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

That made her attention sharpen immediately.

“And make his spies work overtime,” Ludger added, “to gather the information we need.”

That sounded exactly like the kind of sentence Torvares would hate hearing from a fourteen-year-old and then agree to anyway because the fourteen-year-old was obviously correct. Eclaire studied him for a second.

“That’s not all.”

“No.”

Of course not.

Ludger’s eyes stayed forward for a moment before he said, “My next goal is already clear.”

That made something cold and expectant slide into the space between them.

Eclaire asked, “What is it?”

Ludger’s answer came without hesitation.

“The sealed labyrinths.”

She went still for half a second. Of course it was something like that.

Not a library. Not just records. Not weeks of patient court pressure and financial tracking, though those would still matter. No, Ludger had looked at a problem tied to a hidden great family, underworld logistics, cursed deaths, disappearing evidence, and military rot, and immediately found the most dangerous direct route into the structure’s buried throat.

Eclaire exhaled slowly.

“The quickest method,” Ludger said, “for me to find the answers I need is to get inside.”

His tone remained level.

“Once I’m in and they try to stop me,” he added, “I’ll have people to question directly.”

There it was. That was the Ludger part of the plan. Not recklessness, exactly. More like controlled aggression turned into investigation.

He knew paper would matter. He knew spies would matter. He knew Torvares’s network would need to pull every scrap it could out of the Empire’s quieter corners. But at the same time, he also knew there were places inside the enemy structure where people would still be living, guarding, transporting, hiding, or maintaining what needed to stay buried.

And sealed labyrinths were perfect for that.

Secretive. Isolated. Easy to control. Easy to repurpose. Easy to stuff full of loyal or disposable hands who assumed no one would come kicking the doors in unless they already belonged there.

Eclaire was quiet for a moment after that, then said, “Rowan and Jennifer could help you infiltrate them.”

Ludger frowned slightly and looked at her.

“How?”

Eclaire folded her hands in her lap, fully awake now, her voice steady again.

“Their families guard sealed labyrinths too,” she said. “Not all of them. But some.” She paused briefly. “Enough that they would understand the magic that keeps them sealed, the patrol logic, the protocols around restricted access.”

That made Ludger’s eyes narrow just a little.

He hadn’t asked before. It hadn’t mattered enough at the time. Rowan and Jennifer had simply been two people orbiting Eclaire, useful enough to note, irrelevant enough not to waste thought on unless they stepped into his way.

Apparently that had been an incomplete read. He asked, “So those two are nobles too.”

Eclaire nodded once.

“Yes.”

Ludger held his chin with one hand while the runic carriage kept moving, his posture looking casual enough at first glance. It wasn’t. His mind was already moving. Noble families tied to sealed labyrinths.

Two young guards with actual access, upbringing, habits, and likely fragments of knowledge they might not even realize were valuable. Yes, that could help. People raised near that sort of thing often absorbed useful details without noticing.

Ludger disliked how useful that sounded. Because it also meant working with Eclaire a little more. And that, in itself, was troublesome. Not because she was incapable.

Because she was the kind of person who understood debts. More than understood them, really. She had been trained around them.

Ludger could absolutely imagine her letting little debts pile up over time. One help here. One opening there. One answer. One contact. One introduction. One useful silence.

Then, years later, when the stack had grown fat enough and he had forgotten half of it, she would probably appear with that polite, composed face and ask, very reasonably, very intelligently, and with horrible timing, for his help in something monstrous.

Like taking the throne.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

The thought felt disgustingly plausible. He could practically hear it.

Ludger, you do remember, don’t you?

He stared ahead for a second, then clicked his tongue softly. Eclaire noticed.

“That expression,” she said, “suggests you are imagining something rude.”

Ludger kept his eyes on the track ahead and said, “I’ll think about it.”

Eclaire looked at him but didn’t interrupt.

“For now,” he continued, “I need to prepare for the mission. And I have to wait until the rest of my suit is done.”

That part alone was already irritating enough.

The prototype had served its purpose, but if he was going to start pushing into sealed labyrinths tied to noble families, imperial rot, and whatever filth Armandis had hidden under layers of authority, then “good enough” gear was not actually good enough. He needed the finished version. Proper fit. Proper arrays. Proper resistance. The kind of equipment that let him go into a place built to kill intruders and still leave room in his mind to think instead of merely survive.

Eclaire gave a small nod.

“All right.”

She didn’t argue. Didn’t push Rowan and Jennifer again. Didn’t try to frame urgency in some clever way to steer him faster.

Which, ironically, made it clearer that she had already helped enough for one operation. She was supposed to step back now.

That would have been the smart thing. But Ludger could tell she didn’t want to hide again after this.

