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

In the center and along the edges, cloaked figures were already gathering. A lot of them.

Some stood alone. Some in pairs. Some with the posture of buyers, others with the quiet watchfulness of handlers, guards, or sellers waiting to see which direction the money would start flowing once the curtains opened. Voices were low. Faces were hidden. Weapons were mostly out of sight, which only meant they were present.

The whole place felt tense in a restrained way. Not chaotic. Not loud. Just tightly wound. Everyone was waiting. Waiting for the market to begin. Waiting for curtains to open.

Waiting for secrets to change hands under the capital while the Empire above slept and pretended not to know what fed beneath it. Ludger’s filtered breathing echoed faintly behind the mask as he took in the scene. Beside him, Eclaire remained composed, but he could tell she was seeing it too. Not just the market itself, but what it meant.

This was not gutter crime. Not some roadside smuggler den or desperate thieves’ exchange. This was infrastructure. A hidden organ inside the Empire. A place built not just for criminals, but for the people who used criminals while keeping their own hands perfumed and clean. It was finally time to see the darkness of the Empire with their own eyes.

Ludger and Eclaire moved a little away from the entrance after coming down the stairs, slipping toward a spot near the outer edge of the underground chamber where they could see almost the entire market without standing in the center of attention.

It was a good position. Not hidden enough to look suspicious. Not exposed enough to look careless. Just the kind of place people would choose if they had come with a purpose, intended to complete that purpose, and did not care much about the rest.

So that was exactly how they stood. Still. Controlled.

Eclaire carried herself like someone who had arrived planning to get one specific thing and had no patience to browse. Ludger, half a step behind and to the side, looked even less approachable. Between the armored hood, the wrongness of the mask, and the faint echo of his breathing, he gave the impression of a bodyguard who existed to discourage unnecessary words.

Which, for once, was helpful.

A few more cloaked figures continued arriving from the stairwell behind them, filtering into the underground chamber in quiet waves. Some entered smoothly, already used to places like this. Others were less convincing. Their caution dragged a little too long. Their heads turned too often. Their shoulders carried the kind of stiffness that came from fear rather than discipline.

Those ones paid a lot of attention to Ludger. Or, more precisely, to the noise coming from him. The mask was truly doing its job.

Every filtered breath came out just wrong enough to unsettle people without giving them anything clear to challenge. A few of the less confident newcomers glanced at him, then glanced away too fast, like they didn’t want to be caught staring at whatever kind of person thought breathing like that on purpose was acceptable.

One man in a dark gray cloak slowed slightly while passing, clearly trying not to look directly at Ludger while also obviously listening for the next breath.

Another kept his face turned toward a closed stand but angled his body just enough that it was obvious where his attention really was. Ludger noticed all of it. Did nothing. That was the point.

If people were unsettled, good. Unsettled people often made mistakes. And in a place like this, being remembered as wrong instead of familiar could work in his favor.

Beside him, Eclaire remained perfectly composed. She did not fidget. Did not look around too much. Did not react to every arrival like someone new to the scene. She simply watched the market with the calm disinterest of a person waiting for the part that actually mattered.

Eventually, that scattered attention began to shift. Because the stands were opening. One by one, the heavy curtains were drawn aside, and the underground market began to reveal itself.

Eclaire began to move the moment the curtains opened. Ludger followed at the same pace.

Not casually. Not like a wandering customer. He moved with the steady, exact rhythm of something built for one purpose and little else. A machine. Or maybe a runic golem given human shape and told to stay close to its mistress until told otherwise.

That part, at least, he played well.

They passed the first row of stands slowly enough to look deliberate, but not slowly enough to seem overwhelmed. Most of the stalls were organized the same way: one product type per stand, no unnecessary clutter, no shouting, no desperate salesmanship. This wasn’t a public market. It was a place for people who already knew value when they saw it. The cloaked people guarding the stands didn’t react either.

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The first stand they approached dealt in ores.

Not normal mining stock. These were strange things pulled from labyrinths, deep veins,, and monster nests. Bars and chunks of metal rested on dark cloth with handwritten tags in cipher script. One ore looked black at first, but thin veins of deep violet shimmered under the candlelight whenever the angle changed, like lightning trapped in stone. Another was dull gray with a wet-looking surface even though it was completely dry, the kind of thing that made the eyes want to blink twice to confirm it wasn’t moving. A tray at the far end held reddish fragments that gave off faint warmth despite the cold underground air, each one shaped irregularly, like the ore had been broken out of a monster’s bones instead of mined from the earth.

The next stand focused on mana cores.

