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

Chapter 689

Luna woke like she’d been dragged out of a nightmare by the throat.

She shot upright on pure instinct, then the world lurched, smeared, and split into two. A brutal throb detonated behind her eyes, right where something on the ship had kissed her skull. It wasn’t a headache. It was a hammer. Slow, deliberate, and personal.

“Ugh—” Her groan came out thin and sharp. She clapped a hand to her head and immediately regretted it. The skin was tender. Swollen. There was crusted warmth in her hairline.

Breathe. Don’t puke. Don’t pass out. She forced herself to blink until the blur settled into shapes.

A tent.

Not canvas. Not sailcloth. Leaves, wide, layered leaves, woven with bamboo slats and bound by twisted fiber. The smell hit her next: salt, damp green, and that sweet, faintly rancid note of crushed fruit. Her “bed” was a rough mat of dried palm fronds, coconut leaves, maybe, scratchy against her back and oddly springy.

Luna lay still for a beat, listening. Wind. Surf. Birds she didn’t recognize. No creaking hull. No shouted orders. No thunder. Her mind tried to stitch reality together and kept missing a piece.

Last thing she remembered… the ship righting itself. Everyone screaming. The waterspouts, those towering funnels dragging the ocean up like it wanted to drink the sky. Then…

Darkness.

She pushed herself up slower this time, teeth clenched. The hammer in her skull answered with a second strike.

“Okay…” she muttered, voice hoarse. “Not dreaming.”

Not sure was worse than dead.

She scanned the tent, eyes narrowing. No lantern. No crate. No gear. No familiar silhouettes. Whoever built this had done it fast and with local materials, bamboo ribs, leaf panels, tight knots. Efficient. Primitive. Functional.

And she was alone. Her hand slid automatically toward the inside of her maid uniform, where her knives always lived.

Nothing.

Her fingers swept again, higher, lower, like the blades might have shifted in sleep.

Still nothing. Cold panic crawled up her spine. Her knives were more than metal. They were routine. Control. The line between “Luna” and “victim.”

She swallowed, forcing the rising bile back down.

I still have magic.

The thought didn’t comfort her as much as it should have. Luna could use magic. But she wasn’t Kaela. She wasn’t Maurien. Her magic was a tool she used when she had to, her knives were who she was.

Footsteps crunched outside. Sand. Not wood. Not deck.

Her entire body tightened. She slid off the leaf-mat without making it creak, planting her feet in the sand with careful pressure. The tent was small enough that any lunge would put her into the entrance. Any fight would be close.

Close was fine.

The footsteps paused right outside.

A shadow blocked the woven doorway, broad shoulders, tall frame, wrong for any coastal raider she’d ever heard. The silhouette didn’t loom. It waited, as if it knew the space belonged to her for the moment.

Then the figure eased into view. Ludger.

He didn’t stride in. He knelt at the entrance instead, posture low and nonthreatening in a way that felt… practiced. Like he’d learned, somewhere along the way, that waking people who’d nearly died wasn’t a good time to play the scary vice guildmaster.

His eyes were on her face, sharp and assessing.

“Do you recognize me?” he asked.

Luna frowned, suspicion flaring through the pain. “What are you talking about?”

For a heartbeat, Ludger didn’t answer, just stared like he was counting her breaths.

Then he exhaled, tension bleeding out of his shoulders so quickly it was almost ugly.

“Good.” His voice softened, just a fraction. “You hit your head hard when you went over. I… wasn’t sure what you’d wake up as.”

Luna’s hand hovered near her waist, still searching for steel that wasn’t there. Her gaze flicked past him, trying to catch more of the outside. Bright. Too bright. Ocean glare.

“Where are we?” she demanded.

Ludger’s mouth twitched, half relief, half annoyance at the universe. “Somewhere we’re not supposed to be,” he said, and then, more plainly, “But you’re awake. You’re you. That’s the important part right now.”

Luna’s headache pulsed like it disagreed.

Ludger sat back on his heels outside the tent, the ocean glare cutting hard lines across his face. He held the coconut shell out again, patient in the way only someone with too many near-death experiences could be.

Luna finally took it, sipping carefully so she wouldn’t trigger another spike of nausea.

“Where are my knives?” she asked immediately, voice flat but tight.

Ludger didn’t flinch. “Gone.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You lost them when you hit the water,” he continued, as if he was discussing a torn sleeve. “Salt, panic, waves. Anything strapped or tucked becomes a suggestion, not a guarantee.”

Luna’s fingers tightened around the coconut shell.

Ludger lifted his left hand, palm half-open. The fingers were swollen, puffy at the joints, skin scraped raw in places. Even in the bright morning, the hand looked wrong. Not broken, but punished.

“And I lost my scarf,” he added. His eyes flicked toward the shoreline, then back. “If it ended up on the other side… hopefully they’ll find it.”

Luna stared at him. “Other side...”

He nodded once. “If the scarf floats back where the ship is, it tells them we didn’t just vanish into nothing. We’re alive.”

“And if they see it and assume you got eaten,” Luna said, bitterness creeping in.

Ludger’s mouth twitched. “That too is possible....”

