Viola shifted slightly in the armor and asked, “So?”

Ludger looked at her.

“So what?”

“Does this count as being prepared?”

He stared at her for another second.

Then said, “It counts as being prepared in a way that creates several new problems.”

Viola puffed her cheeks slightly.

“That still sounds like progress.”

“It sounds like you bought a mystery and now want me to be grateful it fits.”

Luna, unfortunately, looked like she almost agreed with both sides. The twins, who had long since stopped caring about the deeper implications, were now staring up at the armor with wide-eyed amazement.

Elle pointed at Viola and announced, “Cool.”

Arash nodded with the solemn certainty of a child recognizing greatness. Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose. That, annoyingly, did not help his argument.

Because yes. It was cool. Very suspicious. Still cool. And that only made it worse.

Ludger looked at the armor again, then at Viola, and said, “Go see Raukor.”

Viola blinked once.

Ludger continued, “Let him inspect those pieces properly and see if he can guess who made them.”

That, at least, was useful. If anyone in Lionfang could look at foreign armor, strange deployment mechanisms, hidden joints, and layered metalwork without immediately turning the whole matter into confused speculation, it would be Raukor. He might not know the maker directly, but he could probably tell whether the thing came from some known external style, a lost workshop, a militarized foreign craft tradition, or something even stranger.

Ludger narrowed his eyes slightly and asked, “Did Torvares investigate it too?”

Viola nodded.

“He did.”

That was expected. Ludger waited.

Viola added, “But he didn’t find anyone in the capital who fit the description of the man who sold it to me.”

That made Ludger facepalm. Actually facepalm. Not out of dramatic despair. Out of genuine, tired disbelief.

“Viola,” he said, dragging his hand down his face, “you are almost seventeen.”

Viola’s expression tightened immediately, because she could already hear where this was going and clearly disliked every part of it. Ludger kept going.

“You are too old to be receiving things from strangers,” he said. “Or buying something that is obviously too good to be true.”

Viola looked away at that. Embarrassed. Actually embarrassed, which was rare enough from her to make the moment more impressive than the armor.

The problem, unfortunately, was that she still believed at least part of her original judgment had been correct. And in fairness, from one angle, it had. She really had made a killing by buying the armor if the only variables were value and price. The sets were absurdly useful. Compact, face-concealing, combat-ready, and clearly made with skill beyond anything ordinary in the Empire.

Which was exactly why the situation was so bad.

Because “a great bargain” and “a deeply suspicious setup” were not mutually exclusive.

Viola, still looking off to the side, muttered, “It was a very good deal.”

Ludger stared at her.

“That is not helping your case.”

“I know.”

“You are saying it like you want partial credit.”

“I do want partial credit.”

That answer was so shamelessly Viola that even Luna had to look away for a moment. Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose. Of course she was still halfway proud of herself for spotting what she thought was an impossible bargain in the capital and securing two sets before anyone else could.

That really was the problem with smart people. They were often just intelligent enough to negotiate themselves into traps with excellent efficiency. Ludger pointed at the armor.

He said, “Take it to Raukor.”

This time the order landed properly. Viola nodded once.

“I will.”

“And don’t wear it anywhere important until he checks everything.”

“I already checked for curses.”

“That’s not the same as understanding the maker.”

That, finally, she accepted without argument. Ludger rubbed once at the bridge of his nose and muttered, “Unbelievable.”

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

Viola looked mildly offended again at that.

“I said I was going.”

“That doesn’t make the original decision less stupid.”

Luna, who had wisely remained silent through most of the exchange, finally said, “We’ll take them to Raukor.”

Ludger nodded. At least one of them sounded like she understood that this had already moved beyond “cool armor” and into “unidentified foreign technology mysteriously placed into the hands of the wrong people.”

Viola folded her arms, now looking more put together again even with the embarrassment lingering in the corners of her face.

“For the record,” she said, “I still think it was an excellent purchase under incomplete information.”

Ludger stared at her for a second.

Then said, “That is the most noble way possible to say ‘I made a bad decision confidently.’”

Luna looked down again. Viola clicked her tongue softly.

“I hate when you summarize things correctly.”

And with that, the matter was settled for now. The armor would go to Raukor. And Ludger would add yet another suspicious thread to the growing pile of things that were absolutely going to become annoying later.

Night came, and before long the whole family was gathered for dinner. The table felt fuller than usual.

Not crowded exactly, but lively in the way houses became when people who belonged in different circles somehow ended up sharing the same meal anyway. The lamps were lit, the food was hot, the twins were loud in bursts and drowsy in between, and the day’s dust had settled enough that even tension had to sit down and eat with everyone else.

Viola and Luna had joined them.

That part wasn’t unusual anymore. It wasn’t the first time they had come for dinner, and at this point their presence fit the house naturally enough that nobody treated it like an event.

Still, Elaine was in a good mood because of them. Or, more specifically, because of their orderliness.

