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

He took one slow step forward over broken stone. Then another. And all the while he kept staring at Ludger. Not looking at him normally. Not like a rival measuring another fighter.

He looked at Ludger the way a starving beast might look at meat that had suddenly stood up and volunteered to run. His grin stretched too far, eyes fixed and gleaming, every line of his face warped by anticipation. There was joy there, but the wrong kind, the kind born from cruelty, obsession, and the expectation of pain. He drank in the sight of Ludger with manic fascination, like the fact that the boy was alive had not ruined the evening at all.

It had improved it. Greatly. Hans licked a bit of blood from the corner of his mouth without taking his eyes off Ludger.

“You little monster,” he murmured, almost fondly. “You have any idea how rare it is for the dead to stand back up just when things are getting boring?”

The temperature in the room began to rise. Not gradually. Violently.

Mana poured out of Hans in hot waves that distorted the air around him. The red wand in his hand glowed brighter, and the ruby rings on his fingers lit one by one like coals being fed fresh breath. Heat shimmered over his shoulders. Dust around his boots blackened. Tiny sparks began snapping into existence at random points near his body before burning out again.

Then the first fireball appeared. A sphere of flame no larger than a fist, floating beside his shoulder. Then another. Then three more. Then ten.

Within seconds, countless fireballs were forming around him in expanding circles, suspended in the air like burning stars dragged down into the underground chamber. Some were small and dense, compressed spheres of white-orange heat. Others were larger, unstable and roiling, their surfaces boiling with darker red veins. They hovered in layers around Hans, casting mad light across his grinning face and painting the walls of the hideout in flickering hellish orange.

Every killer still standing felt it. The heat. The pressure. The sheer destructive madness gathering in one place. Hans spread his arms slightly as the fire orbited him. His grin widened even further.

And in that moment, surrounded by floating suns and laughing like a lunatic, he looked less like a man and more like a fire given human shape just long enough to enjoy murder properly.

Ludger looked at the growing storm of fire around Hans and spoke in the same calm tone he might have used to comment on the weather.

“Sorry,” he said, “but I can’t let you make too much chaos or too many explosions in here.”

Hans’s grin only widened. Then Ludger moved his mana. The chamber trembled.

For an instant, several of the underworld killers seemed confused, because there was no immediate wall of stone, no spear, no obvious strike. Then the air pressure shifted, and something vast appeared behind Ludger.

A wave.

Not an illusion. Not mist. A real mass of water, heavy and violent, surging into existence behind him in a sudden wall that swallowed lanternlight and filled the underground chamber with the roar of collapsing rivers. It rose so fast it felt unnatural even in a place already drowning in mana, a dark, gleaming surge compressed into the confines of stone and pillars.

And then Ludger sent it forward.

The wave crashed toward Hans with overwhelming force.

Everyone in its path was simply taken.

Tables ripped loose and smashed apart. Cloaked figures were washed off their feet and hurled across the chamber like scraps of cloth. Fireballs sputtered as the front of the torrent slammed into them, some bursting into steam and shrieking heat, others exploding half-formed under the sheer impact. Men shouted, cursed, choked, and vanished beneath the violent surge as the underground hideout was turned, for a few brutal seconds, into a flood tunnel.

Even Hroth got caught by the edge of it. The blue-glowing spy slammed shoulder-first into a pillar, rebounded off it, and somehow kept his footing before shouting over the roar, “You didn’t need to hit me with that!”

Ludger ignored him. His eyes were on Hans. Because while everyone else was being smashed aside, the pyromancer had not panicked. Hans’s mana flared around him in an instant.

It wrapped over his body like armor, dense, blazing, and tight to the skin, a shell of fire-fed force that swallowed the water’s impact with a hiss of steam and violent pressure. It did not stop the wave entirely, but it resisted long enough for Hans to move.

And move he did. The fiery armor around him compressed, then detonated upward.

Hans was launched toward the ceiling like a missile, his body propelled by raw fire mana hard enough to crack the air. He smashed into the stone overhead and pierced straight through it, blasting rock apart in a violent eruption of shattered earth and steam.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Debris rained down into the chamber. Ludger clicked his tongue. He hadn’t expected him to be that skilled.

Mad, yes. Brutal, certainly. But that kind of control under pressure, wrapping himself in mana armor, converting explosive force into movement, and escaping vertically through reinforced earth in a split second—meant Hans was far more dangerous than just a lunatic with strong flames.

He was an experienced lunatic. Which was worse. Without wasting another moment, Ludger bent his legs and launched himself upward.

He followed through the hole Hans had made, pushing through broken stone and loosened dirt, climbing the ruined shaft with bursts of mana-assisted movement until the underground dark gave way to cold night air.

He emerged into the grove outside.

