Ludger hit, disappeared, hit, disappeared, hit…
Every strike came from a new angle, timed to land in the micro-moments between the guardian’s weight shifts, when his joints were committed and his guard couldn’t fully adjust.
Left cheek. Right cheek. Temple. Jaw. Nose.
Side of the head again, snapping it back the other way before it could settle.
CRACK—CRACK—CRACK—!
The air itself started to pop with each displacement, little sonic snaps following Ludger’s movement like afterimages made of sound.
Sparks danced around Ludger’s limbs as he moved, wind-dense mana rubbing against the world hard enough to generate static flashes. Each appearance was a tiny storm. Each punch was the thunder.
The guardian swung wildly now, huge arms cutting arcs meant to catch Ludger mid-step, but Ludger never gave him a step to catch. He was there only long enough to land damage.
Then gone. The guardian’s eyes tried to follow, pupils flicking, head jerking, body lagging behind the information it was receiving. It was like watching a beast try to bite a swarm of insects, angry, powerful, and completely outplayed by speed it wasn’t built to handle.
And Ludger kept punishing the gap. Every time the guardian raised his guard, Ludger hit around it. Every time the guardian lowered his guard to attack, Ludger hit through it.
Every time the guardian tried to plant his feet and stabilize, Ludger hit the head again and forced balance to reset. The fixed grin began to look less like confidence and more like a trap, an expression that couldn’t show what the guardian was starting to feel.
Because now, under the unrelenting barrage… He wasn’t in control. He was being dismantled. One punch at a time, faster than he could react, faster than he could even see.
The guardian adapted the way big predators always did when their favorite trick stopped working. He stopped trying to think. He started trying to catch.
His tail snapped out first, fast, brutal, a horizontal whip meant to erase the space around him. It cracked through the air low and wide, aiming for Ludger’s legs, then came back higher in a second sweep meant to take his head.
Both swings should’ve hit. Both swings hit nothing. Ludger wasn’t dodging like a normal fighter, he wasn’t reacting after the tail moved.
He was leaving before it arrived. A ripple of wind. A stutter in the air. Sand lifting in thin rings where his feet had been. The tail scythed through empty space, tearing up palm roots and spraying grit instead of bone.
The guardian’s eyes narrowed, annoyed, and he shifted tactics with a violent jerk of his shoulders. The purple spear came up.
He thrust, not a measured stab this time, but a committed impale, the full weight of his body driving the weapon forward like a piledriver. Violet light surged down the shaft, and the air around the spearhead hummed with that same pressure that had shattered the ground earlier.
WHUM—!
The spear shot through where Ludger stood… and punched into sand and stone as Ludger reappeared two steps to the side, already punching.
CRACK—!
The guardian yanked the spear free, thrust again, higher, then lower, then a diagonal sweep meant to catch a teleport… Nothing.
Ludger’s movement didn’t have a “line” to cut. It had no path. No predictable arc. He was just… there, then not there, then there again. Every miss made the spear bite earth, each impact sending little tremors through the clearing. Each time the guardian committed, Ludger punished the opening with another hit to the head, another strike to the jaw, another snapping blow behind the ear that made the guardian’s posture stutter.
The guardian’s face began to fracture, not the grin, never the grin, but everything around it.
Annoyance tightened the eyes. Rage pulled at the brow. The muscles in his jaw flexed hard enough to make the scales along his throat bunch and ripple. But the grin stayed. Unchanged. As if that part of him was stuck, locked in place, the last remnant of whatever personality he’d once had, or the last piece of a mask he physically couldn’t take off.
And it was the only part of his head that didn’t match what the rest of him was feeling. Because the rest of him was getting dismantled. Blood started as a thin line from the corner of his mouth. Then it became a spill.
It ran down over his teeth and chin, dripping in thick drops onto the sand. It smeared across green scales and silver armor plates with every jerking breath.
Then his nose began to bleed, dark red streaming out and staining the grin in ugly streaks. Then his ears. Thin rivulets at first, then more, as if the repeated impacts were hammering his inner skull until something inside finally gave.
Blood from mouth. From nose. From ears. A classic sign of something important rattling loose inside.
The guardian tried the tail again, faster, tail snapping like a whip at Ludger’s midsection, Ludger was gone. He tried the spear again, a sudden thrust aimed at Ludger’s reappearance point… Ludger wasn’t there.
He swung the spear in a wide arc, tail following, trying to turn the space around him into a death zone. And Ludger still found the gaps. Because there were always gaps when you were too big, too angry, too slow. The guardian’s eyes flickered, trying to track. Trying to predict.
And all he got for his effort was another fist appearing out of nowhere…
CRACK—!
—driving his head sideways again, blood spraying out in a red fan while the grin stayed carved in place like a cruel joke the universe refused to stop telling.
The guardian finally stopped trying to “catch” Ludger and started trying to break him with noise.
He threw his head back and roared—an animal sound forced through a throat that was half human, half reptile, all wrong. It rolled across the island and came back in echoes, bouncing between palms and stone like the night itself was laughing with him.
