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

Chapter 676

Leather straps came free with practiced motions. Metal buckles clicked. He pulled off his forearm guards first, reinforced bracers etched with faint lines of runes and set them down on the deck with a soft clack. Then the heavier pieces: bracers and layered guards that would only drag him down if he went into the water wearing them.

Viola’s boots thudded closer.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, eyes flicking to the gear.

Ludger didn’t look up. “Checking things.”

Viola blinked. “Checking—” Her gaze snapped to the ocean. “You mean down there?”

Ludger straightened, rolling his shoulders once like he was shedding weight from his bones.

“Yes.”

Viola took a step in front of him, swords still in hand. “Alone?”

Ludger’s expression stayed flat.

“Yes.”

The wind snapped at their clothes. The sea hissed against the hull like it was listening.

Viola’s brow furrowed. “That’s stupid.”

“It’s efficient,” Ludger corrected. “If I take others, I spend mana shielding them, watching them, dragging them back up when they panic. If I go alone, I save mana and time.” 

Viola scowled, but she didn’t have a clean argument for that.

“I won’t take long,” Ludger added. “Stay on the ship.”

Viola’s eyes tightened, like she wanted to protest anyway. Ludger ignored it and turned toward the others.

Maurien stood near the mast, already alert, eyes open now and sharp. Kaela’s wind stirred around her ankles like a restless animal. Renvar had moved to a position with clear lines of sight over both sides, hands near coils and anchors. Ludger’s gaze met each of theirs in turn.

“Stay on guard,” he said.

No speeches. No dramatics. Just an order. Maurien nodded once.

Kaela gave a short, tight smile. “Don’t drown.”

Renvar lifted his chin. “If something comes up, we cut it.”

“Good,” Ludger said. “Unless it is me coming up.”

He stepped to the rail, looked down at the water, and let his Mana Sense dip again, one last check for anything close enough to swallow him mid-jump. Still nothing. Which meant the danger wasn’t waiting on the surface.

It was waiting below. Ludger inhaled once, slow and controlled. Then he jumped. The ocean swallowed him whole, cold and heavy, the world instantly turning into muffled sound and dim light.

Above, the ship continued to circle like a cautious predator.

Below, Ludger sank fast, alone, saving mana and time …and trusting that if the sea had teeth here, he’d feel them before they closed.

The moment the ocean closed over his head, the world tried to take ownership of him.

Cold pressed into every gap in his clothing. Pressure wrapped around his chest like an impatient hand. Sound died into a distant, warped thrum, creaking hull above, the faint vibration of the ship’s runes, the steady heartbeat in his own ears.

Ludger didn’t fight the water with brute force. He cheated. Mana flared around his skin, not as heat, not as armor, but as air. Wind magic, thin layers, tight control, wrapped around his body like a second surface. It wasn’t a bubble that floated him; it was a moving sheath, sliding the ocean away from his limbs and reducing drag the way oil reduced friction.

The difference was immediate.

His movements stopped being slow and punishing. Each kick didn’t feel like pushing through mud anymore. He could glide, cut, redirect. The currents still existed, but they stopped owning him.

Then he shaped it closer around his face, compressed air held steady with pressure equalized, a controlled pocket that fed him breath without expanding into something that would betray him like a bright silver bubble trail.

Inhale. Air. Clean enough. Exhale. The wind sheath caught the outgoing breath and bled it away in tiny, controlled streams instead of letting it burst free in loud, obvious beads.

It wasn’t comfortable, but it worked. And it did something else too. The wind layer cleared the water right in front of his eyes, reducing distortion, pushing away the suspended grit and tiny drifting particles that turned underwater vision into a foggy guess. It sharpened the edges. Improved contrast. Let him see instead of squint.

Ludger dropped deeper.

Light faded fast, turning the world from blue into dark blue, then into a cold, dim gray. The seabed rose to meet him like a shadow becoming real.

When his boots finally touched bottom, the sand puffed upward in a slow, lazy cloud. It tried to cling to him, but the wind sheath peeled it away.

Ludger didn’t linger. He lowered one hand to the ground and let Seismic Sense spread.

Not the normal version he used on land.

Underwater, it felt stranger, softer, muted by layers of water and shifting sediment, but the seabed still carried truth. Vibrations traveled through packed sand and rock. Shapes interrupted patterns. Hollow spaces answered differently than solid ones.

His senses expanded outward in a widening dome. The ocean floor unfolded in his mind. Ridges. Dips. Rock outcroppings. A scattering of debris. Then… A long, unnatural shape. Broken geometry. A thing that didn’t belong in nature.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed.

Found you.

He pushed off the seabed and moved, body streamlined, wind sheath tightening around him like a blade being sharpened mid-swing. His kicks were controlled bursts, minimal movement for maximal distance. No wasted thrashing. No panic trails.

It didn’t take long. The remains of the first ship emerged from the gloom. He slowed as he approached, not because he was afraid of the wreck itself, but because wrecks were loud in a different way. They snagged. They hid sharp edges. They could trap a careless man with one torn rope or one collapsed beam.

