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

Chapter 684

Rathen didn’t ask. Not out loud. He just stared into the night for half a heartbeat longer, then looked back at Ludger with the weary understanding of a man who’d watched Ludger bend the world before.

If anyone could find a way to flee from the impossible… It would be the boy telling him to do it.

Ludger clapped Rathen lightly on the shoulder, more signal than comfort, then moved away, back toward midship, eyes scanning the water and the sky with Mana Sense stretched taut.

The storm kept building.

At first it was just harder gusts and higher swells. The ship rose and fell like a breathing creature with an uneven heartbeat. Spray started coming over the rail in sheets instead of mist, cold enough to sting skin and soak cloth instantly.

Then the air started to hum.

Not audibly, in the bones.

A faint vibration that made the hair on Ludger’s arms stand up under damp sleeves. Mana in the atmosphere thickened, like the storm was drawing power from somewhere deeper than weather.

An hour passed like a slow tightening noose. And then the storm hit them with full force. The wind slammed into the sails like a living wall. Rigging shrieked. The mast groaned.

The ship heeled hard to one side, deck tilting abruptly enough that loose crates slid several inches before sailors threw themselves onto them to stop them from becoming flying weapons.

A wave rose out of the darkness, taller than it had any right to be, and crashed across the bow in a roaring sheet. Water exploded over the deck, knocking a sailor to his knees and sending a lantern swinging wildly on its hook. The flame sputtered, almost died, then flared again as if angry.

Thunder rolled overhead, deep, close, followed by lightning that didn’t flash white.

It flashed blue.

Mana-charged light forked across the cloud ceiling like cracks in the sky itself, illuminating the ship for a split second in harsh, unnatural color. Every wet surface gleamed. Every face looked pale and sharp and suddenly very mortal.

Then darkness returned, thicker than before.

Rain came in needles, driven sideways, so dense it turned the air into a wall. It hammered the deck, the sails, the cabin roof, drowning speech and swallowing distance. The world shrank to what you could touch.

Rathen shouted orders, but the wind stole half the words.

Sailors moved anyway, because in a real storm you didn’t rely on hearing, you relied on training and fear.

Kaela planted her feet and summoned wind around herself instinctively, steadying her stance. Maurien’s eyes narrowed, mana stirring, measuring the storm like it was an opponent. Renvar grabbed a line and braced, muscles tight as steel cables. Viola and Luna stayed close to the cabin doorway, wet hair plastered to their faces, eyes wide but controlled, refusing to be blown around like baggage.

And Ludger, Ludger felt it. Not just the storm. The charge in it. Mana in the rain. Mana in the wind. Mana in the pressure gradients. It wasn’t merely bad weather. It was a system under strain, saturated enough to behave like magic.

He tightened his grip on the rail as the ship pitched again, harder. Another wave hit, slamming the hull with a deep impact that made the wood shudder all the way through the deck.

The sea below them was no longer a surface. It was a moving darkness with teeth. Ludger’s eyes narrowed into the rain. If the beast was out there, this storm was either its ally… Or its declaration.

Lightning tore the sky open again.

For a heartbeat, the world turned bright, blue-white and unnatural, like someone had held a mage-lamp over the ocean and demanded it show its true face.

The waves rose into view. Not normal swells. Walls.

Great, heaving ridges of water rolling in lines like marching beasts, their peaks shredded by wind into white spray that hung in the air and got slapped sideways. Some crests were high enough that, in the flash, people could see the underside of them, dark bellies of water curling forward like fists about to land.

A sailor near the rail froze, mouth open. Another whispered something that got ripped away by the wind. Even Kaela, steady as she was, stared for a second too long.

The ship’s violent shaking should’ve been enough warning on its own, every plank groaning, every rope snapping taut then slack, the deck tilting so hard it felt like the ocean was trying to roll them off its back.

But seeing the wave height in lightning made it real in a way that motion alone didn’t. It wasn’t just rough seas. It was the sea deciding it could erase them. Then the light died, and the darkness returned thicker than before. And that’s when the worst started.

Everyone felt it.

Mana in the air climbed, fast, heavy, suffocating. It saturated the wind and rain until breathing felt like inhaling through charged cloth. The sensation crawled across skin and teeth, a subtle prickling that made even non-mages swallow hard.

For Ludger, it was worse. His Mana Sense, usually sharp as a blade, began to blur. Signals overlapped. Pressure waves smeared together. Every spark of energy in the storm bled into every other spark until the world stopped being crisp and became… noisy. A constant hiss of information that refused to sort itself.

Even his Seismic Sense degraded. The ship’s vibrations, the waves’ impacts, the rain hammering the deck, everything merged into one chaotic tremor that made the seabed’s truth impossible to read. It was like trying to listen for footsteps during an earthquake.

Ludger’s brows pulled tight.

“Too much,” he muttered, voice lost under the gale.

Maurien’s eyes narrowed beside him, jaw clenched. He could feel it too, mana pressure rising to the point where the atmosphere itself started behaving like a spell.

