Luna read the shift in his expression and frowned. “You’re thinking too far.”
“I’m thinking exactly as far as I have to,” Ludger whispered back.
Because that was the terrifying part. If they ignored this and left, they might be abandoning a problem that would eventually grow teeth and come looking for other doors.
If they helped, they might be confirming to the locals that outsiders existed, and giving them a reason to seek those outsiders out later. Either option had consequences. Real ones. The kind you couldn’t punch away. Ludger’s eyes narrowed as the distant tremors continued, each step ahead sending a heavier shiver through the ground.
“We need to see what it is,” he said, voice low. “Before we decide anything.”
Luna’s grip tightened on her earth-forged dagger.
“And if it’s something from a labyrinth,” she whispered, “then we’re in the worst kind of situation.”
Ludger didn’t disagree. He just listened to the earth tremble and felt, with grim clarity, that getting home had just become a lot more than finding a way back. It was about making sure whatever doors existed in this place didn’t open the wrong way later.
They moved again, slow and careful, letting the tremors guide them instead of charging blindly into whatever was ahead.
The jungle thinned in uneven patches, like something had forced it open rather than nature deciding to be kind. The canopy broke, moonlight pouring in through gaps that didn’t belong. The air grew clearer, less damp leaf smell, more raw earth, blood, and that faint pressure that made Ludger’s skin prickle.
Then the trees stopped being trees. The forest opened into a wide cleared area. Not a neat clearing like woodcutters made. A scar. A big part of the land had been cleaned out in a rough circle, the boundary jagged and uneven. There were trunks lying sideways, roots still attached, dirt clinging to them in heavy clods. Whole trees had been ripped out of the ground like weeds. Some lay snapped in half, splintered down the middle as if something had grabbed and twisted until the wood surrendered.
Luna crouched lower instinctively, eyes tracking the damage.
“These weren’t chopped,” she whispered.
“No,” Ludger murmured. “They were… removed.”
He let his senses touch the churned soil, reading the pressure marks like fingerprints. The ground told the story in blunt, ugly detail: deep depressions, long drags, impacts heavy enough to compact earth into hard plates.
Strength. Sheer, stupid strength. Ludger’s gaze lifted. And he saw what had done it. Giants. Humanoid, towering shapes moving in the clearing with slow, heavy steps, each footfall a soft quake that crawled up through the roots into Ludger’s bones. They were tall enough that even at a distance they looked like walking pillars between the remaining trees. Broad shoulders. Long limbs. Thick torsos. They could have been sculpted from a giant’s idea of a soldier.
And at first glance… They looked like humans from the Empire. Same general proportions. Same upright stance. Same two arms, two legs, head, face, hair. But something was wrong. Not in an obvious “monster” way. Not horns or scales or extra eyes.
Wrong in the way a familiar person becomes frightening if they start moving just slightly off-beat. Their posture was the first thing Ludger noticed. They stood too still when they weren’t walking, shoulders slack, heads angled at odd degrees, necks not quite aligned like they’d forgotten how to hold themselves comfortably. When they moved, they didn’t shift weight naturally. They drifted their center of gravity forward, then corrected late, like puppets learning to mimic walking after watching it from far away.
Then there was their behavior. Creepy was the only useful word. They didn’t talk. They didn’t gesture to each other in any normal way. They’d pause suddenly, mid-step, like a thought had yanked their strings. Then their heads would turn in sharp, delayed movements, snapping toward nothing, toward a tree line, toward the sky, toward the ground, toward each other, with the same empty attention.
Like something was listening through them. Like they were constantly reacting to stimuli Luna and Ludger couldn’t see. One of them took a slow step forward, stopped, and tilted its head, staring at the open air as if watching someone stand there.
Then it smiled. Not wide. Not dramatic. Just a small curl of lips that didn’t fit the rest of its expression. Ludger felt a cold prickle crawl up his spine. They looked like people. But they didn’t feel like people.
They felt like the result of people who had spent far too long watching something they shouldn’t. Like eyes that had seen behind a curtain the brain was never meant to pull back. Like minds that had been forced to understand shapes that didn’t match the world’s logic, and the effort had scraped something essential out of them.
That was the impression Ludger got, stronger than any mana reading. Not “evil.” Not “hungry.” Just… wrong in the head. Broken by knowledge. Twisted by exposure. As if reality itself had leaned too close and whispered into their skulls until their thinking became crooked. Ludger swallowed slowly, eyes narrowing.
“I don’t like this,” Luna breathed.
Ludger didn’t answer. He couldn’t stop staring at the giants’ faces, so human-shaped, so familiar in the wrong way, and the way they moved as if they were imitating life from memory rather than living it.
His mind supplied the only word that fit. Labyrinth. And whatever door had opened here hadn’t just let monsters through. It had let something through that looked like it used to be human.
Ludger stared at the giants and felt something inside him settle into a hard, ugly clarity.
They looked like humans. But his mind refused to file them as human. Not because of prejudice. Not because of shape. Because every instinct he had, every learned pattern from fighting beasts, delving labyrinths, watching mana signatures twist wrong, was screaming the same message at him:
Do not humanize them.
