To an observer, it would have looked like the air itself had filled with weapons. Ludger lifted a hand. And fired.
The spears launched without a sound at first, just sudden motion, streaking through darkness in straight, brutal lines.
The first two targets never even turned. A spear hit the nearest giant square in the forehead.
The impact was clean and violent, punching through skull with the kind of force you only got when earth-shaping met intent. The giant’s head snapped back, and its body simply folded, collapsing into the dirt with a heavy, wet thud.
Another spear took a second giant through the eye ridge, shattering bone and driving deep. It dropped like a puppet with its strings cut, limbs slack, posture never correcting because there was nothing left inside it to correct.
Two down. No alarm. No shout. The third spear went lower. Torso. It punched into the chest and buried itself near the sternum.
The giant staggered half a step, finally reacting—head twitching toward the direction the strike came from… Then the rune activated.
A pale film crawled across its body from the wound outward, not like normal ice, but like a sudden, invasive stillness. The skin, too human, too familiar, tightened and paled as a thin frost-web spread along veins and muscle lines. The air around it seemed to chill for a heartbeat.
The giant’s movement stuttered. Shoulders locked mid-rise. Jaw froze half-open. Its breath, if it even breathed, came out as a faint, foggy hiss that died immediately. Then the freezing accelerated.
Its chest stopped expanding. The muscles seized as if the body itself had forgotten how to move. A crust of frost crept over its ribs and up its neck, spreading across the face in uneven patches, glazing eyelids, sealing the corners of the mouth, turning that wrong expression into a dead mask.
The giant toppled slowly, stiffening as it fell, hitting the ground with a heavy crack like dropped stone.
Another torso hit. Another freeze.
This one tried to lift an arm, and the limb locked halfway, fingers curling in a stiff, useless claw as ice crawled over knuckles and forearm, turning the skin dull and rigid. The frost spread down into the legs, anchoring it in place for a single second, then the whole body locked and tipped over, solidifying into a frozen corpse that looked like a grotesque statue left in the wrong world.
Only then did the rest begin to notice. A few heads snapped around at once. Postures shifted, wrongly, jerkily, but with sudden focus. The aura in the clearing thickened like a pressure wave.
Ludger didn’t pause.
He raised his hand again, spears still floating around him like a storm of sharpened earth, and sent another volley into the darkness. Because the first rule of fighting something that attacked your mind was simple:
Don’t give it time to start.
The clearing changed the moment the giants truly noticed him.
At first, the deaths had been quiet, bodies dropping, freezing, turning into stiff statues in the dirt without a scream or a warning. The others had stood there in their wrong, drifting posture, reacting late as if the world needed time to reach them.
Then several heads snapped in his direction at once. Not smoothly. Not like people turning to face a threat. Like joints being yanked into alignment by invisible hands.
And when their eyes locked onto him, Ludger felt the air thicken. Their aura hit harder the instant he looked at them directly.
It wasn’t a wave that knocked him back. It was subtler, and nastier. A pressure behind his eyes. A crawling sensation at the edge of thought, like someone had slid cold fingers into the back of his skull and started squeezing. For a heartbeat, his mind offered a useless, intrusive impulse:
Run.
Not tactical retreat. Not reposition. Just run.
Ludger’s jaw clenched, and he forced his gaze away from their faces, back to torsos, to limbs, to the ground between them. Peripheral tracking. Motion. Angles. Distances.
The pressure eased a fraction immediately. So it was real. Good. He could work with real. The giants started moving. Charging, but not like trained soldiers.
They came with an unnatural, lurching speed, long legs eating ground in heavy strides, feet slamming into the dirt hard enough to send tremors through the clearing. Their arms swung loose at first, then tightened into crude running balance. Their shoulders rolled forward too far, posture slightly hunched, like they were leaning into an invisible wind.
And their faces… That was the worst part. Their expressions didn’t match the situation. A few wore slack, empty smiles that didn’t reach their eyes.
One had its mouth hanging open in a silent, delighted “O,” like it was watching a performance.
Another’s lips were pulled back too far, teeth showing, not a snarl, not rage, just… the shape a face made when it tried to imitate emotion it didn’t understand. They ran past the bodies of their fallen without slowing.
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Past frozen corpses locked mid-step. Past shattered skulls and stiffened limbs. No hesitation. No alarm. No grief.
It was like the deaths didn’t register as meaningful, like the only relevant stimulus was Ludger.
Targets. Chase. Close. Kill.
That single track obsession slammed into the clearing like a command. Ludger lifted his hand again. Spears launched.
Again.
Again.
He fired into heads and throats when he could, clean kills that dropped them instantly. When a spear sank into a torso, the freezing rune flashed into effect and the giant’s movement stuttered, frost crawling across skin and muscle, locking joints and turning momentum into a heavy topple.
But there were too many. They kept coming.
