breathing sounded too loud.

Ludger kept his hand hovering just above the ground, feeling the rhythm of the earth like a heartbeat beneath his palm. Every few meters, a faint echo pinged through his senses—pressure plates, hidden runes, tripwires. He disarmed them one by one, the soft rumble of shifting stone the only sound breaking the stillness.

Then the air changed.

A subtle vibration ran through the walls—a faint hum, as if the mountain itself had just exhaled. Ludger’s head snapped up. Maurien’s eyes narrowed, and in the next heartbeat, he hissed, “Run.”

They didn’t need to be told twice.

Ludger surged forward, boots striking hard stone. Freyra’s heavier steps thundered behind him, while Maurien’s magic stirred the air in their wake, bending wind to smother sound and deflect any traps they missed.

The corridor wasn’t long, but it twisted sharply—each turn close and claustrophobic. Ludger took the front, his focus locked on the path ahead. With every step, he sent small seismic pulses through the ground, feeling for the faint vibrations of hidden mechanisms. Each time he found one, he struck back instantly—stones folding, metal bending, wires snapping apart.

A faint chain of clicks echoed behind them as traps deactivated in sequence. The sound followed them like a quiet applause of failure.

Ludger’s jaw clenched. “Whoever designed this damn place,” he muttered between breaths, “had too much time on their hands.”

A section of the ceiling trembled as another trap triggered and immediately crushed itself under his counterpulse. “They could’ve just built a door,” he growled.

Maurien smirked faintly, even as he twisted his wrist to redirect a gust of wind that snuffed out a rune’s activation spark. “Be grateful. Their obsession’s saving us the trouble of fighting.”

Freyra barked a laugh mid-sprint. “Then we’ll fight whoever’s dumb enough to build this maze instead!”

“Focus,” Ludger snapped, though a hint of dry amusement colored his tone.

The faint glow of open space appeared ahead—the end of the corridor. The last traps disarmed themselves in a muffled crunch of earth, and Ludger exhaled sharply, sweat running down his temple.

“Finally,” he muttered. “If the next room’s full of more traps, I’m burying the architect alive.”

Maurien’s voice echoed behind him, calm but edged with readiness. “Let’s hope he’s still breathing, then.”

The tunnel opened abruptly into a wide chamber—and hell greeted them the instant they crossed the threshold.

A blinding flash seared across Ludger’s vision, followed by the thunder of explosions. Fireballs roared through the dark like a dozen miniature suns, tearing through the air in a storm of heat and smoke. The sheer pressure made the stone floor quake.

“Down!” Ludger barked, already dropping into a crouch, one hand slamming toward the ground to raise an earthen wall—

—but Maurien was faster.

With a sharp flick of his wrist, the air in front of them howled into motion. A wall of compressed wind unfurled across the chamber like a rippling sheet of glass, the rushing current bending each fireball away in spiraling bursts of flame and shrapnel. The impacts shook the air, the detonations echoing like drums in a canyon, but none of the blasts reached them.

Ludger blinked through the glare, his eyes struggling to adjust. Before he could ask anything, Maurien snapped his other hand upward, muttering an incantation. A small orb of fire flared near the ceiling, bursting into a steady flame that cast harsh light over the cavern.

The sight that followed hit harder than the explosions.

It was an old mine—walls ribbed with rotted timber supports, veins of blackened rock streaked with rust. But the structure didn’t matter. What mattered were the people standing within it.

At least ten figures in mismatched gear lined the far side of the chamber, faces covered by bandanas and goggles, their silhouettes half-hidden by the smoke. Each one gripped a strange, bulky object braced against their shoulders—metal tubes reinforced with runes and copper channels.

Recognition hit Ludger immediately, a sick twist in his gut.

“Those aren’t staves,” he muttered. “They’re—”

One of the figures pulled a trigger. The device spat a bright orb of fire that screamed through the air before exploding against Maurien’s barrier in a flash of orange and pressure.

“—grenade launchers,” Ludger finished grimly, squinting through the smoke.

More triggers clicked in rapid succession, each one followed by a concussive blast. Dozens of fireballs slammed against the wind wall, each impact distorting the barrier like ripples on a lake. The tunnel behind them filled with heat and echoing thunder.

Freyra gritted her teeth, raising her arm to shield her face. “What kind of magic is that?”