His senses treated them like a trap wearing skin. A target. Something that would punish hesitation. Even from this distance, the air around them felt… contaminated. Not thick with mana the way a storm was, but heavy with the wrong kind of presence, like standing near a corpse that hadn’t decided it was dead yet.
Ludger’s thoughts tried to stay analytical, count them, read their routes, find cover, determine whether there was a labyrinth gate nearby… But Luna’s breathing cut through the moment like a knife.
It was too loud. Too fast. He glanced sideways and saw her shoulders rising and falling sharply, chest working like she’d just sprinted uphill. Her eyes were wide, fixed on the clearing, pupils dilated in a way that had nothing to do with darkness.
Her face had gone pale. She took one step back. Then another. Not tactical. Not repositioning. Retreating. Like her body had decided the only correct plan was to leave now and it didn’t care what her pride thought about it.
Ludger reached toward her without looking away from the giants. “Luna—”
She didn’t answer. Her throat worked like she was trying to swallow air and failing. The aura from those things, whatever wrongness they carried, was hitting her hard. True terror. The kind that bypassed training and went straight for the part of the brain that remembered what it meant to be prey.
Luna took another step back. Her heel found nothing. For a split second, Ludger didn’t understand what he was seeing. Then her leg buckled like it had been cut. She dropped. Just… dropped. Ludger lunged and almost missed her by a breath. He caught her under the shoulders and pulled her against him before her head could hit the ground again.
Her body was cold. Not “cool from night air” cold. Cold in a wrong, sudden way, as if her blood had forgotten how to move properly. And she was still breathing hard, ragged, shallow pulls that scraped through her chest like she couldn’t get enough oxygen no matter how much she stole from the air.
“Luna,” Ludger hissed, low and tight. Her eyes fluttered, unfocused. “Hey. Focus.”
No response. Just that panicked breathing and a tremor running through her limbs. Ludger didn’t waste another second. Wind gathered around his feet in a tight coil, silent and compressed. He shifted Luna’s weight into a carry that wouldn’t jostle her head too much, then moved.
Wind Step.
A smooth burst, no loud crack, no flashy arc, just a controlled surge that carried him backward through the forest with unnatural speed. Leaves blurred. Roots vanished beneath his boots. He threaded between trunks like a shadow, keeping low, keeping quiet, putting distance between them and the clearing before anything in there could decide to look their way.
Only when the tremors faded and the air stopped feeling poisoned did he slow. He lowered Luna carefully against a tree trunk, keeping her upright, one hand steadying her chin as he checked her pupils and the stiffness in her posture.
She was still cold. Still breathing too fast. Still trapped in that invisible grip of fear. Ludger’s jaw clenched. He exhaled once, sharp with frustration, at the situation, at the island, at himself for letting them get close enough for this to happen.
Then, quietly, he said the thing he’d been holding back since day one.
“That,” he muttered, voice low and flat as he watched her fight for breath, “is why I told you to let me heal you… and then rest properly.”
His eyes flicked back in the direction they’d come from, where the giants still walked in that wrong clearing, human-shaped and not human at all. Targets. He tightened his grip on Luna’s shoulder, grounding her with pressure. And this time, he didn’t let his mind pretend they could solve this by simply “observing a bit more.”
By the time they reached the shelter again, Luna was barely walking.
Not unconscious, her eyes were open, tracking shadows, but unfocused, like she was looking through the world instead of at it. Her skin still carried that wrong chill, and her breathing kept coming in shallow, frantic pulls that didn’t match the slow pace of their retreat.
Ludger didn’t waste time. The moment they were inside the leaf-and-bamboo tent, he set her down on the coconut-leaf mat and knelt behind her head. His fingers found the swollen spot at the back of her skull where she’d struck the rail days ago.
The swelling was there, small, firm, tender. But it wasn’t enough to explain what had just happened. Not that. Not the cold skin. Not the panicked breathing. Not the sudden collapse like her body had simply shut off.
Still, he started where he could. Ludger placed his palm over the injury and pushed mana through Healing Touch.
Soft, controlled, no brute-force flooding. He let the warmth seep into tissue, knitting capillaries, easing bruised nerves, coaxing inflammation down. The swelling faded under his hand like a bruise being erased by time sped up.
He did it again. And again. Each pulse was gentle, precise. Luna’s breathing didn’t change immediately. Then, on the third pass, her chest hitched, and her next inhale came deeper.
Her shoulders loosened a fraction. The frantic rhythm began to slow, uneven at first, then steadier, as if something inside her finally remembered how to breathe without fighting. Ludger’s brows pulled together. Her temperature shifted too. The coldness that had clung to her skin started to retreat, warmth returning to her cheeks and fingers. Her shaking eased. The tension in her jaw softened.
And then, as if someone had cut her strings… Luna sagged. Her eyelids fluttered once, twice, and then she simply dropped into sleep, head lolling forward as a heavy wave of exhaustion swallowed her whole. Not the normal “I’m tired” kind of sleep.
The sudden kind. The kind that felt like her body had been running from something invisible and finally collapsed the moment it believed it was safe. Ludger stayed still for a few seconds, hand hovering near her shoulder, watching her breathing settle into a slow, even rhythm.
He sat back, rubbing his chin.
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