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

Chapter 623

Elaine stared at him like she wanted to scold him, hug him, and chain him to a chair all at once. The dire wolf at her feet lifted its head, watching Ludger with unsettling intelligence, like it understood more than a normal animal should.

The twins laughed, blissfully unaware that the world outside was preparing to eat itself. Ludger adjusted the strap of his pouch.

“Yvar and Dad will handle the town,” he said. “The whole thing. Lists. Patrol schedules. Meetings.”

Elaine’s eyes narrowed. “And you don’t want to wait.”

“No,” Ludger said simply.

He paused, not because he hesitated, but because he wanted her to understand what he was doing and why.

“An army of monsters is roaming the realm,” he said. “If we lose time, we lose people.”

Elaine’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t argue further, because she knew arguing with Ludger in this mood was like trying to stop a boulder by politely asking it to reconsider gravity. She stepped closer and adjusted his cloak collar with quick, firm hands, the way she used to when he was smaller.

“Then come back alive,” she said quietly.

Ludger nodded once. Not a promise. A plan. He turned toward the door. Behind him, Silva gave a low rumble that could’ve been agreement… or anticipation. Either way, Ludger didn’t slow. Waiting was for people who believed the world would be kind if you gave it time.

Ludger had outgrown that belief years ago. He left his house with his pack tight against his back and a bad taste in his mouth that had nothing to do with rations.

It was the feeling of friction. Not fear. Not doubt. Friction, the kind that happened when you tried to move fast and realized the world was built to move slow.

He’d grown up around soldiers and guild work. He knew what “mobilizing” actually meant. It sounded clean when people said it in meetings, like you could ring a bell and an army would assemble neatly in rows.

Reality was uglier. Reality was a hundred small delays that added up into a corpse count. He could already see it in his head like a list he didn’t want to read. If he mobilized the entire guild for something like Rokram and Fittar…

First you had to find people. Half the guild was always in motion, delving, escorting, scouting, hauling froststeel, guarding routes. Some of them were on the road right now, days away. Some were underground with no signal except a runner who might take hours to reach them.

Then you had to pull them back. That meant interrupting active contracts. It meant telling a caravan owner who paid good coin that their protection was suddenly optional. It meant risking reputation. It meant refunds and angry words and people who didn’t care that monsters were eating a city three days away because their goods still needed to arrive.

Then you had to arm them. Not everyone kept their kit ready. Some people stored gear in personal rooms. Some people kept weapons at the training yard. Some had runic gear that needed recharging. Some needed repairs. Some, idiots, still tried to “save” their best potions for “when it really matters.”

And after all of that you had to move them. Which meant wagons. Which meant horses. Which meant drivers. Which meant fuel, food, water, tents, spare parts. It meant marching speed determined by the slowest person, and the slowest person was usually the one who forgot their boots or thought “I’ll pack in five minutes.”

Even with Yvar, even with the best dispatch in the region, it was still a process. A good process. A professional process. A process that took time. Ludger’s jaw tightened as he dahsed, boots crunching on the gravel paths leading back toward the guild roads.

Time was exactly what they didn’t have. Rokram didn’t fall because someone was slow with paperwork.

Rokram fell because something got out, fast, violent, and hungry. And now that hunger was moving. If Fittar screamed for help, and the Lionsguard needed three days just to gather itself into a single fist, then they weren’t a guild. They were a bureaucracy with swords.

Ludger hated that thought enough that it made his steps sharper. He needed a different structure. Not for normal work, normal work could keep running on contracts and schedules and Yvar’s tidy ledgers. But for crisis response? He needed a system where the guild could react the way a trained body reacted to pain.

Protocols.

That was the word that settled in his mind like a stone. Protocols that everyone would know. Not “general guidelines.” Not “we should consider.” Not “in a perfect scenario.”

Clear, brutal, simple steps. If this happens, do that. He started sketching it mentally as he walked.

A tiered response system. Different levels of mobilization depending on threat and distance.

Level One: Local threat to Lionfang. Walls manned. Wolf pairs assigned to patrol loops. Civilians pulled behind the second line. Healers staged at the guild and market square. No one leaves town without a writ.

Level Two: Threat to a branch or allied settlement within range. A rapid-response team deploys, pre-chosen, pre-packed, trained to move within an hour. No waiting for debates. No waiting for “everyone.” The point wasn’t to send the whole guild. The point was to send the right people fast enough to matter.

Level Three: Regional crisis. Refugee wave. Monster migration. Labyrinth breach. That’s when you mobilize the guild, but you do it through modules, not a messy pile.

Modules. Groups with fixed composition.

A vanguard unit. A healer unit. A supply unit. A scouting unit. Each with a captain. Each with predetermined equipment lists. Each with assigned wolves or mounts. Each with explicit authority to act without needing Arslan or Yvar to physically approve every step.