“Not magic,” Maurien said, his tone cold, eyes narrowing as the last wave of fire splashed harmlessly against the shimmering barrier. “Engineering. Runic work. Someone’s arming bandits with magitech”

Maurien’s expression was stone. His wind wall pulsed once, absorbing another explosion before settling again. “Let’s disarm them,” he said quietly, the air around him vibrating with restrained power.

Ludger’s hands clenched, mana already flowing through his fingers. “Gladly.”

And in the light of the burning ceiling, the three of them prepared to return fire.

Maurien’s eyes narrowed. The faint hum of wind around him deepened, growing from a low whisper to a roar. He flicked his fingers once—almost lazily—and the wind wall that had been holding back the barrage suddenly folded inward, then surged forward like an invisible tidal wave.

The compressed air detonated across the chamber.

The bandits staggered as the shockfront slammed into them, hurling fire-slingers off balance. Their strange launchers clattered against stone, and several men hit the ground hard, gasping for breath.

That was all the opening Ludger needed.

“Move!” he shouted, already sprinting into the chaos. Freyra followed with a savage grin, her boots pounding the stone.

They hit the disoriented line like a hammer strike.

Freyra’s first blow shattered a man’s ribs before he even raised his weapon. She pivoted, elbowed another in the jaw, and drove her knee into a third’s stomach, sending him sprawling into a pile of broken crates.

Ludger’s movements were sharper—quieter. He flowed between lunges, his strikes short, efficient, merciless. One punch caved in a bandit’s cheekbone; an elbow shattered another’s jaw. His hands were a blur—redirecting blades, cracking bones, disarming in silence. Every motion was measured to disable, not to kill—quick precision over brutality.

Steel flashed as the surviving bandits pulled curved knives, shouting incoherently over the ringing chaos. The flickering firelight caught the runes on their blades—poison, or maybe something else. Ludger barely registered it; he was already inside their reach.

Three men lunged for him at once. He shifted his weight, sidestepped, and felt the earth beneath their boots. A pulse of mana through his feet tripped their balance, and before they could recover—

Thwump!

Small, dense balls of wind shot across the chamber, striking their skulls in rapid succession. Each impact was clean, precise, and brutally efficient—like being struck by invisible hammers. The men’s heads snapped sideways from the force, staggering them in dazed confusion.

Maurien stood a few meters behind, his hand raised, eyes cold. “You’re welcome,” he muttered.

Ludger didn’t waste the gift. He drove an elbow into the first man’s temple, pivoted, and palm-struck the second under the chin, snapping his head back before catching him mid-fall to ease him down. The third went down with a sharp crack as Ludger swept his legs and struck him across the side of the neck.

Freyra, meanwhile, fought like a living avalanche—every punching smashing a skull and breaking bones, every strike smashing armor. She laughed once, low and wild, as a man’s blade shattered against her bracer.

Within moments, the chamber was filled with the sounds of groans, scattered weapons, and the dull rhythm of collapsing bodies.

Ludger stood at the center, breathing steadily, his fists lowering as he surveyed the survivors. “I didn’t think I’d have to thank such engineering for making you idiots stand still long enough to get beaten,” he muttered.

Maurien smirked faintly. “See? Collaboration’s already paying off.”

Freyra cracked her knuckles and kicked one of the fallen launchers aside. “If this is what the Empire arms their dogs with,” she said, voice thick with disdain, “then maybe I should start hunting them, too.”

Ludger’s gaze hardened, the gears already turning behind his eyes. “No,” he said quietly. “We’ll find who’s training them first. Then we’ll decide who needs burying.”

The chamber stilled again, filled only by the faint sound of dripping water—and the lingering scent of gunpowder and blood.

Ludger crouched by the nearest fallen launcher, fingertips skimming the rune-etched metal. It hummed faintly, a dead thing still warm from use. The design wasn’t something he had seen around—too precise, too neat.

“Maurien,” he said, voice flat, “these—where do they come from?”

The older mage moved among the bodies with the languid confidence of someone who’d seen worse. He plucked a ruined bandolier free of a man’s clutched fingers and held the launcher up to the flickering ceiling-firelight. His brow tightened as he traced the lines with a gloved thumb.

“Past the border,” Maurien said. “The next country over. There’s a stretch of academy-towns and private forges—magic researchers and engineers trading ideas for coin. I’ve seen crude versions before, made by desperate smiths and hungry alchemists. These are better. More rune integration, cleaner channeling. Whoever supplied these had access to real workshops.”

Ludger looked at the ruined men around them. Their breathing was ragged. Faces slack. Bones at impossible angles where his strikes had done what they needed to do. He closed his eyes for a second and tasted iron on the air.

