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

Chapter 586

Ludger didn’t sleep much.

He closed his eyes again and again, letting the dark take him for a few breaths at a time. No dreams. No scenes. Just blank stretches where he thought nothing and saw nothing, like his mind had finally agreed to sit down and shut up.

It wasn’t real sleep. But it was enough.

Enough for his mind to settle. Enough for the tightness in his shoulders to loosen. Enough that the world felt a little less sharp when he opened his eyes again.

At some point, after one of those empty stretches, he blinked and realized the sky had changed.

The black had thinned.

The stars were fading, not all at once, but in layers, as if morning was washing them away with pale water. A faint gray-blue spread over the peaks. The cold didn’t leave, but it shifted, becoming cleaner and drier. The steam from the vents looked almost white now, drifting in lazy lines.

Morning had arrived. Ludger sat up slowly, cloak sliding off his shoulder, and turned his head deeper into the valley. The old man was already there.

Not the “giant,” not the beast skull and meat and vomit, just a silhouette sitting cross-legged on a flat rock near the vents, back straight, hands resting on his knees. His eyes were closed. His breath was slow enough that it barely fogged.

He looked like a statue that had decided to practice stillness as an insult. Ludger stared for a moment, then sighed softly through his nose.

Hopefully this meditation session won’t end in a week.

He stood, stretched once, and began walking toward the old goat, quiet, controlled, letting his steps match the morning’s calm even as his mind sharpened. Whatever happened next, it was finally starting.

The old man’s eyes snapped open. Not slowly. Not like a sleepy person waking. Like a trap being triggered.

His gaze locked onto Ludger the moment Ludger got close enough to be counted as “present,” and his voice rolled out of him, deep and rough.

“Show your rage.”

Ludger blinked once. Then, because his mouth always moved before his sense of self-preservation could catch up, he said, “It’s not something I keep in my pocket at all times.”

The old man didn’t smile. He didn’t even look amused. He just stared at Ludger like he was measuring the thickness of his skull.

“The rage you use,” he said, “to copy the northerners.”

Ludger’s expression sobered immediately. Message received. He nodded once, slow.

“Alright.”

He inhaled, letting his mana sink into the familiar channels, the ones he’d used sparingly, because Rage Flow was a tool that bit back if you treated it like a toy. Then he activated it.

Rage Flow.

Heat surged through his veins. Not flame, pressure. A red tide that pushed from his core outward, tightening muscle fibers and sharpening his body’s readiness. His skin took on a faint, red flush, like someone had turned the saturation up. His shoulders broadened by a fraction, and the muscles in his arms and neck bulged subtly.

Ludger flexed his fingers once and looked at the old man.

“Is this enough?” he asked.

The old man’s eyes didn’t leave him.

“Yes,” he said. “Stay.”

Ludger frowned slightly but didn’t argue. He held the state, letting the rage sit in him like a contained storm. A minute passed. Then another.

His breathing started to deepen, the air scraping a little harder through his throat. Steam began to rise from his skin, thin at first, then more visible, rolling off him in faint waves in the cold morning air. The heat inside him pushed outward relentlessly, turning the space around him into a small pocket of warmth.

He kept his posture steady. He kept his jaw unclenched. He kept his mind from wandering into anger that wasn’t useful. Three minutes. Four.

By the fifth, his breathing had grown rougher, controlled, but heavier. The Rage Flow wanted more space. More expression. It always did. The old man watched the entire time without blinking. Then, finally, he spoke.

“Stop.”

Ludger released the skill immediately.

The pressure drained away like water pulled from a cracked basin. The flush on his skin faded. His muscles relaxed back to normal, though the residual heat lingered for a few seconds, steam still rising as his body cooled.

Ludger exhaled, once, slow.

The old man watched the last of the steam peel off Ludger’s skin, eyes narrowed like he was reading a ledger no one else could see.

“You have stamina,” he said at last. “And control of your mind. For someone so young.”

Ludger’s expression stayed neutral, but his attention sharpened. Praise from this man didn’t sound like kindness. It sounded like a measurement. The old man continued, voice rough and matter-of-fact.

“I heard your father was… problematic at your age.”

He paused, as if tasting the memory of someone else’s reputation.

“But it looks like you didn’t inherit that.”

Ludger blinked once. He wondered what the point of saying that was. A test? A jab? A way to see if Ludger would bristle and prove the opposite? He didn’t ask. Instead, he waited.

The old man nodded slightly, as if Ludger’s silence was the correct response.

“Rage Flow consumes stamina,” he said. “It consumes more the longer you hold it. And it consumes faster when you lose your mind to it.”

