All Jobs and Classes! I Just Wanted One Skill, Not Them All!

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The strike jammed his arm at the elbow, interrupting the punch before the power fully traveled. Then the burning length wrapped his wrist once and burst.

Ludger ripped free through flame and force, but the opening was gone. Hans had already slid back one step, both whips circling again, grin alive and ugly in the firelight.

They came together once more.

Ludger dashed in high, then dropped low at the last instant, trying to come under the outer arc of the whips. Hans responded by crossing both weapons in front of him and snapping them apart. Two streaks of fire carved an X through the dark. Ludger slipped between the arms of it by inches, his coat hem scorching, and drove a palm toward Hans’s sternum.

Hans turned his body and took the strike on mana-armored ribs. The blow landed hard enough to force a grunt out of him. Ludger’s other hand shot for the throat.

Hans’s head snapped back. The fingers missed by a hair.

His right whip came around behind his own back and hooked toward Ludger’s side from a blind angle. Ludger sensed the heat at the last instant and dropped his elbow into it.

Explosion.

The blast lit the grove white-orange. When the light died, both were still standing.

Ludger’s breathing had deepened. Hans’s coat was torn at one side where the body blow had landed. Burn marks and frost cracks scarred the ground all around them in overlapping circles and lines, the grove chewed apart by near misses and blocked strikes.

Hans rolled his shoulders, laughing under his breath. Ludger looked at the whips, then at Hans’s feet, then at the rhythm of his arms.

And charged again. Ludger went in again before the last embers had finished falling.

Wind burst under his feet and kicked him sideways through the grove in a sharp diagonal, fast enough that his outline blurred between tree shadows and firelight. Hans tracked him with the grin still carved across his face, both flaming whips already turning in front of him in tight circles, the burning lengths drawing bright loops in the dark.

The first whip snapped out for Ludger’s chest. Ludger didn’t block it.

He dipped under the line of fire, shoulder rolling forward, and the burning lash passed over his back so close that the heat clawed at his scarf. The tip exploded behind him with a thundercrack that shredded bark off a nearby tree and blasted hot air over the back of his neck.

He kept going.

Hans’s second whip came low, cutting for Ludger’s thigh in a horizontal sweep meant to stop his forward momentum. Ludger shortened his stride at the last instant, planted one foot, and vaulted over it, body twisting sideways in the air. The flaming length screamed beneath him and detonated against the earth in a burst of red-orange light.

Hans was already stepping in to catch the landing. His wand hand rose for a thrust toward Ludger’s throat while one whip recoiled and the other began to turn back around. Ludger landed crooked on purpose.

Instead of settling normally, he let the bad angle throw his body into a spin. His left bracer smashed the wand arm aside with a metallic crack, frost hissing across red wood and fingers, while his right hand came around in the same motion like a hammer.

The punch slammed into Hans’s guard. Not his face. Not cleanly. But it landed.

Hans had crossed one flaming whip back over his torso to intercept, and Ludger’s fist crashed into that defense hard enough to make the braided weapon bend inward and smash against the pyromancer’s chest. The impact folded Hans’s upper body half a step back, the grin on his face faltering for the briefest instant as air blasted out of him.

Ludger saw the opening and drove in harder.

That was when the whip caught him. Hans’s right wrist flicked with vicious precision.

One burning length wrapped around Ludger’s arm just below the elbow and coiled upward in a flash, snaring his forearm like a living band of fire. Before Ludger could rip free, Hans’s expression twisted into something delighted and ugly.

Then the explosions began. Not one. Not two. A chain of them.

The whip detonated along the length of Ludger’s trapped arm in savage succession, each blast blooming into the next so quickly it looked like his entire right side had been swallowed by a column of fire. The night flashed orange-white over and over as force hammered into him from wrist to shoulder. Every explosion drove heat and pressure deeper, battering through cloth and flesh while the coiled whip held the line tight enough that he couldn’t fully tear away until the sequence finished.

The sound rolled through the grove like artillery.

Ludger was blasted backward through smoke and burning dirt, boots gouging trenches into the ground before he finally tore free of the last wrap and skidded to a halt. For a second the grove disappeared behind a veil of smoke, sparks, and drifting black fragments of scorched cloth.

Hans laughed from somewhere inside it. Then the haze thinned. Ludger was still standing. His forearm and hand were intact.

The bracers and forearm guards had done their work, their surfaces scorched black in places, frost lines shattered and melted away, but still holding. The metal had taken the worst of the direct force over the lower arm, saving bone, tendons, and fingers from being destroyed outright.

Everything above that looked much worse. The area closer to his shoulder and biceps had taken the punishment the armor couldn’t fully catch.

