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

“That,” she said, “is not reassuring.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

“Clearly.”

Still, she turned and began walking toward the mansion with controlled confidence, not too fast, not too cautious, moving like someone who had every right to be there and no reason to explain herself unless asked.

Ludger followed half a step behind and to the side. Silent. Watching. Armed. Exactly what a bodyguard should be. Unfortunately for Eclaire, he was also still Ludger. And that meant the silence was doing a lot of work.

As they moved toward the mansion, Ludger reached into one of the inner pockets of his suit and pulled out another piece.

It was compact, dark, and made of shaped metal and layered material that didn’t really resemble anything common in this world. Without a word, he lifted it and attached it to the lower part of his mask with a series of small, precise clicks.

Eclaire glanced at him once… Then did a double take.

The thing changed the whole impression of his face immediately. Before, the mask and hood made him look sharp, dangerous, and obscure. Now he looked unsettling.

The added piece covered the lower half more fully and extended outward just enough to make the shape wrong in a deliberate way. Not monstrous exactly. Worse than that, in some ways. Artificial. Clinical. Inhuman in a way this world didn’t really have a reference for. It looked like something built for foul air, poison, plague, or battlefields no sane person should still be standing in.

It looked like a gas mask. Of course no one here would call it that. But that was what it felt like. Then Ludger breathed in. And when he exhaled, the sound came out different.

A little deeper. A little more hollow.

It echoed faintly inside the mask and bled into the air around them with a filtered, mechanical wrongness that did not fit the setting, the street, or the capital at all. It made his breathing sound less human than it should have. Not loud enough to be absurd. Just wrong enough to make the nerves of anyone nearby start whispering that something was off.

Eclaire frowned at him.

“What is that?”

Ludger adjusted the piece once, clearly satisfied with the fit.

“It changes my voice,” he said.

The words that came through it already sounded altered, flatter and heavier, like they had been forced through some unnatural chamber before reaching the air.

Then he added, “And it makes my breathing sound wrong enough to put people nearby on edge.”

Eclaire’s frown deepened. Because that was not the answer of someone improvising under pressure. That was the answer of someone who had thought about this. A lot.

Her eyes narrowed slightly as she looked at the mask again, then at him. It also sounded very much like something he had really wanted to build and use the first chance he got. Which, frankly, explained the amount of care behind it.

“You put a disturbing amount of thought into that,” she said.

Ludger’s altered breathing answered first, a low filtered inhale and exhale that made the darkness around him feel slightly less friendly.

Then he said, through the mask, “A proper disguise should affect more than sight.”

That logic was annoyingly solid. Eclaire still kept frowning. Because even if the reasoning made sense, there was a very specific kind of enthusiasm behind it. The kind Ludger got whenever he built something that was both useful and, in his opinion, extremely cool.

This absolutely qualified.

She looked at him for another second, then said, “You really wanted to use this.”

The masked breathing echoed once more. Ludger did not deny it. Which was denial enough. Eclaire sighed quietly through her nose. Of course he had.

Of course the strange, intimidating breathing filter had not just happened to exist as a practical option. Of course he had built it because it served a purpose and because some part of him had seen the concept and immediately thought yes, that is exactly the kind of thing I want.

Honestly, she should have expected it by now. Still, she had to admit the result was effective.

The dark hood with its armored contours. The partial helmet-like shape. The deep shadow around the eyes. The crossbows hidden at his sides. And now that unnatural lower mask making every breath sound faintly wrong.

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He looked less like a bodyguard and more like the sort of person standing behind one. Which, in fairness, might help.

Eclaire adjusted her robe and said, “Try not to lean into it too much.”

They had only gone a little farther when Ludger suddenly said, in that low, distorted voice of his,

“If you only knew the power of the dark side!”

Eclaire immediately took one step away from him.

Not dramatic. Not loud. Just a very real adjustment of distance, her eyes cutting toward him with sudden suspicion as if she was briefly reconsidering whether this was all just Ludger slowly showing his true colors in the worst possible way.

The filtered breathing echoed once. Then Ludger chuckled under the mask, the sound coming out rougher and stranger than it should have.

“Sorry,” he said. “I had to say that.”

Eclaire stared at him.

Ludger tilted his head slightly and added, “It’s part of my charm to act like a moron before a serious moment.”

That made her expression go completely flat.

“I hope that was the last time,” she said. “Because your disguise and mask will be useless if you keep saying that kind of nonsense.”

