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

Chapter 580

The area went still in that subtle way it did when someone said something that could turn into a problem if the wrong person took it the wrong way. A few northerners glanced over, water dripping off their hair, waiting to see if their leader would laugh… or bite.

Sigrid stared at Ludger like he’d just thrown a rotten fish at her feet. That look again.

The are you mocking me? Look.

She wore it a lot, Ludger noticed. Either because she genuinely suspected everyone of disrespect… or because he had a talent for getting under people’s skin with fewer than ten words. Probably both.

“You’re making fun of me,” Sigrid said flatly.

“I’m not,” Ludger replied just as flat. No offense taken. No apology offered. “I want to learn.”

Sigrid’s nostrils flared.

“Why?” she demanded. “You already tear stone out of the ground like you’re pulling weeds. You already build glass tanks and golems and whatever other nonsense you call ‘practice.’ Why would you want my magic?”

Ludger held her gaze without blinking.

“Because I want to,” he said simply.

One of the northerners choked on a laugh. Another one elbowed him quiet. Sigrid didn’t laugh.

Her eyes narrowed, sharp and suspicious. “That is your reason?”

“Yes,” Ludger said. “Also because you didn’t need much focus, or time. You did it with your hand and your voice.”

Sigrid’s mouth tightened. She looked like she wanted to call him arrogant just on principle.

Ludger didn’t let her build momentum.

“I don’t want endless lessons,” he added, before she could turn it into a pride fight. “I’m not asking to become a shaman.”

He paused, then clarified in the bluntest way possible.

“Just teach me the most basic spell you can think of.”

Sigrid stared at him for a long moment. The suspicion didn’t leave her face, but something else slipped in beside it, interest, like a wolf catching a scent it hadn’t expected.

“You want my weakest spell,” she said slowly. “The one we teach children.”

Ludger nodded once. “Yes.”

Sigrid’s eyes flicked over him, up and down, assessing, weighing. Like she was trying to decide if this was a trap, a joke, or simply another example of Ludger being infuriatingly direct. Then she snorted.

“You really can get on people’s nerves with just a few words,” she muttered, more to herself than him.

Ludger didn’t deny it. He just waited. Sigrid finally uncrossed her arms and stepped closer, stopping at arm’s length.

“Fine,” she said. “I will teach you one.”

Her voice dropped, the edges of her accent sharpening.

“But if you laugh,” she warned, eyes hard, “I will throw you into the tank and see how long your ‘earth magic’ helps you when your lungs burn.”

Ludger’s expression didn’t change.

“I won’t laugh,” he said. “I can also break the tank in no time.”

Sigrid stared at him for another beat, then jerked her chin toward the empty space of stone beside the tank.

“Stand there,” she ordered. “And listen. This is not like your runes. This is not like your neat little magic.”

She lifted her hand, fingers crooked like claws.

“This is shaman work,” she said. “It cares about intent more than elegance.”

Ludger stepped where she indicated, calm as always, only his eyes were a little sharper now, like a hunter spotting a new kind of weapon and deciding it belonged in his hands.

Sigrid didn’t start with the spell. Of course she didn’t. She started with a speech.

It wasn’t polished like a lecture. It wasn’t structured like one of Ludger’s manuals. It was raw, direct, and oddly… passionate.

“Shaman magic,” she said, pacing a slow half-circle around him like she was sizing up a recruit, “is not for people who think the world is a puzzle you solve on a slate.”

Her hand chopped through the air. “It is for people who know the world is hungry.”

Ludger’s eyes narrowed a fraction.

He could feel it already, how different her mana moved. Earth magic was pressure and structure. Runes were rules. Overdrive was controlled violence.

This felt like instinct given form. Sigrid kept going, voice climbing.

“We do not beg mana to behave,” she said. “We do not ask. We do not sit and polish symbols until the world agrees to help us.”

She jabbed a thumb at her chest. “We tell it what we want, and we mean it so hard the world listens.”

A northerner nearby grunted approvingly, still dripping from the tank.

Ludger, meanwhile, fought the urge to raise a hand and say can we skip to the part where the magic happens?

He didn’t. Mostly because Sigrid looked like the kind of person who would interpret interruption as an invitation to violence. So he let her talk. For a while.

She spoke about winters where food ran low and sickness crept through tents. About wolves that learned to stalk the edges of the tribe like patient shadows. About the first time she’d cast a spell, not to show off, but because there was a beast between her people and the fire.

She spoke like those memories still lived under her skin. And as annoying as it was, Ludger understood the purpose. This wasn’t just magic.

It was culture. Survival. Identity. Eventually, finally, Sigrid stopped pacing and faced him squarely.

“Alright,” she said, exhaling like she’d just decided he’d earned the right to touch something sacred. “You wanted the most basic spell.”

“Yes,” Ludger said, quiet and unwavering.

Sigrid raised one hand, palm down, fingers spread.

“This one,” she said. “We teach it first. Because if you cannot do this, you are useless.”

The air felt thicker. Not heavy like earth.

Attentive.