She followed his gaze again, watching him for the first time instead of just the tent and the beach. He moved carefully, like his body was working on borrowed credit. The calmness was there—but it wasn’t peace. It was control. The kind you used when panic would kill you faster than any monster.

Luna tipped her chin at his hand. “What happened to your fingers?”

“The fight,” he said simply.

“The fight,” she echoed, as if she’d misheard.

Ludger exhaled through his nose, the sound almost a sigh. “The monster hit the ship. Everyone was looking at the waterspouts. We got surprised.”

A flash of memory stabbed through Luna, metal rail, the sound of impact, her weight going weightless…

He kept going, voice steady, clinical. “You fell. Hit your head on the rails. Then you went through the breach and into the ocean.”

Luna’s throat tightened.

“Viola jumped in right away,” Ludger said. For a split second, something sharp moved behind his eyes. Not anger, something more tired than that. “She didn’t think. She just jumped.”

Luna’s grip whitened on the shell.

“I jumped after,” Ludger continued, like that was normal, like that was the obvious solution. “Caught her mid-fall. Threw her back onto the ship.”

“You…” Luna started, but the words jammed.

Ludger didn’t let it become a conversation. “Then I fell in. I grabbed your arm. That’s the last thing I remember clearly.”

He rotated his swollen hand, flexing the fingers with a faint wince he didn’t bother to hide. “After that… pieces. Salt. Black water. Getting dragged. Waking up coughing sand. I failed to use magic to save you both.”

Luna stared at him, trying to reconcile that with the tent, with the quiet, with the fact he was sitting there like they were on a mildly unpleasant camping trip.

“Why didn’t you use your magic?” she asked. “Why didn’t you make a shelter out of earth? Heal yourself?” Her gaze dropped to his hand again, then snapped back up. 

He let out a real sigh this time, long and heavy, like it had been waiting behind his ribs.

“I should have,” he said. “But I can’t. Not right now.”

Luna blinked. “What?”

“My circuits are fried,” Ludger said, tone still maddeningly calm. “From the attack I launched on the beast. That wind beam. The storm mana density. Pushing Overdrive. Rage Flow. All of it stacked until something inside me decided it didn’t want to cooperate anymore.”

He looked down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else. “I’m recovering. Slowly. But mana won’t move clean. When I try, it feels like pouring fire into cracked glass.”

Luna’s mouth went dry.

“That’s why I haven’t healed your head yet,” he added. “If I push mana through a damaged channel, I might make it worse. Or knock myself out. Either way, we lose our only advantage.”

“And the shelter…?” she asked, already knowing the answer, but needing to hear it anyway.

“No earth shaping,” Ludger said. “No proper wards. No quick repairs. I made this with hands and whatever I could break, cut, and weave.”

Luna’s gaze drifted to the tent walls again, leaf, bamboo, fiber knots. It had looked strange before. Now it looked terrifying for a different reason.

Because it meant Ludger had done all of this without the one thing that made him Ludger. He said it like it was weather. Like it was a bruise. Like it didn’t matter. Luna felt a chill crawl up her spine that had nothing to do with the sea breeze.

“You’re… calm,” she said, voice low. “Too calm.”

Ludger met her eyes. His expression didn’t change, but something in it hardened, an anchor dropping.

“Panic doesn’t fix fried circuits,” he said. “It just wastes oxygen.”

Luna stared at him, genuinely shocked. Not because he was being brave. Because he was saying, matter-of-factly, that his strongest weapon, his magic, was gone.

And he was still treating survival like a checklist.

Luna sat there with the coconut shell cradled in both hands, staring at the weave of leaves like the pattern might rearrange itself into an answer.

It didn’t. Her throat tightened anyway.

“…I’m sorry,” she said, the words scraping out of her like she had to drag them past broken pride. “This, this is on me. I screwed up. I fell. I hit my head. I…” She swallowed hard. “I got you in this mess.”

For a second, Ludger just looked at her. Then he shrugged. A small motion. Almost lazy. Like she’d apologized for spilling tea.

“It was my idea to face the giant sea monster,” he said. “Not yours.”

Luna’s brows drew together. “But if I…”

“No,” Ludger cut in, firm but not unkind. “No one could’ve planned for something like that. Not that storm, not that size. We weren’t baiting a shark. We were standing in front of a moving disaster and hoping it would respect math.”

He leaned back slightly, eyes narrowing as if he was looking past her, past the tent, into something only he could see.

“If anything,” he added, voice dry, “I deserved to be here.”

Luna blinked. “That’s not…”

“It is,” he said, and for the first time since she’d woken, the calm on him didn’t feel like control. It felt like weight. “I chose the job. I pushed. I kept digging into the cargo. I poked the world in a place it didn’t want to be poked.”

He paused, then his tone shifted, subtle, but unmistakable. Less confession. More Ludger.

“But,” he continued, “this also brings an opportunity.”

Luna frowned. “Opportunity...”

“And several questions,” he finished.

She stared at him. “What are you talking about?”

Ludger brought his swollen hand up, rubbing his chin with the side of his thumb like the motion helped him think. He held it there for a long moment, eyes unfocused, then looked back at her.

“By ‘the other side,’” he said, “I mean we’re on the other side of an underwater labyrinth.”

Silence. Luna blinked once. Then again.

“…What?”

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