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

Chapter 654

A new economy, built on something ugly Within days, you could feel it. The city didn’t just mourn. It pivoted.

A black market appeared for “uncertified” chitin. Honest guilds competed with scavengers. People who’d never cared about craftsmanship suddenly learned the basics because turning monster parts into sellable goods meant eating next month.

Rokram was a graveyard. But it was also a workshop now. And for a lot of survivors, the difference between starving and starting over was measured in how many usable plates they could pry from a dead ant before nightfall.

Two weeks passed after Rokram. Time moved the way it always did after a disaster, too fast for grief, too slow for the aches.

Ludger and the others were back in Lionfang ten days earlier, because once the battle ended the empire didn’t really need them anymore. Not officially. Not with Orleandul’s perimeter tightened around the ant castle and the capital turning the ruins into a controlled excavation site.

So Lionsguard left while it was still politically clean to do so. And then, finally, they rested.

Not “vacation” rest. The kind of rest where your body keeps waking you up at night to remind you what it survived. The kind where bruises bloom in slow colors and cuts itch under scabs and your joints complain every time you sit down too fast. The kind where everyone pretends they’re fine because admitting you’re not feels like inviting the next fight.

Ludger didn’t talk much about the ant king. Nobody pushed. Not after they’d seen his clothes. Not after they’d smelled the blood.

Instead, they did the boring but necessary things: ate, slept, checked each other’s wounds, and quietly returned to routine until routine started to feel real again.

The swords didn’t stay quiet, though. On the first evening he was able to stand without his legs wobbling, Ludger brought them out. Four silver blades laid on a table that suddenly looked too small and too ordinary for them.

He didn’t posture about it. He just made decisions. One sword went to Arslan.

His father didn’t ask for it. Ludger didn’t explain much. He simply placed it in front of him like a tool being returned to the person most likely to survive using it. Arslan’s hand closed around the grip, and for a moment his expression softened, something like pride and worry mixing into the same breath.

Another sword went to Viola.

She took it with that Torvares composure that always looked like confidence even when she was processing ten thoughts at once. Her fingers tested balance, the edge, the weight. Her eyes flicked to Ludger like she wanted to ask if this was payment or apology or warning.

Ludger gave her nothing. Just a flat look that said: don’t make it weird. The last two went to Raukor.

Not because Ludger trusted everyone, but because Raukor was one of the few people in Lionsguard who could stare at something unnatural and treat it like a puzzle instead of a miracle.

Raukor set them down, ran callused fingers along the metal, and his expression shifted almost immediately. He didn’t need a forge. Didn’t need a lab. Didn’t need ten hours of tests.

Within a day, within the first day, he was already certain.

The material was wrong. Not “rare.” Not “exotic.” Wrong in the way a stone is wrong when you find it in a riverbed that couldn’t possibly have produced it. Wrong in the way a language is wrong when you recognize the alphabet but none of the words.

Alien.

It didn’t belong to this world. Raukor said it without drama, voice low, eyes fixed on the blade like it might start breathing if he looked away.

“This isn’t local,” he murmured. “Not empire. Not League. Not any known labyrinth steel. Not froststeel.”

He tapped the blade lightly with a tool and listened to the ring, clean, precise, too perfect. Then he looked at Ludger.

“It doesn’t belong here.”

Ludger didn’t respond right away.

He just stared at the swords, thinking about the ant king’s summoning trick… the way the blades had survived being flash-frozen while the creature turned to dust… the way Orleandul’s eyes had sharpened the moment he saw them.

A part of him felt satisfied. A bigger part felt annoyed. Because “spoils of war” were supposed to be simple.

These weren’t. These were questions made of metal. And questions had a way of following you home.

Ludger sat in the Guildmaster’s office with his boots propped on the edge of a table he technically wasn’t allowed to scuff. Technically.

The room smelled like ink, old paper, and the faint mineral tang of stonework that never quite stopped remembering it used to be dirt. Morning light cut through the window in a clean stripe, landing right across the report he’d been reading for the third time.

It was one of Torvares’ sealed packets, addressed to Arslan, written in that careful, polite language nobles used when they wanted to say I’m warning you without saying it.

Ludger read it anyway. Because Arslan was out doing Guildmaster things, and Ludger didn’t trust “later” when politics were involved. He unfolded the page, eyes scanning the neat lines.

To Guildmaster Arslan, Lionsguard, Lionfang.

From Torvares of House Torvares.

Subject: Rokram Incident — Post-Engagement Findings

Guildmaster,

I write to confirm the following, based on reports obtained through my observers, allied officers within the containment command, and those tasked with the capital’s post-battle excavation.

The ant leader (“king”) has been confirmed slain. The swarm’s loss of cohesion coincided with the collapse of its command structure. This aligns with Commander Varik’s stated objective and with the observed reduction in coordinated behavior immediately following the castle breach.