The trees shook from the force of the breach. Chunks of earth and stone still tumbled around the torn opening. Beyond the dark trunks, distant lights from the town to the south flickered faintly, while farther north the capital glimmered under the night like a spread of low stars.

Somewhere in that open darkness, Hans had landed. And Ludger was already looking for him. Soon, fireballs began appearing from every direction.

Not in a single clean volley, but in staggered bursts from the darkness beyond the grove, left, right, above the trees, between trunks, from blind angles that should have made no sense. They lit the night in flashes of orange and red as they came screaming toward Ludger, hissing through the cold air like hungry things.

Ludger reacted instantly.

Mana surged from him, and a cluster of water spheres formed around his body, dense and spinning. The moment the first fireballs reached him, he sent the water out in sharp bursts. Steam exploded in every direction as flame met water and vanished in violent hissing clouds. More fireballs came, and more water answered, spheres colliding midair and erasing the attacks one after another while Ludger kept turning, eyes scanning the dark grove for even the slightest sign of movement.

But Hans refused to appear. Only his laughter did. It echoed through the trees, bouncing from trunk to trunk in a way that made direction meaningless.

“You can’t drown me outside,” Hans called out, voice bright with manic delight, “but you still want to stop my attacks so no one gets alerted?”

Another wave of fire streaked in from the right, only to be crushed by spinning water before it could reach Ludger. Hans laughed again, louder this time.

“It’s too late, brat!”

Ludger clicked his tongue. Annoying. Even Seismic Sense couldn’t tell him where that maniac was.

The ground gave him nothing useful. No clear position. No steady rhythm of footsteps. No real weight pressing into one point long enough to mark Hans properly. Either the bastard was moving too erratically, using bursts of fire propulsion to stay off the earth, or he was touching surfaces so lightly and briefly that the signals blurred into useless noise.

Which meant Hans wasn’t just insane. He was experienced enough to be a nightmare.

Ludger erased another incoming fireball with a snapping water sphere and narrowed his eyes into the darkness, steam coiling around him while Hans’s laughter kept circling through the grove like something that didn’t belong to a human throat.

Eventually, Hans landed nearby in a wash of fire.

He dropped out of the dark like a piece of the night had caught flame and decided to become human on the way down. Heat rolled off him in waves, the ground beneath his boots charring as he touched down between the trees. Flames clung to his body for a moment longer, wrapping his frame in a writhing mantle of orange and red that made his ruby rings gleam like drops of fresh blood.

Then he dispersed them.

The fire peeled away from him in lazy curls, shrinking back into sparks that drifted upward and vanished into the dark canopy above. What remained was just Hans, standing there with that same grin stretched across his face, wand hanging loose in one hand as if none of this was urgent at all.

“Let’s enjoy this slowly,” he said.

His voice was almost warm.

“No need to rush, right?”

Ludger didn’t answer. He watched him instead. Part of him immediately wondered whether Hans was trying to buy time. For reinforcements, maybe. For a better position. For some ritual, trap, or delayed move already set in motion. That would have been the sensible assumption. But the problem was Hans.

Could this lunatic even understand the tactical value of stalling properly? He was dangerous enough, yes. Skilled enough, definitely. But he also radiated the sort of madness that blurred the line between deliberate cruelty and sheer impulse. It was entirely possible he really did just want to savor the fight because his mind was rotten enough to treat murder like a drawn-out meal.

Hans tilted his head slightly, studying Ludger with bright, feverish eyes.

“I didn’t kill your aunt and grandparents because I wanted to,” he said. “It was just a job.”

The words came out almost casually. As if that made them better. As if being paid to burn a family alive was somehow cleaner than doing it for pleasure. Hans’s grin twitched wider.

“So fight for yourself instead of fighting for others. Don’t make this too boring.”

He lifted the red wand a little, not yet casting, just pointing it lazily in Ludger’s direction like a teacher giving advice.

“That will make things more fun.”

Ludger stayed silent. His eyes never left Hans.

He studied the man carefully, searching for rhythm, posture, tells, hidden tension, anything. Was he provoking him on purpose? Trying to shake his judgment? Was he fishing for anger, trying to drag Ludger into a sloppier fight? Or was this simply the way his broken mind worked, confessing, taunting, and baiting because he genuinely found it entertaining?

Ludger couldn’t tell. And that annoyed him more than the flames did.

Because Hans wasn’t easy to read in the normal sense. There was intelligence there, buried under the madness. Enough cunning to survive for decades. Enough control to weaponize fire with terrifying precision. But the insanity distorted everything, making every line of reasoning feel just slightly unreliable.

Which meant Ludger had to treat him as both. A skilled enemy. And an unstable one. The worst combination.

So he kept watching, saying nothing, letting Hans enjoy the silence for now while trying to decide what kind of game the pyromancer was playing.

He couldn’t tell. Not yet. Ludger’s gaze stayed fixed on him.