That was, annoyingly, fair. Ludger gave a small nod. This time, he stayed quiet. Probably because even he understood that some jokes were better enjoyed before walking into a secret black market hidden under the nobles’ district.

They pushed through the half-open gate of the mansion and stepped inside the property without hesitation.

The metal groaned softly under the pressure, the sound swallowed quickly by the night. No alarm followed. No movement. No challenge. Just the old, tired complaint of neglected hinges and a place that had been left to rot in expensive silence.

Then they crossed the garden. Or what used to be a garden.

Now it was a patch of overgrown neglect wrapped around dead nobility. Grass had climbed too high, bushes had gone wild, and old decorative shapes had long since lost the argument against time. Vines crept over cracked stone edges. Thorny growth pushed through once-orderly paths. Statues and carved borders sat half-swallowed by shadow and plant life alike.

Neither of them looked around too much. That was deliberate.

People who belonged did not gawk. They did not slow down to admire decay or inspect every dark corner like nervous thieves on their first job. So Eclaire kept moving with measured purpose, and Ludger followed in his role, silent and watchful but not obviously scanning every inch of the grounds.

Soon they headed straight toward the entrance of the building. From close range, the mansion looked even more abandoned than it had from the street. Not ruined. Worse.

The overgrown garden. The webbing gathered in corners and under the stone trim. The stale hush sitting over the front of the house. The faint signs of wealth that no one was currently bothering to love.

It didn’t seem like the Empire had any intention of giving this place to anyone else after the disappearance of the Rodericks. Which, in itself, said something.

A house like this should have been seized, reassigned, contested, inherited, or repurposed. Not left sitting in the nobles’ district like an expensive corpse people preferred not to discuss.

That alone made the whole place smell wrong. Ludger said nothing as they climbed the final steps. His breathing echoed faintly through the mask, warped and unsettling in the stillness. Beside him, Eclaire kept her pace even.

Ahead, the entrance waited in silence, dark and heavy, like the mansion was holding its breath right alongside them.

Inside the mansion, everything was dark.

Not naturally dark, either. Not the simple darkness of a place left empty. This was the kind of darkness that felt arranged. Deliberate. Thick in the corners. Deep enough between the old furniture and cracked walls that the entire entrance hall seemed less abandoned than waiting.

Still, there was a path.

A few candlelights burned ahead, sparse and carefully placed, each one just bright enough to guide the eye to the next without truly illuminating the rest of the room. Their flames trembled softly in the stale air, throwing long, uneven shadows across old floor tiles, dust-coated walls, and the remnants of what had once been a noble interior.

Nothing was said. Nothing needed to be.

Eclaire moved first, her pace controlled and unhurried, and Ludger followed half a step behind her. As they advanced deeper into the hall, the candlelit path finally revealed where it was leading.

An underground entrance had been carved directly into the floor of the building. Not some hidden trapdoor tucked beneath a rug or concealed behind furniture. No. This was cleaner than that. A deliberate opening in the old stone, wide enough for a steady flow of people, its edges worked carefully enough that someone had either used proper earth magic or something close enough to matter.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly behind the shadow of the hood. So this was how they did it. Not permanently. Not openly. A hidden route prepared at the last moment, clean enough to serve as a temporary artery beneath the capital.

A patch of moving shadow slipped ahead of them then, one of the cloaked figures that had entered before. Then another. And another. The silhouettes merged with the candlelit dark for a moment before resolving again into people descending below.

Ludger and Eclaire followed them.

The stone staircase stretched down farther than it should have for a simple mansion cellar. Candlelight lined the descent on both sides, dozens of small flames creating a strange procession into the earth. The air grew cooler the farther they went, and the silence changed too. Aboveground silence was one thing. Underground silence was heavier. More intimate. Like the world had pressed in close enough to hear secrets.

They kept descending. One minute. Then another.

The stairs curved slightly, passed reinforced stone, then opened through a final stretch where the walls widened enough to suggest this route had not been made carelessly. Whoever created it knew what they were doing, or at least had enough experience to fake competence convincingly.

After a couple of minutes, they finally reached the bottom. And the place where the black market would be held opened before them. It was larger than the mansion above could have suggested.

A broad underground space, shaped from packed earth and reinforced stone, wide enough to hold a crowd and lined with a rough ring of stands. Most of those stands were still closed, each one hidden behind heavy curtains rather than open displays. Nothing was being shown yet. Nothing was being announced. The merchants and brokers clearly preferred secrecy even here, perhaps especially here.