Dozens of them sat in compartment boxes lined with velvet or old leather. Blue, green, amber, white, and ugly mixed colors too unstable-looking to trust at a glance. Some were polished clean and almost jewel-like. Others had been left rough on purpose, still carrying jagged edges and monster residue that made them look more alive than they should have. One cluster of high-grade cores in the back had internal lights that pulsed slowly like sleeping hearts. Another tray held corrupted-looking things with cloudy centers and black veins drifting beneath the surface, the sort of cores that probably powered desperate experiments and terrible decisions.

Then came potions.

Rows of narrow glass vials, squat bottles, sealed ceramic containers, and metal-topped canisters lined the shelves. Most were unlabeled in any honest way. Some liquids glowed faintly. Others looked muddy, metallic, or far too thick. One set of vials held something silver that clung to the glass and crawled downward too slowly to be normal. Another rack displayed potions in layered colors, green over gold, blue over red, pale white over murky gray, as though the contents had never fully agreed to become one thing. Some gave off scent even through the stopper: herbs, rot, blood, alcohol, sulfur, sweet poison. There were healing brews there, probably. Also stimulants. Suppressants. Things to wake a mage. Things to kill a mage. Things to make a body keep moving even after it should have fallen.

Farther in, the gem stands began.

Not decorative gems. Functional ones. Attunement stones, mana conductors, ritual anchors, focus crystals. A tray of pale green stones had tiny natural fractures in geometric patterns, almost like runes had grown inside them. Beside them sat dark blue gems with centers so dense they looked like pinholes into deeper water. One stand had translucent amber pieces with bits of preserved monster material suspended inside, fang splinters, scale flecks, something that might have been an eye. Another offered tiny black stones that reflected candlelight with a rainbow edge and made the skin on the back of Ludger’s neck feel slightly wrong just from standing near them.

There were finished products too. Magic relics. Those drew a different kind of buyer.

One stand offered rings and earrings laid out in pairs, each one subtly mismatched in a way that suggested linked effects. Another displayed slim daggers with etched blades, bracelets woven from monster hair and silver thread, little brass devices full of hinge-parts and folded inscriptions, and one ugly pendant made from polished vertebrae set in gold. A table farther down had masks, gloves, and boots with hidden arrays worked into their seams. One cloak hanging at the back looked almost ordinary until the fabric shifted and the candlelight slid off it the wrong way, refusing to settle.

Eclaire tried not to pay too much attention. She knew better than to look like a curious outsider. So her eyes moved across the goods with controlled indifference, never stopping too long, never leaning in unless it could be justified. She played the part well.

But Ludger noticed the half-seconds. The tiny moments where her gaze caught a little too long before moving on. He followed those moments. And on those stands, he saw them. Tails. Beastmen tails.

Some had been cleaned and preserved, others still carried traces of skin or rough binding at the cut. Fox tails, wolf tails, something feline, something long and striped. They hung from hooks, lay across dark cloth, or had already been worked into accessories, ritual tools, or alchemical components. One stand had grouped them by type and apparent quality with the neatness of a butcher displaying cuts of meat.

And some of them looked young. Too small. Not fully grown. Eclaire did not react with her face. Not at all. Her posture stayed sharp, her eyes kept moving, her pace did not break. But beside her, the breathing from Ludger’s mask turned rougher that one time.

Just once. One inhale. One exhale. Hard enough to sound different. It was impossible to tell whether he was pissed, or whether he was trying very hard not to get pissed and that was the closest his control could make the sound.

Either way, the message was there if a person stood close enough to hear it.

They kept moving. They had to. Stopping there would have meant questions, attention, interest. All the wrong things too early. So they continued along the rows while the market opened wider around them, showing more of the Empire’s hidden rot every few steps.

At another stand, they found something stranger. Crystals. Flat-faced, polished crystals mounted upright in fitted slots or laid in padded trays like precious documents. At first Ludger thought they were memory stones or some kind of storage medium. But then he saw the surfaces properly.

Images had been engraved into them. No, not engraved. Captured. Preserved. They looked like photographs. Frozen scenes trapped in crystal. One held the face of a man mid-scream with enough detail to make the skin crawl. Another showed what looked like a hidden ritual chamber, all candle-circles and stained stone.

And then Ludger saw the one that made him stop breathing. Three dryads. Chained.

The image was clean enough to leave no room for denial. Their bark-patterned skin, branch-like hair, leaf growth around the shoulders and arms, the strained expressions in their faces. They had been captured alive when the crystal was made. Bound. Displayed. Catalogued like merchandise or proof of possession.

Ludger stopped his breathing for a short moment. Completely. Because he knew if the next breath came out wrong, too sharp, too loud, too angry, it could blow his cover.