Chapter 808: Seeking Closure
"What?" Redd whispered, his body tightening beneath Ludwig’s grip. His foot hovered inches above a patch of floor that looked exactly like every other patch of floor.
That was the problem. Things that looked harmless in places like this were usually waiting for someone to trust appearances.
Ludwig stared at the bricks ahead, then at the faint line where the mortar shifted. He could not fully see the spell, but he felt the arrangement in the air. Too neat. Too quiet. The sealwork in the walls seemed to gather near that section of floor, not visibly, but in pressure. A place where the tunnel’s breathing changed.
The Malvolume Codex pulsed at Ludwig’s hip. Its pages shifted without wind, and the air beside him bent inward.
Kaiser emerged from the book with that unpleasant smoothness of someone stepping out of a space that had no right to contain a person. Under the lantern’s illusion, he looked human enough from a distance, but there was no making that entrance normal.
Redd’s hand moved closer to his weapon. The ghost beside him sharpened, her outline flickering as she drifted a fraction between Redd and Kaiser, protective despite her silence.
"That’s... what is that?" Redd asked. He did well to keep his voice quiet. A lesser man might have shouted, which would have been annoying and possibly fatal.
Kaiser raised a finger to his lips. "Quiet. Where you were about to step, there’s a detection spell. We’re getting closer to the underside of the Sacrosanctum. They have wards set up."
The lich crouched near the suspicious patch of floor, his expression stripped of mockery. That alone made Ludwig take the ward more seriously. Kaiser was the kind to sound amused when danger was merely personal. When he became professional, the danger usually involved consequences.
Redd could not see what the strange young man was talking about, but Ludwig did not argue or deny it, so he decided to trust him for now. His gaze moved from Kaiser to Ludwig, asking without words whether this newly appeared stranger was allowed to exist. Ludwig gave the smallest nod. Redd slowly lowered his foot onto safe brick, jaw tight.
"Who’s that?"
"A companion," Ludwig said, crouching beside Kaiser. It was the shortest answer that did not begin with lich and end with please do not react loudly beneath the Sacrosanctum.
Companion covered enough for now. Former enemy, necromantic scholar, temporary ally, arrogant corpse with useful eyes. All of that could wait.
Kaiser lifted a finger and fed a thin thread of mana into it, then pressed the ward. The touch was delicate, almost insulting after Ludwig’s earlier approach to floors. Purple light spread from his fingertip, tracing hidden lines in the brickwork. It crawled outward in thin channels, revealing rings, angled cuts, and interlocking symbols woven across the floor. Then it climbed the walls and curved along the lower ceiling, showing that the ward was not a simple floor trigger. It was a sealed corridor segment.
"Hmm. This needs a key," Kaiser said, his voice thoughtful. "We could bait one of the guards here and take theirs."
"A key? How would that help?" Redd asked, staring at the purple lines. The ghost avoided the edges of the glow, drifting closer to his shoulder.
"Not a physical one," Kaiser said. "This ward detects specific mana signals. If the person crossing it doesn’t have the right one, it alerts whoever placed it."
He lifted his finger slightly, and the glow dimmed without vanishing. The ward was permission written into magic. Those with the correct signature passed as if the corridor were empty. Everyone else became a message.
"So what do we do?" Redd asked. His voice remained controlled, but Ludwig heard the impatience beneath it. They were barely inside, and already the tunnel demanded either patience or cleverness. Neither were resources Ludwig enjoyed spending in large amounts.
"Either we bait a guard and take his key, or you wait while I bypass it," Kaiser said. "Shouldn’t take more than four hours. That’s short for something this old and complicated."
Ludwig looked at him, then at the ward, then at the passage beyond.
Four hours. While the Hero was inside the Sacrosanctum. While Sister Gallows moved somewhere below or above them. While the sky had already broken once in another line of time.
Scholars and their sense of reasonable delay deserved to be studied in a separate room with no clocks.
"Why are we doing all this?" Ludwig asked. His tone was not irritated yet. It was approaching that neighborhood, but had not moved in.
Kaiser looked up. "What do you mean? How are we supposed to cross it otherwise?"
"Is the whole area warded?"
"No. Just the passage ahead."
Kaiser paused, eyes narrowing. He did not like where the question was going. That was fair. Most people who knew Ludwig eventually learned to fear questions that sounded simple.
"How long?"
"It’s better if I show you."
Kaiser pressed his finger down again. A large portion of the tunnel lit up, nearly a dozen meters of floor, walls, and ceiling glowing in purple lines. The warded stretch looked like a cage built from light.
"The ward stops there," Kaiser said. "It’s long enough to stop anyone from jumping across, and it has aerial detection if someone tries."
The design was competent. More than competent. It accounted for leaping, crawling, climbing, flying low, and most obvious attempts to cross without permission. Whoever made it had expected intruders to be athletic, desperate, or arrogant. Ludwig was at least two of those on most days. Unfortunately for the ward, he was also deeply disrespectful of intended solutions.
"Doesn’t matter," Ludwig said. "Dark Mirror."
A blanket-shaped mirror unfolded in front of him, black as poured glass. Its surface drank the purple glow instead of reflecting it. A second mirror appeared beyond the warded stretch, standing calmly in the safe section as if it had every right to be there.