It was there in the way she held herself now. Less like a girl tucked away under protection and more like someone who had looked straight at one of the Empire’s hidden organs and decided she hated being furniture while others moved around her.

That was understandable. Also troublesome. Because working with her openly, around the Empire, without hiding her face, was a bad idea. A very bad one. Which brought Ludger’s thoughts, annoyingly, back to the illusionist.

If only he had some leverage earlier, he could have asked that bastard to teach him those tricks. The face work. The light distortion. The clean false identities. That would have solved a number of irritating problems very quickly.

Not all of them, of course. An illusion was not the same as becoming another person. But it would have made moving Eclaire around far easier, and it would have let him build more than one useful shape for himself.

Unfortunately, he hadn’t had the leverage then. He had only had questions. Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly as the thought settled.

Perhaps he would have the leverage later. Once he learned which of his people had ties to the illusionist. That little detail still sat in the back of his head like a thorn. Someone near him. Someone the man cared enough about to loosen his hand tonight.

That meant there was a connection. A real one. And real connections could be pulled. Carefully. Very carefully. Not because Ludger intended to threaten the person. That would be stupid unless he wanted the illusionist to become actively hostile, which sounded like a waste of life expectancy.

But knowledge itself was leverage. Knowing the shape of a bond changed how one spoke to a man. What one could ask for. What one could trade. What one could imply.

And if Ludger learned that piece…

Then maybe next time he would not leave that tent with only answers and warnings. Maybe next time he would leave with a lesson. Or two.

Ludger had originally planned to drop Eclaire off at Lionfang, then head straight to speak with Torvares alone.

That would have been cleaner. Less noise. Fewer opinions. Fewer people in the room while he tried to sort which parts of the truth were solid enough to move on and which parts still needed to be pried open by force.

But Eclaire, apparently, had other ideas.

“I want to speak with Lord Torvares too,” she said.

Ludger looked at her for a second.

Not because the request was unreasonable. It wasn’t. She had been there. She had seen the market. Heard the illusionist. Watched the shape of the problem become uglier in real time. If Torvares was going to be pulled fully into this, then having her present would remove the need for Ludger to repeat half the details later.

Which meant it would save time. And right now, time was useful enough that personal preference could go choke on a rock.

So he said, “Fine.”

Eclaire nodded once, like she had expected that answer anyway.

A few hours later, the two of them were seated in one of the more private rooms of the Torvares manor, giving their report while the old bull listened in silence.

Torvares did not interrupt much. That alone said enough. Ludger gave the facts cleanly.

The black market beneath the abandoned Rodericks manor. The route hidden through the nobles’ district. The sellers. The brokers. The assassin stalls. The relics, monster materials, preserved beastmen tails, and chained dryads trapped in crystal.

The information broker. The illusionist. The confirmation that Arslan’s family had been killed because they had started finding a way to purge curse degradation. The Rodericks. General Armandis.

Through all of it, Torvares listened. When they finished, the room stayed quiet for a few seconds. Then the old bull leaned back a little and let out a slow breath through his nose.

“I can’t say I’m surprised,” he said.

His voice was calm. Too calm.

“That the Empire has gotten this rotten.”

No one answered immediately. Because there wasn’t much to say to that.

He wasn’t speaking as a dramatist. He wasn’t trying to sound cynical or wise. Just tired. Tired in the way only a powerful man could be after decades of watching institutions rot from the inside while still being forced to negotiate with them as though they were solid.

Torvares rubbed once at his jaw.

“I’ve already been trying to increase my network of spies,” he said. “Quietly. Carefully. The trouble is that for work like this, trustworthy people are rarer than gold.” His mouth twisted slightly. “And often much more expensive.”

Ludger nodded faintly. Yes. That was the problem. Any fool could pay for ears. Paying for ears that didn’t sell what they heard somewhere else was the real challenge.

Torvares looked at Ludger next.

“If Armandis is truly tied to this structure, then anything moving too close to the military side will be dangerous.”

“It already is,” Ludger said.

Torvares gave a short grunt.

“Fair.”

Eclaire sat quietly in her seat, hands folded neatly, but her eyes remained sharp. She didn’t look hidden now. Not the way she had before. Not like someone merely tucked under protection and hoping events passed around her.

That, too, Torvares noticed. Of course he did. But he said nothing about it. The room fell silent again after that. Not awkward silence. Working silence.

The kind that settled when every person in the room was turning the same ugly machine over in their head, looking for the most efficient place to wedge a blade into it.

The black market buyers who had passed through the capital like ghosts and vanished again. Possible noble houses feeding off the structure without exposing themselves to it directly. No clean answer appeared. Just harder work.

Then a sharp sound cracked through the quiet from the first floor.

Glass, or porcelain, breaking.