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

By the time they found the fifth piece, they finally had enough to stop wandering blindly and start working with something real.

They pulled back into a darker corner between two old buildings where the night traffic thinned and the walls blocked most lines of sight. There, under weak moonless light and the dim spill of a distant lantern, Eclaire unfolded the paper and spread out the copied markings.

Ludger leaned in beside her. Now the work turned into something closer to a puzzle.

The five pieces did not fit neatly at first. Some lines seemed to connect, then didn’t. Some angles looked wrong until the whole fragment was turned mentally and compared again. One section that looked like a boundary ended up matching better as part of an inner route. Another fragment clearly represented more than just direction, it suggested scale, or at least relative position.

They tested one combination. Wrong. Another. Closer. Then a third. While they were still shifting the pieces around, Eclaire spoke without looking up.

“Why didn’t you bring the beastmen with us?”

Ludger’s eyes stayed on the paper.

“I didn’t have disguises for them.”

Eclaire glanced at him briefly, but he continued before she could push.

“Besides,” he said, “Lionfang is probably the only place in the whole Empire that openly receives visitors from the Primal Groves.”

That was true enough to matter.

“If something went wrong,” he said, “anyone with half a brain would be able to point straight at my guild.”

Eclaire’s hands paused slightly over one of the copied marks. Yes. That made sense.

Beastmen tied to the Primal Groves were not the kind of presence one could easily hide in the capital, especially not around a secret gathering full of criminals, brokers, and opportunists whose entire lives revolved around noticing valuable irregularities.

Ludger kept speaking, still focused on the fragments.

“And I was planning to get that information and more from the information broker anyway.”

That made her look at him more directly.

“With the bracer.”

“Yes.”

Eclaire’s gaze sharpened slightly.

“What can it do?”

Ludger’s mouth shifted faintly, not quite a smile, but close enough to count as satisfaction.

“When the wearer receives damage,” he said, “the bracer drains mana instead of letting them actually get hurt.”

Eclaire stared at him. For a second, even the map stopped mattering.

“I’ve never heard of an effect like that,” she said.

“Most people haven’t.”

That was obvious. And, annoyingly, it was impressive. Eclaire looked at him for another moment, then back at the paper.

“It seems useful.”

“Obviously.”

Useful was an understatement, really.

In the hands of the right person, something like that could change the value of an entire fight. It turned mana into a buffer against injury. Not infinite, obviously. Not perfect. A weak mage or someone already drained would still die like anyone else once the reserve ran out. But for a broker, a smuggler, or any cautious criminal who valued survival enough to pay for it, the appeal was obvious.

No wonder Ludger thought it would be enough to pull real attention. Eclaire clicked her tongue softly and returned to the map. Together they shifted the last pieces again. This time, the shape settled. The fragments aligned into a coherent route structure, and once they did, the answer hit both of them almost at the same time.

Eclaire frowned. Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He more or less recognized the map as well. Not because the coded lines were easy, but because once assembled, the pattern of streets and internal paths beneath them became familiar enough.

It was the nobles’ district of the capital.

And at the edge of the assembled map, worked into the final guiding mark almost like a signature left by someone arrogant enough to believe no one would dare act on it, there was an emblem.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

The head of a mad red bear. Ludger stared at it for half a second.

Then said, flatly, “Roderick.”

Eclaire’s frown deepened.

“The Rodericks’ family insignia,” she said quietly.

Not a random street sign. Not merchant code. A family mark. One tied to status, influence, old wealth, and exactly the kind of people who might bury their filth under polished stone and legal inheritance.

They approached the nobles’ district carefully, using the outer streets first and only narrowing their route once the pattern of patrols, servant movement, and late-hour carriage traffic became clearer.

The district looked the way noble districts always did at night. Too clean. Too still. Too convinced that polished stone and old money could make filth disappear if enough walls were built around it.

The Rodericks’ estate stood ahead in its own section of that quiet, large enough to remind everyone nearby what generations of influence looked like when turned into land, stone, and guarded distance. Even abandoned, it still carried weight.

And it had been abandoned. For more than a year, by the look of it.

The place was dark in the wrong way. Not actively neglected, but not lived in either. No lived rhythm. No current household pulse. No real movement worth noting. Ludger studied it from the shadow of a side route, his gaze moving over the exterior lines, the walls, the windows, the approach paths.

Nothing about it suggested the actual black market would take place inside. Too obvious. Too symbolic. Too easy to watch.

