Ludger looked back toward the forge, where Raukor’s silhouette passed by the window, broad shoulders filling half the frame.

  “So Torvares didn’t just call him troublesome because of his attitude,” Ludger said quietly. “He meant politically.”

  “Exactly.” Yvar nodded. “A beastman showing up in Lionfang? That will draw attention. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But someone, somewhere, will hear about it.”

  Ludger crossed his arms, processing it. Still… he didn’t regret bringing Raukor here. If anything, the man’s presence only made Lionfang feel stronger, rougher, more alive.

  “Good,” Ludger said. “Let them come.”

  Yvar groaned. “No, Ludger, that is not the takeaway.”

  But Ludger was already thinking ahead. A rare beastman blacksmith. Froststeel stockpiles. A forging path to unlock. And a birthday gift to create. If trouble was coming, he’d be ready.

  Yvar adjusted his glasses, clearly preparing to give another cautionary warning. “Just… be careful around him, Ludger. Beastmen may not all be spies, but history sticks. Don’t reveal too much. Not about the guild, not about our politics, not about—”

  Ludger cut him off. “Reveal what, exactly?”

  Yvar blinked. “What?”

  Ludger stared at him, expression flat, deadpan. “Yvar, we have two famous bandit hunters living inside the guild. Maurien and Kaela. They stroll in and out like they own the place.”

  Yvar opened his mouth, but Ludger kept going.

  “We exposed an underworld smuggling network crossing between the Empire and the Velis League. We dragged Verk, a councilor with advanced runic armor, out of hiding. We survived his manor exploding so hard it registered on half the capital’s seismometers.”

  Yvar shifted his weight, uneasy.

  “And,” Ludger added, voice steady and unamused, “we forced the Rodericks, one of the wealthiest, most connected imperial families, to abandon their estate and flee like rats because they couldn’t fight us openly.”

  Yvar stared. Ludger continued, unfazed.

  “At this point, it’s pretty obvious we’re hunting down anyone who gets in our way. We don’t exactly have a ‘mysterious peaceful guild’ reputation anymore.”

  Silence hung for a long moment. Yvar blinked once. Twice. Then a third time, slower, as if the realization was sinking deeper with each repetition.

  Finally, he let out a long, exhausted sigh. “Actually… you’re right.” He removed his glasses, pinched the bridge of his nose, then put them back on. “We don’t have to hide it anymore.”

  Ludger shrugged. “Exactly.”

  Yvar stared up at the sky, muttering, “Torvares is going to lose a decade of lifespan when he hears you say that…”

  Ludger didn’t deny it. And with Raukor Ironmane settling into Lionfang, things were only going to get louder from here.

  Ludger let the topic hang for a moment, then shifted gears. “Alright. Enough about spies and trouble. What do you actually know about beastmen? Their land. Their people.”

  Yvar perked up at the change, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Quite a bit, actually. They’re a very diverse bunch. Their homeland stretches across a massive region south of the Velis League, mostly uncharted by imperial cartographers because they don’t allow foreigners too deep. It’s dominated by enormous forests, old, dense, magically rich. They call them the Primal Groves.”

  Ludger nodded slowly, letting the image form in his mind: towering trees, hidden clans, mana running wild under the soil.

  Yvar continued, warming to the subject. “Beastmen don’t build cities like humans or the League. They don’t have fortresses or academies. They have forest clans. Each clan is centered around its species type, lion clans, wolf clans, bear clans, serpent clans, and so on. They’re tribal, but not primitive. Their craftsmanship is excellent, their cultural traditions are ancient, and their hunters can track prey better than most imperial scouts.”

  He paused, adjusting a scroll under his arm. “Mixed beastmen exist too. They’re not common, but they’re accepted. Their society is surprisingly stable when left alone. But…”

  He sighed. “They’ve been at odds with the Velis League for a very long time.”

  Ludger tilted his head. “Why?”

  “Pollution,” Yvar said simply. “The League’s city academies produce a lot of smoke, metal fumes, alchemical waste, magical discharge. When the wind shifts, dirty mist drifts south and reaches the forests close to the borders. It corrupts the mana there. Sickens the wildlife. Sometimes even sickens beastmen who breathe too much of it.” Yvar shook his head. “It’s a problem the League has never solved.”

  Ludger held his chin, thoughtful. “That matches something I heard in Coria. The prisoners we captured said the berserker draughts were being used on beastmen too.”

  You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

  Yvar froze mid-step, eyes sharpening. “You’re sure?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  The scholar frowned deeply, thinking it through. “If that’s true… then it’s probably the work of rebel clans or splinter groups. Beastmen aren’t a unified force. Some of them resent the League so much that they’d use anything to fuel a war. Even something as dangerous as berserker draughts. They also are against those who are mainly pacifists.”

  He exhaled slowly, frustration in his voice. “But I don’t know the details. The Empire has almost no formal contact with the clans, and the League only shares sanitized reports.”

  Ludger crossed his arms, eyes narrowing. “So someone might be arming beastmen rebels with berserker draughts. Someone who got them from Verk and the Rodericks.”

  “And someone would profit from the chaos,” Yvar added. “War is good business for certain people.”

  Ludger didn’t need to say it out loud. He already had suspects.

  Roderick. Verk. And whoever else was hiding behind their shadows. He let out a slow breath, watching the cold air curl. This world kept getting uglier the deeper he dug. And he wasn’t planning to stop digging.