That was the sort of thing she appreciated deeply. Two young women who sat properly, handled the table without chaos, helped keep the twins from turning every shared meal into a frontier siege, and generally carried themselves like civilized people instead of half-trained wolves? Yes. That would improve her mood whether it was the first dinner or the fiftieth.

So Elaine was smiling a little more easily than usual. That alone made the room feel lighter. Viola, for her part, had returned from Raukor’s workshop earlier with an answer. Or rather, with the lack of one.

Raukor had no idea who the hell crafted the armor.

He had looked at the folding mechanism, the plate structure, the internal locking sequences, the strange compact deployment, the material layering, and whatever hidden madness made the whole thing transform from armlets into full combat gear, and in the end, even after all of that, his answer had still basically been:

no clue.

And that mattered.

Because Raukor was not some local blacksmith with provincial pride and limited knowledge. He had traveled. Worked. Seen real craft traditions. According to Viola, he had grunted, cursed, stared at the pieces for a long time, and finally admitted that he had been in all the lands of this continent and had never seen anything like them.

That made the armor even worse. Or better. Which, in this case, meant worse. Ludger sat there with food in front of him, hearing the normal dinner sounds around the table while part of his mind remained caught on that answer.

All the lands of this continent. And still nothing. So the armor was either from somewhere farther out than Raukor had ever reached, tied to a workshop hidden well enough to stay invisible to people like him, or made by someone working outside any recognized tradition entirely.

None of those options improved his opinion of the situation. He cut through a piece of meat in silence while Viola, apparently having recovered enough from the earlier embarrassment, recounted Raukor’s verdict with the confidence of someone who had decided partial innocence was available as long as the mystery was sufficiently absurd.

“He kept turning the armlet around like he wanted it to offend itself into explaining how it worked,” Viola said.

Arslan huffed a laugh. That sounded about right.

Viola continued, “Then he said he’d seen armor from every major region on the continent and nothing like this was even close.”

Luna nodded once from beside her.

“That was the shortest polite version,” she said.

Elaine, still in that better mood, served more food with the unshaken calm of someone who had long ago accepted that if she listened closely enough at this table, eventually she would hear things that sounded like either military reports or the beginning of a criminal trial.

“That means it’s valuable,” Arslan said.

Ludger glanced at him. Arslan shrugged.

“What? It does.”

“It also means it’s suspicious,” Ludger said.

“That too.”

Elaine gave Arslan a flat look.

“Do try to sound less pleased when your children describe suspicious foreign armor bought from strangers.”

Arslan cleared his throat.

“All right.”

Viola muttered, “I keep hearing the ‘from strangers’ part repeated like I didn’t understand it the first seven times.”

“That’s because you clearly didn’t understand it the first time,” Ludger said.

Viola looked immediately annoyed again. Luna very carefully focused on her food.

Elaine, however, remained in a good mood anyway, because no matter how suspicious the conversation topic was, the actual table behavior stayed orderly. Viola and Luna sat properly. They helped with the twins without being asked. They didn’t make extra work. They didn’t spill things, pick fights, or encourage the children into climbing furniture with weapons.

Those were real virtues in Elaine’s world.

So while Ludger’s thoughts remained on unknown armor makers, false identities, vanished sellers, and all the ways that thread might tie into the rest of the filth he was already dealing with, the dinner itself stayed warm.

After dinner, once the table had been cleared enough that the meal had shifted into that softer, slower stage where people either relaxed or started asking the dangerous questions they had postponed during food, Viola looked at Ludger and asked,

“So what’s the plan?”

Ludger didn’t even pretend to take that seriously at first.

“Our top priority,” he said, completely flat, “should be to search for your sense of logic and danger before it’s too late.”

Viola turned red almost immediately. Part anger. Part embarrassment. And a very small part because half the table looked like they were trying not to react too much to how cleanly he had landed the hit.

“Ludger,” Elaine said at once, in the tone only mothers used when deciding that a boy had just crossed the line from funny into punishable.

“Don’t tease your sister.”

Ludger let out a quiet sigh through his nose, the kind that suggested he felt deeply misunderstood by a world hostile to precision. Then he gave up on dodging. Or rather, he gave up just enough.

“Fine,” he said. “Since Viola won’t stop bothering me until she knows, I might as well tell the whole family.”

That got everyone’s attention properly. Even Arslan straightened a little.

Ludger looked around the table and said, “I’m going to infiltrate one of the sealed labyrinths.”

The room went still for half a second. Not chaotic stillness. Sharp stillness. Because that sentence carried too many meanings at once. Not a labyrinth in the loose adventurer sense.

Not the kind of everyday dungeon-clearing contract people talked about over drinks.

The labyrinth. The sealed ones. The hidden ones. The ones tied to the ugly shape of the structure now creeping through too many parts of his life. Viola recovered first.

“How did going to the capital with Eclaire help with that?”