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

A note from Comedian0

Thank you for reading!

Don't forget to follow, favorite, and rate. If you want to read 400 chapters ahead, you can check my patreon: /Comedian0

Elaine’s eyes narrowed slightly at that, but she let him continue.

“He doesn’t want to look weak,” Arslan said. “And he definitely doesn’t want other people worrying about him.”

That part he was certain of. Ludger hated being handled. Hated looking vulnerable. Hated the idea of adding his own weight to someone else’s back unless he had no other choice.

If he had come home soaked in blood, smelling like smoke and death, and still refused to speak, then whatever had happened was something he had already decided to carry alone before he even stepped through the door.

Arslan leaned his forearms on his knees and stared ahead for a few seconds.

“That’s not because he thinks we’re useless,” he said. “It’s because… well, from his point of view, if he can carry it himself, then letting us carry part of it only creates more problems.”

Elaine was quiet for a while. The house remained still around them. Somewhere deeper in the room, one of the twins made a small sleepy sound and then settled again. Arslan spoke once more, more quietly this time.

“He’s at that age too,” he said. “Old enough to start deciding for himself what he keeps inside. Old enough to think some things should stay his and his alone.”

Then his mouth tightened faintly.

“Problem is, Ludger isn’t doing that like an ordinary fourteen-year-old. He’s doing it like someone who already believes he has to hold the roof up while everyone else sleeps under it.”

That made the silence between them heavier. Because it was too close to the truth.

Arslan knew the look Ludger had worn when he said he didn’t want to talk about it. It wasn’t shame. It wasn’t simple stubbornness either. It was control. The deliberate kind. The look of someone shutting a door before whatever was behind it could step into the house.

And Arslan understood that far too well.

“He probably thinks he’s protecting us,” he said at last.

Elaine’s face softened only slightly, though worry remained sharp in her eyes.

“And is he?”

Arslan let out a slow breath.

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “Maybe. Or maybe he’s just doing what men do when they decide they’d rather break their own backs than let the people they care about see the weight.”

That answer didn’t comfort either of them. But it felt honest. Arslan leaned back and rubbed at the side of his jaw before speaking again.

“At the very least,” he said, “Ludger is smart enough not to do anything too dangerous or too far beyond him.”

Elaine gave him a look that suggested she had serious objections already prepared, but he kept going.

“He’s strategic to a fault,” Arslan said. “That boy doesn’t just run headfirst into things unless he’s already measured ten ways to survive them first. He plans. He calculates. He stacks advantages. Even when he looks reckless, most of the time he’s already decided the risk is acceptable.” His mouth tightened faintly. “He wouldn’t do something that would make him fall and leave the rest of us drowning in problems.”

Elaine’s expression did not soften.

Instead, she asked, very evenly, “It seems that you forgot he went to fight a giant sea monster capable of sinking extra-large ships.”

Arslan opened his mouth. Closed it. Then exhaled through his nose and nodded once.

“…More often than not,” he corrected, “he can be strategic.”

That drew the faintest shift in Elaine’s face, not amusement, exactly, but something close to it for half a heartbeat. Then the worry settled right back in.

Arslan looked away for a moment, his gaze drifting toward the darkened doorway.

He still believed what he had said, mostly. Ludger was careful in ways that mattered. Even his worst decisions usually had too much thought behind them to be called pure recklessness. But Elaine was right too. There were exceptions. And those exceptions tended to be large, violent, and absurd enough to become local history.

The sea monster was a very good example. Arslan let out a tired breath.

“For now,” he said, “we’ll just have to wait and see.”

He didn’t like that answer. Elaine clearly didn’t either.

But neither of them could drag Ludger back out of the frost labyrinth by force, and even if they could, Arslan wasn’t sure it would help. Whatever the boy was trying to work out in there, he had chosen the cold, the monsters, and the solitude for a reason.

So all they could do tonight was sit with the quiet weight of it and hope that when Ludger finally came back, he would look a little less like someone trying to punch a hole through whatever had followed him home.

In the end, Ludger stayed inside the Frost Labyrinth for a full week.

Silva had gone in with him at the start, and that alone had calmed some of the nerves around Lionfang. Not all of them, because sending a direwolf into a frozen death hole with him was only comforting by Ludger’s standards, but enough that people stopped hovering near the entrance every few hours like anxious idiots waiting for the mountain itself to spit him back out.

