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

Chapter 599

Ludger’s smirk faded.

He turned back to Shera and bowed his head slightly, small, controlled, but sincere.

“Thank you,” he said, more seriously this time. “For teaching me.”

Shera blinked once, as if sincerity was rarer than magic up here.

Ludger added, “Don’t forget to visit Lionfang.”

Shera’s expression stayed guarded, but she nodded once, short, noncommittal, the kind of nod that meant I heard you even if it didn’t mean I will.

Ludger accepted it.

He shifted his weight, then glanced down at the dire wolf beside him.

The beast stood tall now, no longer bruised, ears alert, eyes sharp. The mana thread between them felt steady, new, but real.

Ludger’s tone brightened with purpose.

“Let’s go,” he said.

He paused, then tried a name like he’d always had one ready.

“Silva.”

The dire wolf’s ear flicked.

Ludger looked it straight in the eyes. “Let’s race to find the next target that’ll teach me some neat tricks.”

Silva’s head lifted.

And then the wolf howled, low at first, then rising into a clean, powerful note that rolled across the burned hill and out into the northern emptiness like a challenge thrown at the world itself.

Ludger grinned again, more restrained this time. Then he moved.

He and Silva broke into a run together, sprinting down the slope, boy and beast cutting through the terrain like they belonged to it. Ludger’s body moved with that new efficiency, Vitality Well smoothing the strain, his breath controlled and clean. The dire wolf ran beside him with long, effortless strides, snow and dirt scattering under its paws.

In seconds they were past the trees.

In moments they were a shrinking shape in the distance. Then nothing. Shera stood there and watched until the last trace of them disappeared beyond the slope. Only after they were gone did her face finally crack.

The poker mask slipped. Astonishment flooded in, raw and unmistakable. A boy had tamed a dire wolf in less than a day.

Then learned her family’s art, an art her bloodline had guarded for five hundred years, fast enough that it felt like theft. It was… unbelievable.

Shera swallowed, staring at the empty space where he’d vanished, as if the north might hand him back just to prove she hadn’t imagined it.

If others like her existed, other summoners, other weird bloodline inheritors, she would bet no one would believe her if she told them what had happened. Not without proof. Not without seeing the bare earth ringed by trees that shouldn’t grow here. Not without seeing a dire wolf answer to a boy’s voice. Shera exhaled slowly, still stunned.

“…What are you?” she muttered to the wind, and for once it didn’t sound like an insult.

It sounded like a question she wasn’t sure she wanted answered.

Shera didn’t move for a long time after the boy left.

The door still hung crooked where he’d knocked too hard, and the hut felt… smaller, somehow. Like the space had realized it wasn’t the only place in the world anymore. The fire crackled low. Snow hissed when it touched the stones outside. Everything was normal.

And yet the air still remembered him.

Not his smell, though there had been that too, iron and sweat and stubborn youth, but the shape of his intent. The way his mana had pressed into the world like it belonged there. Like it had rights.

Shera sat on the edge of her sleeping mat and stared at her hands.

They were steady. They always were. Calloused, scarred, competent hands. Hands that had carried her mother’s bowls and carved charms. And then Ludger had walked into her yard and brute-forced her family art like the world was a door and he’d decided doors were optional.

He’d done it fast. Too fast. Shera’s gaze drifted to the door.

Outside, the snowfield was altered. It wasn’t a subtle change. It wasn’t the kind of careful, respectful touch a proper druid would leave. He’d planted trees like he was laying down a claim. Shera didn’t know what annoyed her more. That he could. Or that part of her had liked it.

She’d heard rumors, of course. You couldn’t live in the north and not hear some scraps of the south, carried by traders who needed warmth and stories to justify their long road.

Lionfang. A rebuilt border town. A guild that had made an alliance with northerners instead of killing them. A young vice guildmaster with earth magic so strong people said he shaped walls like other men shaped words.

She’d listened politely and then pushed the rumors out of her mind like smoke. She hadn’t cared. After her mother died, the world outside her hill had turned into a distant noise, something that happened to other people. The politics, the titles, the alliances, the Empire breathing down everyone’s neck like a fat wolf pretending it wasn’t hungry.

None of it replaced the hands she’d grown up watching, the calm voice that had taught her to feel beasts as living souls instead of tools. So Shera had stayed here, with the burned hill and the bell cords and the memories that bit harder than winter… And then the boy came.

She stared at the floorboards, jaw tight. Had the world changed while she was hiding from it? Or had it always been like this, full of monsters and miracles and people born with the kind of violence and talent that made the old rules look silly?

Shera thought of the alliance again. Northerners and southerners shaking hands instead of breaking bones. Traders talking about cooperation like it wasn’t just a slower kind of betrayal. A guild rising on the border with walls of earth and contracts of froststeel.

She’d dismissed it all as noise. Now she wondered if she’d dismissed the wrong thing.

Because if someone like Ludger existed, thirteen years old, already dangerous, already learning like a starving beast, then the world outside her hill wasn’t the same tired cycle she’d turned away from.