Then lightning struck again, closer this time. The flash lit the ocean long enough for everyone to see it. At first, it looked like the sea was simply breaking in strange patterns. Then the patterns tightened. Water began to twist.

A circular pull formed on the surface, a wide spiral that sucked foam inward. The center dipped, deepening fast, as if the ocean had suddenly opened a drain to the abyss.

A cyclone. No, a waterspout beginning to rise.

The spiral grew, its rotation accelerating until the surface frothed like boiling water. Wind above it screamed in a different pitch, drawn into the same rotation. Spray lifted in sheets, pulled upward and spun into a growing column.

Then a second formed.

To starboard, another spiral, wider, angrier, the center darkening as it deepened.

Then a third. Then a fourth.

Four cyclones on the ocean’s surface, spaced like deliberate placements rather than random weather. Each one turning faster, each one dragging the sea into a violent, twisting frenzy. Their outer rings threw waves outward in jagged bursts, colliding with the storm swells and turning the water into a chaos of intersecting walls.

The S.S. Elaine lurched as the sea beneath her became uneven in every direction.

A wave slammed the hull from the side, then another from a different angle, as if the ocean had stopped being one enemy and become four.

On deck, sailors stared in open disbelief. Mouths hung open. Hands froze on ropes.

Even Rathen, hardened captain that he was, stared at the forming cyclones with a look that bordered on offended, like the sea had broken a rule.

Viola’s eyes were wide, hair plastered to her face, both swords clutched like they could somehow fight wind and water. Luna stood beside her, expression tight, breathing controlled but clearly strained by the sheer scale of what they were seeing.

Shera’s lips parted, awe and fear mixing in her eyes. Valk’s calm didn’t break, but his stance deepened, grounded, ready, like he expected the ship to try to throw him.

Kaela’s wind magic stirred instinctively around her, a defensive cocoon forming without her even thinking about it.

Maurien’s gaze turned cold. Because cyclones like that weren’t just “bad weather.” They were a statement.

And the way they’d formed, four of them, clean and spaced, rising with the mana pressure like they’d been called into existence… made it painfully clear that the storm wasn’t the only thing out there with power.

The ocean had just grown hands. And it was starting to close them.

In the middle of the chaos, rain like needles, wind like knives, four cyclones tearing the sea into rotating pits, Ludger stopped trying to understand and started to decide.

His Mana Sense was a blur. His Seismic Sense was useless. The storm wasn’t just weather anymore. It was a battlefield shaped by something that didn’t care about ships, or men, or plans.

And for the first time in a long while, Ludger looked at a problem and admitted the truth without dressing it up. He couldn’t fight this. Not like this. Not at this scale. He’d been naïve to think otherwise. He was strong, strong enough to build tunnels under a kingdom, to crush labyrinth kings, to command veterans twice his age.

But he wasn’t moving natural disaster strong.

Not yet.

Ludger’s jaw tightened. He reached for the earth container he’d hauled up earlier, the sealed stone box holding the colorful marbles, and in one smooth motion he lifted it with geomancy, the heavy block rising off the deck as if the ship had suddenly lost its anchor.

He held it at the rail for a heartbeat. Then he hurled it into the ocean. The stone mass vanished into the black water with a deep, ugly splash, swallowed instantly by foam and darkness.

“I don’t want them anyway!” Ludger shouted into the storm, voice pitched hard to carry.

It sounded casual if you didn’t know him. It sounded like the kind of bravado someone used to pretend they were in control. And everyone on deck understood exactly what it was: Ludger trying to look calm so their nerves wouldn’t snap.

Viola stared at the water, realization and fear mixing in her eyes. Luna’s lips pressed into a thin line. Ludger didn’t wait for debate. He turned and yelled toward the wheel.

“Rathen!” he roared. “Turn around! Full speed, now! We retreat!”

Rathen didn’t hesitate. He was already braced at the wheel, drenched, hair plastered to his forehead, eyes wild with the same conclusion Ludger had reached.

“Aye!” Rathen shouted back, voice ripped by wind.

He wrenched the wheel.

Orders spilled from his mouth like gunfire, half swallowed by the gale. Sailors moved, suddenly fast again, fear turning into motion.

The ship began to shift… And that’s when the ocean answered.

A shadow rose beside them. Not a wave. Not foam. Something solid. A massive shape broke the surface with a violence that made the storm seem polite. Then lightning cracked across the sky, a blue-white thunderbolt that held the world still for a fraction of a second.

And in that frozen light, everyone saw it. A tail. Not a fish tail. Not a serpent tail. A towering, muscular end of a tail, ridged and armored, rising like a hundred-meter pillar from the sea, dripping black water and shredded foam.

It hung there for the length of a heartbeat.

Then it swung. The impact was not a sound. It was a moment.

Wood screamed. Metal shrieked. The entire ship jolted sideways as if it had been slapped by a mountain. The S.S. Elaine lifted, actually lifted, its hull rising out of the water at an angle that made the deck become a falling floor.

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