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

The giant left the ground like he’d been kicked by a hurricane. He spun through the air in vertically, armor clinking, tail whipping uselessly, flung so far and so fast that he became a tumbling silhouette against the black ocean.

Away from the island. Away from the gate. Away from everything. For one clean, brutal moment, it looked like Ludger had simply removed the problem by throwing it into the sea.

Then the horizon changed. A dark wall rose out of the ocean. Not a wave. Not fog.

Something solid, massive, and moving, so large it swallowed starlight behind it. It cut across the night like a living cliff. The guardian hit it.

BOOOOM—!

The sound rolled back to the island a heartbeat later, deep, concussive, like a ship ramming a fortress. Even from this distance, Ludger felt the vibration in his teeth.

The tumbling giant rebounded. Like a ball off a bat. For a second Ludger couldn’t process what could possibly stop that much mass mid-flight.

Then the moonlight caught the shape, just enough. A curve. A taper. Scales the size of shields. Even in the darkness, Ludger recognized it.

A tail. The sea monster’s tail. It had risen from the ocean like a judgment, intercepted the guardian in midair, and blocked Ludger’s launch as casually as swatting a fly. Then it flicked. And the guardian came back.

The air screamed as the giant was sent toward the island with the same effortless violence, spinning end-over-end, a helpless chunk of meat and armor thrown by something that didn’t care about his capsules, his aura, or his grin.

He slammed back into the beachside clearing with a crater-making impact, sand and shattered wood blasting outward. And somewhere out beyond the shore, the black wall of the sea monster’s tail sank back into the ocean without a splash, like the sea itself had simply decided, No. Not yet.

Ludger stared at the crater, then briefly toward the dark water. He didn’t smile. But something in his eyes sharpened. Because now he understood the message. The warden wasn’t just watching. It was controlling the board. And it had just tossed his enemy right back into his hands.

The guardian landed in front of Ludger like a dropped statue. He didn’t bounce. Didn’t roll.

He just hit the sand and cracked it, the impact digging a shallow crater around his shoulders and hips. For a moment, he lay there without moving, tail sprawled at an ugly angle, silver scales armor dented and twisted like it had been hugged by a mountain.

Still alive. Ludger could tell by the way the chest rose, barely. By the faint, wet rasp that came from his throat. By the slow drip of blood making little dark constellations in the sand. But his body was a mess.

Where Ludger’s punch had hit his stomach, the aftereffect had not stayed “internal.” Wind didn’t behave like a normal weapon when you compressed it that hard and then let it detonate inside a living thing.

It searched for exits.

The burst had exploded through him and then unraveled into spirals, tight, rotating currents that turned the inside of his body into a corridor for blades. They punched outward in multiple corkscrewing paths, carving through meat and tendon as they went.

Ludger could see the evidence.

Long, curved gashes appeared across the guardian’s torso as the residual wind cut its way free, deep lines that opened with a delayed shudder, as if the skin realized it had been sliced only after the air left. Blood welled and ran, not in clean streams but in messy sheets, soaking the sand and painting the green scales black-red.

One spiral had raked up the side of his ribs, shredding the edge of the silver scales armor and leaving jagged, peeled plates. Another had torn across his shoulder, cutting so deep it exposed pale muscle under burned scale. Smaller spirals had bitten into his arms and thighs, leaving a pattern of wounds that looked like something had twisted him from the inside.

The guardian coughed. A wet, choking sound. Something dark splattered from his mouth, blood and saliva, and a couple of half-dissolved red capsules that hadn’t even had time to fully go down.

His grin was still there. Of course it was. But now it looked… stretched. Tired. Like the muscle fibers holding it had started to fail. And then something else happened. His body began to change back. Slowly at first, like a film rewinding.

The tail behind him twitched, then shortened, vertebrae drawing inward as if the extra length was being reclaimed. The green scales along his neck lost their sheen, fading toward a duller tone. Patches of reptilian texture softened, the edges of scales shrinking, sinking back into skin that wanted to be human again.

Maybe it was the damage. Shock forcing the mutation to collapse. Maybe it was time, some limit on the “prototype.” Or maybe the sea monster’s hit had done something more subtle than just swat him back, something that disrupted whatever unstable transformation he’d forced on himself.

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Whatever the reason, the monster in silver armor was unraveling.

The half-lizard shape retreated in uneven pulses, leaving a grotesque in-between: human skin reappearing in islands between scales, the tail shrinking while still bleeding, the hands shifting back toward fingers even as claws remained half-formed.

Ludger watched without stepping closer yet. He didn’t relax. A wounded monster was still a monster, sometimes the most dangerous kind. But as the guardian’s breathing hitched and the mutation faltered, Ludger’s expression hardened into something colder than victory.

Because even “getting back to normal” didn’t make him less disgusting. It just made him easier to finish. Ludger didn’t walk up and talk. He didn’t wait for a dying speech. He didn’t give the universe a chance to pull something stupid like “second phase.” His hand lifted, fingers spreading, and the earth answered. Not spears this time. Swords.

