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

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Ludger looked at him, waiting.

Hroth folded his arms and glanced back toward the direction of the ruined hideout.

“The guild has several hideouts,” he said. “But only one is used at a time. They rotate. Quietly. Sometimes because of pressure, sometimes because they’re paranoid, sometimes because they enjoy making everyone beneath them guess where they’re supposed to crawl next.”

Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

“And that’s not the only problem,” Hroth continued. “I haven’t met the guild master. Not once. Not in all these years.”

That made Ludger’s face harden slightly. Hroth shrugged with visible irritation.

“I can’t say for certain that anyone has, unless they’d been around as long as that nut job.” He jerked his chin toward Hans’s corpse. “Someone like him might have seen the guild master in person. Someone with that level of value, seniority, and trust.” His mouth flattened. “Most of the rest only know instructions, intermediaries, and rumors.”

Ludger clicked his tongue. That was annoying.

For a brief moment, the thought crossed his mind that perhaps he had made a mistake by killing the crazy bastard before squeezing more out of him. There had been a narrow window there, maybe, between smashing his face and ending him properly. A possibility that Hans could have been dragged through a little more pain and forced to spit out something useful before his body gave up.

Maybe. But Ludger dismissed the thought almost as quickly as it came. Things probably would not have been that different anyway.

Hans had already shown the shape of the problem without meaning to. If only a handful of people knew the guild master directly, or almost none at all, then this was not the sort of underworld structure led by a loud brute hiding in the dark with his boots on the table. It meant the guild master was far more cautious than Ludger had expected.

And that kind of caution had consequences. It meant layers. Distance. Controlled access. A leader who understood that real power lasted longer when nobody could point at the face holding it.

Ludger’s gaze drifted toward the capital lights in the distance. Most likely, the guild master was not just an underworld figure. He was someone influential outside the underworld as well. That would explain too much too neatly to ignore.

A man with one foot in respectable circles and one foot in the filth below. Someone who could commission murders through criminal channels while helping investigations fail through noble or political influence. Someone who could hear about breakthroughs before others did, decide which ones threatened the wrong balance of power, and then send people like Hans to erase the problem.

Someone exactly positioned to have wanted Arslan’s parents dead. Not because of personal hatred. Because their work had become inconvenient.

Cheaper treatments. Rising influence. dangerous knowledge. The kind of progress that shifted wealth and leverage away from the people who thought they owned both.

If that same sort of hand had remained active for decades, then the guild master might not just be a criminal hiding behind shadows.

He might be one of the hands quietly arranging who got to rise in the Empire at all. Ludger’s expression cooled further. That made him harder to reach. But it also made him matter more than ever.

“He’s not just hiding,” Ludger said at last. “He’s insulated.”

Hroth glanced at him. Ludger continued, voice flat.

“If almost nobody in the guild sees him, then he isn’t merely careful. He has a reason to stay unseen.” His eyes sharpened. “Either his face would expose too much… or his position would.”

Hroth was silent for a second, then gave a faint nod.

“That sounds right.”

Ludger looked down once at Hans’s corpse, then back toward the capital. Which meant the trail was no longer about finding a single underworld den and kicking in the door. Now it was about identifying the kind of man who could rule criminals from behind clean walls.

And that kind of enemy was always harder to drag into the light. Ludger turned his eyes back to Hroth.

“How did you get your jobs from them?”

Hroth answered without much hesitation.

“Usually, someone represented the guild master.”

Ludger stayed silent, so he continued.

“They’d pass the details along. Targets. locations. deadlines. special conditions, if there were any. Sometimes payment terms too. Sometimes only part of them, if they wanted to keep everyone properly obedient.”

Ludger’s expression remained unreadable.

“So you never dealt with him directly.”

“No.”

Ludger narrowed his eyes slightly.

“How did those representatives receive messages from the guild master?”

Hroth exhaled and glanced off toward the dark trees, thinking through the structure again.

“The missions were usually delivered to those representatives at random locations and times,” he said. “Not fixed hideouts. Not regular meeting points. A different alley one week, an abandoned storage yard another, maybe a half-collapsed shrine outside the city after that. Enough randomness to make patterns hard to form.”

Ludger listened in silence. Hroth continued, voice dry.

“And because of that, it’s unlikely they could even guess who had actually seen the guild master. Most of them probably didn’t know whether the person giving instructions had met him that day, three days earlier, or never at all.”

