Despite staggered delays, each rune reached its target with surgical timing. Like fireflies drifting into statues’ joints, they touched stone and vanished… then all discharged simultaneously.

Not lightning bolts, subtle internal pulses.

Electric energy spiked inside each golem, short-circuiting their cores for a heartbeat. Eyes flickered out. Halberds twitched. Rune veins dimmed like dying embers. Silence, but beneath that silence Ludger felt systems fail. He didn’t wait for a second confirmation.

The moment mana disruptions rippled through the sentinel network, Ludger pressed his palm flat to the rooftop tile and whispered mana downward.

This time he didn’t release Seismic Sense broadly, he threaded it thin, like water dripping through cracks, avoiding sentinels’ detection radius while they were failing to work properly. A controlled pulse, burrowing instead of radiating, tracing foundations and substructure.

The world unfolded in his mind. Stone walls, cellar chambers, mana forges, guild vaults. He felt footsteps above, guards pacing lazily with no idea a predator ghosted beneath their awareness.

Then deeper. beneath cobbles, basements, support pillars… A void. A hollow. A hidden space.

Bigger than any standard cellar. Not one building, connecting multiple guild buildings like a web. Reinforced with mana-resistant material. Vent shafts disguised as sewer junctions. Doors layered with barriers.

A secret underground compound. His pulse stayed even, but his eyes sharpened.

Linne and Dalan never mentioned this.

Which meant either the underworld hid it exceptionally well…or this wasn’t sanctioned by the city at all. Sentinel cores sputtered and attempted to reboot, stone fingers twitching. Time was sand draining fast. Ludger dropped from the roof.

He landed silently behind a storage shed, boots swallowing the impact. Before sentinels could recover or sense his presence, he forced earth downward beneath his feet, tunneling into the ground like a needle driven into skin.

He didn’t dig a cavern. That would shake the ground, alert sensors. Instead he compressed earth, pushing a human-sized tunnel downward in a single breath. Stone parted like clay under mana precision.

He slid inside before detection rebalanced, leaving the surface to seal shut above him, no trace, no disturbed tile. Dark swallowed him.

No torches. No sound but soft scrape of boots through tunnel and distant city life bleeding down like heartbeat thumps.

Then, he broke through. Cold, stale air hit him. A scent of rust, oil, and damp stone. Faint metallic ringing from somewhere ahead. Ludger stepped out of the tunnel into a dim underground passage, lit only by weak runic lamps flickering amber along carved, reinforced walls.

The underground room stretched into darkness long enough that even Ludger’s sharp senses began to press against their limit. He could hear metal… liquid in pipes… something ticking like a slowly leaking clock. The floor sloped gently downward, leading toward a bigger chamber where faint breath-like drafts of air pulsed in and out, almost alive.

He needed sight.

He lifted two fingers, drew a tiny flame,「Tinder」  nothing more than a spark to avoid triggering sensor wards. A bead of warm light flickered into existence above his palm, no brighter than a candle’s ember.

Enough to see without announcing himself. And what he saw made him pause. Just for a second. Because the room ahead made no sense.

It was enormous, a cavern hollowed beneath the guildquarter, but instead of treasure vaults or illegal armories… it looked like a warehouse fused with a hospital.

Crates stacked in rows. Racks holding dismantled weapons and runic plates. Shelves of monster reagents labeled in tidy handwriting. Tools disinfected and arranged with surgical precision. And at the center…

Surgical beds. Dozens of them. Metal tables with leather straps and drain gutters beneath. Pillars with glass tubes filled with glowing liquids. Needles. Mana conduits. Blood stains soaking the floor in brown patches like rust. Some beds still had restraints fastened, as if used recently. Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

Hospitals didn’t sit under guild quarters. Hospitals didn’t hide behind sentinels. Hospitals didn’t store runic weapons beside operating tables. And then he noticed the walls.

Embedded in alcoves like statues in crypts stood runic golems, inactive, carved from metal and enchanted plates. Their cores glowed faint gold, breathing like sleeping beasts. Dozens of them, maybe more.

His small flame flickered, shadows stretching… The nearest golem’s eye slit ignited with yellow light. Another followed. Then another. Mana surged through the walls, not loud, just a quiet hum like a hive waking. They had sensed him.

Dozens of runic sentinels, far more advanced than those on the surface, lifted heads with a slow grinding sound like steel scraping bone. Their limbs unfolded, smooth, precise, not old junk like above. These were new models, war golems. Upgraded. Weaponized. Hidden.

The temperature felt colder. This place wasn’t built to heal the wounded. It was built to modify people, enhance them, break them, stitch magic into flesh and metal. A lab disguised as a clinic disguised as a warehouse beneath the most respectable district in the Velis League.

Ludger’s expression didn’t change, but inside his chest something tightened like a coiled spring.

Whatever this was, slaving, experimentation, forced augmentation, it ran deeper than pirates or beastmen radicals. Someone here was engineering soldiers, or slaves, or something worse. The golems stepped down from their alcoves one by one, metal feet thudding like slow war drums.

They glowed brighter. They saw him. And Ludger felt it, that cold, clear certainty: He was standing inside a crime the world wasn’t meant to witness. And someone else had just realized he was here.

