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

Ludger didn’t chase. He stepped back instead, breathing controlled despite the state of his body, aura still boiling under the green. The street around them was unrecognizable now. Cracked. Collapsed. Torn apart from repeated impacts.

Buildings leaned at unnatural angles.

Dust filled the air.

And in the middle of it… A human stood against a labyrinth guardian. And was winning the exchange. Not by overpowering it. Not by overwhelming it. But by breaking it. One strike at a time.

Drarc finally flinched. Not from one strike. Not from some dramatic blow that split armor open in a single moment. From accumulation. From the ugly truth settling into his body one hit at a time.

The scales should have reduced the damage far more than this. That was what they existed for. Even more so because Ludger had not been mindlessly hammering the same point over and over. Most of the hits had landed on different sections, jaw, shoulder joint, ribs, neck, forelimb, flank. By every sensible measure, the distributed impact should have kept the internal strain low enough for a creature like Drarc to brush it off.

And yet the pain kept building. Something in Ludger’s punches was getting through. Not just the force. Something deeper.

The hits did not merely dent scale and shake flesh. They punched through the outer defense and made the inside hurt in ways Drarc hated. Organs shuddered. Bone rang. Muscles spasmed beneath armor that should have protected them better. It felt less like being struck and more like being invaded by impact.

The guardian bared his fangs and glared at Ludger, trying to reclaim control of the moment through sheer menace. Usually that worked. Usually prey saw the size, the scales, the eyes, the blood, and remembered what they were supposed to do.

Fear. Hesitate. Break.

Instead… Drarc felt cold sweat gather beneath the armored ridges of his neck. Because Ludger’s eyes were worse.

They were bloodshot now, deepened by Rage Flow and the strain tearing through his body, the whites webbed red and the pupils locked with a focus so violent it barely looked human anymore. There was no fear in them. No uncertainty. No instinct to survive at all costs.

Only the gaze of something that had already decided to utterly destroy whatever stood in front of it. For the first time since revealing his true form, Drarc felt a real stab of danger. Then Ludger moved. Not toward him. To the side.

A sudden explosive jump, body cutting away at an angle so fast it looked instinctive rather than planned.

Drarc followed immediately.

His head turned, claws shifting, body already adjusting to pursue… And something pierced the wounded part of his face.

It happened so fast he barely registered the motion. A thin object punched straight into the already dented, damaged section near his jawline and buried itself with a wet metallic crack.

Pain hit a heartbeat later. A sharp, stinging pain. Different from Ludger’s punches. Smaller. Needle-like. But vicious.

Drarc roared and jerked his head aside, muscles spasming as the thing lodged deeper for an instant before snapping free partway. The wounded section of scale and flesh burned as if venom or some foul enchantment had been forced directly into exposed weakness.

Ludger turned his head over his shoulder.

Far away… A full kilometer or so through the broken capital… he saw a figure landing on a rooftop, then rebounding again into darkness.

Lanky. Fast. A blowgun in hand. For a split second, the shape was clear in the moonlight before it vanished between buildings.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He had sensed the attack. That was why he moved. But he had not expected the method. A blowgun? From that far? That was absurd. Not impossible, clearly. But absurd.

The shot had crossed an insane distance with enough precision to strike a wounded point on a moving labyrinth guardian in the middle of battle. Whoever that was, they were not some random assassin dragged into the capital for backup.

They were dangerous. Very dangerous. And worse… they had just helped him by mistake.

Drarc jerked his head violently, a furious snarl ripping out of his throat as the sting in his face spread.

“That bastard…”

His voice came out warped by pain and rage.

“I’ll kill him!”

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Ludger could already see the damage changing. The flesh around the punctured section of Drarc’s face was rotting. Slowly, but visibly.

Darkness spread out from the wound in ugly veins, chewing through exposed flesh and slipping beneath the edges of the damaged scale where Ludger had already weakened the area. The guardian’s body was massive, his scales unnaturally hard, and his vitality absurdly high, but the poison in that shot was vile enough to matter anyway.

Truly nasty. It didn’t matter where it came from. It was useful. And right now, useful was enough.

Ludger disappeared. Not with flourish. Not with visible buildup.

One moment he stood watching Drarc’s reaction, and the next he was already at the guardian’s side, body twisting as he drove a kick straight into the wounded part of the beast’s face.

The impact landed with a crack that echoed across the ruined garden.

Drarc’s head whipped to the side, and the sheer force of the blow sent his gigantic body rolling violently across the castle grounds. He tore through broken pathways, smashed apart low walls, uprooted decorative trees, and churned the once elegant garden into a trail of ruined earth and shattered stone before finally crashing to a stop in a mass of dust and debris.

