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

The illusionist glanced once toward the thin curtain wall of the tent, where the muffled noise of the market kept moving outside in quiet waves.

Then he said, “You should get moving.”

Neither Ludger nor Eclaire spoke. The illusionist’s tone remained calm.

“If you stay here much longer, this conversation will start looking suspicious.” He gave a small, almost amused shrug. “And while I do enjoy making people uncomfortable, I prefer not to waste that on something preventable.”

That was fair. A tent in the informants’ section was not the kind of place where people sat for long unless they were receiving something specific, bargaining hard, or plotting something worth dying over. The longer they remained inside after the key answers had already been given, the more likely it became that someone outside would start wondering exactly what kind of truths were being traded in here.

The illusionist’s eyes shifted back to Ludger. And when he spoke again, the tone had changed. Less amused. Sharper.

“If you want to kill the beast,” he said, “you will have to burn it down completely.”

Ludger stayed still. The illusionist continued.

“Cutting off one head will not be enough.” His expression did not change, but there was old certainty in the words now. “Two others will take its place.”

Silence sat for a second after that. Then Ludger gave a slow nod. Yes. That was exactly what this was. A hydra. Not one enemy. Not one guild master. Not one general. Not even one family.

A structure of linked mouths, claws, hands, brokers, buyers, soldiers, smugglers, assassins, false nobles, real nobles, cursed deaths, black-market stands, and quiet military rot all feeding the same body beneath the surface.

Kill one head, and the rest recoiled for a moment before reorganizing. Burn the whole thing down, or prepare to fight it forever. Ludger understood that. He hated that he understood it.

The illusionist seemed satisfied with the answer in his silence. He leaned back slightly in the chair and said no more. That was enough. Ludger rose first.

Eclaire followed half a second later, smooth and controlled, with the posture of someone who had gotten exactly what she came for and would now waste no time pretending the matter was anything else.

Neither of them asked for more. No extra questions. No names of convenient targets. No neat list of weak points wrapped and handed over like a child’s lesson sheet. Because that would be useless.

Or worse than useless. Ludger already knew enough now to understand the shape of the work ahead. This was not a matter of killing one man in a dark corner and calling the matter settled. This was not even a matter of finding a single hidden lair and crushing it.

He and Lionsguard would have to do a different kind of work now. Slower in some places. Sharper in others. Pressure. Interference. Cutting routes. Pulling apart structures. Forcing reactions. Making people move before they wanted to. Making those above show the shape of the hands beneath them.

Not just hunting monsters. Becoming the thing that made monsters nervous. The illusionist watched them approach the curtain.

He turned, and the two of them stepped out of the tent and back into the underground market. The noise hit them again immediately, low voices, bargaining, shifting feet, curtains moving, the hidden machinery of the Empire’s filth carrying on as if nothing had changed.

But something had changed. For Ludger, at least. The market no longer looked like a maze. It looked like part of a body. And now he finally knew where some of the arteries led.

They left the black market by the same path they had used to enter. No dramatic exit. No confrontation. No one calling after them.

They moved back through the underground chamber at the same controlled pace they had used from the start, neither hurried nor slow, just two more cloaked figures finishing their business beneath the capital. Around them, the market continued breathing in that low, ugly rhythm of hidden wealth and hidden sin. Buyers still bargained. Curtains still shifted. Stands still traded things that should never have been allowed to exist so openly anywhere civilized.

But no one stopped them.

No one followed. At least, no one obvious enough to matter yet.

They climbed the candlelit stone staircase in silence, the flames trembling along the walls as they ascended back toward the dead mansion above. The air gradually changed as they rose. Less packed. Less close. Less like the lungs of the Empire were wrapped around them.

Then they stepped back into the dark interior of the Rodericks manor.

From there, they crossed the abandoned building again, passed through the entrance hall, and moved out into the overgrown garden beneath the cloudy night sky.

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It felt… early. Too early, somehow. Like they had gone in expecting a night-long hunt through filth and hidden traps, only to come back out carrying something worse than a fight: direction.

Still, no one tried to stop them.

The half-open gate gave the same tired groan when they pushed through it, and soon they were outside the estate grounds again, moving through the nobles’ district shadows where the polished streets tried very hard not to acknowledge what slept underneath them.

For a while, Eclaire said nothing.

Then, once they had gained enough distance from the manor that casual ears were less of a concern, she finally asked, “Are you fine with this?”

Ludger glanced at her from beneath the armored hood. Eclaire kept walking as she spoke.