Ludger shifted his weight, arms up, body instinctively lowering into a guarded stance. Every golem stepping toward him sent vibrations through the floor, heavy, methodical, like metal coffins learning to walk.

He was about to strike first, to smash the nearest construct into scrap before they could surround him. But something felt wrong. Too wrong. He needed information more than he needed bloodshed. So instead of lunging, he brought his breath inward and whispered through clenched teeth: Mana Pulse.

Not a blast. Not an outward sweep. He focused it inward, through his core, then outward only a finger-width beyond his skin, a controlled ripple, thin as paper, delicate as silk. He let mana bleed forward slowly, mapping the room without shocking runes awake.

The effect hit him like ice water shoved down his spine. Because inside each golem… beneath metal plating and rune lines… There were heartbeats.Slow. Weak. Faint like dying embers. But real.

Two pulses hit his senses at once, one mechanical, rhythmic, artificial. The other trembling, biological, the flicker of a struggling life barely clinging. He stood frozen. Not because of fear. Because rage opened a cold pit in his stomach. These weren’t just constructs.

They were people. Or what was left of them.

Bodies, prisoners, encased inside metal frames, used as living mana cores. Drugged. Weak. Conscious or unconscious, he couldn’t tell. But their hearts pulsed with sluggish irregularity, like exhausted animals forced to run endlessly.

His hands tightened. Someone, some guild, or the underworld behind it, had looked at human lives and thought:

What if we shoved them inside machines?

The shapes of each golem suddenly made sense. Some tall with elongated limbs, a prisoner inside stretched and reinforced like a beast. Some wide-shouldered with plate-like rib cages, muscle plating welded to bone. Some thin and hunched, built for speed and stalking corridors like predators. Not golems. Puppets. Battery-shells. Bio-weapons.

Mana surged faintly through Ludger’s armor, not spellcasting, just raw emotion heating through runes. His jaw clenched so tight he felt teeth strain.

The golems moved again, synchronized steps on the metal floor. Ludger stared at them, not with fear, but with murderous clarity. Monster slayers, spellforged soldiers, pirates and radicals, all of that was expected.

This? This was a factory of slavery turned into machinery. A place where people were hollowed out and worn like armor. His voice, when it came, was low, steady, and void of warmth.

“…They used prisoners as mana batteries.”

Fogged breath leaked from his mask as if the room had turned winter-cold.

He felt the weak pulses again, flickering sparks of life suffocating beneath iron. Drugged. Suppressed. Still alive. He could free them. He would free them. Even if he had to tear this entire district off the map to do it because this was simply inhumane…

His fingers twitched, mana condensing, runes already forming instinctively on his wrist plates. The golems stepped closer, three meters. Two meters. Audio sensors clicked. Runes brightened. Someone upstairs was about to learn that combining humans and puppets was the worst mistake they ever made. Because Ludger had entered their house. And he wasn’t leaving quietly.

He didn’t have time to revel in disgust.

One of the closest golems, a lean one plated with overlapping steel ribs like the body of a mantis, moved first. No grinding gears. No clunky footsteps. Just a sudden blur.

It pounced. Claws extended, tips glowing with a faint runic edge meant for slicing armor instead of mere flesh. The thing crossed ten meters in the space of a blink, utterly silent, like a predator that had hunted in darkness long before metal touched its bones.

Ludger barely shifted his weight in time. He stepped sideways, heel digging into the floor with just enough energy to slide instead of stumble. The claws missed his throat by a hand’s width, scraping a shower of sparks from the pillar behind him.

The golem didn’t roar or taunt. It didn’t breathe. It simply rotated its head 180 degrees, vertebrae clicking like bones cracked by a sadist, then charged again at the same terrifying speed.

Ludger’s mind was already racing faster. Not fear, calculation. He ducked beneath a swipe, rolled across cold metal floor, and came up behind a support beam. The golem slashed where he’d been, claws carving through stone like warm butter.

Fast. Silent. High efficiency. Minimal waste motion.

Not sloppy. Not improvised. This was designed. Refined. Engineered. And the signature reeked of madness he knew too well. Verk… or someone continuing his work.

Ludger’s memory flashed, the last moments of that battle: The manor collapsing. The flesh armor peeling away. Verk’s grin. The explosion that nearly wiped a district off the map. He could still smell that burning mana, hear screams swallowed by falling stone.

If Verk had prepared failsafe detonations in his armor, why wouldn’t he or his successors do the same for converted puppets? Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

He couldn’t just smash them. He couldn’t rupture a manacore recklessly. These bodies might be rigged to explode if damaged too badly. Or worse, if the prisoners inside were killed, the runic circuit might cascade.

He needed to disable without destroying. Extract the cores, not rupture them. Another golem moved, a bulkier one, armored with metal slabs over human-like limbs, each step a suppressed quake. It flanked, silent, coordinating with the clawed predator. Ludger exhaled slow. He watched joints. Rune channels. Breath-like pulses.

Inside each construct, he could feel the faint heartbeat, a human heart pressed into a cage of machinery. Runic sedation was keeping them docile, mana suppressed to fuel rage and speed.

“Fucking hell…” Ludger muttered under his breath. “Verk really was insane. Or someone worse picked up the scraps.”

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