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

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Then Ludger stepped back and waited. He expected explosions. A lot of them.

He expected Hans to panic, lash out, and start blasting from inside the enclosure. That would burn oxygen fast. Heat would rise, air would thin, and the fool would either choke, overcommit mana breaking out, or both.

So Ludger held the structure firm and listened. Nothing. No blast. No manic laughter. No immediate attempt to simply turn the earth prison into a furnace. Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He had been hoping Hans would be stupid. Or at least stupid in a useful way.

Instead, the silence itself told him what he needed to know. He was smarter than that.

The bastard had realized exactly what Ludger wanted. Burning wildly inside a sealed shell would only trap heat and consume the air around him first. Hans might be insane, but he was not the kind of insane that forgot how not to die.

Then Ludger felt it. A large amount of mana began to gather inside and around the earth trap.

It wasn’t the scattered flare of hasty escape magic. It was heavier. Denser. Intentional. The kind of buildup that made the air feel tighter and the skin along Ludger’s neck prick slightly in warning.

Hans wasn’t taking any chances, it seemed. Which meant whatever he was doing in there was not a simple attempt to break the shell. It was something bigger.

The earth prison exploded. Not cracked. Not burst at one point. Exploded in all directions at once.

The reinforced mound Ludger had built around Hans came apart in a violent detonation of shattered stone, burning dirt, and pressurized force that tore outward through the grove like a localized disaster. Chunks of earth flew through the trees. Roots ripped free from the ground. Dust and steam blasted across the clearing in a hot wave that bent branches and sent loose leaves spiraling into the night.

Hans emerged from the center of it like something crawling out of a furnace.

Steam rolled off his body in thick white streams, hissing from his shoulders, arms, and back where trapped heat met the colder night air. Flames spread outward from him in ragged waves, racing over broken earth and licking up nearby trunks before dying back under his control. His coat hung torn and scorched, ruby rings glowing dull red in the firelight, wand still clenched in one hand while both whips dragged burning trails through the dirt.

He looked immediately toward where Ludger had been standing. And found nothing. The empty patch of torn ground stared back at him through drifting smoke. Hans’s grin faltered for only an instant.

Then he turned his head sharply, scanning the grove. Left. Right. Between the trees. Up through the branches. Across the broken ground. Firelight danced over his face while his eyes moved with twitchy irritation, searching for any sign of movement.

He found none.

His fighting power was monstrous, but sensing hidden enemies was clearly not his strength. He could drown the area in fire, tear stone apart, and force open almost any direct confrontation through raw lethality and experience. But when it came to actually finding someone who had vanished on purpose, he lacked the instincts for it.

That annoyed him. Hans slowly straightened, steam still rising from his body, and then threw his voice out into the grove.

“Boy!”

His laughter followed a heartbeat later, sharp and ugly, bouncing through the trees.

“What happened?”

He spread his arms slightly, flames curling around the burning whips.

“Are you running away to your daddy and mommy?”

The taunt hung in the dark while he kept turning, grinning up into the branches and out into the shadows, trying to provoke movement where his senses couldn’t find it.

All of a sudden, Hans felt it. Danger.

Not vague instinct. Not the usual thrill of a fight turning sharper. Something immediate and heavy enough to make his body react before his mind could catch up. His grin twitched, and both arms started to move, burning whips rising on pure reflex to carve a wall of fire around him.

He was too late. Ludger appeared at his flank like a piece of the dark itself had condensed into a fist. The punch landed on the side of Hans’s face.

Not a glancing hit. Not a setup strike. A full, brutal impact that smashed into his jaw and cheek with enough force to make the air crack. Hans’s head whipped sideways so violently that the rest of his body followed an instant later, his feet leaving the ground as he was launched through the grove.

He crashed through one tree. Then a second. Then a third.

Wood exploded into splinters around him as his body tore through trunks and branches before finally slamming into the ground in a spray of dirt, bark, and blood. He rolled once, twice, and came to a stop on his side.

His face was half smashed.

The side Ludger had hit looked ruined, bone visibly broken beneath torn flesh, one eye nearly swollen shut already, blood pouring down his neck and into the collar of his burned coat. A normal man would have been dead. A tougher one would have been unconscious.

Hans was still half conscious. He let out a wet little laugh from where he lay, one hand twitching weakly against the dirt.

“…This was a nice fight,” he muttered.

Blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth when he spoke, but he still sounded amused.

“I was hoping…” He coughed, then laughed again, smaller this time. “I was hoping I could burn you more before you finally stopped moving.”