The labyrinth remains. Contrary to public assumptions and early rumor, the death of the leader did not cause the sealed structure beneath Rokram to collapse or dissolve. The “unknown labyrinth” persists in a diminished but active state.

Re-sealing efforts are underway. Capital mages and assigned specialists have entered the site under heavy guard. Temporary containment measures have been established, and efforts have begun to restore a functional seal. Early notes indicate the labyrinth continues to generate pressure and must be managed as before: routine internal hunts and maintenance.

Information control has begun. The capital’s representatives appear intent on minimizing public exposure. Several accounts from field units have been collected and “standardized.” Access to the site has been restricted to imperial personnel. Credit distribution is already being shaped.

I advise the Lionsguard to remain prudent in public statements and to avoid direct confrontation over spoils or attribution while capital forces remain present. The empire’s interest is not in learning publicly, but in ensuring this event becomes a contained footnote rather than a precedent.

Privately, I recommend we treat the persistence of the labyrinth as the true threat. If such a leader can emerge without collapsing its source, then the next emergence is a matter of when, not if.

Respectfully, Torvares

Ludger stared at the last paragraph.

Then he facepalmed, hard enough that the sound of skin on paper echoed in the quiet office.

“Unbelievable…”

He dragged his hand down his face slowly, as if he could wipe the stupidity off the world. So that was it.

They’d killed the “king,” cracked the hive, bled thousands, turned a city into a butcher’s yard… and the labyrinth was still sitting there like an unlearned lesson, still generating pressure, still waiting for the empire to get lazy again.

And the capital? Of course the capital’s first instinct wasn’t understanding. It was erasing.

Standardize accounts. Restrict access. Shape credit. Make the story small. Make the spear-man look clean. Make everyone forget the part where the empire only survived because a border guild of children and one exhausted geomancer did something the official plan didn’t include.

Ludger leaned back in the chair, eyes flat, a cold irritation settling in his chest.

“In the end,” he muttered to the empty room, “they didn’t learn a damn thing.”

His fingers tapped the report once, twice.

“They’ll use every means they have,” he said quietly, “to make people forget about Rokram.”

He exhaled through his nose, then folded the paper with deliberate care. Not because he respected it. Because if the empire wanted the incident to disappear, then Torvares’ warning was exactly the kind of thing you kept close.

Because the labyrinth hadn’t gone anywhere. It was just waiting for everyone to get comfortable again.

Arslan found Ludger in the Guildmaster’s office with the kind of posture that meant the world had annoyed him on a structural level.

Not angry-loud. Angry-quiet. Paper folded too neatly. Jaw set too still. Eyes focused on nothing like he was mentally punching someone he couldn’t reach.

Arslan paused in the doorway and watched him for a moment, trying to decide what could possibly pull his son out of that mood.

A joke wouldn’t land. Food might… but only if it was warm and didn’t require talking. A lecture would be suicide. In the end, Arslan didn’t move right away because the truth was simple:

This was the kind of mood you didn’t “dispel.” This was the kind you got used to. Because none of it was a surprise. Not to Arslan. Not to anyone who’d lived long enough inside an empire.

Rokram was a disaster, yes, but it was also an embarrassment. A containment failure. A public crack in the idea that the imperial machine was always in control. And empires didn’t survive by letting those cracks turn into conversations.

So the capital would do what it always did. Restrict access so only approved hands touched the truth. Standardize the story so every witness repeated the same clean narrative. Assign credit where it supported the chain of command. Bury anything inconvenient under bureaucracy, then under time.

Not because they were “evil,” not even primarily because they were greedy. Because stability mattered more than honesty. If the common people believed sealed labyrinths could break, cities could fall overnight, and monsters could develop leaders that spoke and planned, then the empire didn’t just face ants.

It faced panic.

Panic meant riots, stampedes, supply lines collapsing, lords raising private armies “for protection,” provinces refusing taxes, merchants fleeing routes, and opportunists turning fear into civil war.

The truth could kill more people than the monsters. That was the ugly math Arslan had learned years ago, back when he still thought the capital played fair. And despite how unnerving it was, despite how it made his skin crawl to see the same pattern repeat, part of him understood why the empire chose this path.

A controlled lie held the borders together. A public truth could tear them apart. The capital would re-seal the labyrinth, declare the incident “resolved,” and shove the whole thing into a locked drawer labeled Never Again, because Never Again was how governments prayed.

And Arslan could even admit, quietly, privately, that it was better for imperial stability. Better for families that wanted to sleep. Better for farmers that needed markets to stay open. Better for the roads, the taxes, the fragile web that kept a continent from becoming a hundred warring towns.

But he couldn’t say that to Ludger. Not to a boy who had bled in that castle. Not to his son, who had killed the “king” while the official plan pretended he didn’t exist. Not to a thirteen-year-old who still believed that if you did the hard thing, the world should at least be honest about it.

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