novelraw Chapter 496
Chapter 496
Full patrol of runic golems. Full defensive grid. A wall. Ludger rose slowly.
“Looks like we’ll be clearing this one properly,” Viola said, tightening her grip.
Luna exhaled through her nose. “Of course we will.”
Ludger stared into the deeper darkness. He knew the layout. The choke points. The ambush corridors. The pressure chambers. Still—
He couldn’t fall back now. Lucius had gone this way. Or someone had taken him this way. Either way, turning around wasn’t an option. Ludger stepped forward.
“The drainage keeps the terrain stable,” he said quietly. “But it also funnels movement into kill zones.”
Viola smiled. “So we break the pattern.”
Ludger stepped past the threshold of the second section and raised one hand.
“As planned,” he said quietly. “I’ll handle the enemies. While I’m hiding their remains, you two watch the surroundings. Make sure we don’t draw more of them in.”
Viola frowned immediately. “You shouldn’t be dealing with the second section alone—”
“Watch first,” Ludger interrupted calmly. “Complain later.”
She pressed her lips together, clearly unhappy with the arrangement, but nodded anyway. “…Fine.”
They moved down the sloped passage together, boots finding steady purchase on damp stone. The air was colder here, heavy with mana pressure and the faint metallic scent of active runes embedded deep within the labyrinth’s structure. The walls narrowed, channeling movement forward in a way that made retreat expensive and mistakes lethal.
Ludger stopped.
He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, exposing his forearms. The forearm guards he wore caught the low light, froststeel layered over it, with extended segments forged by Raukor and himself. Compact, brutal, efficient. He rotated his arms once, feeling the balance settle.
That was all the preparation he needed. The labyrinth answered.
Metal shifted ahead. Plates slid against each other with grinding precision as three runic golems emerged from the bend in the corridor. Their cores flared to life, pale light threading through vein-like channels beneath their stone shells. They locked onto Ludger immediately.
Left arms rotated. Runes aligned. Mana condensed. Before Viola could even finish inhaling, the golems fired.
A barrage of compressed mana bullets tore down the corridor in blinding streaks, the air screaming as the projectiles shredded through it. Stone behind Ludger exploded where the first volley struck, fragments scattering across the floor.
He didn’t slow. Wind burst beneath his boots. Once. Twice.
Ludger surged forward in long, tearing strides, body angled just enough that the first wave screamed past his shoulder and shattered against the wall behind him. The second volley came in lower, carving through the space where his legs had been a heartbeat earlier.
He twisted, slid, and launched again, boots biting into wet stone as wind hurled him straight into their firing line. His forearm guards came up. The impact hit like a collapsing wall.
Mana detonated against his arms in blinding flashes, but they held. The energy bled sideways into the floor, carving deep trenches through stone instead of through him. The corridor shook under the force.
Ludger landed inside their formation. Close enough to see the pulsing cores behind layered plating. Close enough to hear the faint hum of their internal mana circulation.
The golems began to reorient. They were already too late.
Right arms unfolded as segmented plating slid back, revealing built-in spears of condensed metal and runic alloy. The weapons extended with sharp mechanical snaps, rune-lines flaring as targeting arrays recalibrated at point-blank range. In perfect synchronization, all three constructs lunged forward, spears driving toward Ludger’s chest from different angles, their movements precise and brutally efficient.
Ludger’s arms moved first.
Blue light ignited along the froststeel guards, a cold glint rippling across their surface as layered mana activated in perfect sequence. The temperature around his fists dropped so fast that frost crystallized in the air itself. He stepped into the attack instead of away from it and drove his fist forward with everything he had.
The first golem took the punch square in the torso. The impact sounded wrong.
Not the deep, grinding crack of stone under stress, but the sharp, brittle shatter of glass. A spiderweb of frost raced across its chest plate in an instant, and then the entire section exploded outward in a spray of frozen shards. The golem staggered as its internal core was briefly exposed, mana spilling into the air like pale fire.
Behind him, Viola and Luna both froze. For a split second, even Viola forgot to breathe. The blow had looked absurdly powerful, too powerful. The way the torso had shattered made it seem as if Ludger’s raw strength alone had simply overwhelmed the construct’s defenses.
Was his brute strength really that high?
The answer came a heartbeat later.
Ludger twisted and drove his elbow into the second golem’s shoulder joint. The same blue-white glow flashed across his guard, and the same unnatural cold bit deep into the metal beneath the stone. Frost surged through the joint, locking the plates together mid-motion. The arm seized, then shattered under its own momentum, fragments skittering across the wet floor.
That wasn’t brute force. That was method.
Ludger had layered Freezing Enchantment over the froststeel itself, turning his guards into weapons that devoured heat and stability on impact. The moment his fist connected, the target metal mana-froze. Internal stress spiked beyond tolerance. Structural cohesion collapsed. The golems weren’t being overpowered, they were being brittled. Once frozen, their defenses dropped to a fraction of their normal rating. Metal became glass. Runic alloy became crystal. And Ludger shattered them accordingly.
