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

Hroth’s face did not change, though his eyes had gone colder.

“Who hired you?”

Hans looked at him, frowning slightly as if the question itself offended him.

“Why do you care?” he asked. “And why would that matter?”

Hroth gave a faint shrug.

“I’m curious.”

Hans snorted.

“That’s none of your business.”

Then, instead of leaving it there like a sane man might have, he smiled again. Not broadly. Not theatrically. Just enough to make him look worse.

“Still,” he said, “it has been a while since I heard screams that nice from people burning.”

The room stayed deathly quiet. Hans’s eyes unfocused slightly, as if the memory itself entertained him.

“The girl screamed so well while I made her flesh melt…” He exhaled slowly, almost blissfully. “I get goosebumps just recalling it.”

No one in the chamber moved. No one wanted to. Hans rolled one shoulder and gave a light, almost cheerful sigh.

“Maybe I should go on a killing spree again just to find someone who screams like that as well. Still, I might get addicted, and…”

He never finished. One instant he was standing there, half-smiling, red wand in hand. The next, he was sent flying.

The impact came so suddenly that most of the room didn’t even understand what had happened until Hans’s body smashed into the far wall with enough force to shake the entire hideout. Stone cracked. Dust burst outward. Tables rattled hard enough to make cups jump and tip. A few of the seated figures lurched halfway to their feet in pure shock.

For one stunned heartbeat, nobody moved. Because every eye in the chamber had seen the impossible. The body on the table had kicked him.

Somehow, the pale, blood-scented corpse that had lain still in front of them had moved first, faster than their eyes could properly follow, and buried a kick into Hans’s stomach hard enough to launch the mad pyromancer across the room like broken luggage.

The cloak slid from the table as Ludger rose. Not dead. Not even close. Ludger slowly rose from the table.

Blood-stained cloth slid from his shoulders and pooled around his feet as he straightened, pale-faced and sharp-eyed, the smell of blood still clinging heavily to him. For a moment, he just looked around at the underground chamber, at the frozen faces, at the hands tightening around blades and hidden wands, at Hans still crumpled against the cracked wall.

Then he said, flatly, “I had prepared to say bazinga.”

The room remained dead silent. Ludger’s expression darkened.

“But that asshole ruined my mood.”

Hroth let out a quiet breath through his nose, more annoyed than amused.

“You could’ve let me make him talk a little longer,” he said. “But I guess it couldn’t be helped.”

That was enough to break the paralysis in the room.

The cloaked figures around them moved all at once, chairs scraping, boots grinding against stone as weapons came free in a wave of steel and malice. Knives flashed. Curved swords hissed from sheaths. One man pulled a chain loose from his belt, another drew a short wand blackened at the tip, and several more spread out instinctively, trying to surround the two of them before panic could fully become chaos.

“You bastard!”

“So you betrayed us!”

“Hroth!”

The accusations flew with the speed of men who already knew the answer but wanted to spit it out anyway. Hroth clicked his tongue and rolled one shoulder as if the whole thing had become mildly irritating.

“Betrayed you?” he said. “Please.”

Then his voice flattened into something colder.

“There’s no honor among underworld guilds.”

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That made a few of them hesitate. Only for a second. Hroth’s mouth twisted into something that wasn’t quite a smile.

“You’re all going to die today anyway,” he said. “So who cares that I fooled you all?”

He tore his cloak away. It whipped behind him and hit the floor in a dark heap, revealing the lean, scarred frame beneath, and the blue tattoos that spread across his torso like intricate veins of living mana.

Then they began to glow. Not softly. Not steadily. They ignited.

Blue light raced across the lines inked into his flesh, flooding through them in sudden violent pulses until his entire upper body looked like it had been carved full of lightning. Mana surged outward in a dense, visible layer, wrapping around him in a shimmering coat that distorted the air around his frame.

It reminded Ludger of Overdrive at first glance. But only at first. Overdrive was pressure. Concentrated force. Controlled amplification forced through the body until every movement became sharper, heavier, faster.

This was different.

A thin line of energy whipped around Hroth’s body like a living thread of blue-white light, snapping and circling him in frantic loops. It moved violently, unpredictably, as if it could barely be contained inside the current that cloaked him. Sometimes it wrapped his arm. Sometimes his waist. Sometimes it streaked past his shoulders and vanished behind him before reappearing at his ankles a blink later.

The skill was not built around raw pressure. It was built around release. Around velocity. Around the body becoming a thing too fast for common sense.