Even so, the week became strange. Because Silva did not remain inside the whole time.

Every so often, the direwolf would emerge from the labyrinth alone, massive paws crunching over frost and stone, body steaming faintly in the colder air outside. More than once, he came out pulling several carts behind him, loaded with froststeel taken from the labyrinth depths. The sight was bizarre enough that people stopped what they were doing just to stare.

A giant wolf hauling wealth out of a frozen labyrinth without a rider, without a handler, without anyone guiding him except his own grim patience.

The carts creaked under the weight of pale blue metal and ice-crusted materials, the froststeel stacked in rough bundles and chunks that still carried the chill of the labyrinth itself. Silva would drag them all the way back like it was merely another irritating task forced upon him by an unreasonable master, then turn around and head right back in again after only the shortest pause.

No explanation. No drama. Just labor. Which, in a way, made it feel even more like Ludger. By the time the full week had passed, the people around the labyrinth entrance had started to understand two things. First, Ludger was very much alive down there.

Second, whatever he was doing, he was doing it with the kind of relentless insanity that made even veterans stop asking too many questions.

Then, finally, he came out. When Ludger left the Frost Labyrinth at last, he looked exhausted. Not wounded in the dramatic sense. Not half-dead. Not staggering.

Just exhausted.

The kind of exhaustion that sat deep in the body and behind the eyes, earned layer by layer until it stopped looking like tiredness and started looking like someone had been worn down by repetition, violence, and refusal to stop.

Staying awake for one week was troublesome enough. Staying awake for one week while fighting frozen skeleton riders was something else entirely.

The Frost Labyrinth did not offer the kind of enemies one could lazily crush without thought. The mounted skeletons hit hard, moved across the frozen terrain with miserable efficiency, and forced constant adjustments in footing, timing, and impact control. Ludger had spent days smashing through them, reading their movement, taking hits, trading blows, refining body mechanics, then doing it all again until fists, shoulders, legs, and stamina became one long, ugly lesson.

It had been miserable. Useful. But miserable. His clothes were in rough condition, his hair a mess by Ludger’s standards, and the calm expression on his face had become slightly flatter than usual in the specific way it did when he was too tired to waste effort pretending he wasn’t.

Still, despite all that, there was a hard little note of satisfaction buried under the fatigue.

Because he had achieved his goal. At least one of them. The Pugilist class had reached level one hundred.

And judging by the way Ludger stepped out of the labyrinth with his knuckles scarred, body drained, and eyes carrying that cold, settled look, the Frost Labyrinth had paid dearly for helping him get there.

Ludger went straight home and ignored everyone calling for him.

People spoke the moment they saw him. Questions, greetings, reports, concern, probably a complaint or two buried in the noise. He heard all of it in the vague way one heard distant weather. None of it mattered enough to stop walking.

He crossed the city, entered the house, and kept moving. Someone tried again when he stepped inside. Another voice followed. Then another. Ludger ignored all of them.

He reached his room, and made it to the bed on pure momentum and stubbornness. The moment his body hit the mattress, all remaining intent vanished with it. He didn’t even bother with proper positioning. He just fell onto the bed like a man who had already spent every useful thought he had on punching frozen skeletons for a week straight.

Then he slept. For an entire day.

Not light sleep, either. Not the sort broken by noise, movement, or the normal irritations of a crowded household. He was simply gone. Dead to the world in the most practical sense available without actual death being involved.

That did not stop the twins.

At some point during that full day of unconsciousness, they apparently decided Ludger’s sleeping body was an acceptable target for entertainment. They played pranks on him while he slept, small things, harmless things, the kind of nonsense only very young children found endlessly funny. A scarf moved here. Hair tugged there. Tiny hands arranging whatever parts of him they could reach into positions they no doubt considered deeply artistic.

Ludger did not wake up. Not once.

By the time he finally opened his eyes, the room was quieter again, the light shifted enough to tell him a ridiculous amount of time had passed, and the twins had apparently exhausted themselves with their own mischief.

Both were sleeping. Using him as a pillow.

One had claimed part of his chest. The other had ended up more across his side with the shameless confidence only children possessed when deciding another person existed primarily for comfort.

Ludger looked at them for a moment. Then ignored that too. Without bothering to move them immediately, he simply opened his status screen to confirm his progress.