His eyes bored into Ludger. “When the technique drives you, instead of you driving it.”

Ludger nodded once. That much matched his own experience. Rage Flow was a fire, useful, hot, and happy to burn the hand that fed it.

“To learn my art,” the old man continued, “you must control both.” He tapped two thick fingers against his own chest. “Body. Mind.”

Ludger nodded again. “Understood.”

The old man shifted his posture slightly, still cross-legged, still impossibly steady, as if sitting on a cold stone for hours was just another form of walking.

“My art,” he said, “lets me control my body like few others can.”

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. “Control… how?”

The old man’s gaze flicked toward the cave, toward yesterday’s unpleasant demonstration.

“What you saw before,” he said, “was the same.”

Ludger frowned slightly. “Before?”

For half a heartbeat, his mind jumped to the wrong thing on purpose.

The controlled vomit technique?

The old man didn’t answer immediately. He stared at Ludger in silence for a long moment, face still half-hidden under the brutal line of his brow. The pause was so long it almost felt like punishment. Then, finally, he spoke.

“That,” he said, voice flat, “is one application.”

He leaned forward a fraction, and for the first time there was something almost instructional in the way he said the next words.

“I can expel poison from my body like that.”

Ludger’s eyebrows twitched, just slightly. Poison. That made the disgusting part make sense. Eating half-skinned meat, then purging whatever shouldn’t stay. Efficient in a brutal way. Ludger’s mind, unhelpful as always, supplied a comparison anyway.

So… like a cat throwing up a furball.

He kept his face calm and didn’t say it out loud. Instead, he nodded once, slow.

“I see,” Ludger said.

The old man’s eyes stayed on him.

“If you can learn this,” the old man continued, “you will not fear what others put in your food. You will not fear sickness the same way. You will not fear wounds the same way.”

He sat back again, voice returning to its rough baseline.

“But first,” he said, “you learn to hold the vitality inside you.”

Ludger exhaled once, steady.

“Alright,” he said.

The old man stood with an ease that didn’t match his size, then pointed at the flat stone near the vents.

“Sit.”

Ludger sat where indicated.

“Cross your legs,” the old man added.

Ludger did, folding into the posture without complaint, though he looked like someone who wasn’t built for stillness.

“Meditate,” the old man said. “Clear your mind.”

His voice was blunt, like a command to a weapon.

“When your mind is clear, use the technique. Then try to sense your energy being burned.” He tapped his own chest with two fingers again. “Feel it. Follow it.”

Ludger listened carefully, eyes narrowed.

“If you think of anything,” the old man continued, “stop. Start from the beginning.”

Ludger’s mouth twitched slightly. “That’s…”

“It is necessary,” the old man said. “The first step is to feel your vital energy. Then control it.”

Ludger nodded once. He understood the logic. Clear mind, stable base, sense the internal burn instead of getting lost in the emotion.

Still… He looked up. “A simple demonstration.”

The old man paused, then nodded. Without ceremony, he raised one hand and held his palm out toward Ludger, fingers relaxed.

For a second, it was just a large hand, callused, scarred, older than it looked. Then the air changed.

The old man’s palm began to vibrate, subtle at first, like a muscle twitch you could barely see. The vibration intensified until the skin blurred faintly at the edges. The air around his hand shimmered, not from light, but from heat and pressure, like a mirage forming in the cold morning.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed, focus sharpening. The old man slowly pushed his palm forward.

A wave of hot air rolled out from him, silent, invisible, and heavy. It didn’t look like a spell. It looked like the world itself had exhaled. The wave passed behind Ludger, close enough that the hairs on his neck lifted. It slammed into the outside of the cavern mouth… and the snow beyond it exploded outward in a straight line, as if shoved by an invisible wall. Powder blasted away from rock. A strip of snow melted instantly into wet, dark slush, steam rising in a thin plume. The line continued several meters across the slope, clean and purposeful, like someone had dragged a heated blade through the landscape.

The old man lowered his hand. The mirage shimmer vanished. The air returned to normal. Ludger sat very still. Impressed, because the technique was crude and powerful in a way magic rarely was.

Troubled, because he could feel the control behind it. Not just raw strength, but precision. Internal regulation. A body treated like a furnace you could throttle without blowing it apart.

This wasn’t something you learned by watching once. And yet the demonstration had been so clear it felt like a dare. Ludger swallowed, eyes still on the melted line outside.

“…Alright,” he said quietly.

He looked down at his own hands. Hard to master, even with a clean example like that. But now he’d seen what the art could do. And that meant he couldn’t pretend he didn’t want it.

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