Hroth’s fingers flexed, and spiked claws slid into his hands, short, brutal weapons meant for ripping through flesh at close range rather than trading honorable blows. They gleamed faintly in the blue light, the edges wicked and predatory.

Then he moved. He did not charge so much as vanish forward.

A crack like split air burst through the chamber, and Hroth shot across the room at sonic speed, too fast for most of the gathered killers to even track properly. One moment he was standing beside Ludger in a storm of blue mana. The next, he was at the far side of the chamber, body low, claws already tearing open the throat of a man who had just managed to raise his weapon.

Blood sprayed. Then Hroth was gone again. He moved like he was bouncing off the world itself.

Pillar. Floor. Wall. Table edge.

Each surface became a point of impact and release, his body ricocheting through the chamber in impossible angles while that line of energy whipped violently around him like a mad halo. Every contact launched him somewhere else, faster than before, turning the underground hall into a killing field where blue flashes and wet red arcs appeared almost simultaneously.

A woman with a curved dagger turned too late and lost half her face to a claw strike that passed through her like a blade.

A man with a chain tried to swing toward the blur approaching him, only for Hroth to plant one foot on the side of a pillar, rebound sideways, and gut him from hip to sternum before the chain had even finished moving.

Another cloaked figure raised a wand and started chanting, but Hroth hit the table in front of him, bounced upward in a spray of splintered wood, and drove both claws into the caster’s chest hard enough to pin him backward over his own chair.

He was not fighting like a duelist. Not like a soldier. Not like an assassin in the clean sense either. He was fighting like a projectile that had decided it enjoyed screaming.

And every time that thin line of energy wrapped around him and snapped away again, his speed spiked even harder, making the air groan in his wake.

The gathered killers had expected a traitor. What they got was a monster in motion.

And beside the overturned table, Ludger watched the first wave break in front of him, blood still staining his clothes, eyes already shifting toward the next target.

Ludger stamped a foot lightly against the ground and sent mana downward. The stone around the main entrance groaned.

Then the entire passage behind them collapsed in a roar of cracking rock and cascading debris, sealing the route they had used to enter beneath a wall of shattered earth. Almost at the same time, Ludger extended his control farther through the floor and pillars, feeling the side exits branching from the main chamber. With a precise twist of geomancy, he forced those passages inward as well. Stone folded. Support lines buckled. Tunnels caved in one after another with muffled booms that rolled through the hideout like distant thunder.

Dust burst through the chamber. Several heads turned for a heartbeat. But only for a heartbeat. No one there was thinking about escape anymore. Not really. The moment the trap closed, the room committed fully to one idea: kill them first.

The surviving cloaked figures surged harder, curses hissing under their breath, blades raised, killing intent filling the underground chamber thick enough to taste. Some rushed Ludger. Others tried to flank Hroth. A few backed away to create casting room.

It did not help them. Hroth was already among them.

Blue light kept flashing through the chamber in savage bursts as he carved men open with terrifying ease. Throats split under his claws before shouts could fully leave mouths. One swordsman lunged from the left and got his neck opened so cleanly that his body ran two more steps before realizing it was dead. Another underworld killer tried to block with a curved short blade only for Hroth to smash aside the weapon, pivot at impossible speed, and slash through the man’s throat on the return motion.

Blood sprayed over tables, pillars, and stone floors slick with dust.

The chamber had become chaos in the ugliest sense, screams, bootsteps, cracked wood, bodies dropping, mana flaring, steel ringing, people dying too fast to understand why.

And amid all of it, Ludger heard a laugh. Not loud. Not sane. A thin, creepy sound that cut through the violence and made his eyes snap toward the cracked wall.

Hans was still there. Or rather, he had been there a second ago.

Now the pyromancer was shaking as he pushed himself up from the shattered stone, shoulders twitching, head bowed, laughter leaking out of him in ugly little bursts. Dust rolled off his clothes. Rubble slid from his back. His ruby rings clicked faintly as his fingers flexed around the red wand.

Then he straightened. And the grin on his face was wider than before. Ludger looked at him coldly.

“I kicked you while holding back so I wouldn’t kill you,” he said. “I’m surprised you’re still conscious.”

Hans lifted his head fully. His eyes were bright in a way that had nothing to do with health and everything to do with madness. The man looked delighted, almost feverish, like someone who had just been handed a favorite toy he thought had been taken away.

“I didn’t expect,” Hans said, voice trembling with excitement, “that such a golden opportunity would just fall into my lap.”