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

It couldn’t be helped. Those were Aronia’s people. The people of his half-dryad teacher and friend. Ludger stared at the crystal for less than a second too long, then forced himself forward again.

Inside the mask, his jaw tightened. How was he supposed to face Aronia after seeing this? How was he supposed to say he had walked through a market under the capital and found her people displayed in crystal like hunting trophies?

The thought lodged in him like something sharp and filthy.

Beside him, Eclaire felt the pause. Saw it without looking directly. But she didn’t react, didn’t ask, didn’t turn the moment into anything visible. She just kept walking at the same pace, trusting him to either hold the line or destroy it himself.

Ludger held it. Barely. The underground market stretched on ahead of them, full of relics, flesh, cores, poisons, stolen lives, and pretty stones meant to hide ugliness in polished surfaces.

And for the first time since entering, the darkness of the Empire no longer felt abstract. It felt personal. Soon the market began to move for real.

At first it had only been tension and observation, people pretending not to look too interested while measuring one another through fabric, posture, and silence. But once the first few exchanges started, the rest followed naturally. Buyers approached stands. Sellers spoke in low voices. Pouches changed hands. A vial was tested against candlelight. A gem was pressed between gloved fingers. A relic’s activation phrase was whispered once and judged in a heartbeat.

The black market was awake now. Ludger and Eclaire kept moving through it at the same measured pace, never stopping long enough to seem indecisive, never hurrying enough to seem nervous. Around them, quiet transactions unfolded one after another.

Ludger and Eclaire eventually reached a row of stands that looked different from the others. There were no displayed goods. No crates. No trays. No hidden racks behind curtains. Just cloaked individuals standing still behind narrow counters with their arms crossed.

In front of each of them lay a few clean sheets of paper and a writing tool. Nothing else. Ludger didn’t need anyone to explain what that meant. Killers for hire. Not flashy mercenaries. Not random thugs willing to stab a man in an alley for enough silver.

Assassins.

The kind whose clients were expected to write down names, and then wait for a price to be returned. A system neat enough to be efficient and detached enough to make murder feel administrative. One of the cloaked figures gave a tiny tilt of the head as Eclaire passed, perhaps gauging whether she had come to write down someone important.

She didn’t even slow. Ludger, half a step behind, didn’t look at them for longer than necessary either.

Because if he looked too long, he might start wondering whose names had passed over those pages. How many promising people, inconvenient rivals, witnesses, and innovators had vanished because someone at a stand like this had quietly accepted a commission and filed it away like a business expense.

They ignored those men and moved on. Eventually, they reached the section where the informants were. It was smaller than the others.

Much smaller. Only three of them. That alone said something. Information was rarer than poison, rarer than monster parts, rarer than illegal relics. Or perhaps just more tightly controlled.

The first informant sat behind a low table under layered curtains, face hidden completely, hands gloved, posture still enough to feel deliberate.

The second wore a smooth porcelain-like mask with no expression carved into it, only eyeholes and a mouth line so faint it might as well not have existed. The effect was unsettling, but in a theatrical way.

The third one caught their attention immediately. Because unlike the others, he wasn’t masked. And he wasn’t wearing a cloak. He stood there in perfectly ordinary clothes.

Not rich. Not poor. Just ordinary. A dark brown coat with no distinctive cut, plain boots, simple gloves tucked at his belt rather than worn, and a muted shirt that would have vanished into any crowd in the capital without so much as a second glance. His hair was brown too, neither light enough nor dark enough to stand out, combed neatly but not fashionably. His face was the same. Neither handsome nor ugly, neither young nor old enough to define quickly. The kind of face a person could look at directly and still fail to describe ten minutes later.

Even his build was ordinary. Average height. Average shoulders. Average hands. A man built out of forgettable pieces. And then there was the smile. Soft. Polite. Unthreatening.

The sort of smile a shopkeeper might give a regular customer. Warm enough to seem pleasant, restrained enough not to feel fake. It sat on his face so naturally that it would have been reassuring anywhere else.

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Here, it was worse than a mask. Because it meant he was confident enough not to need one. Ludger’s altered breathing remained steady as he looked at the man. Beside him, Eclaire slowed just enough to signal interest without making it obvious.

The informant’s ordinary smile did not change. Which somehow made him feel like the most dangerous person they had seen since entering. The man lifted one hand and gave them a small, friendly wave.

