The impact smmed into his crossed forearms like a meteor strike. The shock ripped down his bones and into his spine, rattling his teeth. His boots carved small craters into the deck from the force. Earth Overdrive kept him upright, but only barely.

  He gritted his teeth and looked up. A beastman stood perched on one foot against Ludger’s guard, the other leg extended behind him with acrobatic bance. Furry arms. Lean wiry muscle. A prehensile tail coiled in a deliberate counterbance.

  And a monkey’s face, grinning wide enough to show every sharpened tooth. The weapon in his hand wasn’t a standard nunchaku.

  It was a three-section staff, all three pieces runic-etched, glowing faintly, linked with mana-conductive cords. One of the hardened segments had smmed into Ludger’s forearm guards, leaving a faint dent where there normally should’ve been none.

  The monkey beastman twirled the chained segments once, letting them blur in a circling arc that sang through the air.

  “Ke-ke-ke-ke…” A strange, clicking ugh.

  Ludger’s brow twitched.

  “Great,” he muttered. “A martial-artist type.”

  The monkey’s grin widened. And without warning, he dropped— spinning midair, and swung all three sections toward Ludger’s head in a blinding flurry.

  The monkey-type beastman didn’t allow Ludger even a heartbeat to settle. The three-section staff erupted into motion, the weapon spinning into a chaotic storm of snapping chains and whipping segments. Each hardened piece whistled through the air with the velocity of a thrown dagger, shifting direction at impossible angles as the beastman maniputed the cords with instinctive precision.

  The harsh rhythm of CLACK—CLANG—WHAM—TCHK beat against Ludger’s arms as he absorbed the initial barrage. He raised his forearm guards in tight arcs, catching the first blow with a braced angle, letting the second scrape harmlessly along his gauntlet, and twisting his torso just enough for the third shard of momentum to slip past his ribs. Even with Earth Overdrive stabilizing him, the impacts rang through his bones like hammer strikes.

  The beastman nded lightly on the balls of his feet, spinning into a second assault that came faster and sharper. The staff became a blur of brown, gold, and steel, the chain segments singing as they sliced toward Ludger's knees, throat, temple, and ribs in rapid succession. He tracked every one of them.

  Earth Overdrive grounded his stance with unshakeable density. Ludger rotated his wrist to intercept one segment on the thick ridge of his guard, pressed down against another to smother its momentum, then leaned back by centimeters to let a third pass over his chin. The monkey-type clicked and cackled, chaining the motions together with an acrobat’s fluidity. He twisted his torso, tail whipping around him to stabilize his bance as he unched yet another sequence of rapid-fire attacks.

  That was when the riflemen started shooting.

  A cluster of panicked human pirates, finally regaining the nerve to open fire, lifted a dozen mana rifles from across the deck and pulled their triggers without hesitation. PEW—PEW—PEW— white-hot bolts tore through the stormlit haze, cutting lines of burning light toward Ludger’s back and legs. He didn’t turn. He didn’t even acknowledge the incoming shots. He simply moved. His geomantic senses picked up the tremors of boots scraping behind him, the trembling barrels of rifles, and the high-pitched distortion of mana bolts slicing through the air. That was enough.

  He shifted his weight in subtle, efficient motion, a half-step left, a tilt of the shoulders, a controlled drop of his hips, and the incoming fire sailed past him. One bolt tore by his ear close enough to heat the edge of his scarf. Another burned under his arm as he lifted it to catch a descending staff stroke. A third passed cleanly between his knees as he stepped forward. A fourth grazed the surface of his shoulder pad, but only because Ludger let it pass over the armor’s reinforced pting.

  The monkey beastman faltered in mid-swing. His eyes widened with disbelief as Ludger continued advancing through the crossfire, blocking the weapon aimed at his throat while sidestepping the shot meant to pierce his spine. To an outsider it looked like reckless improvisation, a child weaving through a hurricane of magic bullets and spinning nunchaku without ever turning his head. But to Ludger it was nothing more than calcuted flow, a series of angles and timings that fit together with mechanical inevitability.

  Mana bolts scorched the deck around him. Splinters sprayed. The three-section staff cracked against his guards, searching for a gap in his defense. Ludger shifted each limb with the precision of someone dancing along the edges of trajectories he already understood.

  He redirected a downward strike by sliding his palm across the chain, forcing the segment to embed itself into the pnks instead of his ribs. He ducked under a mana bolt streaking across the deck and pressed forward, forcing the monkey-type back step by step. The beastman clicked his teeth in growing frustration, his rhythm broken, footwork slipping, tail flicking wildly to compensate as Ludger denied him the space to regain momentum. The riflemen kept firing, bolts streaking past the dueling pair, but Ludger moved through them like he’d rehearsed it a thousand times.

  The monkey-type’s weapon slowed, the chains clinking with a softer rhythm as he eased out of his aggressive stance. His shoulders rolled back with deliberate looseness, and a wide, toothy grin carved itself across his face. A low chuckle escaped him at first—sharp, clicking amusement—but it quickly grew into something louder, almost delighted. The beastman straightened, tapping one end of the three-section staff against his palm as though testing its bance.

