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

Chapter 687

Ludger held the beam as long as he could, arms shaking, teeth clenched so hard his jaw ached, the taste of blood and salt filling his mouth.

Then the beam collapsed, mana spent, pressure released. The rain rushed back in like a curtain snapping shut. Darkness returned. But the space remained.

The tail was farther now, the water between them churning where it had been pushed back.

Ludger dropped from the rail onto the deck in a low crouch, chest heaving once, hands smoking faintly with residual sparks that died in the wet air.

He didn’t look heroic. He looked like a boy who had just fired a piece of himself into the ocean. He lifted his head and shouted into the storm, voice raw and absolute.

“NOW! RUN!”

The deck exploded into motion.

Rathen roared orders until his voice went hoarse, wrenching the wheel hard and holding it there like he was trying to break the ocean’s grip by force of will. Sailors scrambled across slick planks, hauling lines, trimming sails, fighting wind that tried to steal canvas from their hands.

Kaela and Maurien pushed wind into the sails, brutal, sustained force, turning gusts into propulsion instead of chaos. The air around the mast twisted in controlled streams, a funnel of pressure that gave the S.S. Elaine a shove the storm hadn’t intended.

Renvar braced and added his own gusts in short bursts when the ship’s bow started to drift, correcting angles, keeping them from being pulled back into the cyclones’ hungry geometry.

Viola and Luna stayed near the rail, grabbing anyone who slipped, dragging sailors back from the edge before a bad step became a drowning. Shera tied lines around waists and posts with hands that moved faster than her jokes ever did. Valk moved like a calm anchor, planting people where they needed to be, slapping panic out of their shoulders with firm grips and steady words no one could hear over the wind but somehow understood anyway.

The ship began to move. Not gracefully. Not smoothly.

But it moved, cutting a new line through the storm, turning away from the place where the ocean had tried to close its fist. Ludger stood near the stern, rain streaming down his face, eyes fixed on the darkness behind them.

He watched the black sea where the tail had been. He watched the storm for any sign, any shadow rising, any surge of pressure, any glimpse of scaled mass returning to finish what it started.

Nothing. Just darkness. Just sheets of rain and foam exploding off wave crests.

Just four cyclones still chewing at the surface farther back like the ocean had grown mouths.

Ludger’s Mana Sense reached, but it was ragged now, overheated, distorted, like trying to see through smoke while your eyes burned.

His breath came hard, too fast, and he forced it down, swallowing the urge to gasp like a drowning man. Then his body collected its debt. It hit all at once.

The runes in his chest felt like molten wire. His magic circuits, already strained from Overdrive ×3, from Rage Flow, from the beam, began to overheat in a way that wasn’t metaphor anymore. The pain wasn’t just in his muscles.

It was in the channels. In the pathways that carried mana like blood. Heat surged through him, savage and internal, as if someone had poured lava into his veins and told it to circulate.

His right shoulder throbbed, then burned, then went numb in a way that terrified him more than pain ever could.

A sharp crack sounded inside him, not loud, not external, felt more than heard. Then another. Tiny fractures in places that weren’t supposed to fracture. Bones taking the stress he’d forced them to carry.

His knees weakened.

Ludger tried to stay upright. Tried to keep watching the stern. Tried to stay useful. His vision wavered. The deck tilted under him, not from waves this time, but from his own balance collapsing.

He dropped, hard, landing on his butt with a wet slap against the planks.

For a second he couldn’t breathe. Not because the air wasn’t there. Because his chest refused to expand properly under the crushing heat inside him.

He clenched his teeth, a strangled sound caught in his throat, hands digging into the deck as if he could anchor himself to wood and keep his body from tearing apart.

More cracks, small, deep, sickening, ran through his frame like the sound of ice breaking underfoot.

His veins felt like fire. His limbs trembled uncontrollably. Rain hit his face, cold and sharp, and the contrast only made the heat inside him feel more unreal.

Ludger stared into the storm behind the ship, jaw locked, refusing to let the pain drag a sound out of him.

Because if he looked weak now, if he showed it… then everyone else would remember how close they’d been to dying.

And panic would finish what the monster hadn’t. Viola was the first one to break through the shock long enough to move toward him. She slid across the wet deck, boots braced, one hand still holding a sword while the other reached out.

“Ludger,” she shouted over the storm. Then, softer, like the word itself felt strange—“Are you fine?”

Her hand hovered in front of him.

Ludger looked at it, then at her face. Rain ran down her cheeks like tears, but her eyes were hard and awake.

“I’ll be,” he said, voice rough. “Eventually.”

He tried to breathe through the molten ache in his chest, tried to make his muscles listen again.

“Unless,” he added with dry bitterness, “someone has medicine for strained magic circuits. If that exists.”

Viola’s mouth twitched like she wanted to snap back with something stupid. She didn’t. She just tightened her grip and steadied him as he pushed himself up.

Ludger rose unsteadily to his feet, pain flaring in his shoulder and ribs like a warning siren. He kept his posture straight anyway, because posture was the cheapest kind of strength you could show. He turned back toward the stern.

Kept watch.

Even as the ship clawed through the storm, even as people staggered and clung to ropes and rails, even as everyone’s faces wore the same expression, wide-eyed, pale, and hollowed out, as if they’d just sprinted out of a living nightmare and weren’t sure the nightmare hadn’t followed.