The spell did not cross the ward. It did not step on the floor, touch the walls, or disturb the detection field. It simply made the space before Ludwig and the space beyond the ward briefly agree that distance was an optional inconvenience.
Kaiser opened his mouth, then closed it. "I’m ashamed I didn’t think of that first."
The admission sounded genuinely wounded. He looked from the mirrors to the ward, then back to Ludwig with the expression of a man who had just watched someone solve a complex lock by removing the door from the idea of walls.
"Don’t be," Ludwig said. "Someone with your kind of brain always thinks the best way to solve a problem is through proper means."
"I don’t know if that’s an insult or a compliment."
"It’s a compliment. You like doing things properly. I just throw away the problem."
Ludwig stepped into the Black Mirror and emerged on the other side. The transition was cold and brief, a swallow of darkness that folded around him and released him beyond the ward. His boots touched safe brick, and no alarm sounded. No light flared. No holy execution mechanism activated. Already a better outcome than several plans he had made recently.
Redd followed after a short hesitation, jaw set, eyes narrowing as the mirror swallowed and spat him out beside Ludwig. The ghost came with him, flickering as she passed through the black surface. Kaiser stepped through last, still wearing the expression of a scholar reconsidering his relationship with efficiency.
Behind them, the ward’s glow faded as Kaiser withdrew his mana, leaving the tunnel ordinary again. That was probably the most insulting part. Something capable of ruining their infiltration looked like normal brick until touched by the right senses. Solania truly enjoyed hiding ugly things beneath polished surfaces.
"If there are more wards, I’ll inform you," Kaiser said.
That lessened Ludwig’s worries. Slightly. The lich remained manifested now, walking close enough to inspect the tunnel as they advanced. His presence in the catacombs was risky, but the seals along the walls blocked sight and signal anyway. For once, the enemy’s paranoia worked in their favor. Ludwig appreciated that. He would appreciate it more if it did not mean they were walking into a place paranoid enough to justify this much warding.
They moved deeper until the tunnel’s structure and smell began to change. The bricks shifted first. The reinforced passage gave way to older stonework, patched unevenly over generations. The floor grew wetter, the ceiling lower, and the air heavier. The clean hum of maintained seals thinned behind them, replaced by something more physical and unpleasant.
Rot. Filth. Sewer stench. Then something worse.
The smell of decaying bodies arrived gradually, then all at once, thick and sweet enough to stick to the back of the throat. Redd’s nose wrinkled, and his lips pulled back from his teeth in an instinctive grimace. Kaiser looked unaffected, because of course the corpse scholar had no reason to care. Ludwig had smelled worse, which was not comforting. Worse existed. That was the problem with experience. It made horror comparative.
The walls ahead were damp with blackened stains, some from water, some from things Ludwig did not care to identify without necessity. Old scratch marks cut across certain bricks at shoulder height. A rusted chain hung from a hook in one wall, swaying faintly though there was no wind. The compass still pointed forward, but now the needle seemed almost eager, drawing them toward the stink with the confidence of a guide that did not have to breathe.
Ludwig raised a hand.
Everyone stopped.
Voices came from ahead, around a bend. Low and careless, the kind men used when they believed nobody important was close enough to hear. A faint amber glow licked the wall beyond the corner, likely from a lamp or warded sconce.
Ludwig pressed closer to the brick. Redd moved beside him without a word, lowering his body slightly, ears angling toward the voices. Kaiser remained behind them, one hand near the wall as if ready to suppress any ward that took offense. The ghost drifted near Redd’s shoulder, dim and silent.
"Didn’t expect him to show up here," one guard said. "So what do you say? Red light district tonight? Tomorrow, things will get more annoying with that fatass here."
"I’ll pass. Last time I came back drunk and almost had my skin flayed. Can you believe it? He came down here with a bottle in his hand to ruin some poor soul, then told me I was a poor example for being hungover."
"They call him Hero. I don’t see any heroism in what he’s doing. Look at that one there. He abused her for three days, then killed her afterward. Said she couldn’t be saved. Everyone heard her screams. Poor wretch."
"Not gonna lie, he isn’t the one who creeps me out the most. Don’t get me wrong, he deserves a spot in hell. But the other motherfucker with him, the one that eats organs? That guy is a menace."
The two guards sighed. Their voices carried the exhaustion of men who had seen too much and chosen survival over morality too many times to pretend innocence. Armor scraped softly as one shifted his weight. A bottle clinked against stone. Somewhere beyond the bend, liquid dripped steadily into standing water, each drop louder now that the words had settled.
Ludwig, Kaiser, and Redd remained around the corner, listening.
Ludwig already knew who the guards meant.
Hiro was obvious. The abuse. The arrogance. The way suffering became an excuse when wrapped in heroic propaganda. Disgusting, but not surprising.
The second made Ludwig’s fists tighten.
The one that eats organs. His fingers curled slowly, nails pressing into his palm. Beside him, Redd had gone very still. Too still. The kind of stillness that came before a beast either lunged or broke something inside itself to remain in control.
Good, Ludwig thought, though nothing about it felt pleasant.
Good meant the targets were closer than expected. Good meant the day had decided to offer more than one overdue debt.
That fucker is with the Hero, then. Good. I guess it’s not just Redd who gets closure today.