For one brief instant, the beast lay there, stunned enough that the world seemed to pause around him. Then he looked up. Ludger was already falling from the sky. He came down like judgment.

A dark red figure wrapped in green aura, body swollen from Rage Flow, air distorting around him from the sheer force of the descent.

Then his knee hit.

It smashed straight into Drarc’s face with brutal, concentrated force, crushing down into the wounded section and blowing apart a good chunk of it. Scales cracked. Flesh burst. The ground beneath the guardian’s head caved in from the impact, cratered by the force driving through him.

Drarc roared, the sound ragged now.

Then he cursed Ludger too, fury completely swallowing whatever composure he had left.

His claws shot upward in a savage, desperate arc, both forelimbs slashing toward Ludger’s neck with enough speed and force to take the head clean off.

Ludger caught them.

His forearm guards slammed into the claws with a violent metallic shriek, froststeel grinding against alien metal as sparks and mana burst outward from the collision. The force still drove through his arms hard enough to shake his bones and drag him backward over the broken ground, but the blades stopped just short of his throat.

For a heartbeat, the two remained locked there. Drarc below, jaws twisted in pain and fury, half his face mangled and rotting.

Ludger above, bloodshot eyes cold and inhuman, both arms braced as his froststeel guards held the claws apart with raw strength and reinforced fury.

Then Ludger pushed. Ludger let go of the clash with the claws for just a fraction of a second. Not to retreat. To kill.

His hand shot forward and buried itself against what remained of Drarc’s face, fingers digging into broken scale, mangled flesh, and blood-slick bone. The grip was brutal, more like a predator seizing prey than a fighter maintaining control. Drarc tried to jerk away, but Ludger had already planted his stance.

Then he forced the guardian’s head down. Hard. The huge beast’s neck buckled under the pressure, one forelimb scraping uselessly against the ground as Ludger drove the face toward his rising knee.

The first impact was sickening.

Bone, scale, and flesh all gave at once with a wet crack, Drarc’s head snapping upward for half a heartbeat before Ludger yanked it down again with the same merciless grip.

The second knee came from the other side. Then the third. Then the fourth.

Ludger alternated one knee, then the other, smashing Drarc’s face over and over with savage rhythm. Each strike landed with enough force to jolt the giant body beneath him, driving blood outward in thick sprays while broken scale fragments flew across the ruined garden. The sound alone was grotesque, dull, crunching, wet, like someone hammering apart a suit of armor filled with meat.

Drarc tried to fight back.

He really did.

A claw came up once, slower than before, trying to rake through Ludger’s side. Ludger twisted slightly and brought another knee up into the guardian’s face before the strike could carry any real force behind it. The claw lost its line and crashed uselessly into the ground beside them.

A forelimb shoved forward next, trying to create distance. Another knee broke the motion. The guardian’s tail jerked, trying to sweep Ludger off his balance.

Another knee.

Every time Drarc tried to recover, tried to gather power, tried to bring his size and strength back into the exchange, Ludger smashed his face again and ruined the movement before it could form.

That was the worst part. The beast’s attacks weren’t being cleanly blocked anymore. They were being interrupted at their source.

The moment Drarc’s head took another hit, everything else unraveled with it. The claws lost weight. The timing broke. The speed dulled. The motion itself came apart. His body still had monstrous power in it, but it could no longer organize that power into anything that mattered.

Ludger understood that instinctively and exploited it without mercy.

He kept one hand locked in Drarc’s ruined face and used it to control the angle, dragging the head into every knee with cruel precision. He didn’t hit randomly. He drove into what was already broken, folding the damage inward, turning cracks into fractures and fractures into collapse.

Blood covered both of them now.

It ran down Ludger’s forearm. It sprayed over his legs. It pooled beneath the guardian’s head and soaked into the shattered garden paths in dark, widening sheets.

Drarc’s roars had changed too. At first they had been furious. Then pained. Now they were ragged, broken things, more instinct than voice. Ludger didn’t slow down.

He smashed another knee into the face.

And another. The skull started to cave in. Not all at once.

Just enough at first that the shape became wrong, one side collapsing inward beneath ruined scale, the bone no longer holding its proper line. Then Ludger struck again, and the damage deepened, the structure finally giving way under accumulated punishment and blood loss.

Drarc had lost too much blood.

Too much flesh. The beast’s body shuddered violently, one last attempt at resistance running through it, but there was nothing left in the movement. No force. No real danger. Just the dying twitch of something too big to accept it was already finished.

Then the transformation began to fail.