Ludger drifted above the wreck and angled his head upward. The surface was far above, just a faint, rippling brightness.

He needed the others to know exactly where he was. So he gathered water mana into his palm and released it in a single upward shove, not a damaging blast, but a forceful column, a compressed push of water that surged toward the surface like a sudden underwater geyser.

The ocean above him burped and churned, sending a visible disturbance up to the ship. A signal.

Here.

Then he turned back to the wreck and let himself descend. As he got closer, the scale of the damage became clear. The ship hadn’t just sunk. It had been killed. The keel, its spine, had been split. Not cracked. Not broken by time or storms.

Split cleanly enough that it looked like the hull had been grabbed, bent, and snapped with deliberate force.

The ship lay in two main halves, separated by a jagged gap where the keel should’ve held everything together. One half had rolled slightly, exposing ribs like bones. The other half sagged into the sand, its belly torn open, boards peeled outward as if something had struck from below and kept going.

Ropes drifted in slow motion like seaweed. Broken crates lay scattered, their contents either spilled or missing. Metal fittings gleamed dully where sand hadn’t already claimed them.

Ludger hovered there, motionless for a heartbeat. The wind sheath kept his breathing steady, kept his vision clear, kept his body from sinking into the wreck like an anchor.

But it couldn’t keep a chill from running through him. Not the cold of the water. The cold of comprehension.

Something did this.

Not a storm. Not rocks. Not rot. A beast. A living thing with enough mass and power to strike a ship’s spine and break it like a twig.

Ludger felt a shiver crawl up his back despite the controlled air and the disciplined breath. He wasn’t afraid of dying. He was afraid of miscalculating. Because this wasn’t a land fight where the ground belonged to him.

This was a territory where a creature could tear apart ships, ships, with a single hit. And down here, he was nothing but meat wrapped in wind and willpower. Ludger’s eyes narrowed until the gloom seemed to sharpen under the weight of his focus.

He drifted closer to the split keel, careful, silent, and suddenly very aware that the ocean was vast… and he was trespassing in something else’s home.

Ludger forced the shiver down. Fear was a signal, not a command.

He drifted closer to the wreck, boots barely grazing sand, wind sheath tightening around his limbs to keep every movement precise. The broken hull loomed like a dead animal, ribs exposed, ropes swaying in slow motion as if the ocean was still trying to pull the body apart.

He started with the obvious.

He traced the split along the keel, eyes scanning for scrape marks, teeth, residue, anything that hinted at how the monster struck. He let Mana Sense skim the wood and metal fittings, feeling for lingering signatures. Most of it was dead, soaked, hollowed by time and salt.

But not all wrecks went quiet the same way.

Ludger moved methodically, shifting debris aside with bursts of wind, short, controlled pulses that shoved planks and tangled rope without stirring up a blinding cloud of silt. The wind didn’t roar underwater. It didn’t need to. It was pressure and direction, a firm hand moving clutter out of his way.

A shattered crate rolled, releasing a spill of sodden cloth that floated like jellyfish skin. A broken beam shifted, revealing a pocket of collapsed cargo beneath.

Nothing. Nothing. Then his senses snagged. Not mana, shape. Something wrong in the texture of the debris field. Something that didn’t match rotten wood and rusted iron. Something smoother. Denser. Too uniform.

Half-buried.

Ludger hovered over it, eyes narrowing, then blasted the sand away with a tight spiral of wind. The sediment peeled back in a lazy plume, and he followed with a second burst to clear the rest.

The object emerged like a fossil being uncovered.

Metal. Not ship metal. Not nails or fittings. Thicker. Layered. Reinforced in a way that screamed constructed for violence. Ludger’s gaze sharpened until it hurt.

He pushed aside one last piece of shattered plank, and the light caught a familiar curve, an edge he’d seen before in torchlight and labyrinth darkness, framed by runic grooves meant to channel force.

His eyes squinted. His stomach sank. It was the metallic plating of the runic golems labyrinth guardian.

The whole body dismounted and dragged here like salvage. Half-buried on the ocean floor as if the sea itself had tried to hide the evidence. For a second, Ludger didn’t move. The cold ocean couldn’t touch his skin through the wind sheath, but his body still felt like it was boiling.

Heat rose behind his ribs, rage without screaming, the kind that tightened the throat and made the hands want to crush something into powder.

So that’s what the Empire asked Rathen to transport.

Not generic cargo. Not supplies. Guardian parts. Pieces from the far side of the runic golems labyrinth. For whatever reason the capital didn’t want spoken out loud. Ludger’s breath hitched once in his air pocket. He forced it smooth again. Inhale. Exhale. Control.

He stared at the metal for a long moment, letting the implication settle like lead. The beast didn’t just sink ships.

It targeted these.

Or it was drawn to the mana density and the runic resonance the way a shark was drawn to blood. Either way, it wasn’t random. It was a pattern.

Ludger swallowed the anger and turned it into action. He raised a hand.

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