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

“I’ll fight like that,” he said, “if you tell me who hired you.”

Hans let out a soft, delighted laugh, as if he had just been offered a better game rather than a demand.

“You really do want everything, don’t you, brat?”

He rolled one shoulder and twirled the red wand between his fingers.

“I didn’t meet the client.”

Ludger’s eyes narrowed slightly. Hans shrugged.

“It was the guild master who handled that part. He talked to them, not me. I was given the job, the target, and enough details to make sure the work was done properly.” His grin sharpened. “That’s how good arrangements work.”

Ludger said nothing, so Hans kept going, because of course he did.

“Still,” he said, “I’ve done similar things over the years. More than once. More than twice. Families, researchers, annoying little talents who were about to matter too much.” He spread his hands slightly. “And no one ever got even close to finding me.”

The smile on his face turned uglier.

“That means someone with real power and influence has been manipulating the investigations.” He tapped the side of his head lightly with the wand. “Burying trails. Redirecting questions. Making the wrong people look elsewhere.”

Hans’s eyes gleamed in the dark.

“Is that enough for you?”

Ludger answered immediately.

“No.”

The pyromancer laughed again. But Ludger continued, voice flat and cold.

“It’ll do.”

Before Hans could answer, Ludger moved.

Mana surged into his bracers and forearm guards as he invoked Freezing Enchantment. Frost spread over the metal in sharp pale lines, racing across the engraved surfaces until both arms were coated in a thin sheath of killing cold. The air around his fists crackled as heat met frost and lost.

Then Ludger charged. He drove forward in a straight burst, boots ripping across the scorched ground of the grove, body low and fast, frozen arms raised to crash into the madman before another storm of fire could build around him.

The madman grinned from ear to ear the moment Ludger charged.

Not a normal grin. Not even a cruel one in the usual sense. It stretched too wide, too eager, the expression of a man who had finally found the exact kind of violence he wanted. His eyes shone with sick excitement as he lifted both arms, and for an instant Ludger thought he was preparing another spell.

Then a pair of whips slid free into his hands.

They came from behind his back and sleeves in a smooth, practiced motion, thin dark lengths of braided material that looked almost oily in the night. The handles locked neatly into Hans’s grip as if they had been waiting there the whole time. A heartbeat later, flames rushed along both whips from base to tip, racing over them in twisting streams of orange and red.

But the weapons did not blacken. Did not warp. Did not melt. They only burned brighter.

Magic weapons.

That much was obvious at once.

The fire didn’t consume them. It fed through them, clinging to the braided lengths like a second skin, turning each whip into a living ribbon of flame. The heat pouring off them was intense enough to distort the air, and every tiny motion of Hans’s wrists sent firelight flickering across the trees in mad, dancing lines.

Ludger ignored it. He didn’t slow. Didn’t hesitate. Didn’t pull back to reevaluate.

He drove straight in anyway, frozen bracers forward, body angled to crash through the pyromancer’s space before those weapons could fully establish rhythm. Against most fighters, closing distance that fast was enough to force them into panic or retreat.

Hans did neither. His grin widened. Then one whip snapped.

The strike came so fast it barely looked real, the flaming length cracking through the air with a sound like the world splitting open. Ludger brought his forearm guard up on instinct, turning his body into the block just in time.

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The whip hit. And exploded.

Fire and force erupted outward at the moment of impact, not just a lash but a detonation compressed into a single strike. The blast slammed into Ludger’s guard with brutal violence. Frost shattered across the surface in a spray of white shards. Heat and shock drove through his arm hard enough to rattle bone and shoulder alike.

Even though he blocked it, the impact still threw him away.

Ludger was blasted backward across the grove, boots tearing trenches into the dirt as he fought to keep his footing. He managed two stumbling steps before the force won and sent him skidding farther, frozen vapor and embers trailing in his wake.

He came to a halt several meters back, forearm still raised, the guard blackened in one place where the explosion had landed. Hans stood where he was, both burning whips rolling lazily through the air around him, grin untouched.

As if he had just proven a point. And the point was simple. Getting close would not be easy.

Hans advanced with that same maniacal grin stretched across his face, both whips already in motion.

He didn’t just swing them. He let them orbit him.

The burning lengths carved circles through the night in overlapping arcs, each motion feeding into the next with the fluid confidence of someone who had practiced killing this way for years. Fire traced glowing rings around his body as the whips rolled through the air, sometimes high, sometimes low, sometimes crossing in front of him in sudden snapping bursts that made the grove flash orange and red for an instant at a time. The sound they made was wrong, part whip-crack, part furnace roar, part explosive hiss, as if every swing was a blade and a detonation woven together.

