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

They reached the capital on the morning of the black market day.

By then, the underground ride had long since burned away any sense of normal travel. The runic carriage finally slowed beneath layers of old stone and reinforced channels, the hum in its frame fading into something lower and rougher before it came to a full stop.

Ludger stepped out first.

The air felt different immediately.

Cooler than Lionfang’s. Drier in a way that made the lungs notice. And underneath the ordinary smell of stone, dust, old water, and city runoff, there was something else too, something only really large cities seemed to have. A layered density. Too many people, too many roads, too many lives stacked on top of one another until even the ground felt crowded.

The capital. Eclaire stepped out after him, composed as ever, though Ludger noticed the faint tightening in her posture all the same. He didn’t comment on it.

Instead, the moment they emerged far enough to stand properly, he extended his senses into the earth. No hesitation.

Mana spread downward and outward through the stone beneath the capital, his awareness sliding through packed layers of soil, foundations, old construction, forgotten tunnels, sewage channels, cellar networks, hidden basements, collapsed sections, braced sections, smugglers’ routes, and older scars left by repairs no one aboveground would ever think about.

He checked the earth of the entire capital. Or at least as much of it as he could reach in one controlled sweep without doing something stupid. His awareness moved fast. Underground meeting spots. Hidden chambers. Recently hollowed spaces. Unusual structural gaps. Temporary access tunnels. Reinforced cavities where crowds might gather unnoticed.

He looked for all of it. And found nothing. At least, nothing that fit.

There were hidden places, naturally. This was the capital. People had been burying secrets under it for longer than most bloodlines could remember. But none of what he sensed felt like a current black market site waiting to wake up. No fresh underground gathering hall prepared for tonight. No suspicious central chamber ready to hold brokers, smugglers, and the kind of people who smiled while selling poison components by moonlight.

Ludger frowned slightly and pulled his senses back in. Then he looked at Eclaire.

“Where’s the meeting?”

She looked at him without surprise, as if she had expected the question the moment he started using his earth sense.

“We’ll have to look for clues in the capital,” she said.

Ludger’s expression didn’t change. Eclaire continued.

“They usually leave clues at previous meeting sites,” she said. “Or at places tied to the last route. Not obvious ones. Instructions meant only for people who know how to read them.”

Ludger listened.

“The new place,” she added, “is usually created about an hour before the event.”

That made his eyes narrow slightly.

“Created.”

“Yes.”

He glanced once toward the stone underfoot.

“Of course it’ll be underground,” Eclaire said. “But it won’t be there yet. Not until the last moment.”

Ludger was quiet for a second. That was… interesting. Annoying, but interesting.

If the location truly didn’t exist yet, that explained why he found nothing stable enough to matter. It also meant the organizers were taking security much more seriously than most criminal idiots usually bothered to.

He wondered how they were doing it.

To create a fresh underground site that late without making a disaster out of the surrounding structure… that wasn’t simple. Not if they wanted something large enough for a real black market gathering.

Without a geomancer on Gaius’s level… No.

Even Gaius wouldn’t be the right comparison for this kind of work. Gaius was absurd in his own direction. And Ludger himself could obviously do it. Given enough mana, enough preparation, and enough patience, he could open space underground, brace it, hide access, and make it look natural enough to irritate anyone trying to track it.

But the kind of people running the black market probably didn’t have someone on that level. At least, not likely. So how? Maybe they weren’t carving out an entirely new chamber each time.

Maybe they were using partially prepared voids hidden under stable structures and only opening the final access point at the end. Or using multiple smaller earth mages in sequence. Or temporary shaping arrays. Or earth-aspected relics.

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Or some ugly method of controlled collapse and reformation that would be too dangerous for decent people and therefore perfect for criminals.

Perhaps they could use earth magic to achieve something pretty similar to true geomancy without actually having a monster like him doing the work. That would fit. Messy imitation backed by enough manpower, money, or relics could still get results. He looked at Eclaire again.

When night finally came, they left the underground tunnels. By then, the capital had already changed faces.

The daytime polish was gone. Not entirely, of course. This was still the capital. Even at night, some districts stayed lit, guarded, and painfully respectable. But the rhythm underneath had shifted. The official city was winding down in some places, pretending to sleep in others, while the hidden one began to stretch awake.

Ludger and Eclaire slipped out through a narrow a newly created exit buried behind old stonework and a rotting storage structure no one cared enough to inspect properly.

From there, they began to move through the capital. Carefully.

Not openly. Not quickly enough to draw attention, but not so slowly that they looked uncertain either. They took side routes, crossed through narrower streets, cut behind shuttered shops, avoided patrol lines when possible, and used the parts of the city that were easiest to forget.

