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

Chapter 640

Ludger ran behind Harold’s shoulder, eyes half on the world and half on the map under it. He didn’t waste mana on the small fights. Not yet.

But whenever the ground tried to become a trap, when a section sagged suspiciously, when a hollow pocket threatened to collapse under their feet, his focus flicked down and the earth hardened, stabilized, behaved. A subtle correction. A denial of the nest’s attempt to dictate their route.

They were moving too fast for the swarm to organize properly. At least for now. The ants that met them head-on died. Not with drama. With efficiency. With the kind of ruthless brutality that didn’t leave room for retaliation.

The street ahead became a smear of broken bodies and cracked chitin, obstacles removed as casually as kicking aside stones.

The monsters didn’t stand a chance. Not the ones in front of them. Not yet. But Ludger could feel the pattern shifting.

The vibrations ahead thickened. Ant traffic began to turn. Streams started to bend toward them like water finding a new slope. The city was noticing.

And the ant castle loomed larger with every step, its resin-black walls rising like an armored cliff, like something that had been built to endure exactly this kind of violence. Harold didn’t slow. Selene didn’t slow. Cor didn’t slow. Aleia didn’t slow.

And Ludger, eyes fixed on the “castle” at the center of the nest, felt his mana settle like a blade sliding out of its sheath. Run now. Pay later. That was the deal. And the bill was getting close.

The last stretch felt like running into the mouth of a storm.

The ant castle grew until it stopped being “a structure” and became terrain, a wall of resin-black ridges and layered chitin plates rising higher than any human-built keep in the district. Up close, it was worse. The surface wasn’t just hardened earth and secretion; it was reinforced with scavenged stone blocks, snapped beams, twisted metal, anything the swarm had found useful, fused into the mass like bones set in tar.

The entrances, those sloping, mouth-like tunnels, breathed cold air out in slow pulses.

And the ground around them wasn’t cobble anymore. It was packed, ridged earth, grooved into lanes by constant traffic. Ant roads. Smooth, efficient, and stained dark from countless legs.

Harold’s team hit the outer perimeter at full speed, then the castle answered.

A new wave didn’t rush them from alleys. It stepped forward in formation. Ants with armor.

Not natural plates, built plates, layered chitin strapped and fused into thicker segments over shoulders and torsos, with extra ridges that looked like intentional reinforcement. Their heads were crowned with horned crests. Their eyes were narrower. Their movement… disciplined.

They carried shields.

Actual shields, broad slabs of curved chitin held in forelimbs like tower shields, overlapping as they advanced. Behind them, long spears leveled, tips glinting wet and sharp. The spear shafts were dark, reinforced with resin bands, and the points looked like polished bone, designed to punch into gaps and hold. The line stopped ten meters from Harold’s group. Then it lowered its spears in unison. Ludger felt the vibrations of that motion like a synchronized exhale.

Cor’s voice was calm, but there was a hard edge underneath. “Those should be the royal guard.”

Selene didn’t even glance at him. “Indeed, Mr. Obvious.”

Cor’s eyes flicked sideways, unimpressed. “I live to serve.”

Harold didn’t let the banter breathe. He leaned forward, studying the shield wall, the spear angles, the way the second and third ranks were already positioning to rotate forward if the first fell.

“These aren’t workers,” he said. “These are trained.”

A spear tip twitched. The guard line began to advance. Slow at first. Measured. Like a wall moving. Then faster.

Chitin shields locked. Spears thrust out in staggered rhythm, one-two-three, probing for openings, forcing Harold’s wedge to either commit or die standing still.

Harold barked, voice low and sharp. “Ludger.”

Ludger was already watching the spacing, already seeing the problem.

If Harold tried to bulldoze this line alone, he’d get pinned and bled out through gaps. If Selene went wild, she’d get speared. If Cor raised walls, they’d just funnel themselves into a kill lane unless it was perfect. They needed the first line gone.

Now.

“Help us clear the first line,” Harold said, “then go straight inside. No stalling. No second-guessing.”

Ludger nodded once. Simple. Clean. Brutal. He didn’t like it. He didn’t like the idea of leaving his four allies against an army’s worth of armored monsters, royal guards, disciplined and packed thick at the entrance of the castle like a throat full of teeth.

But it had to be done. They weren’t here to win a war in the courtyard. They were here to cut the brain. He just needed to be fast. Ludger inhaled, and his mana shifted, quiet, heavy, settling into his limbs like gravity choosing a direction.

He stepped forward, just off Harold’s shoulder, close enough that he could feel the heat of the man’s breath through armor.

Then he moved a hand toward the ground. Not dramatic.

Not flashy. A small motion, like reaching for a tool. The earth responded instantly. Stone Flow coiled beneath the packed ant-road. Terra Burst built pressure like a heartbeat about to punch through skin.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. He readied himself. Then the royal guard hit like a moving fortress.