While he was thinking that through, he noticed Eclaire. She was looking past the estate. Toward the castle in the distance.

It rose over the capital the way such places always did, like power itself had decided it preferred height. Even from here, at roughly a kilometer away, it was visible enough to matter. Stone, towers, layered defenses, and all the quiet memory tied to what it represented.

For Eclaire, apparently, it represented trouble. Not vague trouble. The kind that felt personal.

She wasn’t panicking. Not even close. But Ludger could see it anyway now that he was looking for it: the nervous tension in the line of her body, the way her attention kept catching there, the faint stiffness in her shoulders.

From where she stood, it probably felt like she could already see a problem approaching her. A problem big enough to end her life if it noticed her the wrong way.

Ludger watched her for a second, then said, “One can probably see the tension in your shoulders.”

Eclaire’s eyes shifted to him immediately. He kept his tone flat.

“Infiltrating the black market will be impossible if you stay like this.”

The words landed cleanly. No comfort. No softness. Just fact. Eclaire held still for a moment, then drew in a deep breath.

Slow. Controlled. She exhaled just as slowly. And then, almost instantly, the change happened. Her shoulders settled. The nervous edge vanished from her posture. Her face sharpened.

Her eyes lost that distant pull toward the castle and became focused again, calm and precise like before.

It was fast enough to be almost unsettling. One moment she looked like someone too close to an old wound. The next, she looked sharp as ever. Ludger studied her for half a second. That was one quick way to reset her mood.

Eclaire noticed the look and said, quietly, “I told you. I was trained.”

“Yes,” Ludger said. “That part’s obvious.”

She didn’t answer. Didn’t need to.

The capital castle remained in the distance, silent and massive and full of ghosts she clearly had no interest in greeting tonight. But now she looked away from it without that same nervous pull, and whatever fear had surfaced a moment ago was back behind walls where it wouldn’t interfere with the job.

A cluster of clouds drifted over the district not long after that, slow and heavy enough to swallow what little light still lingered over the rooftops.

The surroundings grew darker almost immediately.

Not completely blind. Just darker in the right way. Enough to blur edges. Enough to soften distance. Enough to make shadows feel thicker and movement easier to miss if a person wasn’t already looking for it.

And, unsurprisingly, the people sneaking around took that as their chance. From alleys, service paths, garden walls, side streets, and stretches of decorative stone that ordinary people would have dismissed as empty, cloaked figures began to approach the Rodericks’ abandoned mansion.

Not in a rush. Not like amateurs. They moved with the ugly confidence of people who believed they were remaining hidden. Even though Ludger could see them.

Not all details, of course. But enough. The shifts in weight, the movement lines, the way a patch of darkness broke wrong for half a second and then corrected itself. Some were using stealth skills. Some relied on the darkness itself. Some simply moved like they had done this many times before and trusted routine to protect them.

To normal eyes, they probably would have been hard to catch. To Ludger, they were just people pretending the night belonged to them.

He watched one slip across a low wall, another emerge from behind a carriage shelter, a third angle in from the rear gardens with practiced caution. One by one, then in twos, then in a slow trickle that started becoming a pattern.

More and more cloaked figures began entering the mansion. So the estate really was part of the path. Not the market itself, probably, but a gate. A staging point. A skin worn over the real route. Ludger narrowed his eyes beneath the armored hood.

For a moment he considered whether staying hidden was even the correct approach while getting closer. Most of these people were sneaking too hard. That was useful if no one was watching. Less useful if the place expected arrivals. Sometimes the least suspicious thing was not to crawl like a rat, but to walk like someone who already knew they belonged there.

Apparently Eclaire had the same thought.

She looked at the flow of incoming figures, then said quietly, “We should go too.”

Ludger’s gaze stayed on the mansion.

Eclaire adjusted her robe and lowered the face covering properly this time, letting the cloth shadow the lower half of her features while leaving just enough visible to seem deliberate rather than panicked.

Then she looked at him.

“Remember,” she said, “you’re a bodyguard.”

Ludger gave her a flat glance. She continued before he could respond.

“You should not do anything stupid,” she said. “Like picking a fight. Or saying something sarcastic just to annoy people.”

Ludger stared at her for a second.

Then he shrugged.

“At that point,” he said, “you might as well ask me not to breathe too.”

Eclaire closed her eyes for the briefest moment. When she opened them again, her look carried the quiet exhaustion of someone who had already started regretting a plan that had not yet technically begun.