Because the guildmaster couldn’t be everywhere. Arslan couldn’t be in ten places at once. And Ludger wasn’t going to pretend he could keep saving everyone personally just by running faster than disaster.

He needed to turn individual competence into an organism. That meant standardizing. He could already hear half the guild complaining about it.

I don’t like being told how to pack. My sword is different. My potion belt is personal. I work better alone.

Ludger didn’t care. If they wanted to be the last line of defense, then they didn’t get to act like a collection of freelancers who happened to share a banner. They had to become something disciplined enough to respond on instinct.

He imagined a bell system, literal or runic, different signals for different levels. He imagined pre-written orders sealed in wax and posted. He imagined drills. Mandatory drills.

Not just combat drills. Movement drills.

You have ten minutes to be ready. You have twenty minutes to form up. You have thirty minutes to leave the gate.

And if you failed? You didn’t get punished with speeches. You got assigned to the slow logistics tail until you learned why speed mattered. The thought was grimly satisfying.

The wolves helped. Mana Pulse bracers helped. Rails would help even more. But the biggest missing piece wasn’t infrastructure. It was behavior. People defaulted to hesitation when they were scared. They defaulted to comfort when they were tired.

They defaulted to waiting for permission because permission was a shield, if you waited to be told, then failure wasn’t “your fault.”

Ludger’s eyes narrowed as he ran. He couldn’t fix the world. But he could fix his guild. He could build protocols so clear that even fear couldn’t argue with them.

So when the next message came, another city falling, another branch threatened, no one would stand in an office exchanging looks and swallowing dread.

They would already be moving. Because the order wouldn’t be a discussion. It would be a reflex.

And that was the kind of guild he intended to leave behind, one that could act fast enough to save people… even when the politics wanted them to hesitate.

As Ludger moved, the thought kept circling back, not like hope, but like another lever he could pull.

If they handled this right… if Fittar held, if refugees didn’t turn into a massacre, if the monsters got stopped instead of spreading… Then the aftermath would flood Lionfang with bodies.

Not monsters. People. Trainees.

He’d already seen how fast fear turned into ambition when the Lionsguard did something impossible. Every time they survived a battle that “should’ve wiped them,” the story traveled faster than their wagons. And stories recruited.

Rokram falling would terrify the countryside. Fittar being threatened would remind every border-town mercenary and every third son with a sword that the empire’s “safety” was paper-thin.

When people got scared, they looked for a banner that didn’t fold. And the Lionsguard… didn’t fold.

Ludger could already imagine the line outside the recruiting hall once the crisis ended. Farmers’ sons with callused hands. City brats with too much confidence. Veterans with dead eyes. Kids hungry enough to try anything. People with talent. People with desperation.

A much larger number of trainees. Enough that he could finally stop treating training like a personal project and start treating it like a machine.

Teams for the protocols. Actual teams, built with intent.

A vanguard squad that knew how to breach and hold. A healer cadre that didn’t freeze the first time someone screamed. A logistics team that could set up camp, move supplies, and keep a column alive when the road turned ugly.

He could enforce protocols. He could scale the guild without depending on a handful of exceptional individuals doing everything. It was almost… comforting. Almost.

Because the next thought came right behind it, sharp enough to cut the comfort in half. They wouldn’t be allowed to grow unchecked. Not anymore.

There was a chance, more than a chance, that other guilds would try to stop them. Undercut them. Poach talent. Spread rumors about “wolf-mad barbarians” and “child commanders” and “unlicensed runic weapons.” Start whispering that Lionsguard jobs were suicide, that their contracts were cursed, that their success came from cheating.

And the Regent?

The Regent didn’t need to swing a sword to slow their growth. He could do it with ink. He could “protect the realm” while cutting their legs out from under them. Because the Lionsguard wasn’t a curiosity anymore.

It wasn’t a local border militia with a nice crest and a few good contracts.

In less than five years of existence, they’d become the most famous guild in the empire, labyrinth clearing, border stability, infrastructure, dire wolves. People in cities that had never seen Lionfang still knew the name.

And something that famous couldn’t be ignored. Not by rivals who depended on being the biggest fish in their region. Not by nobles who preferred their strength to be the only strength that mattered. Not by a Regent who’d just offered them a leash and received a refusal instead.

Ludger’s expression stayed calm, but his mind ran cold. All their enemies knew it now. The Lionsguard had crossed the line where success turned into threat. And once you became a threat, the world stopped pretending to be fair.

Ludger’s hand brushed his bracer, more habit than need, and his pace didn’t slow.

Let them try.

If they wanted to stop the Lionsguard’s growth, they’d have to do it while monsters roamed the realm and cities burned. While Ludger raged much worse than them as well.

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