Maurien knelt beside the nearest of Ludger’s captives, checked pulse, jaw, the way a bone lay oddly where it should not. He didn’t bother to sugarcoat anything. “You left them alive,” he said. “Intentionally. Their limbs are so broken they’ll curse you when they wake up. Won’t be pretty.”

Ludger let the word sit. He’d aimed to disable, to keep speech possible. Information was worth more than bodies—most of the time.

Maurien’s hand moved over to Freyra’s spread of victims. He felt for a pulse, and the brief shake through his shoulders told the story. “These,” he said quietly, “are gone. You didn’t leave them anything to talk about.”

Freyra’s chest rose, a flash of something—defiance, maybe regret—crossing her face. “They drew blades,” she said, voice rough. “They would’ve killed us.”

“They would’ve bled us of time and answers,” Ludger shot back, sharper than he meant. He looked Freyra in the eye. “We needed names. We needed directions. Dead men don’t tell us who bought these or where they came from. You know that.”

She bristled, lips pressed, then dropped her gaze. “I don’t like being soft,” she said, quiet. “I don’t like letting people live to stab you in the dark.”

“I get that,” Ludger said. “But letting them live long enough to hate you is better than killing the only lead.” He folded his arms. “If we had gotten enough names, we could have traced these to a buyer. We could have found a workshop, a patron—something that points at who’s paying for rifles and grenades instead of herbs and coin.”

Maurien stepped between them, hands up in a small neutral gesture. “Both approaches work when used together,” he said. “Ludger’s way gets answers. Freyra’s way makes sure the trail stays clean. Tonight we used both, because we had to.”

Ludger let his jaw relax a fraction. “Fine. But next time—if there’s a choice—ask me before you start collecting skulls.” He sounded weary, not angry.

Freyra snorted, but there was no fire in it. “Don’t lecture me about discretion, kid.”

“And we will,” Maurien said, voice low and steady. “Gather the weapons, the scraps. I’ll see what I can read from the patterns. We take the weapons, we follow the metalsmiths, and we follow the money. That’s how you find who’s buying these for mountain thieves.”

Ludger nodded once and began working—binding wrists, stacking broken weapons, pressing his Seismic Sense in small, careful probes around the chamber to make sure there were no hidden survivors and no alarm nodes left to trip. The implications settled in his chest like a cold stone: foreign-made war-gear in the hands of traffickers. That wasn’t just banditry. That was a line that, if followed, would reach people with names and shelters and pockets too deep to ignore.

When the last of the work was finished—bodies checked, weapons gathered, and Maurien marking the runes for study—Ludger’s attention drifted to the far wall of the chamber.

A faint draft brushed against his cheek, cool and constant. He followed it to a seam in the stone behind a half-collapsed support beam. With a little help from his magic, the rocks shifted, revealing the mouth of another tunnel—narrow, steady, and sloping downward before curling out of sight.

Ludger crouched near the entrance, peering into the dark. “There’s another one,” he said. “Opposite direction from where we came. Judging by the air, it probably leads through the mountain… maybe out the other side.”

Maurien walked over, rubbing his long beard thoughtfully. The motion carried that familiar weight—his habit when deciding how much truth to share.

Ludger tilted his head. “If it really goes to the other side, that means we’re close to the border, right? How far is this other country anyway?”

Maurien’s eyes drifted toward the tunnel’s faint darkness. “Depends where you measure from,” he said at last. “But since you asked…” He sighed, as if resigning himself to a lecture. “You might as well learn some history.”

He crouched beside Ludger, tapping a finger against the ground. “A long time ago, the Empire was much bigger than what you see now. Not just one people or one culture—dozens of them, stitched together by trade, conquest, and the illusion of order. The imperial family claimed divine right, and for a while, everyone played along.”

He rubbed his beard again, eyes distant. “Then they got too strong. Too proud. Too certain they could keep the whole continent in a chokehold. That’s when the cracks started showing. Provinces rebelled, old kingdoms resurfaced, and mages who hated the capital’s leash took their knowledge and left.”

Freyra listened quietly from a few paces back, her expression unreadable.

Maurien continued, voice lower now. “The ones who fled the longest and farthest went beyond these mountains. When the last of the surviving imperial bloodline and their loyalists realized they couldn’t hold the heartlands, they ran here—to this side. They built new fortresses, new names, new excuses. What’s left of the ‘Empire’ today is just the remnant of those who survived the purge.”

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