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

Ludger crossed his arms.

“If that happens, I might get one or two directions before they shut down everything useful.” He exhaled slowly through his nose. “And then the whole structure tightens before I’m ready to start cutting.”

That would be bad. Very bad. Not fatal, maybe. But wasteful. The sort of mistake that made clever enemies retreat into smaller holes and start eating through different tunnels.

So, no. He couldn’t just brute-force the answer out of the earth with magic and call it a day. Not this time. Not without paying for it later.

Eclaire watched him for a second, then said, “So you really do have to do things the hard way.”

Ludger’s mouth shifted slightly.

“Yes.”

There was no complaint in it. Only acceptance.

Because the hard way was still a way. And now that he had a thread, he no longer needed the whole thing handed to him at once. One buyer. Then another. One route. One habit. One careless move. One hidden pattern. That was enough to begin tightening the noose around a structure like this.

Slowly. Patiently. The ugly part was that patience would matter more now than power. Eclaire seemed to understand that too. For a moment, neither of them spoke.

Then Ludger stepped into the carriage fully and said, “We’ll start with the people who think they left safely.”

Eclaire followed him in.

“And after that?”

Ludger’s eyes stayed forward.

“After that,” he said, “we find out which of them leads somewhere worth breaking here in the capital.”

That answer sat well enough in the quiet. Not comforting. But solid. And at this point, solid was more useful than comfort. They waited.

The runic carriage sat in the hidden underground chamber, still and dark, while Ludger remained seated near the front with one arm resting on his knee and his senses stretched outward through the city. He wasn’t using broad geomancy this time. No heavy probing. No deep pulses through the earth that might brush against hidden wards and announce his interest to the wrong people.

Just patience. Just the thin thread of sand he had prepared in the Rodericks’ overgrown garden, waiting for the marked traces to begin moving through the capital. Across from him, Eclaire waited too.

At first, she sat upright. Composed. Alert. Arms folded lightly, eyes half-open, posture still carrying the shape of readiness even after everything they had just seen. But exhaustion was a real thing, no matter how good a person’s training was.

Not sleeping for almost three days had finally started to catch up to her. The travel. The tension. The return to the capital. The black market. The illusionist. The answers. The new questions. It had all kept her upright by force. But now the force was fading.

The moment the tension decreased, her body almost shut down completely.Before long, she lost the fight.

Not dramatically. Not with some graceful surrender into sleep. Her body just gave up pretending it could keep going. One moment she was sitting there trying to remain dignified, and the next she had slumped slightly against the side of the seat, breathing slower, face gone still in the unguarded way only sleep could manage.

Ludger glanced at her once. That was it. Then he looked away again. Her problem.

So he waited. And eventually, he felt it. The sand moved. Ludger’s eyes sharpened immediately.

Far across the capital, thin traces of the disturbed particles began shifting through the city in different directions. Not all at once. Not neatly. More like scattered lines waking up one after another as people left the black market, crossed streets, entered carriages, took hidden paths, or slipped back into the city’s night like the filth had simply put on cleaner shoes.

He followed the first line. Then the second. Then the third.

Some of them moved fast enough that he could tell they were leaving the capital entirely. Those traces stretched toward the outer roads and eventually slipped too far from his detection range. Once they reached that point, the thread grew too thin to be useful without him moving physically to keep up.

Annoying. But expected. Other traces stayed within the city. Those were better.

A few moved toward private residences in respectable districts, which was interesting in the worst possible way. Others wound through merchant streets or service roads, then settled in smaller inns tucked into the capital’s less polished sections. Not slums. Not noble streets either. The kind of places people used when they wanted a room without questions and a staff too tired or too cheap to remember faces clearly in the morning.

Those lines Ludger marked mentally. Worth checking.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

He kept tracing them one by one, holding each movement in place long enough to understand direction, pace, and likely endpoint before shifting to the next. It wasn’t perfect. The further they moved, the weaker the connection became. The more crossed routes there were, the more careful he had to be.

Still, it worked. Enough. Time passed while the city above slowly dragged itself toward morning. And then, just as Ludger had expected, the change came. The wards around the black market vanished.

He felt it not directly, but in the absence they left behind. A network of pressure in the earth and surrounding space that had been sitting there all night, carefully suppressing deeper readings and shielding movement, suddenly loosened and disappeared as dawn approached.

The moment that happened, Ludger extended his senses toward the old location again. And found nothing. The underground chamber was gone. Not emptied. Gone.

The carved space beneath the Rodericks manor no longer held the shape it had during the night. The routes had been collapsed, closed, or reabsorbed so cleanly that only a mess of layered stone, packed earth, and confused pressure patterns remained. No open market. No ring of stands. No staircase worth tracing. No neat chamber hidden under the nobles’ district.