Ludger stood a short distance away, breathing steady enough to be irritating, his expression flat as ever.

“A single punch was enough to make you stop grinning,” he said.

His eyes stayed on Hans’s broken face.

“But it was pretty troublesome to hit you like that.”

That much was true. Getting close had been a problem from the beginning. The whips, the explosions, the veteran reflexes, the air manipulation, the constant area denial. Hans had made every step ugly.

Ludger looked down at him for another second, then said,

“You were lucky you didn’t suffer more.”

His voice lowered slightly.

“Sick bastard.”

Ludger looked down at Hans’s ruined face and understood, with some irritation, that landing that punch had been far more troublesome than it should have been. The bastard’s reactions were simply too sharp at close and mid range.

As long as Hans could see him, he could respond. Maybe not perfectly, maybe not fast enough to dominate Ludger in pure movement, but well enough to throw up those burning whips, detonate the space around himself, and turn every direct approach into a mess of explosions and heat. That meant Ludger couldn’t just outfight him in a straightforward exchange and expect a clean finish.

So he had done the opposite. He moved away. Far away.

Not retreating in the normal sense, but creating enough distance that Hans would lose visual contact completely. Once the pyromancer had no idea where Ludger was, his reactions stopped mattering nearly as much. He could not defend properly against what he could not see coming.

To do that, Ludger had pushed Wind Step far harder than he normally would. A lot harder.

He poured a heavy amount of mana into the skill and, on top of that, dumped raw stamina into the movement as well, forcing his body to produce more than it safely should just to strengthen that single step. It wasn’t just mana-assisted speed anymore. It was a violent burst of acceleration layered over muscle, bone, and momentum all at once.

The result was absurd. Ludger crossed a full kilometer in the blink of an eye. One instant he had been near Hans in the grove.

The next, he was so far away that even a fighter like the madman had no chance of tracking where he had gone. No line of sight. No meaningful reaction window. Just sudden absence.

That gave Ludger exactly what he needed. A blind angle big enough to become a death sentence.

From there, he reversed direction, compressed all that momentum into the return, and struck before Hans could do more than sense danger.

It worked. But not for free. Forcing that much power through a single step had snapped his heel.

Not clean off, obviously, but badly enough that the damage flared through his leg the moment the movement ended. The bone and surrounding structure had taken more stress than they were meant to bear, and the impact of that kilometer-crossing burst had punished the foot hard for it.

So yes, Ludger had hit Hans with one punch.

But that punch had cost him a ridiculous amount of mana, a brutal chunk of stamina, and a broken heel just to make sure that annoying bastard wouldn’t see it coming.

Ludger crouched beside what was left of Hans and checked the body thoroughly. He wasn’t expecting a confession from a corpse, but he would have preferred something useful. He found nothing out of the ordinary.

No hidden crest. No identifying mark tied to a patron. No coded documents tucked into his clothes. No ring with some house insignia hidden on the inner side. No token that connected him cleanly to the hand that had hired him over the years.

Annoying. The only things worth taking were the wand and the whips. All three were clearly magic relics.

The red wand still held residual heat even after Hans had stopped moving, its surface veined with old mana channels and reinforced to carry far more fire than ordinary materials should have endured. The whips were even more interesting. Their braided lengths had survived repeated flame reinforcement and explosive casting without degrading, which meant they had been built specifically for that style. Ludger collected them.

A while later, Hroth approached from the direction of the ruined hideout, moving through the grove with none of the urgency of a man who had just finished a bloody cleanup.

“Are you finally done?” he asked. “It took me some time to finish the others, especially since everything was drowned down there.”

Ludger gave him a flat look.

“Liar.”

Hroth blinked once. Ludger stood, still holding the relics.

“I know you’ve been watching the fight for a while.”

That drew a pause out of Hroth. Then he forced a laugh and lifted his hands slightly in surrender.

“Fine,” he said. “I suppose I didn’t really have to pretend.”

His mouth twitched faintly.

“As you know, I’m a spy. Gathering information without being noticed is basically breathing for me.”

Ludger didn’t bother responding to that. Hroth looked past him once, toward Hans’s broken remains, then back at the wand and whips in Ludger’s hands.

“Regardless,” he said, “what now?”

The grove fell quiet around them, smoke and burnt air still drifting between the trees while the distant lights of the capital glimmered beyond the dark.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly. Now came the harder part.

“We still need the guild master,” Ludger said. “Then we question him.”

Hroth’s expression shifted immediately.

“That,” he said, “is going to be a problem.”