“Come,” he said, as if inviting them into a tea shop rather than a hidden information stall under the capital. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

His smile remained exactly the same. Polite. Ordinary. Wrong.

Then he added, “And I have the answers you’re looking for.”

Neither Ludger nor Eclaire reacted. Not visibly. Eclaire knew they had to select an informant eventually. That much was obvious. Wandering the black market without committing to a broker or information seller would only make them look indecisive, and indecisive people stood out in bad ways.

But she didn’t know this man. More importantly, she had never even heard of anyone like him. The masked informants made sense. Cloaks made sense. Layered anonymity made sense. This man, standing there with that forgettable face and that calm little smile, did not.

So they didn’t react. Didn’t speed up. Didn’t turn toward him. Didn’t signal interest. They simply held their line for half a second longer, as if they were still considering the other stalls. The man’s expression didn’t shift.

Then he said, just a little more softly, “Both of your questions can be answered with me.”

That made the air around them feel slightly tighter. Ludger’s breathing through the mask remained steady, but his attention sharpened at once. Both of your questions. Not one. Both. That was far too specific to be chance.

Eclaire kept her posture clean and unreadable, though a thread of cold slid down her spine all the same. She had come here expecting criminals, smugglers, brokers, hired blades, maybe even hidden noble agents pretending to be one more shadow among many.

She had not expected a smiling man with an ordinary face to look directly at them and speak like he already knew why they had come. It was almost as if he knew Ludger was only using a disguise somehow.

Perhaps his mana signature really was that easy to read, even with Ludger not using a single spell. That possibility was irritating. And dangerous.

Ludger stood still for a second, eyes hidden in shadow beneath the armored hood, mask turning each breath into a low filtered echo. Eclaire could almost feel him measuring the man the way he measured traps and monsters, looking for the shape of the danger before deciding whether to break it or step into it.

In the end, they approached. Slowly. Not because they trusted him. Because at this point, not approaching would have been more suspicious than the alternative.

The man’s smile widened by the smallest amount, enough to suggest satisfaction without becoming smug. He stepped aside and lifted the curtain flap of his stand, or tent, really, since the setup was less like a market counter and more like a small enclosed negotiation space hidden inside the larger chamber.

Inside, they found chairs. Three of them. Simple wooden chairs around a low table that held nothing but a candle, a glass bottle of water, and two clean pieces of paper. The man gestured lightly.

“Please.”

Ludger remained standing for half a second longer before Eclaire took the seat that made the most sense for her role. He sat after her, still positioned slightly to the side, still like a bodyguard who could become violence faster than conversation if required.

The man entered last and let the curtain fall behind him. Then he closed the entrance more fully. Not that it would give them any real privacy in a place like this.

The black market outside still murmured and breathed beyond the thin fabric walls. Footsteps passed. Voices shifted. Trade continued. If someone wanted to listen, they probably could. If someone wanted to interrupt, they certainly could.

The man sat opposite them with that same calm, ordinary smile and folded his hands together on the table and then called for a ward to muffle all the noise coming from outside from coming and from inside from leaving.

For a moment, no one spoke. Then he looked at Eclaire first, and then at Ludger, and said, as gently as if they were all acquaintances meeting under civilized circumstances,

“So.”

His eyes lingered on the dark hood and the mask for a moment too long to be meaningless. Eclaire was the first to speak.

Her voice came out calm, flat, and controlled.

“Who are you?”

The man smiled as if she had asked him something charmingly unnecessary.

Then she added, “And who do you think we are?”

That made his smile sharpen by the tiniest degree.

“I,” he said pleasantly, “could be anyone I wanted.”

The answer should have sounded evasive. Instead, in a place like this, it somehow sounded honest. His forgettable face made it worse. The plain brown hair. The mild features. The harmless clothes. A man who looked like no one in particular claiming he could be anyone at all. It fit too well. Then his eyes moved toward Ludger.

“As for who you are…” he said.

He leaned back a little in his chair, still perfectly at ease.

“This one,” he added with a small motion toward Ludger, “has been causing a bit of destruction and cleaning while looking for me.”

Ludger didn’t react. Didn’t shift. Didn’t breathe differently. Not outwardly. The man’s smile remained.

“And you,” he continued, turning back to Eclaire, “came to help him with his questions.”

His tone stayed light.

“Though,” he added, “you also wanted to ask a few things yourself.”

Eclaire’s fingers tightened slightly where they rested in her lap. The man watched her with that same soft expression.

“Like who is still searching for you.”