Magic blades of packed energy sharpened by mana until they looked like grey glass. They hovered around him in a tight halo, silent, steady, each one aligned like a thought that had become metal.

He narrowed his eyes and sent them. The first wave hit the guardian’s chest with a wet, solid sound, blades punching through scorched scales and dented armor seams, driving straight into where a human heart should be.

THK—THK—THK—!

The guardian’s body jolted with each impact, limbs twitching, fingers scraping uselessly at the sand. Ludger didn’t stop at “should.” Because he didn’t know what those fuckers had done to themselves.

He didn’t know where they’d moved their organs. He didn’t know if they’d grown redundancies. He didn’t know if they’d turned their biology into some labyrinth joke where “vitals” were optional.

So he made it not optional.

A second barrage followed, angled higher. Blades slammed into the throat, into the jaw, into the skull. One punched through an eye socket. Another drove through the temple. Two more went straight down through the crown, sinking deep until the hilt nearly disappeared.

THK—THK—THK—!

The grin finally stopped being a grin. Not because it softened. Because the face stopped moving. Ludger stared at the pinned corpse for a full heartbeat, waiting for the twitch. Waiting for the bullshit. Waiting for the aura to surge one last time.

Nothing. He exhaled slowly through his nose.

Hopefully, he thought, coldly amused at his own restraint, not enough to survive without a heart and a brain.

The floating swords hung for another second, then disappeared. Only then did Ludger let his shoulders sag a fraction. Sweat ran down his temples. Down his neck. His shirt clung to his back under the tropical humidity, and his breathing came out steady but deeper than before, the kind of breathing you did after you’d forced your body to outrun itself.

Footsteps approached, light, careful.

Luna emerged from behind the fallen palms, still carrying that assassin’s quiet even when exhausted. Her hands were empty now, but her posture said she could still kill if something moved wrong.

She looked at the corpse. Looked at the crater. Looked at the swords embedded in meat and bone like stakes. Then she looked at Ludger, at the sweat, the grit, the faint stiffness in his stance he was trying to pretend didn’t exist.

“From a distance,” she said, voice dry, “it looked like your fight was easy.”

Her eyes flicked briefly to his arms, to the way he rolled his shoulders once like something ached deeper than muscle.

“But that tail strike truly hurt you, huh?”

Ludger wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his wrist and gave her a flat look.

“’Tis but a scratch.”

It came out deadpan enough that it almost sounded believable. Almost. Luna huffed, half laugh, half exhausted breath, and shook her head. Ludger’s gaze returned to the gate for a moment, then to the ocean beyond where the warden circled in silence.

“Regardless,” he said, voice settling back into that pragmatic tone that meant the emotion was already locked away, “our job’s done.”

He glanced at Luna.

“Now we get out before something else decides it wants to argue.”

Luna stared at the field of corpses, then back at Ludger.

“Are we just… leaving them?” she asked quietly. “Your whole goal was keeping our existence unknown. If someone finds this…”

Ludger glanced at the labyrinth gate, then at the ocean. His expression didn’t change, but his eyes narrowed like he was already measuring the consequences.

“We can ask the client,” he said.

Luna opened her mouth to ask what he meant… and the sea moved. Not a wave. Not tide. The ocean itself seemed to part.

A massive shape rose near the shore, water sheeting off scarred scales in heavy curtains. Even with only a fraction of it visible, it was enough to make the night feel smaller. A ridge like a cliff line. A jaw that could swallow their camp whole. An eye the size of a cart wheel catching moonlight like a dull coin.

Luna flinched hard and instinctively shifted her stance, half turning as if she could hide behind a tree that would snap like a twig if the monster decided to breathe too hard.

She still didn’t feel comfortable facing that thing. Ludger, annoyingly, looked like he was dealing with a difficult neighbor. He stepped closer to the waterline and raised his voice just enough to carry.

“Should we burn the bodies,” he called, “or throw them into the ocean?”

The sea monster snorted. It wasn’t a roar. Not even a warning. Just a low blast of breath that sent ripples racing across the shore and made the sand jump like it had been slapped. The sound vibrated in Ludger’s ribs.

He didn’t even blink. His eyes went slightly distant, like he was listening to something Luna couldn’t hear.

Mana Sense widened.

The giant sea monster presence was… immense. Not just a pool, an ocean. Dense currents layered over each other, old and heavy, with sharper streaks of aggression moving underneath like muscles flexing in deep water.

And in that shifting color, in the intensity of it, Ludger caught intent the way you caught weather by smell.

Leave them.

Not for mercy. For message.

A cold satisfaction ran through the warden’s mana when it looked at the bodies, like it wanted them displayed, not hidden. Like it wanted whatever came next to see the aftermath and understand, with perfect clarity, that this could happen again.

Ludger nodded once, more to himself than to the monster.