  Ludger let Yvar’s explanation sit for a moment, then rolled his shoulders as if physically shifting back into the realm of logistics. “Alright. First thing,” he said, voice settling into that practical cadence everyone in the guild recognized. “Send a daily amount of froststeel to Raukor. Not the entire stockpile at once, he’ll need time to sort through it, test the purity, decide what he wants to work with. But make sure it’s steady. He asked for it ‘as soon as possible,’ and I’m not going to argue with a two-meter lion who pulls iron carriages across frozen roads because he feels like it.”

  Yvar’s eyebrows shot up, and he clutched his scrolls a little tighter. “Daily? Ludger, that’s… that’s a substantial amount of froststeel.”

  “I’ll be learning from him for a while,” Ludger continued, completely unfazed by Yvar’s shock. “Forging is complicated and time-consuming. If I want to get anywhere near making Viola’s mountain-destroying sword, I need to focus.”

  Yvar stopped dead in his tracks and stared at him. It wasn’t a subtle stare. It was the kind of stare that screamed please tell me you’re joking before I start crying. “I sincerely, deeply hope you’re joking.”

  Ludger tilted his head, genuinely confused by the reaction. “Why would I be?”

  That question alone made Yvar let out a slow, soul-drained sigh. He pinched the bridge of his nose, the way scholars did when dealing with particularly stubborn historical errors, or Ludger. “Because giving Lady Viola a mountain-obliterating magical sword as a birthday present might send the wrong political message. Or the wrong personal message. Or the wrong ‘don’t worry, my grandson won’t start a small war’ message to Lord Torvares.”

  “It would be practical,” Ludger argued, completely serious. “She’d use it.”

  “That’s exactly the problem!” Yvar sputtered, sounding more like a panicked tutor than a guild strategist. He took a moment to compose himself, adjusting his glasses with a resigned exhale. “Listen. It would be better to give Lady Viola a gift that reflects the positive image you have of her, not something that could flatten a mountain range. Something personal. Something meaningful. Something that doesn’t require the Empire to rewrite its border maps if she gets annoyed at someone.”

  Ludger crossed his arms, unimpressed with the argument. “Like what? What does she even like that isn’t related to swords or beating people up?”

  Yvar inhaled, as though preparing to explain something delicate. “Lady Viola has always cherished the portraits of her mother.” His tone softened, respectful, carrying that unspoken understanding that her late mother was a topic treated gently by everyone close to the Torvares family. “She keeps all the portraits in her room now. She… brought them there herself. From the hallways, from the old sitting rooms, from everywhere. Lord Torvares lets her keep them. He pretends he doesn’t notice, but he does.”

  Ludger paused. Hard. Heat and frost swirled together in his breath. He had not expected that answer. “I’m not a painter,” he said after a moment, the dryness of his tone bordering on absurdity. “I’ve never seen those portraits. I don’t even know what they look like.”

  “That’s because she took all of them,” Yvar said with a small, tired smile. “Every last one in the house. Lord Torvares might still have a single portrait hidden away in his office, he keeps a few things from the past sealed up where she won’t accidentally find them.”

  Ludger stared toward the manor, mind spinning in a direction he had not anticipated today. Portraits. Her mother. A memory Viola kept close enough to gather into her room and guard like treasure. That was a clue. A meaningful one. But it didn’t solve the problem that Ludger had never painted anything, sculpted stone not canvas, and had absolutely no visual reference for Viola’s mother.

  So now he had a new series of tasks added to the pile: learn forging, master the basics under Raukor, continue training the second squad, prepare Overdrive lessons, and somehow craft a gift worthy of Viola, one that wasn’t a mountain-destroying sword or a badly drawn stick figure.

  Ludger inhaled slowly, then exhaled into the cold air, watching the fog swirl. “One problem at a time,” he muttered.

  But he already knew, deep down: Viola’s birthday gift had just become far more complicated than forging a sword capable of erasing a mountain.

  The next morning arrived with the usual Lionfang chill, a biting wind that cut across the northern district and carried the scent of froststeel, pine, and distant cookfires. Ludger made his way toward Raukor’s forge just after sunrise, expecting to find the blacksmith asleep or maybe warming up for the day.

  Instead, he saw smoke rising from the building’s ventilation shafts, a thick, steady plume that meant the forge had been burning for hours. Raukor had clearly started working well before dawn. Ludger wasn’t surprised. Beastmen didn’t exactly strike him as creatures who enjoyed sleeping in. Maybe they did in the winter, but Ludger frowned wondering if that was a rude thought.

  At least the noise was minimal. Just a low, rhythmic thunk barely audible through the thick stone walls. Good. The last thing he wanted was some idiot villager complaining about the sound of hammering, turning it into a rumor about “the dangerous beastman making war machines,” and escalating it into an unnecessary political headache. Lionfang had enough chaos without building a new one.

  But as Ludger approached the front of the workshop, something else grabbed his attention.

  A pile. A big pile. A chaotic mountain of twisted, malformed, utterly ruined metal. He stopped walking. His eye twitched.

  Because every single warped fragment, bent blade, melted lump, and unrecognizable chunk of scrap metal in that pile was made of froststeel.

  Not cheap iron. Not practice alloy. Not junk metal from old caravans. No, Raukor had apparently spent the night turning perfectly good froststeel into… this.

  Ludger picked up a piece from the top, a blade that looked like it had tried to curl itself into a pretzel before giving up. The color was off too. Froststeel normally had a faint blue sheen. This one… didn’t. It looked burned.

  Something cold prickled down Ludger’s spine. He narrowed his eyes at the workshop door, a bad feeling settling in his gut. Very bad.

  Because nothing about this pile said “normal blacksmithing.”And everything about it said: This man was experimenting. Hard. And he didn’t care how much froststeel he destroyed in the process. Ludger exhaled slowly, staring at the disaster of expensive scrap.

  “...This might be worse than I expected.”