It was moving. Fast. And it didn’t look like it planned to wait for her grief to catch up. Shera’s eyes narrowed.

Could he become it?

A true summoner. Not just a boy with a wolf. Not just a brute with mana and stubbornness. A master. The kind she had failed to be.

The thought sat in her chest and didn’t feel like jealousy the way it should have. It felt like… curiosity. Like seeing a crack in a wall you’d given up trying to break, and realizing someone else might actually push through.

Shera let out a quiet laugh, dry and humorless.

“Of course,” she murmured to the empty hut. “Of course the world sends me a miracle after I stop caring.”

Ludger trudged through knee-deep snow with a dire wolf pacing him like a living shadow. Silva moved smoother than he had any right to, shoulders rolling under thick fur, paws landing where the crust wouldn’t betray him. Every so often the wolf flicked an ear back, checking Ludger’s position.

Ludger didn’t slow down. Silva glanced at him, amber eyes too intelligent for comfort.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Ludger muttered. “I’m not making the cold go away. I’m bribing my body to ignore it.”

Silva sneezed, as if that was the dumbest sentence he’d heard all day.

Ludger rode Silva a few times purely out of boredom.

Not because he needed to. Not because it was efficient. Just because the wolf was there, the snow was endless, and after three days of getting his lungs punched into shape by Valk and his patience insulted by Shera, his brain wanted something that felt simple.

Silva hated it.

Not in the “throw him off a cliff” way, Silva had already learned that Ludger’s armored forearm made for a very unpleasant argument, but in the silent, offended way a predator had when someone treated it like a horse.

The first time Ludger swung up, Silva stiffened like he’d been saddled with an insult. His shoulders bunched. His ears pinned back. He took three deliberate steps forward, then stopped and looked over his shoulder with eyes that very clearly said:

This is beneath me.

Ludger adjusted his seat anyway, legs settling against thick fur, hands resting lightly near the wolf’s neck.

“Just walk,” he said.

Silva snorted and did walk, slow at first, like he was proving the pace was his choice, then broke into an easy lope the moment Ludger’s weight stopped shifting like a beginner.

The sensation was strange.

Not like a horse. Too much shoulder. Too much living power under him. Each stride had a spring to it that made Ludger’s core engage automatically. It was… comfortable. Annoyingly comfortable. Ludger rode for maybe five minutes before hopping off, not because he was tired, but because he didn’t want to admit to himself that he liked it.

Silva immediately shook his coat out like he was removing contamination.

Ludger stared at him. “You’re dramatic.”

Silva sneezed. That happened again the next day. And the next.

Sometimes Ludger only climbed on for a few dozen paces, just to get used to the feeling of height and motion. Sometimes he rode longer, letting the wolf carry him over stretches of snow that would’ve eaten his legs. A thought started to worm its way into his head.

Should I get a Rider class next?

Silva was taller than him, broad-backed, built like a winter nightmare. Strong enough that Ludger didn’t feel bad about it, at least not physically. The wolf could probably drag a grown man through snow while chewing on a second one.

And it did something to the world when Ludger rode him.

People, if there were any people, wouldn’t see a boy walking.

They’d see a boy arriving. He couldn’t help the dry thought that followed.

“Now I just need green clothes and a bow,” Ludger muttered, hands in his pockets as Silva trotted beside him, “and I can finally work as a ranger.”

Silva flicked an ear like that was the most ridiculous career plan he’d ever heard.

Ludger shrugged. “What? You’re the beast companion. I’m the brooding child with questionable ethics.”

Silva’s tail swished once, sharp, as if to say: At least you’re self-aware.

They moved through the afternoon, the sky bruising purple as the sun began to sink. The north didn’t do gentle sunsets. It did slow bleeding light, the horizon darkening like a lid closing.

That’s when Ludger finally found the last location Sigrid had told him.

He knew it by the markers, three standing stones half-buried in snow, carved with old knotwork and clawed symbols, as if someone had tried to draw a warning without using words. The wind cut through the gap between them with a steady howl that sounded almost like a voice if you listened too long.

He slowed, eyes narrowing. He’d been expecting another desolate place. A cave. A hut. A burned hill. Something small and stubborn and hidden, like the “old goats” were all allergic to civilization.

Instead, he crested the last rise and stared down at a settlement. Not a camp. A settlement.

Dozens of buildings clustered around a central fire pit, smoke rising in thick columns. Wooden palisades reinforced with stone. Watch towers with lanterns already being lit. People moving with purpose. The kind of organized motion you didn’t get unless someone had decided this place was worth defending.

It was big enough that it had layers, outer sheds, inner homes, storage, penned animals, and at the very center something like a hall built from stacked timber and dark rock.

Ludger frowned. His first instinct was to assume he’d misread the directions. His second instinct was to assume Sigrid had done it on purpose in order to make him understand northerner culture or something.

Silva slowed too, body lowering slightly, ears angled forward. The wolf didn’t growl. He didn’t need to. The tension in his frame said enough.

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