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

Luna stared at him, breath caught halfway, the implication landing like a fist. Ludger turned his gaze back to the sea monster.

“That’s why you’re still here,” he murmured, almost to himself. “Not to save them.”

The warden’s mana pulsed, heavy agreement, and something like contempt.

“To witness,” Ludger finished. “And to make sure the next ones understand the price.”

Luna’s hands trembled slightly before she forced them still.

“So what,” she whispered, voice tight, “we’re already… ”

Ludger didn’t soften.

“We’re already on the road,” he said. “And if we don’t change course…”

He looked at the labyrinth gate again, the black mouth in the jungle like a waiting throat.

“…then one day, someone from ‘another world’ is going to look at us the way those giants looked at the snake-people.”

As resources. As curiosities. As meat that happened to have a useful trick. Ludger’s eyes stayed on the black line of jungle where the gate sat, half-hidden like a wound that refused to close. The sea monster’s warning hadn’t taught him something new. It had just taken a pile of old, uncomfortable facts and stacked them into a shape he couldn’t ignore anymore.

His mind drifted, back past Lionfang, past Torvares politics, past the north and the coast and all the petty border problems that felt huge until you saw the ocean. Back to history. To the thing every kid learned in pieces, always smoothed down by teachers who didn’t want questions.

The Old Empire.

It had ruled most of the world once. Not “influence” or “trade routes.” Ruled. Borders that had held for generations. Roads that crossed continents. Laws that reached everywhere like a net. Fortresses built with techniques no one could replicate anymore. Whole regions pacified so completely that even the rebellions sounded like rumors when you read them later.

And no one really knew how they’d done it.

There were theories, lost magic schools, ancient contracts with spirits, a magic system that produced monsters in human skin. People said they’d had “better infrastructure,” as if roads alone let you conquer half a planet. But Ludger had always noticed the one detail no one argued with. When the Old Empire fell… it didn’t fall like a kingdom. It fell like someone had kicked the legs out from under the world.

Not one civil war. Not one assassination. Not one border collapse. Breach after breach after breach. Labyrinths opening in places that had been safe for centuries. Gates bleeding out monsters and anomalies and things that didn’t belong. Whole provinces swallowed in weeks. Cities abandoned. Supply lines cut by creatures that didn’t care about armies or tactics. Commanders dying to threats that didn’t even understand what “command” was.

Centuries ago, the Old Empire had been everywhere. And then, suddenly, it wasn’t. No slow decline. No graceful decay into successor states. Just… gone. People loved to pretend the empire had “overextended.” That it had “grown corrupt.” That it had “collapsed under its own bureaucracy.”

Sure. Maybe. But corruption didn’t erase an empire that fast. Bureaucracy didn’t leave entire regions as blank spots on maps. Labyrinth breaches did. Ludger’s jaw tightened. And now, with the sea monster’s words sitting heavy in his mind, the rest of it started to make a brutal kind of sense.

They were farming other worlds too.

Maybe not openly. Maybe not widely known. But if the current Empire could seal doors and lie about it, then the old one, at its peak, with power no one could explain, could’ve been doing it on a scale no one wanted to admit.

Taking resources. Taking knowledge. Taking “samples.” Poking doors that were never meant to be poked. Because once you knew the shortcut existed, why would you stop?

And if you did that long enough… You got noticed. Not by gods. Not by fate. By predators on the other side. By things that didn’t care about borders or politics, only opportunity. Ludger stared into the dark ocean and imagined it: the Old Empire opening too many routes, tugging too hard, trying to build an empire out of stolen worlds. And then the backlash. Not one breach. Thousands.

So many labyrinth mouths tearing open across the world that even the empire’s “mystery power” couldn’t plug them all. So many threats that the system that held everything together snapped at every point at once.

That was how you erased a superpower. Not with a rebellion. With an infection. And that was then. Ludger’s eyes narrowed, and for the first time since waking on this island, he felt something heavier than immediate danger settle in his chest.

Because this time didn’t feel like a repeat. This time felt like an escalation. Back then, the Old Empire fell because breaches happened everywhere. But now? Now there were outsiders with motive. Outsiders who had already learned how to exploit a species like the snake-people.

Outsiders who could copy racial traits with “prototypes” and capsules. Outsiders who, once they’d gotten what they wanted, simply moved on. If the Old Empire had died from breaches alone… Then the next collapse might not end with the world just breaking into smaller pieces.

It might end with someone else picking up the pieces. And calling it conquest. Ludger exhaled slowly, like he was forcing the weight of that history back into its box.

“Alright,” he said, voice flat. “It’s finally time to go home.”

The sea monster drifted closer. Water peeled off its scarred jaw in thick sheets as it rose higher, and then, without ceremony, it opened its mouth. Wide. Not a roar. Not a threat. Just… an invitation. A dark tunnel lined with teeth that looked like broken pillars. Like it was telling them, Get in. Luna flinched so hard she actually took a step back, hands twitching like she wanted knives that weren’t there.

“Absolutely not,” she hissed.

Ludger glanced at her, then at the monster’s open maw, and shrugged like the whole thing was mildly inconvenient.

“We won’t be eaten,” he said.

Luna stared at him as if he’d just suggested taking a nap inside a volcano.