His sleeve there was torn open and blackened, fabric hanging in smoking strips. Beneath it, the flesh was split and burned in ugly patches, raw red showing through where the explosions had chewed into muscle. One section near the outer biceps looked especially nasty, the skin ruptured and scorched at the edges while blood and heat-wet tissue gleamed in the firelight. Another wound closer to the shoulder had been ripped open by blast force rather than cleanly burned, leaving a jagged ruin of torn flesh.

It was the kind of injury that should have drawn a sound. A hiss. A curse. At least a flinch. Ludger gave Hans none of it.

He adjusted his stance, blood running warm down his arm, face flat and cold. Hans stared at him for half a heartbeat. Then he laughed again, louder this time. Because Ludger hadn’t even grimaced.

Hans looked at the wound, then at Ludger’s face, and gave him a slow, almost appreciative grin.

“Well now,” he said, “congratulations.”

He spread his arms slightly, one flaming whip still rolling lazily at his side.

“You truly have guts for a brat your age.” His eyes flicked over the torn flesh near Ludger’s shoulder and biceps, then back to his face. “Not even hissing in pain…” He chuckled. “That’s commendable.”

Ludger didn’t answer. He simply moved his other arm.

Mana gathered in his left hand, dense and controlled, and then the rune there began to glow. Pale green light spread over the engraved pattern, each line shining brighter until the symbol looked almost carved from living radiance. It was not a single activation.

It was a chain cast. The rune pulsed once. Then again. Then again in rapid succession.

Healing Touch X5.

The light wrapped around his injured arm and shoulder in layered waves, each pulse sinking into torn flesh and burned tissue before the previous one had even fully settled. The damaged skin knit visibly. Split muscle drew itself back together in slow, ugly, efficient restoration. Charred edges softened, closed, and reformed under the pressure of healing mana forced through one cycle after another.

It consumed mana like a bottomless pit.

Ludger could feel it vanishing almost as fast as he poured it in, the cost brutal enough to be irritating even for him. But at least this method did not chew through his magic circuits the way Overdrive x3 did. Expensive was acceptable. Permanent self-damage was not, unless there was no better option.

So he let the rune keep glowing.

Healing mana continued to pulse through the wound until the worst of the damage was gone. What remained was redness, lingering pain, and the kind of incomplete restoration that still left the arm usable instead of ruined. Hans watched the entire process with widening interest. Then his grin returned.

“You really are skilled,” he said.

There was no mockery in it this time. Just delighted recognition, the way one monster might praise another for being more entertaining than expected.

Ludger rolled his almost restored arm once, testing the motion. The shoulder still burned dully, but the structure held. Good enough.

Then he looked at Hans and said,

“All right. Time to finish this.”

Hans’s smile widened.

“Such confidence,” he said softly. “I like it.”

Hans tilted his head, both burning whips swaying at his sides like restless predators.

“And what,” he asked, grin stretching wider, “makes you think you have the upper hand to declare that?”

He took a slow step forward, the firelight painting his face in shifting orange.

“You won’t last long, after all.”

Ludger frowned. Then he felt it. Something warm at his nose. A second later, blood slid down over his lip. Hans’s grin widened even further the moment he saw it. That told Ludger enough.

“So much for enjoying the fight,” Ludger said flatly. “Using fire magic to make the air harder to breathe, huh?”

Hans gave a careless shrug.

“I do enjoy a good fight,” he said. “But I hate losing one.”

Ludger looked at the blood on his fingers, then back at the pyromancer.

“Very convenient.”

Hans moved first.

The grin never left his face. If anything, the sight of blood at Ludger’s nose only made it worse. He snapped both whips outward, flames roaring along their lengths, and then charged with the obvious intent to finish things before Ludger’s mana economy could recover.

He had likely judged the situation correctly.

Ludger had spent too much mana in this fight already. Wind Overdrive. Water casting. Healing Touch chained five times. Reinforcement, movement, defense. Against most enemies, that would have been enough to decide the endgame.

Against Hans, it only meant the endgame had become uglier.

Still, Hans made one mistake. He assumed Ludger would keep fighting inside the rhythm he had established. The moment the pyromancer rushed in, the ground answered.

Earth surged up around Hans in a violent heave, not a wall this time, not a spear, but a full rising mound that folded over him from multiple angles at once. Dirt, stone, and packed roots crashed together in a heavy enclosing mass, sealing him inside before his charge had crossed half the remaining distance.

Continental Shield.

It was supposed to be a defensive skill.

A broad, heavy protection technique. Something meant to stop forces from reaching Ludger or those behind him, not to imprison a target.

But it worked anyway.

The structure closed around Hans with a deep grinding roar, a rough dome of dense earth and stone that swallowed the madman whole. Ludger immediately poured mana into it, reinforcing the walls before Hans could react properly. The outer surface hardened. The inner layers compacted. Weak seams sealed themselves under geomantic pressure until the mound became less like piled earth and more like a crude underground bunker wrapped around a lunatic with fire magic.