And through it all, Hans kept walking forward. Slowly. Casually. Like he had already decided how this would end and was simply taking his time to enjoy the middle.

Ludger squinted, his focus narrowing.

The mana around Hans’s body rolled in violent layers, not clean and stable like a normal reinforcement spell. It surged over his limbs and torso in heated currents, pulsing through him in heavy bursts that fed his movement, strength, and speed all at once. It was disturbingly similar to Flame Overdrive.

That annoyed Ludger more than the grin did. Hans was supposed to be a mage. A fire specialist. A ranged threat. A man who hid behind destruction and area attacks.

Instead, the lunatic had the resilience and the skill to use his own body and weapons like a close-combat monster. He wasn’t flailing around with magic-enhanced toys. He knew how to step, how to angle his shoulders, how to guide the whips with tiny wrist motions while keeping his center ready to pivot or explode into motion.

That made him far worse. Ludger moved first.

Wind Step burst through his legs, a sharp surge of mana-assisted speed that cut his weight for an instant and sent him skimming sideways through the grove. The world blurred at the edges as he changed angle, trying to circle, break rhythm, and force Hans to overswing.

Hans only laughed. The whips followed.

They snapped after Ludger in wide, predatory arcs, stretching farther than they should have felt fair, their burning lengths curving through the dark with hungry precision. Hans didn’t need to fully turn his body to chase him. The weapons did it for him, lashing out from both sides at once and turning the space around Ludger into a cage of fire and blast pressure.

Ludger twisted hard. One whip screamed past his ribs.

He bent away from the next, shoulders turning, spine folding just enough to let the flaming length miss by inches.

But “miss” wasn’t safe.

The tips of the whips exploded in the air the moment they passed him.

Each near miss burst outward in a compact blast of heat and force, close enough to rattle his ears and sting his skin. Ludger flinched as one detonation bloomed near his head, a wash of burning air scraping across his cheekbone and temple. The pain wasn’t deep, but it was immediate and sharp, a hot line across his face that told him just how little margin those weapons allowed.

Another explosion burst near his shoulder as he shifted again, and this time the heat licked across the side of his jaw. Hans’s grin widened. He had built his style around denial. Not just hitting. Punishing the space around the hit.

Ludger’s eyes hardened as he continued moving under Wind Step, boots tearing through dirt, body weaving and angling between arcs of burning death while each exploding tip kept trying to eat the distance he created. Hans was forcing him to respect every inch of the fight.

And that, more than the pain, told Ludger exactly how dangerous this man really was.

Ludger didn’t want to use too many of his skills this close to the capital. That had been the plan from the beginning.

Keep the fight contained. Avoid drawing too much attention. Kill the madman quickly, quietly, and without turning the outskirts of the capital into a battlefield people would start asking questions about by dawn. But at this point, that was becoming unrealistic. Mostly because the longer Ludger looked at that bastard’s grin, the more he felt like his brain was taking actual damage.

It wasn’t fear. It wasn’t even disgust in the pure sense. It was the uniquely infuriating sight of a man who should have been dead three times over still smiling like this was the best night of his life. So Ludger stopped holding back that particular part.

Wind Overdrive kicked in.

The shift was immediate.

Mana surged through his body in a violent, cutting rush, sharper and faster than his earlier movements. Air pressure twisted around him, dragging the surrounding wind inward until it wrapped his limbs and torso like a storm forced into human shape. The intensity climbed fast, too fast for subtlety, and then climbed further still, until faint sparks of lightning began to flare around him in pale, jagged flashes.

Not full bolts. Not yet.

Just sharp electrical snarls dancing in the pressure of accelerated wind mana, flickering over his shoulders, forearms, and legs whenever the force peaked.

Hans actually looked surprised for a moment. Only for a moment. Then his grin widened even further. Because Ludger disappeared.

There was no warning rush this time, no visible charge, no clean line of movement to follow. One instant he was standing several meters away with wind and lightning coiling around him. The next, the place where he had been was empty, the air collapsing inward with a sharp crack.

Hans reacted on instinct.

One flaming whip snapped across his front in a sweeping guard just as Ludger appeared inside striking distance, fist already driving toward his ribs. The whip crashed against Ludger’s frozen forearm guard, exploding in a bloom of orange fire and blue-white sparks. At the same instant, Ludger’s other hand lashed out toward Hans’s throat.