For a few breaths, it almost felt like they’d made it. The distance behind them was darkness and rain. No tail. No shadow. No sudden strike. Then the world changed. A powerful impact slammed into the ship from below.

Not the kind that splintered boards immediately. Not the sharp slap of a tail.

This was a deep, heavy lift, a pressure that surged up through the hull and turned every spine on deck into a tuning fork. The ship lurched violently, but not sideways.

Upward.

The crew screamed. Someone dropped a rope. Another man hit the deck hard enough to leave a wet imprint. Ludger’s eyes widened. Because the impact wasn’t just force.

It was displacement. The ocean around them began to drop. At first it was subtle, waves lowering by a meter, foam lines stretching.

Then it accelerated. The surface fell away as if the sea had suddenly been pulled downward by an invisible hand.

“... What?” Rathen choked, voice cracking.

Everyone surged toward the rail instinctively, grabbing posts and lines to keep from sliding as the deck angle shifted again. And then they saw it.

A body.

A colossal, unknown sea monster rising beneath them, not the tail-limbed beast they’d been fighting at range, but something even more impossible. Its back breached the surface like a moving island, ridged and slick with rain. Water poured off it in waterfalls. The scale of it was wrong, the kind of wrong that made the brain refuse to process size because size at that level stopped being an object and started being a landscape.

The ship wasn’t being struck anymore. It was being held. Lifted.

The S.S. Elaine rose into the air, carried by the monster’s body the way a child carried a toy boat. Ludger felt his stomach drop as the deck left the sea entirely, rain still hammering them, wind still screaming, but now there was empty air beneath the hull.

It wasn’t even using its whole body. Its head, whatever counted as its head, was still underwater. As if lifting a ship wasn’t worth looking at. The ship climbed higher.

Ten meters. Twenty. Thirty. Fifty.

Fifty meters above sea level, the lanterns swinging wildly, ropes dangling, men clinging to anything they could grab. Viola’s hand snapped to a post. Luna grabbed Shera’s sleeve and anchored her. Valk slammed his feet wide, bracing like a pillar, one arm locking a sailor against the cabin wall to keep him from sliding.

Ludger’s Mana Sense screamed static, storm, mana, terror, all blended into noise, while his body still burned from Overdrive backlash.

And then the monster moved. A casual shift.

A simple toss.

The ship was flung sideways, weightless for a sickening instant. Then gravity reclaimed it.

The S.S. Elaine flipped, slow at first, then faster, deck becoming ceiling, ceiling becoming deck, lanterns smashing, loose gear turning into lethal rain.

People screamed as the world inverted.

Ludger’s boots left the surface. His stomach lurched up into his throat. His fingers clawed for purchase that wasn’t there.

The ship fell upside down toward the sea, and the storm’s roar swallowed everything as the ocean rushed up to meet them like a mouth opening wide. The fall felt endless. Then it wasn’t.

The ocean hit them like a wall, black water swallowing the inverted ship with a roar that drowned screams and snapped thought in half. For a heartbeat, everything was pressure and impact and the sick certainty that wood was about to split and bodies were about to scatter into the sea like loose cargo.

But the ship didn’t break.

Not completely. Because the air around it hardened.

A wind barrier wrapped the S.S. Elaine just before the worst of the impact, an invisible shell that caught the blow, redirected the force, and kept the hull from turning into debris.

The barrier didn’t make the landing gentle. It made it survivable.

Water erupted around the ship in a ring, foam blasting up like a white explosion. The hull shuddered, groaned, and then, slowly, stubbornly, began to right itself. Not smoothly, not gracefully, but with the grim persistence of a thing that refused to die.

Planks creaked. Ropes snapped taut. Lantern wreckage bobbed and clattered. And then the deck returned beneath them. Not calm, never calm, but oriented the way the world was supposed to be.

People appeared like ghosts out of chaos: sailors clinging to rails, hugging posts, tangled in rigging, lying sprawled on the deck with eyes wide and chests heaving like they’d just been reborn. Someone coughed seawater. Someone else sobbed without sound. A man hung from a rope with one arm, knuckles white, legs kicking until another sailor grabbed him and hauled him back.

The wind barrier still shimmered faintly in the rain.

Kaela stood near midship, both hands raised, fingers curled like claws around invisible threads. Her face was twisted with effort, jaw clenched, teeth bared. Wind coiled around the ship in violent currents, reinforcing the barrier where it thinned, patching holes in real time.

Maurien mirrored her on the opposite side, one hand extended, the other braced against a post, eyes narrowed into a cold, furious focus. His mana didn’t flare; it pressed, like a solid weight.

Renvar was between them, half-kneeling, both arms out, wind ripping from his palms in steady, shaking streams. His shoulders trembled. Veins stood out in his neck. He looked like he was trying to hold up a collapsing roof with his body.

The barrier groaned with them. It wasn’t a perfect dome. It was a desperate, living structure, three mages forcing air to behave like armor through sheer will and pain.

Kaela let out a strangled groan, voice torn by strain and rain.

“Why… ” she gasped, then forced breath back into her lungs, “...why did I accept this job without even asking how much I’d receive to fight such an insane beast?!”

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