“How are you so sure?” she demanded, voice tight. “That thing could swallow us whole and no one would even know we existed.”

Ludger’s eyes stayed calm, annoyingly calm, while his mana sense brushed the massive presence in front of them.

“Because if it wanted us dead,” he said, “we’d already be dead.”

Luna didn’t look convinced. So Ludger added, dry as sand.

“Also… it would be easier for me to blow it up than for it to play games.”

Luna blinked. “Excuse me?”

Ludger nodded toward the sea monster’s face as if explaining basic logistics.

“It’s huge,” he said. “It can’t dodge. It can’t get out of the way fast. If it tried to swallow us and keep us, I’d dump everything I have into its mouth and throat.”

He flexed his fingers once, subtle, casual, like reminding her he could.

“Even if I died,” Ludger continued, expression unchanged, “I’d still do enough damage to make it regret the decision.”

Luna’s lips parted, then she shut them again. Because she knew. She’d seen him fight. Seen him stack Overdrive until the air sparked. Seen him turn wind into a cannon and earth into execution blades. Seen him punch a guardian into the ocean like it was nothing.

She didn’t like the idea. But she understood the logic. The sea monster’s mana remained steady, no hunger spike, no predatory rise. Just that ancient impatience of something that had been waiting too long and wanted the job done. Luna swallowed, eyes flicking from the teeth to Ludger’s face.

“…So it’s accepting the danger,” she muttered.

Ludger gave a small nod.

“It knows,” he said simply. “Same as you.”

Luna stared into the open mouth one last time, jaw tight, then exhaled like she was about to jump off a cliff.

“Fine,” she said. “But if we die, I’m haunting you.”

Ludger’s mouth twitched.

“Sure.”

Then, without any more ceremony, he stepped toward the darkness and climbed in, because sometimes the fastest way home was through the mouth of a monster that had decided you were useful.

Luna moved first, barely.

Like stepping into a grave you weren’t sure was yours.

She climbed over the lower jaw ridge and into the mouth, boots scraping against something that felt like slick stone but moved when the monster breathed. Ludger followed right after, because hesitation was how you got stuck on the wrong side of the world.

The moment they were both inside, the warden’s jaws began to close.

Teeth the size of fence posts slid past each other with a slow, grinding inevitability. The outside night narrowed to a thin wedge of moonlight… then a sliver… then nothing.

Thoom.

Darkness sealed around them like a lid.

Luna made a sound she’d deny later and stepped closer to Ludger until her shoulder brushed his arm, close enough that, in her mind, it probably counted as protection against being swallowed.

As if being near him would somehow stop a creature the size of a coastline from deciding to digest. Ludger glanced down at her in the dark, felt a perfectly petty urge rise in his chest, and filed it away for later.

I’m going to have fun with this.

But first, he needed to see.

He lifted one hand and drew a small ward in the air with his mana, simple, efficient, the kind of spell you made when you didn’t want it to cost anything. A ring of runes flickered into existence, then sank into the air itself like ink absorbed by cloth.

Light bloomed.

Not bright enough to blind, just enough to carve edges out of darkness. It revealed wet, ridged flesh beneath their boots. The slow flex of muscle around them. Saliva clinging in strands between teeth. The ceiling above them rising and falling with every breath like the inside of a living tunnel.

Luna’s eyes darted around once, then immediately returned to Ludger as if the only stable object in the universe was his expression. He kept it neutral on purpose. Outside, the beast shifted.

They felt it through their feet first, a smooth, powerful roll, the entire “floor” tilting as the warden adjusted its posture. Then the sensation of weightlessness for a fraction of a heartbeat… and the cold press of water as the sea monster sank.

The sound changed instantly. The outside world vanished into muffled pressure. Everything became deeper, quieter, heavier. The monster’s body moved with slow, enormous certainty, and the mouth-space they stood in rocked gently with the rhythm of its swim.

Ludger could feel mana around them like currents, old, dense, controlled. Not hostile. Not comforting either.

Just purposeful. They were cargo. The monster swam.

At first it was a steady descent, then a forward push, power building in each stroke of its tail. The mouth chamber swayed as the creature accelerated, the motion smooth for something so huge, like being inside a ship that didn’t care about waves.

Ludger closed his eyes for a second and extended Mana Sense outward, not through walls, but through presence. He felt the direction. Felt the pull. Felt the faint, distant “shape” of the labyrinth route like a scar in the world, a pressure seam connecting places that had no business touching.

It was heading there. Taking them back to the door between worlds with them sitting inside its mouth like two very small, very stubborn parasites.

Luna stayed close, shoulders tight, every breath controlled like she was refusing to let fear become noise. Ludger’s earlier urge to tease her came back, stronger now that he’d seen her rare, honest reaction to something truly monstrous.

He almost opened his mouth. Almost.

Then his mind slid, inevitably, back to Lionfang. To politics and contracts and recruits and rivals. To the Empire’s “sealed” doors. To the fact that he’d been missing long enough for someone clever to start using that absence.

His jaw tightened. The jokes could wait. Because home wasn’t going to be quiet when he returned. Home was going to be on fire in a dozen different ways.

And he had to get back, fast, and put it out before the flames learned how to spread.

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