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

When night finally came, Ludger was ready to leave.

Or at least ready enough that delaying any longer would only become another excuse.

The guild compound had gone mostly quiet by then. It was close to midnight, and most of Lionfang had already emptied into darkness. The market streets were dead compared to their daytime noise. The training yards were still. The halls of the guild had that strange late-night silence that only appeared after a town had spent all day working itself raw and finally collapsed into sleep.

A few lights still burned here and there, but not many.

That suited him.

Ludger sat alone near one of the quieter workspaces, the half-finished suit spread across the table in front of him. Julia and Raukor had done their part well. Now it was his turn to make the thing worth more than fine materials and good craftsmanship.

He was engraving runes into the suit. Carefully.

Not into the soft sections. Those could come later. For now, he was focusing on the metallic supports and the guardian lizard scale sections, places sturdy enough to hold more immediate enchantment work without risking instability during travel.

Some were for reinforcement. Some for strain distribution. Some for thermal control. Some for subtle reaction flow so the heavier sections of the suit wouldn’t drag awkwardly against his movements once the whole thing was worn properly.

He worked in silence, shoulders still, hands exact, green eyes narrowed under the low light as the carving point moved with quiet scraping sounds over scale and metal.

It was almost peaceful. Almost. Because the suit wasn’t the only new thing resting beside him. At either side of his legs lay a pair of crossbows. Raukor had made those too.

And, as usual, the old smith had apparently looked at a normal idea, spat on it, and improved it through stubbornness and questionable instincts until it turned into something stranger than it had any right to be.

Ludger had originally expected wrist-mounted crossbows, maybe something compact and ugly but useful. Instead, Raukor had built two sleek mechanical weapons meant to rest along the outer sides of Ludger’s legs when not in use. The shape was narrow, the limbs compact, the body reinforced and weighted just right so they sat naturally against his movement lines instead of flopping around like badly strapped cargo.

Now, in the dark, with their metal frames and compact loading structure, they looked less like ordinary crossbows and more like some strange kind of gun. Ludger still wasn’t entirely sure what madness in Raukor’s head had produced that result.

But he couldn’t deny the design had merit. Getting them into firing position was simple thanks to the mechanism Raukor had built into them. Ludger only had to touch one with his wrist.

The moment he did, a fitted ring-like brace unfolded from the body of the weapon and enveloped his forearm and wrist in a clean locking motion. Fast. Tight. Stable. No fumbling with straps. No wasting time with clasps.

Just contact. Lock. Ready. He had tested it more than once already. Very efficient.

The firing mechanism had also been built for one-handed use, just as they had agreed. No awkward draw. No complicated loading sequence. No needing a free second hand in the middle of movement.

To fire, Ludger only needed to press a section built into the crossbow’s body with a finger. Then the weapon would drink from his mana and release a bolt formed through the internal array.

Not ordinary ammunition. Freezing bolts. Clean, fast, mana-fed projectiles built to punch out cold hard enough to slow, pin, or damage without demanding the long shaping process of direct casting every time. A useful tool. More importantly, a discreet one.

Perfect for someone trying not to show too much.

Ludger finished carving one short line into a scale plate, brushed the residue aside, and checked the mana flow through the rune with a light touch.

Stable. Good. He moved to the next piece.

At his side, one of the crossbows caught a little of the lantern light, the metal edge glinting faintly before sinking back into shadow. They really did look strange there, resting by his legs like loyal mechanical beasts waiting to be called into his hands.

Eclaire arrived close to midnight.

By then, Ludger had already packed what he needed, secured the unfinished pieces of the suit, and strapped the pair of strange crossbows along the outer sides of his legs. The dark cloak and hood were ready. The mask rested nearby. The engraved sections he had finished were set aside with deliberate care. He was still working when her footsteps reached him, the scratching sound of rune carving fading only when she stepped fully into the room.

Stolen story; please report.

Then she frowned. Not politely. Not faintly. A real frown. Her eyes moved over him once, from the dark outfit to the crossbows, then back to his face.

“It looks like you don’t know the real meaning of disguise,” she said.

Ludger didn’t even pause long enough to look offended.

“This is a disguise.”

Eclaire stared at him.

“No one would recognize me,” he added.

That only made her expression flatter.

“A true disguise,” she said, “would not make you attract that much attention in the first place.”

Ludger finally looked up from the scale plate he had been engraving. He considered that for a second.

Then said, “That sounds like a skill issue on their side.”

Eclaire closed her eyes briefly. Just briefly. When she opened them again, the look she gave him carried the kind of tired patience usually seen in overworked tutors.