It had vanished with the morning. Ludger exhaled slowly through his nose. They truly knew how to erase their traces. Not just hide. Erase.

The sort of discipline that only came from long practice, too much money, or fear of enemies strong enough to make sloppiness fatal. He leaned back slightly in the seat, eyes still open, mind already sorting what he had gained and what had slipped away.

Several traces lost. Several retained. The market route gone. The structure confirmed. The enemy still moving.

Ludger looked once toward the capital through the stone and distance above them. Then back inward. Fine. If the market wanted to vanish by morning, then he would stop chasing the market itself. He would chase the people who thought vanishing with it was enough.

Ludger kept tracking the movements of the ones who had remained in the capital for the entire day.

He did it quietly, patiently, with the same thin sense threaded through the earth and dust of the city rather than anything broad enough to trip alarms. One by one, the traces shifted again as daylight passed and evening crept closer. The buyers who had taken rooms in inns, rented private spaces, or lingered in temporary lodgings began moving out.

And soon they left the capital too. Not all at once, but enough. Enough that a clear pattern formed. None of them lived there. Ludger sat in silence for a while after confirming that. Because that meant something. Several things, actually, and none of them were good.

It meant the black market beneath the capital was not a market for the capital in the ordinary sense. Not a hidden bazaar supplying the city’s greedy rich directly the way a fool might imagine. It was a point of convergence. A node. A place where people came to buy, sell, commission, and disappear again without settling near the filth they fed on.

Which in turn meant that those in power inside the capital were probably profiting from it indirectly. That would fit better.

Nobles. Officers. officials. Merchant powers. Families with old money and clean hands. They wouldn’t need to attend every gathering personally. They only needed to own the pressure around it. The routes. The protection. The tolerances. The fees hidden in a dozen other transactions. The right to leave certain tunnels unchecked. The right to ignore certain disappearances. The right to make the underworld pay for the privilege of existing beneath their polished streets.

That alone could make fortunes. Or perhaps it was even uglier than that. Perhaps some of them did not bother waiting for the market itself at all. Perhaps they simply ordered what they wanted directly from the underground groups. A request passed through a broker.

A courier with no real face. A shipment that never appeared on paper. That would make even more sense for the highest layers. Men and women with enough status to expect the filth to come to them rather than force them to step into it.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly at the thought. Yes. That felt likely.

The market below the Rodericks district might not be the full source of supply at all. It might just be the place where rarer stock changed hands among outsiders, foreign buyers, traveling brokers, rogue nobles, ambitious scum, and the sort of people who wanted things too dangerous or too shameful to request by cleaner routes.

And that led to the next conclusion. It was clear they only wanted rare stuff from other countries. Or from places too far outside the Empire’s ordinary control to be easily replaced. That explained some things too well.

Ludger’s jaw tightened slightly under the mask when his thoughts drifted toward the uglier categories. The tails. The young ones. The crystal images of chained dryads. He did not want to think too hard about why people wanted beastmen children’s tails.

He especially did not want to think about why they wanted captured dryads. Alchemy? Rituals? trophies? medicine? twisted luxuries for the kind of monsters who wore titles in the day and spent gold on living people’s suffering at night?

Any answer he came up with was bad enough. So he stopped there. Not because he lacked imagination. Because he had more than enough of it already, and none of those roads led anywhere that would improve his mood or sharpen his next step.

What mattered now was simpler. The people moving through the black market did not belong to the capital, but the capital still held the structure in place. The city’s power fed from it. Its underworld served it.

When Eclaire woke up, the runic carriage was already moving.

The low hum in the frame had returned, steady and familiar beneath the floor, and the faint vibration of speed was back in the walls and seats. For a second she just sat there, blinking the sleep out of her eyes while her mind caught up to the fact that the capital was no longer above them.

She had no idea how long she had been asleep. But it had been a while. More than a while, really.

Her body felt like it had fallen straight through exhaustion and climbed back out the other side. Her thoughts were clearer, her limbs less heavy, and the sharp soreness that came from holding tension too long had dulled into something manageable. Her internal clock, trained by years of being careful about time even when no one told her what hour it was, made one thing obvious immediately.

The sun was setting. So she had been asleep for at least twelve hours. Probably a little more. Eclaire straightened slightly in her seat and looked across from her. Ludger was awake, of course.

Sitting there like he had never seriously considered doing anything as normal as sleep, one arm resting on his knee while his eyes stayed half-focused on thoughts already moving faster than the carriage itself.

She frowned faintly.

“Why are we returning so soon?”

Ludger looked at her.

No surprise. No comment about her sleeping through half a day like a dead person. Just the answer.

“Because the next part needs different work.”

Eclaire waited.

Ludger continued in the same calm tone.

“I’ll have to work with Torvares.”