Ludger didn’t push deeper through the webbed paths.

Not yet.

He moved along the island’s edge instead, stepping on bare rock whenever he could, skirting the thick carpets of silk like they were pressure plates. The webs weren’t just obstacles, they were information. Any careless tear was a flare in the night.

He kept his pace steady, Seismic Sense running beneath him in a shallow sweep.

And the sweep confirmed what he’d already suspected.

Most of the weight, most of the hidden motion, clustered inland, along the most direct route toward the labyrinth entrances. Like the island had a spine of danger and everything else was just… skin.

“Good,” Ludger muttered.

Then he raised his hand and started firing. Not normal mana bolts.

He shaped them into spinning bolts, tight, rotating projectiles that carried their own stability, drilling forward instead of wobbling. Each one left his hand with a faint whine, rotation compressing the air around it into a thin spiral.

He shot them in controlled arcs, not randomly, left flank, right flank, high into tree lines, low into hollows. The first bolt hit a web-wrapped tree trunk.

It didn’t stop.

It bored through wood and silk like both were paper, punched out the far side, and kept going, until it found what had been hiding behind it.

A white blur jerked.

A spider that had been clinging to the far side of the trunk got pierced cleanly and dropped, legs twitching as it hit the silk-laced ground.

Another bolt took a different angle, through a split boulder, then into a hollow where Seismic Sense had felt a faint shift.

It struck something and the hollow erupted with movement, legs scraping, silk twitching, bodies repositioning.

Ludger fired again.

Spinning bolts lanced through the area with surgical cruelty, punching through trunks, stones, and the thin web veils that tried to hide the targets. Each impact was a hard stop for something that had been waiting to ambush.

Viola watched for a few seconds, then shot him a look. “If you’re going to do that, why did you call us?”

Ludger didn’t look at her as he fired another bolt into a shadowed crease. “Because this isn’t the whole island.”

He lowered his hand, letting the last bolt’s echo fade.

“Move to the sides,” he ordered. “Clear the outer zones, areas with fewer enemies. Keep them from looping around while we set camp.”

Viola frowned. “And you?”

“I’ll keep pressure on the main path.” Ludger’s eyes narrowed toward the inland web spine. “Most of them are between us and the labyrinth. That’s where they’ll mass.”

Viola’s expression sharpened into something eager and dangerous. She drew her sword with a clean hiss, froststeel catching the light like cold promise.

Ludger pointed at her without looking away from the inland line. “Don’t cut webs unless you have to.”

Viola scoffed. “I know.”

He finally glanced at Luna. “Cover her.”

Luna nodded once, already moving, already drifting into the angle where she could intercept anything that tried to jump Viola’s flank. Silent insurance.

On the other side, the three beastmen scouts, Harkun, Ragan, Sivra, shifted into motion as well, spreading out with the calm of predators stepping into familiar trouble. Their movements were economical, confident, and annoyingly unbothered by the fact that the entire island was basically a white death-trap.

They didn’t look worried. Not even a little.

Raukor’s warning echoed in Ludger’s head: troublesome terrain.

Maybe this was exactly what they were built for.

Ludger watched his teams peel outward, then turned back toward the main webbed route inland. He exhaled once, slow.

“Alright,” he murmured.

Then he lifted his hand again, and the spinning bolts returned, drilling into the island’s silence like a declaration that the hunt had officially begun.

Even with his guard up, a pattern started to show.

The spiders that came at them, those that had left the labyrinth and spread into the island, were… weak.

All of them felt like first-section stock.

Fast ambushers. Web spitters. Simple stabbing patterns. Predators that relied on instinct and repetition more than tactics. Dangerous, yes, but not the kind of “advanced” presence Ludger expected if the deeper sections were bleeding out into the open.

He didn’t see anything that screamed second section monster-tier. No stronger variants. No spell-threads. No true swarm coordinators. No brood monstrosities built to hold territory.

Just the basics. Which raised a question he didn’t like.

Why only the first section?

Ludger kept firing, kept moving, kept letting Seismic Sense sample the island’s pulse, but his mind worked in parallel, quiet, relentless.

He didn’t actually know the rules for why monsters left labyrinth boundaries in the first place.

Sometimes they did. Sometimes they didn’t. Sometimes a labyrinth behaved like a sealed wound. Sometimes it behaved like a leaking infection.

And right now, this one was leaking only the weakest strain. That suggested control. Or a barrier.

Or a deliberate design choice, like the labyrinth itself didn’t want the higher-tier monsters wandering off and getting killed somewhere inconvenient.

He frowned, dodged another web strand, and pinned it with a quick earth spike without tearing the surrounding silk.