The first golem’s torso broke apart completely, plates falling away in frozen fragments as the core lost containment. Its legs locked, then collapsed as its systems failed. The second tried to pull back, but Ludger stepped through the broken formation, caught its spear arm, and drove a knee into its chest. Blue light flared again, and the chest plate burst apart like an ice sculpture hit with a hammer, a little less than before, though
The third golem hesitated. Just for a fraction of a second. That hesitation was fatal. Ludger turned toward it, eyes cold and focused, wind already coiling beneath his boots as he prepared to close the distance again. The labyrinth had just learned something important.
It wasn’t fighting a warrior. It was fighting someone who understood exactly how to break machines that thought they were alive.
Ludger closed the distance to the last golem in a single burst of wind.
It barely had time to raise its spear before he was inside its guard. His fist drove into the construct’s chest, blue light flaring as Freezing Enchantment surged through the froststeel. The temperature dropped in an instant. Runes flickered. Mana flow stuttered.
Then the torso shattered.
The golem froze mid-motion, plates locking as frost raced through its frame, before collapsing in a heap of broken stone and ruined metal.
Silence returned.
Ludger straightened and swept his gaze across the corridor, Seismic Sense unfolding in layered waves. No movement. No approaching patrols. No shifting stone beyond the normal pulse of the labyrinth’s internal mechanisms.
“Clear,” he said quietly.
He moved to the remains and began working quickly. Cores came out first, pried free from fractured housings and set aside. Then the runes went down—tight, efficient distortion arrays etched into the wet stone floor. He placed the cores at their centers and fed the arrays just enough mana to stabilize them.
The shattered golems faded into visual irrelevance, swallowed by misaligned light and bent perception.
“We don’t need to keep these hidden for long,” Ludger said as he finished the last remains. “Ironhand won’t send anyone this deep yet. Not without a scheduled push.”
Luna stepped closer, eyes flicking over the broken plating before it vanished from view.
“Most people think blunt force is the worst option against runic golems,” she said. “Metal bodies. Reinforced frames. You’re supposed to use precision strikes or core disruption.”
“That’s true,” Ludger replied, wiping frost residue from his guard. “If you can’t interfere with their mana flow.”
He tapped one of the shattered plates with his boot. “They’re hard because of circulation. Active reinforcement. Dynamic load distribution. The metal itself isn’t exceptional.”
Viola raised an eyebrow.
“If it were,” Ludger continued, “they wouldn’t be mass produced. You can’t build armies out of materials that are rare.”
Luna considered that. Slowly, the logic clicked into place.
“Freeze the runes,” she said. “Freeze the flow. The structure loses its reinforcement.”
“Exactly,” Ludger replied. “Then it’s just badly shaped armor pretending to be alive.”
Luna nodded once. Understanding settled.
And with it, the quiet realization that the labyrinth’s greatest guardians weren’t nearly as invincible as their reputation suggested, at least, not to someone who knew where their strength really came from.
Ludger made it look simple. It wasn’t.
Freezing a runic circuit mid-operation and desynchronizing an active mana flow wasn’t something most could even attempt, let alone pull off in the middle of combat. Runic constructs were designed to resist exactly that kind of interference. Their circuits were layered, self-correcting, and constantly cycling energy to prevent localized disruption.
If you froze only the metal, the runes would compensate. If you disrupted only the runes, the core would reroute. If you tried to overpower both, you’d just get crushed before you finished the cast.
The only reason Ludger could do it was because of how his classes overlapped.
Not stacked. Not added. Interlocked.
His Runic Mage path gave him control over runic language at a structural level. Not just drawing symbols, but understanding how intent flowed through them.
Runic Mage Lv.11
(+5 INT, +5 WIS, +5 DEX)
Wordweave Lv.11
Rune Echo Lv.11
Layered Rune Lv.02: enables you to stack multiple rune effects into the same physical medium without mutual interference.
That was what allowed his froststeel guards to carry several enchantments inside their metal instead of on just the surface. Froststeel made that even more powerful with water and ice effects.
Then came the second half of the equation. His Magic Warrior class. Not a caster pretending to be a fighter. Not a fighter borrowing spells. A class designed to turn magic into physical force.
Magic Warrior Lv.21
(+6 STR, +6 INT, +4 DEX)
Blazing Enchantment Lv.11
Freezing Enchantment Lv.16
Windy Enchantment Lv.06
Earthen Enchantment Lv.03
Mana Output Lv.05: Allows you to dump extra mana on the enchantments of the class according to the level of the skill.
When Ludger punched the golem, he wasn’t just hitting it. He was injecting a layered rune structure directly into its runic circulation system.
The moment his fist connected, Rune Echo synchronized with the golem’s internal inscriptions. Wordweave rewrote their output priority. Layered Rune stacked Freezing Enchantment on top of the metal itself.
The froststeel became a conduit. The impact became a spell. The spell became a system crash.
Mana circulation froze mid-cycle. Reinforcement arrays collapsed. Structural compensation failed. The construct’s defensive rating dropped by more than ninety percent in less than a tenth of a second.
At that point, even ordinary steel would have shattered it. And Ludger was hitting it with something far worse. That was why the golems broke. Not because he was stronger than them. But because he understood them.
And in a system-built world where no one was aware of it, understanding was the most lethal weapon of all.
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