Shields first, curved slabs of chitin that overlapped in a disciplined wall, slick with resin and scarred from prior impacts. Spears followed in staggered thrusts, the points darting through gaps with mechanical timing. Not frantic. Not wild.

Harold met the impact head-on.

Steel shrieked as his weapon bit into the first shield, carving a shallow trench in chitin that would’ve stopped a normal blade. The guard didn’t flinch. Another shield slid forward to cover the cut. Spears stabbed past it, aiming for Harold’s joints, his throat, the inside of his thigh.

Harold’s shield snapped up and down in brutal, practiced rhythm—deflect, absorb, punish. He didn’t chase kills. He created space. Every time a spear committed, he redirected it into the ground or into another ant’s shield, then slammed forward to break their balance.

But there were too many. The line wasn’t a line, it was layers.

Ludger felt it through the earth: second rank stepping into every opening, third rank rotating, fourth rank already edging sideways to wrap around their flanks like a closing net.

They were being measured. Weighed. Pressed. And if they got pinned here, the mission died in the courtyard. Ludger moved. Not with a roar. With a decision.

He slipped into the spear rhythm like he’d memorized it. A spear darted for his ribs, he turned half an inch, letting the point skim past his coat. Another thrust for his knee, he lifted his foot just enough that it missed, heel landing right as the spear tip hit stone with a clack.

To the guards, it probably looked like luck. To Ludger, it was geometry.

His Seismic Sense mapped every shift of weight, every micro-stutter in their stance as they committed to thrusts. Their armor was heavy. Their shields broad. Their movements trained, but training still followed rules. And rules could be exploited.

He stepped in close, inside the safe zone behind a spear’s reach, and drove a short strike into the edge of a shield. Not a big punch. A surgical one.

His fist landed exactly where the chitin plating overlapped, where resin had been used as binding. The impact cracked like ice under a hammer. The shield buckled inward.

The ant holding it didn’t have time to adjust before Ludger’s second strike hit the exposed shoulder plate.

Chitin armor shattered.

Not chipped, shattered.

The plate caved in and the body beneath it collapsed like someone had turned its bones to sand. Ludger didn’t admire the result. He flowed forward.

Another guard lunged, spear sweeping low to hook his legs. Ludger hopped the sweep by a hair, landed on the spear shaft itself for one heartbeat, using it as a step, then dropped a hammering elbow into the guard’s head crest.

The crest split. The headplate imploded. The ant folded.

A spear stabbed for his throat from the side, Ludger turned, grabbed the shaft with one hand, and yanked.

The guard stumbled forward, forced out of formation. Harold’s weapon took its head off with a single savage chop.

“Good,” Harold snarled without looking at Ludger. “Keep that up.”

Selene was on the left flank, and she looked like she was enjoying herself in the way only Selene could.

Royal guards tried to overload her, two spears, then three, then a shield slam to force her back. She didn’t retreat. She attacked the timing.

She let the first spear thrust commit, slipped her torso aside, and smashed her palm into the guard’s wrist joint hard enough that the spear shaft snapped. Then she spun into the second spear, catching it on her forearm with a grunt, and drove a knee into the guard’s shield, popping it upward and exposing the face.

Her fist followed instantly. A straight punch that caved the headplate in. She grabbed the collapsing body and threw it into the next rank like a sack of meat, disrupting their spacing and buying herself room.

“Too many toys,” she muttered, cracking another skull with a short hook. “Not enough time.”

Cor held the right flank like an old fortress refusing to fall. He didn’t try to outpunch them. He shaped the battlefield.

A spear thrust toward his hip, he planted his staff and the ground rose in a sharp ridge, forcing the spear point to scrape uselessly. Another guard tried to rush him, Cor flicked his wrist and a waist-high slab of earth erupted, cutting the ant off from its support ranks.

Then Cor stepped forward and drove his staff into the exposed gap like a lever, cracking armor at the seam with a dry, final crunch.

He moved with grim economy, block, divide, crush.

But even Cor couldn’t change the math. The guards kept coming, rotating fresh ranks, reforming the shield wall every time it cracked. Aleia, covering the rear and angles, made sure none of the flanking units got a clean bite of them.

An ant archer above tried to line a shot into their backs through a gap in the courtyard structure, Aleia’s arrow pinned it to the resin wall before it could release.

A spear-guard tried to circle behind Selene, Aleia put an arrow through its knee joint, dropping it mid-stride. Selene stomped the head as she passed without even looking down.

They weren’t struggling because they were weak. They were struggling because there were numbers.

Every guard they killed was replaced by another stepping over the corpse, shield already raised, spear already probing.

The courtyard floor began to layer with chitin fragments and twitching bodies, and the ant castle mouth loomed behind the guard line like a patient predator, waiting for the moment the humans slowed.

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