“I’ll have fun dissecting you,” he growled, voice thick with venom and promise, blood bubbling at the corner of his mouth. “Before I eat you.”
For a moment, the clearing felt smaller. Not because the guardian had moved. Because the aura did.It pressed outward, heavy, oily, invasive, like a hand closing around the inside of Ludger’s skull.
Ludger stopped attacking. He didn’t retreat. He didn’t brace. He just… stood there. Breathing slow. Shoulders relaxed. And he looked at the guardian with open disdain, as if he was staring at a loud dog that didn’t realize it was already on a leash.
That expression, calm, unimpressed, hit harder than any punch. The grin on the guardian’s face twitched. For the first time, it didn’t look like confidence. It looked like something breaking.
The smile stretched wider, then warped, corners pulling too far, cheek muscles tightening until the grin became ugly. Anger tried to force itself through a face that didn’t know how to display it, twisting the fixed expression into a grotesque mask.
His eyes sharpened into hatred. And the aura spiked. It wasn’t just fear now. It wasn’t just doubt. It was… invitation.
A push that made the blood in Ludger’s body feel hotter, made violence feel pleasant, made the idea of ripping the guardian apart with bare hands seem not only reasonable but satisfying. Dark thoughts crawled up from some old place, the kind you only let out when you’d decided no one deserved mercy.
Ludger felt his mind tilt toward it. Felt his heart beat once… twice… in a rhythm that wanted to sync with the aura. His jaw tightened. Then he slapped his palm against his chest.
[Healing Touch]
Warmth washed through him. The darkness loosened. The intrusive urge scattered like smoke. The aura tried to clamp down again. Ludger didn’t wait.
[Healing Touch] Again.
Then again, quick pulses, controlled and surgical, like wiping mud off a lens.
[Healing Touch]
[Healing Touch]
The dangerous thoughts dispersed completely, leaving only cold clarity and the simple, pragmatic truth: It’s just a trick. And tricks can be countered.
The guardian glared at him, eyes burning with frustration now that his mental hook wasn’t sinking in. Then he barked something sharp—an order.
“Look at him!” the guardian shouted, voice cracking with rage. “All of you, glare at him!”
He snapped his head toward his underlings, expecting the clearing to thicken with that pressure. Expecting a dozen pairs of wrong eyes to turn and drown Ludger in the same emotional poison. Nothing happened. No movement. No response.
For a beat, the guardian just stood there, half-turned, confusion flickering behind the rage. Then he turned fully. And saw why.
Every giant that had come out of the gate with him, every one of the “measured” ones—., was down.
Dead. Not crushed by spears. Not blasted apart. Cut.
Their throats had been opened with clean, nasty precision. Neck tendons severed. Windpipes sliced. Some heads hung at wrong angles, the wounds deep enough that the bodies looked partially decapitated. Blood pooled dark in the sand around them, soaking into the cracks his spear strikes had already made.
Assassination work. Quiet work. Efficient work. A little further back, in the moonlit mess of bodies and fallen palms, Luna stood, or tried to.
She was bent forward with her hands on her knees, breathing hard, shoulders rising and falling fast. Her face was pale with effort, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat and salt, earth-forged daggers still in her grip like she’d forgotten how to let go.
She lifted her head just enough to meet Ludger’s eyes for a heartbeat. She didn’t smile. She didn’t need to. The field behind the guardian was empty now. No underlings. No swarm.
Just the two of them, and the guardian, suddenly alone in a clearing full of corpses, realizing too late that the small “snack” he’d wanted to play with had brought a knife in the dark.
Ludger took one step forward, shoulders loose, eyes flat.
“Time to end this,” he said, voice low and tired in that way only people who’d already decided could sound. “I’m not taking chances like a moron and waiting for you to ‘find’ an opportunity to turn this around.”
The guardian’s grin twitched. His eyes flashed—annoyance, hunger, something feral.
His hand snapped toward his pocket.
Fast.
Too fast for a normal man to stop—
But Ludger wasn’t normal, and the air around him was already coiled.
The guardian pulled out a handful of capsules—red, glossy, identical to the first. He dumped them into his mouth like candy, cheeks bulging for a second as his jaw worked.
He was about to swallow.
He didn’t get the chance.
Wind Step cracked the air.
Ludger appeared in front of him, close enough that the guardian’s breath hit his face, then drove a punch straight into his stomach. Not the ribs. Not the chest. The core. The place where mass met balance.
THOOM—!
A blast of wind detonated at the point of impact. It wasn’t a gust. It was an explosion, compressed air released all at once, slamming outward in a circular shock that lifted sand in a ring and flattened nearby palms like a hand pressing down.
The guardian’s eyes widened. His body folded around Ludger’s fist for a fraction of a second.. Then the wind took him.
Thank you for reading!
Don't forget to follow, favorite, and rate. If you want to read 400 chapters ahead, you can check my patreon: /Comedian0