If deeper monsters could freely leave, places would collapse.

Not slowly. Not “eventually.” Immediately.

There wasn’t any current monster invasion sweeping across countries. Not that he’d heard. No reports of towns being overrun by labyrinth creatures pouring out like a tide. No empire-wide mobilizations. No constant emergency levies.

If anything, the coast of the Empire should’ve been under nonstop assault.

Because underwater labyrinths had to be common. The ocean was vast, deep, and full of places for reality to fold into something unnatural. If labyrinths liked concentrated mana and isolated environments, then the sea was practically inviting them.

And if sea labyrinths leaked even a fraction of their output into the open water?

The coastline would be a feeding ground. Ships wouldn’t just “risk” monsters, they’d be guaranteed to meet them.

Ports would build walls facing the surf. Fishing would be a death sentence. Trade would choke.

But the coast still functioned. People still sailed. Ironhand still made money. Which meant something, somewhere, was keeping the worst of it contained. Maybe labyrinths enforced their own borders unless some condition was met.

Maybe only the “lowest tier” was allowed to roam outside like maintenance predators, clearing intruders, feeding the ecosystem, keeping the surface wrapped in webs.

Or maybe the deeper sections were physically blocked, and what lived down there couldn’t reach the exits without passing through some gate that didn’t open unless the labyrinth decided it was time.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed as another white spider shifted behind a web-wrapped boulder.

Or someone is farming them.

He fired a spinning bolt through the boulder and killed the thought mid-step—both the spider and the idea. He didn’t have proof. Not yet.

But the longer he stayed alive, the more he learned that “monsters” rarely existed without someone trying to turn them into an advantage.

He exhaled through his nose and kept moving along the edge, careful not to shred the silk.

“First section only,” he muttered.

Then, to himself, quieter:

“Which means the real teeth are still inside.”

Ludger’s sweep eventually brought him inland far enough that the island’s “spine” became obvious.

The webbing thickened. The terrain subtly sloped downward. The stone under the silk felt older, denser, carved by something that didn’t belong to weather.

And then the entrance appeared. It sat in the middle of the island like the throat of a buried monument.

At first glance, it was a cavern, an enormous mouth torn into the rock, wide enough for a wagon to pass through without scraping its sides. The webbing around it was heavier than anywhere else, layered like drapes at a funeral, hanging in thick curtains that swayed faintly in the breeze even though the air near the hole felt strangely still.

But the longer Ludger stared, the less it felt like a natural cave. The stone around the opening wasn’t jagged. It was shaped.

Two massive “pillars” flanked the entrance, except they weren’t separate columns, more like the rock had been carved to mimic pillars, with vertical ridges and recessed grooves that suggested architecture rather than erosion. The surface carried faint geometric patterns, lines and angles that didn’t form any obvious runes, but still felt intentional, like the skeleton of a design language.

Above the cavern mouth, the rock formed a broad arch that looked too balanced to be accidental. It rose in a smooth curve, then broke into layered steps of stone that resembled an ornate lintel, worn, chipped, partially swallowed by silk, but unmistakably constructed.

Even the “floor” leading into the darkness wasn’t random rubble.

It was a descending ramp made of stone slabs, half-buried under webbing, laid in a way that guided the foot forward, like a hallway, not a hole.

Ludger stood at the threshold and let Seismic Sense dip inside. The darkness wasn’t empty.

It swallowed his perception in stages, like depth that wasn’t just distance. Hollow corridors branching. Vertical shafts. A vast open space deeper in that made the stone feel like a roof over something too big. He frowned, eyes tracing the arch again.

Cavern… or grand entrance.

It looked like the front of a building that had been swallowed by an island. A temple. A palace. A factory. Something meant for people to walk into with purpose.

He wondered, briefly, if that was a coincidence. Then dismissed it.

Labyrinths didn’t do coincidences. They did patterns. Echoes. Designs that repeated across worlds… And this one was wearing architecture like a mask.

Ludger took one step closer, enough to feel the air coming out of it, cooler, dry, carrying that same dusty cloth smell mixed with something faintly sweet and rotten. He didn’t go in.

Not yet.

He’d done what he came to do: cleared the surrounding approach routes, mapped enemy density, confirmed the entrance location, and learned that only first-section spiders were roaming outside.

The real teeth were still inside. And he wasn’t going to bite into the dungeon proper without his people ready and his camp stable. Ludger turned away from the grand-mouth entrance and started back toward the shoreline. Time to rejoin the others. Time to build the camp.

Time to make sure the island didn’t decide to attack them while they slept.

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