That made Ludger’s face flatten further. Layer after layer. Distance after distance. Exactly the kind of structure built by a man who intended to survive everyone beneath him. Ludger let out a quiet sigh. He had gotten answers tonight. Real ones.

Enough to confirm the underworld angle. Enough to tie Hans to Arslan’s family. Enough to prove that powerful hands had been burying the truth for years. But the mystery was still far from over.

If anything, it had only grown larger now that the shape of the enemy was becoming clearer. Hroth looked toward the capital lights for a moment before speaking.

“It would make sense,” he said, “if someone powerful and already known in the Empire was the guild master of the Obsidian Sword.”

Ludger stayed silent. Hroth folded his arms.

“Someone that smart wouldn’t leave trails connecting back to themselves. Not real ones. Not the kind that survive years of scrutiny.” His mouth twisted faintly. “They’d build layers. intermediaries. fake routes for information. false leads for anyone stupid enough to keep digging.”

He glanced at Hans’s corpse, then back at Ludger.

“Even more so if they’re connected to the Rodericks.”

That made Ludger’s eyes narrow slightly, but he gave a small nod. Yes. That fit too well. A powerful figure with reach in the underworld, enough influence to bury investigations, possible ties to the Rodericks, and a vested interest in making sure certain breakthroughs never changed the balance of power in the Empire.

Ludger looked toward the distant glow of the capital and said, “The best we can do is find clues about people who gained influence and power after the fall of some of those families.”

Hroth nodded once.

“That would be the cleanest trail left.”

Then he exhaled through his nose and added, “Regardless, our job here is done.”

Ludger didn’t like that. Not even a little. The words felt too final for a situation that was anything but finished. Too neat. Too accepting. They sounded like the kind of thing sensible men said when they had gathered enough to survive and wanted to stop before the next layer bit back.

Normally, Ludger could understand that. Tonight, it only irritated him. Especially now. Especially when his father was connected to this. That changed the weight of everything.

This was no longer just a buried underworld trail tied to old noble deaths and suspicious illnesses. It was tangled directly into Arslan’s blood, into the dead family that had been reduced to ash, into a past that had apparently been manipulated, erased, and quietly profited from by people who kept rising while better families burned.

And now he was supposed to accept that this part was “done.” No. Leaving things half-solved was as annoying as ever. Worse, in fact.

Because now Ludger could feel the shape of the truth just beyond reach, close enough to matter, far enough to remain infuriating. He had names without faces, patterns without a master key, motives without the final hand holding the strings.

He hated that. But hating it didn’t change the current limit of what they could get here tonight. So Ludger only looked once more at Hans’s corpse, then toward the capital, his expression calm in the cold way it became when irritation had nowhere left to go except inward.

“Then we move to the next trail,” he said.

Hroth looked at him sideways.

“And what exactly is the next trail?”

Ludger answered without hesitation.

“Paperwork.”

That got a faint snort out of Hroth. Ludger ignored it and continued, voice flat and focused.

“I’ll look for information on anyone over the years who supposedly had creative ideas that gave them more influence. New methods. New treatments. new ventures. new discoveries. Mainly people who already had some standing to begin with.” His eyes narrowed slightly. “The sort who became more important because they found something useful before everyone else.”

Hroth listened in silence.

“It might be too obvious,” Ludger admitted. “The ones behind the curtains probably just buried many of those projects before they could properly surface.” His mouth flattened a little. “But even then, traces should remain. Financial shifts. old reports. abandoned records. patents that went nowhere. investments that suddenly stopped. names that appeared near ideas they should not have controlled.”

He looked toward the capital lights again.

“And eventually,” he said, “I’ll find something.”

Hroth stretched his body, rolling his shoulders and back as if only now remembering that he had spent part of the night slaughtering an underworld hideout and watching a fire mage get his face broken.

“In that case,” he said, “my job here is done.”

Ludger glanced at him. Hroth shrugged.

“I can’t look into that kind of thing the way you can. Sneaking around, listening to people, feeding lies, stabbing the right idiots when needed? Fine. Digging through years of paper trails and political residue?” He made a face. “That sounds like torture.”

Ludger said nothing. Hroth smirked faintly and started to turn away.

“Time to go home.”

Ludger looked at him and said, “We’re not done yet.”

Hroth stopped mid-step and glanced back over his shoulder.

“Oh?”

“There’s something else you should do.”

That drew a faint sigh out of the spy.

“What is it?”