  “Well now…” he said, voice carrying an odd mix of mischief and satisfaction. “This was unexpected.” He gave a short exhale, almost like a sigh. “They warned me something like this might happen. That’s why they stationed me here, on the fgship.” His grin widened, eyes narrowing with an eager spark. “But I didn’t think the Ironhand would send someone like you to invade my ship.”

  Ludger’s brows pulled together. He didn’t lower his guard, didn’t release Earth Overdrive’s anchoring weight. The monkey beastman confidence wasn’t the panicked bravado of the other pirates, it was the rexed certainty of someone who had been briefed, prepared, and perhaps even itching for a fight like this.

  “Who told you that?” Ludger asked, voice ft, tone edged with suspicion.

  The beastman only ughed harder. His tail swayed zily behind him, body nguage practically radiating enjoyment. “Nice try, kid. But I’m not here to spill secrets.” His head tilted slightly, examining Ludger from head to toe with an appraising look that held none of the cruelty the others carried. “You must be Ludger from the Lionsguard. The little martial artist who can also juggle half a dozen kinds of magic. Word about you travels fast.”

  That made Ludger’s jaw tighten. He stepped forward, cracking a line deeper into the deck under his boot. “And you’re still attacking us.”

  “Attacking?” The beastman shrugged, swinging the staff zily in one hand. “Not my style to hurt kids. I actually prefer not to, if I can help it.” His eyes sharpened, excitement fshing in them like lit powder. “But a challenge…” He pointed a finger at Ludger, grin stretching wider. “A challenge I love. And you? You might be the best one I’ve had in years.”

  The air tightened again. The monkey-type lowered into a rexed but unmistakably lethal stance, staff beginning to rotate into a slow orbit around his arms.

  And Ludger understood, this one wasn’t fighting for money, or orders, or fear.

  He was fighting because he wanted to see if Ludger could handle him.

  And that made him far more dangerous.

  The monkey-type’s grin didn’t fade, it colpsed. The mischief drained from his face like someone flipped a switch. His jaw clenched, eyes narrowing into sharp predatory slits. Then his body began to shift. It wasn’t the smooth, fluid morphing Ludger had once seen in controlled beast transformations. This was rougher, more primal. His spine cracked with a sickening pop as he straightened, gaining height inch by inch. His limbs thickened. Veins bulged under his skin like writhing roots.

  The half-human appearance he’d held until now peeled away. His shoulders broadened. His forearms lengthened and knotted with new muscle. His chest pushed outward, infting as fur thickened across it. His face elongated slightly, still recognizable, still intelligent, but undeniably more beast than man now. The rexed martial-artist from moments ago was gone, repced by a creature towering over Ludger with a hulking, simian frame built for explosive power and destructive reach.

  Ludger felt the change before he fully saw it. The aura around the beastman swelled, dense, crushing, predatory. Terrifying in a way only something born for violence could radiate.

  He had never heard of a monkey beastman evolving this aggressively. It wasn’t normal. It wasn’t natural. It was the kind of strength you only saw in battlefield rumors, those whispered accounts of mercenaries who had “other methods” of unlocking their true forms.

  As Ludger watched the transformation crawl across the beastman’s body, the enemy reached into his side pocket. Ludger’s stomach sank even before the hand came out. A small bottle. Thick gss. Sloshing red liquid.

  He didn’t need to sniff it. Didn’t need to taste the power leaking from it. He sighed, annoyance stiffening his shoulders.

  “A berserker draught,” he muttered. “Of course.”

  It made too much sense. Pirates using advanced runic cannons. Underworld guilds receiving Velis-grade equipment. Beastmen mercenaries working outside their cns. And now a frontline fighter pulling out a substance that only thrived in the darkest corners of the continent.

  Ludger had already suspected these pirates were tied to the same shadowy network he’d been dismantling piece by piece. But this? This sealed it. The beastman uncorked the bottle with his teeth. He upended it into his mouth in one long chug. And the real transformation began.

  His skin flushed a deep, violent red as if blood itself burned under the surface. Muscles ballooned outward at a pace that looked painful, ripping seams in his clothes. His shoulders doubled in width. His legs thickened into tree trunks. The runic tattoos on his arms crawled, glowing like molten iron. His fur darkened around the edges, bckening from the roots outward.

  His breathing grew louder, hot, ragged bursts of steam hissing between clenched teeth. Cracks spidered along the deck with every exhale. By the time he smmed the empty bottle onto the pnks, shattering it to glowing shards, the beastman was no longer anywhere close to human in form. He loomed over Ludger like a red-skinned, bck-furred juggernaut, posture hunched and ready to pounce with terrifying speed.

  For the first time since stepping onto the fgship, Ludger felt an actual shift in danger. Not panic. Not fear. Just the simple acknowledgment that this opponent was no longer holding anything back. And worse, he wasn’t in control anymore.

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