Ludger was already wearing the suit.

The dark cloak sat over the reinforced shirt and armored hood structure, the partial mask and altered contours of the hood turning his face into something sharper, harsher, and much less readable than normal. The shadow around his eyes had deepened exactly as intended. Between that, the bodyguard posture, and the modified shape of his silhouette, he looked like someone people would rather remember incorrectly than study too closely.

Eclaire, meanwhile, wore a dark robe over her clothes, though she still hadn’t pulled the face covering fully into place yet. Her hood was up, but not low enough to conceal her features completely. For now she needed to see clearly, move naturally, and read the city around them without looking like she was sneaking.

So she walked like she belonged nowhere and knew exactly what that meant. Ludger stayed half a step behind and to the side.

Silent. Watching. The role fit disturbingly well. They moved through one location, then another.

At each stop, Eclaire slowed slightly, not enough to draw obvious notice, but enough to let her eyes roam over old walls, cracked stone corners, archways, drain mouths, shutter edges, and sections of alley that looked too worthless to matter.

The first spot gave them nothing. Or at least nothing either of them could identify as useful. Just old grime, cracked plaster, a faded delivery mark, and the usual mess of capital neglect hidden behind polished streets.

The second spot looked more promising at first, but turned out to be a dead lead. Some old signs were there, but either too damaged, too outdated, or unrelated. Eclaire studied them for a while, then moved on without saying much.

Only at the third location did she finally stop for real. It was an alley.

Narrow. Damp. Ugly in the quiet way only old capital alleys managed to be. A wall on one side had cracked and been patched badly years ago, while the other side carried layers of stains and scraped-off postings. Nothing about it invited attention.

Which was probably why it mattered. Eclaire stepped closer to the wall and narrowed her eyes. Ludger followed her gaze. At first he saw nothing. Then, after looking harder, he noticed them. Weird engravings.

Small. Crooked-looking at first glance, but too deliberate to be random. Tiny lines and shapes cut shallow into the stone in a pattern that looked meaningless unless someone already expected meaning to be there.

Eclaire took out a folded scrap of paper and began copying them down carefully. Ludger watched the wall, then the paper, then the wall again. He tried to make sense of it. Nothing.

It didn’t look like ordinary code. Didn’t look like a merchant shorthand he knew. Didn’t feel like a runic pattern either. There was shape to it, yes, but not the kind he was used to reading.

He frowned slightly but said nothing while Eclaire finished sketching the lines onto the paper. Then they moved again. The next clue took longer to find.

Two more wrong turns. One silent wait while a patrol passed nearby. A narrow stretch behind a closed wine house. A half-collapsed stairwell that led nowhere worth naming. Then finally another mark, this one cut into the underside of an old stone support near a drainage arch.

Eclaire copied that one too. Ludger leaned in slightly, eyes narrowing behind the shadow of his hood. This time something clicked. Not fully. But enough. He looked at the copied shapes. Then at the first ones. Then back again. His mind rotated them once, not literally with his hands, but in the way he would inspect structure, trying to see not the surface but the relation.

Then he said, “Are those part of a map?”

Eclaire looked at him and nodded once.

“Yes.”

That made the second engraving immediately more interesting. Ludger’s eyes moved over the paper again.

Now that he knew what he was looking at, the shapes stopped feeling random. They were still fragmented, but fragments of space were easier to understand than fragments of language. Curves, turns, intersections, directional suggestions, boundaries broken into coded pieces so no single mark gave away too much.

Eclaire folded the paper slightly, aligning the copied shapes with careful precision.

“Putting the pieces together,” she said, “should give us an idea where the black market will take place tonight.”

Ludger’s gaze sharpened.

So that was how they did it.

Not one obvious instruction. Not one location handed out cleanly. A scattered trail. Multiple fragments. Anyone finding only one would get nothing useful. Anyone finding enough and knowing how to combine them got the path.

Clever.

Annoying, but clever.

He looked down the alley once more, then back at the copied marks.

“How many more?”

Eclaire studied what she had for a second.

“At least two,” she said. “Possibly three, depending on whether they changed the route structure this month.”

Ludger clicked his tongue softly.

“Of course they did.”

Eclaire tucked the paper away again.

“They’re criminals running a secret market under the empire. Repetition gets people killed or worse for them, with money loss.”

“That sounds like their problem.”

“No,” she said, already moving again. “Tonight it’s ours.”

Ludger followed.

The city night stretched around them, full of old stone, sleeping lies, and hidden movement. Somewhere ahead, more fragments waited. Somewhere beyond that, the shape of the black market was slowly assembling itself piece by piece.

And now that Ludger understood they were building a map, the hunt had become much more interesting.