“We got answers,” she said. “But now we have even more questions.”

That was true enough to be irritating.

Armandis. The Rodericks. The Obsidian Sword. The curse murders. Arslan’s family. The black market routes. The broader structure. The illusionist’s warnings. The fact that any direct move now would be the kind of mistake enemies like this fed on.

Ludger let out a slow breath through the mask.

Then he said, “I’ll solve them one by one.”

His voice came out low and filtered, the sound still wrong enough to feel unnatural in the quiet street. Eclaire looked at him but said nothing, so he continued.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “just using strength won’t be enough.”

That sounded almost like an insult directed at himself. Almost. As they passed a stretch of the overgrown garden wall from the outside, Ludger suddenly raised one hand and pointed it toward the grounds of the abandoned manor.

Nothing happened. At least, nothing visible. No rumble. No cracking stone. No shifting earth. No grand geomantic display. He stood like that for only a second. Then lowered his hand and kept moving. Eclaire frowned faintly.

But in the end, she didn’t ask. Not there. Not while they were still that close. So she simply kept pace beside him and waited until they were farther from the district, farther from the manor, and farther from the red bear’s dead estate before letting the question remain where it belonged for now:

In Ludger’s hands. Because one thing was already becoming clear. He had stopped looking at this like a mystery. Now he was looking at it like a structure. And structures, once Ludger started thinking about them properly, usually ended up breaking.

Once they returned to where the runic carriage was hidden, the tension of the nobles’ district finally loosened by a small degree. Not much. Just enough that the night stopped feeling like it was constantly leaning over their shoulders.

The carriage sat where they had left it, quiet and dark in the underground access chamber, its engraved frame waiting like a patient beast built for speed rather than beauty. The familiar sight of it made the whole black market feel slightly less immediate, which was probably a trick of the mind more than anything else.

Eclaire turned toward Ludger once they were properly inside.

“What will you do now?” she asked.

Ludger stepped in first, then reached up and removed the extra piece from his mask, the one that made his breathing sound wrong in that deeply unpleasant way. Once it came off, the air around him felt a little less hostile.

Then he said, “I manipulated the sand in the garden.”

Eclaire blinked once.

“The garden?”

Ludger nodded.

“When people stepped on it, they left traces I can follow for a while.”

That made her look at him more sharply. Not because the idea was impossible. Because it was exactly the kind of thing she should have expected from him and still somehow hadn’t. Ludger continued as he adjusted the dark hood slightly.

“I mixed the particles enough that I can tell where the disturbed sand goes afterward,” he said. “At least for a while. The contact carries a kind of directional memory if I keep track of it properly.”

Eclaire took that in, eyes narrowing slightly as she ran through the implications.

“So you marked everyone who crossed the garden.”

“Everyone that got to enter through the front path, yes.”

That was… clever. Very Ludger, but clever.

He stepped deeper into the carriage chamber and leaned one shoulder lightly against the side of the vehicle as he kept explaining.

“Tracking the buyers should be easy enough,” he said. “Most of them came in through the manor, stepped where I wanted, and will leave carrying the same traces back out into the city.”

Eclaire nodded faintly. Yes. That part made sense.

The clients, brokers, hired killers, buyers of illegal goods, if they had all used the same entrance and the same garden route, then at least some of them had already been marked without even knowing it.

But then she asked, “And the sellers?”

Ludger clicked his tongue softly.

“Harder.”

He didn’t sound frustrated exactly. Just mildly irritated that reality had chosen not to be simple.

“They probably have their own exit,” he said. “Or several. Something cleaner. Something that keeps them from mixing too much with the buyers once the market closes.”

That also made sense.

People running a black market like that would not rely only on the same shared path for every layer of the structure. Not if they wanted to survive. Buyers could come and go through one route. The real operators would have backups, hidden exits, split channels, fallback paths.

Eclaire folded one arm lightly as she thought.

Then she asked, “Couldn’t you sense them with your magic some other way?”

Ludger looked at her.

“I could,” he said. “If I wanted them to notice.”

That answer made her pause. Ludger went on.

“There are a bunch of wards around the market,” he said. “Not just the entrance. Not just the manor. The underground chamber, the routes, probably the fallback exits too.” His expression stayed flat. “If I start pushing my magic through the area too directly, they’ll feel it.”

Eclaire’s gaze sharpened.

“And then?”

“They go on high alert.”

The kind of answer that always made these things more annoying.