Sigrid’s voice dropped into a low, rough cadence. Not quite a chant, more like a command you gave to something that would bite you if you hesitated.

She pressed her palm down toward the stone floor. And for a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then a faint shimmer spread across the ground in a circle, no bright light, no pretty glow. Just a subtle change, like heat haze over summer rock.

The circle tightened.

The air inside it seemed to clamp down. A small pebble at the edge of the circle vibrated, then snapped inward a finger’s width as if pulled by invisible teeth. Ludger’s eyes sharpened. Sigrid lifted her palm and the pressure vanished.

“That,” she said, “is the basic spell.”

Ludger stared at the stone. “What does it do?”

Sigrid’s mouth curled. “It makes you hesitate.”

She held up a finger.

“You call it a Grip. A hold. A hook.” She looked at him as if daring him to underestimate it. “It does not stop a strong beast. Not forever. But it steals a moment.”

She tapped her temple. “A moment is enough to live.”

Then she explained it like she was teaching a stubborn child who might survive if she beat the lesson into his skull.

She placed her hand over her own chest. “You push your intent outward. You tell the mana: hold that. And you picture it. Not words. Not symbols. Picture the feeling of grabbing someone by the ankle when they try to run.”

She demonstrated again, slower. Palm down. A low word that sounded like gravel sliding. The pressure circle returned, small, tight, controlled this time.

“Small first,” Sigrid said. “If you try to hold big things, you fail and you burn your inside.”

Ludger made a small sound of acknowledgment.

Sigrid watched him, almost satisfied. “Now,” she said, stepping back and gesturing at the stone in front of him, “do it.”

Ludger looked down at the floor. He could already feel how it wanted to work. Not through neat channels. Not through carved logic. Through will.

He exhaled once, slow, then lowered his hand, palm down, and tried to make the world listen.

Ludger stared at the stone where Sigrid had shown the shimmer. He didn’t copy her. Not exactly. He let the sound sit in his memory like a tool, then ignored the shape of the tool and focused on what it was meant to do.

Hold that.

Not with runes. Not with earth. Not with cleverness.

With intent.

He lowered his palm, fingers spread, and for a moment his mind did what it always did, tried to turn the problem into structure. Tried to build a framework, a circuit, a rule.

It resisted.

Shaman work didn’t care about frameworks. It cared about meaning.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He pictured a hand clamping around an ankle. The ugly, desperate grip of someone refusing to let a threat reach what was behind them. He didn’t romanticize it. He didn’t soften it.

He made it real. Then he pushed. The air responded with a faint, predatory tightening. The stone under his palm didn’t glow. It didn’t flare.

It shimmered, subtle as breath on glass, and a small circle of pressure formed, clean and tight. A loose pebble near the edge jerked inward as if it had been yanked by invisible fingers.

For a heartbeat, the space inside the circle felt heavier, like the world itself had decided moving was a little more expensive.

A cold pulse ran through Ludger’s chest.

[Class Unlocked: Shaman +04 Int, +04 Wis per level.]

[Skill Unlocked: Shaman’s Grip Lv 01]

The System’s confirmation hit like a stamp, crisp and final. Sigrid froze.

Her eyes widened a fraction, then narrowed, then widened again like her face couldn’t decide whether to be offended or impressed.

Ludger lifted his hand. The pressure vanished.

He sat in the moment for half a breath, just long enough to confirm it hadn’t been luck. Then he nodded once, as if he’d just checked off an item on a list.

“Thank you,” he told Sigrid.

Simple. Direct. No extra words.

And then, like nothing had happened, he turned back to the platform of golem parts.

He picked up a rag, wiped a faint smear of dust from his fingertips, and resumed shaping the next piece with earth magic. Stone answered him with familiar obedience.

He started pulling up a second set of joint rings, already thinking channels and pressure locks and how a shaman’s grip could buy an extra heartbeat underwater.

Behind him, Sigrid just stared. Completely baffled. Her mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

“You—” she began.

Ludger didn’t look back. “If you want,” he said, voice calm, “teach me the second most basic spell later.”

Sigrid’s expression twitched like she’d been slapped by the audacity. One of the northerners nearby made a choking sound, half laugh, half disbelief.

Sigrid’s gaze flicked from Ludger’s steady hands to the golem parts rising from the floor, then back to the spot where he’d just performed her spell on the first try.

She looked… offended. She looked… impressed. Mostly she looked like her worldview had taken a hit and was wobbling.

“Boy,” Sigrid said finally, voice low and dangerous, “you are either a genius… or a monster.”

Ludger hummed softly in acknowledgment, as if both options were equally workable, and kept building his stone monster while the shaman of the northerners stood there trying to understand how someone could treat her people’s magic like just another tool in a growing arsenal.

Ludger didn’t react to the “monster ” comment. If anything, he treated it the way he treated rain, something that existed, occasionally annoying, rarely worth stopping for.

He kept shaping stone, watching the edges of the joint rings form cleanly, then asked the question that had been sitting in the back of his mind for days.

“Where’s Freyra?”

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