From the edges of the clearing. From behind uprooted trunks. From the direction of the gate that still stood open and unguarded, dark as a mouth. Each time he thinned them, another set stepped forward like the line had no end. Ludger’s orbiting storm of spears shrank rapidly.
He’d brought hundreds, and he burned through them in what felt like moments, volley after volley, each throw precise, efficient, ruthless. His last bundle emptied faster than it should have.
The final few spears hovered beside him like reluctant stragglers. He fired them anyway.
A headshot. A throat. A chest, freeze, lock, fall. Then the air around him went suddenly bare. No more hovering points. No more easy distance kills. And the giants were still coming. Closer now. Close enough that he could hear their footsteps over the surf and the jungle. Close enough that their presence pressed on his mind like a hand over his mouth.
Ludger inhaled slowly, forced the breath down deep, and adjusted his bracers with a sharp tug, tightening straps, settling the fit, aligning the runes. His eyes narrowed, not with panic, but with decision.
“Alright,” he muttered, voice flat.
He rolled his shoulders once, feeling Overdrive hum under his skin like a loaded spring.
“It’s time to make this a bit more personal.”
Ludger could have fed mana into his bracers right then. One pulse and the mana would flare. One clean ignition and he could start cutting the clearing apart with wind-enhanced strikes or precise bursts of force.
But he didn’t. Not yet. He could feel how many there were, how the gate behind them kept vomiting new movement into the world. If he spent mana too early, he’d end up standing here empty again with the real threat still breathing.
So he saved it. Instead, he let something older and uglier rise.
Rage Flow.
It slid through him like a hot current, not mindless fury, controlled, channeled, the Berserker’s tool used as a lever instead of a tantrum. His heart rate climbed. His senses sharpened. Heat pushed into his muscles and made them swell, cords thickening along his arms and shoulders as if his body was trying to armor itself from the inside.
His veins stood out. His grip tightened. His stance lowered without him thinking about it. The first giant reached him. It didn’t raise a weapon. Didn’t attempt technique.
It reached, both hands stretching out with that same wrong, creepy smile, fingers spread like it was about to pick up food off a plate. Its palms were huge, skin too human, nails dark and thick, and it grabbed with the casual certainty of something that believed resistance was a myth.
Another giant came from the side at the same time, mouth open in a silent grin, arms out like it was joining a game.
They didn’t look angry. They looked hungry. For the act. For the moment of taking.
Ludger felt their aura bite harder as they closed in, pressure behind the eyes, an itch in the mind that wanted him to flinch and back up. He didn’t give it that satisfaction.
He moved. The first hand came for his chest. Ludger kicked.
Not a wide, slow kick, tight, explosive. His heel snapped up into the giant’s wrist at an angle that mattered, hitting the joint like a hammer. Bone cracked with a wet, ugly sound, and the hand spasmed, fingers curling reflexively.
The smile on the giant’s face didn’t change.
That made Ludger’s skin crawl.
He followed through immediately, no pause, stepping in and smashing his forearm down onto the giant’s broken hand like he was breaking kindling. The fingers snapped. The wrist bent wrong. The arm recoiled.
Then Ludger drove forward.
A short punch to the throat, not to choke, but to collapse structure. Cartilage crunched. The head jerked back. And before the giant could wobble or recover, Ludger snapped upward with a second strike.
Fist to temple.
The impact was brutal and clean. Rage Flow fed the force into his bones, into the ground, into the giant’s skull.
It didn’t scream. It didn’t even look surprised.
Its head simply gave, bone deforming, then breaking, then caving with a dull, heavy crack. The body collapsed like a pillar cut at the base, falling sideways into the dirt with a thud that shook loose dust.
Another set of hands grabbed for him from behind.
Ludger twisted, catching one wrist with his left hand and wrenching it sharply, using leverage instead of strength for half a second—then finished with strength anyway. The joint popped. The arm went slack.
He slammed his elbow backward into the giant’s fingers still trying to close around him.
Knuckles shattered.
Fingers bent.
The hand opened involuntarily.
Ludger pivoted into the space he’d created and drove a palm strike into the giant’s face, snapping its head back. The creepy smile smeared, lips tearing at one corner.
He didn’t let it fall slowly.
He stepped in and hit again, compact, efficient, hateful in its precision.
Fist to jaw.
Fist to throat.
Fist to skull.
The last one landed like a verdict.
The giant’s head snapped sideways, and the upper half of its skull cracked open along the ridge line, dark fluid and fragments spraying into the air. The body took a step forward out of habit and then folded, knees collapsing as it dropped into the dirt.
More hands reached. More smiles.
More wrong faces trying to grab him like he was a snack they’d been promised.
Ludger met them the same way every time.
Break the hands.
Remove the reach.
Then smash the head.
Fast. Close. Personal.
And as he moved through them, he learned something that made his stomach go colder than the night air:
They didn’t care about pain.
Which meant the only language they respected was the one that stopped them moving entirely.