“You are dressed like a suspiciously well-equipped problem,” she said. “A disguise is supposed to make people’s eyes slide past you. Not make them remember the dangerous green-eyed manwith elegant shadow gear and weapons strapped to his legs like some half-finished legend.”

Ludger’s gaze shifted back to the suit pieces.

“Still won’t recognize me.”

“That is not the same thing.”

It wasn’t. Unfortunately, that didn’t mean he cared very much.

The design was practical. The suit fit the role well enough. The silhouette had changed. The face would be partly obscured. The equipment was hidden in plain sight rather than openly displayed. As far as he was concerned, that counted.

As far as Eclaire was concerned, it probably counted as an elaborate threat with tailoring. Still, she didn’t argue any further. Probably because time mattered more than winning that particular battle. So, in the end, they left it there.

Together they headed down into the underground levels of the guild, moving through the quieter stone passages beneath Lionfang until they reached the runic carriage chamber. The place was dimly lit, the air cooler below ground, with the familiar smell of worked stone, metal, dust, and latent mana pressed into the walls. The carriage itself sat waiting in its track housing, angular and sturdy, built more for speed and function than comfort.

Good enough. They boarded without wasted words.

Once the carriage lurched into motion and the runic lines along its structure began to glow faintly, Ludger returned to work almost immediately. He set the unfinished suit across his lap and the opposite bench, and resumed carving runes into the metallic and scaled sections as the carriage sped through the underground routes.

The movement wasn’t ideal, but it was manageable. His hands remained steady.

The scrape of tool against scale and metal became the main sound between them, mixed with the deeper hum of the carriage and the rhythmic pulse of the arrays driving it forward through the dark below the earth.

Eclaire stayed silent.

She sat across from him, posture composed despite the motion, hands folded in her lap at first before one shifted to brace lightly against the seat when the carriage took a harder curve. Her eyes lingered on Ludger once or twice, on the calm precision of his work, on the fact that he was engraving combat-worthy rune structures inside a moving underground carriage like that was a reasonable use of travel time.

Then she looked away again. Because watching Ludger work too long had an odd effect. It made impossible things start to feel ordinary. The carriage moved on.

Ludger kept working. And Eclaire remained silent, but her mind was going places. Back to the capital. Back to the city she had not properly returned to in years.

Not by choice. The thought sat wrong in her chest. The capital was a place built of stone, polish, memory, and rot. Grand streets and quiet knives. Noble smiles and buried malice. A city where the shape of your posture mattered, where servants remembered what they were not supposed to hear, where bloodlines weighed more than merit until merit became useful enough to steal.

She remembered corridors she had walked as a child without truly belonging there. Tutors with careful eyes. Servants who were kind only when unwatched. The feeling of being near power but never inside it. Near legitimacy, but never held by it. Taught constantly, acknowledged rarely. Prepared for games she had not been allowed to openly play.

And now she was going back. Not as a daughter. Not as a lady reclaiming anything. Not even as a hidden piece quietly maintained at the edge of court.

She was going back alongside Ludger, one of the most violently inconvenient boys she had ever met, on a mission that pointed straight into the Empire’s filth. The thought should have been absurd. It probably was absurd. But absurdity had stopped being a useful standard around him some time ago.

Across from her, Ludger etched another clean line into a scale plate, checked the mana response, then moved on without a word.

By the time the runic carriage had eaten through another long stretch of underground distance, Ludger had finished adding all the runes he could reasonably engrave while riding in a moving vehicle.

The larger, sturdier arrays were done.

Reinforcement.

Strain control.

Thermal management.

Impact diffusion.

A few flow-adjustment patterns to make the heavier parts of the suit move more naturally with his body instead of dragging against him at the wrong moments.

Those he could manage here.

The subtler ones would have to wait.

Poison resistance, for example, was not something he wanted to half-ass in a shaking carriage while traveling under the earth.

Acid resistance should be simple enough later. That was mostly a matter of handling corrosion, separation, and material response. Nasty, yes, but straightforward in principle. Acid wanted to ruin things in ways that followed rules.

Poison was worse. There were too many kinds.

He didn’t have enough knowledge in that area yet to build a proper resistance rune he would trust. And “trusting” a poison resistance rune that might fail halfway through was just a creative way of dying stupidly.

So he left those for later. For now, the suit was good enough. Not perfect. Good enough.

Ludger carefully packed the finished pieces away. The dark cloak. The hood. The fitted shirt. The partial mask. The metal and scale sections now carried the runes that mattered most for immediate use.

That left the next problem. His eyes.