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

Chapter 627

Ludger heard them before anyone saw them. Not footsteps, those had been there already.

This was different. A harsh, manic scraping that sped up instead of slowing down, like the swarm had taken the blast as an insult and decided pain was optional. The sound came through the dust curtain in bursts, claws tearing dirt, chitin snapping back into motion, bodies climbing over bodies.

Like possessed beasts. Ludger clicked his tongue once. His left hand lifted and twisted, fingers flexing. Mana threaded into the ground and pulled.

The dust cloud didn’t just drift away. It parted.

The earth exhaled in a controlled gust, stone and sand obeying his will, ripping the curtain sideways in a violent sweep that cleared their sightline.

And everyone saw it.

The road ahead was cratered and blackened. Ant bodies lay broken in heaps, chitin cracked open, limbs twisted, some still twitching as their nervous systems tried to remember what “alive” meant.

More than half were down. Maybe more. It didn’t matter. Because the rest were still coming. The surviving ants charged through the wreckage without hesitation, climbing over their own dead like it was terrain. Not a pause. Not a falter. No fear, no retreat, no confused regroup.

They didn’t even look at the bodies. They looked at the line of humans like… Food.

Their mandibles snapped open and shut in wet, hungry clicks. A few of them produced guttural, rasping noises from deep in their throats, low, ugly vibrations that sounded almost like speech if you squinted your hearing hard enough.

Not words. Intent. A chant of appetite.

Krrk—hss—hss.

Flesh. Warm. Meat. It wasn’t that they saw adversaries. They saw a meal standing still. Some of them made a sound like a laugh, thin and insectile, before lunging faster, as if the sight of prey that didn’t run was a novelty worth enjoying.

One of the trainees behind Ludger whispered, horrified, “They don’t care…”

“No,” Ludger said quietly. “They don’t.”

Harold’s voice snapped the moment into place.

“BRACE!”

Selene slid into her stance on the left flank, knees bent, shoulders loose, grin gone and replaced by a hungry calm. Aleia’s bow came up, her eyes tracking the front ranks, searching for anything that looked like it mattered more than the others.

Cor’s staff planted with a thunk. The air around him tightened, mana gathering like a storm choosing where to break.

The ants hit. The first clash wasn’t a clean collision. It was a saw.

The front line of ants had arms that weren’t arms, each forelimb ended in a long, curved blade of chitin, sharpened into something between a sword and a butcher’s hook. Some had two. Some had one thicker “primary” cutter and a shorter secondary blade that flicked like a dagger.

Sword-claws. They swung them with terrifying speed. No flourish. No wasted motion. Just brutal, angled cuts aimed at tendons, throats, and gaps in armor. Harold met the first one head-on.

His shield came up and the ant’s sword-claw screamed across it, carving a pale line through metal. The impact drove Harold back half a step, boots grinding into dirt.

Harold’s sword answered, one clean, heavy arc.

Steel bit chitin with a crunch like splitting wood. The ant’s upper torso cracked, and it folded sideways, legs still pumping for a heartbeat before it collapsed into a twitching heap. Selene didn’t block. She flowed.

An ant lunged for her midsection, sword-claw stabbing like a spear. Selene slipped inside the strike, shoulder rolling past the blade by inches, and drove her elbow into the creature’s joint.

Bone and chitin shattered. She followed with a palm strike to the head, crack, sending the ant’s faceplate caving in. It dropped without even a scream, mandibles still snapping at nothing.

Another ant came for her from the side, blades scissoring.

Selene caught one blade with her forearm guard, sparks and shards, then kicked the ant’s knee joint sideways. The leg bent the wrong way. The creature fell, and Selene stamped down hard enough to split its thorax with a wet crunch.

Aleia’s arrows started landing like punctuation.

She didn’t waste shots on the ones Harold and Selene were already killing. She targeted the second rank, fast movers, the ones trying to flow around the line. Each arrow drove into an eye-slit or a soft seam at the neck, dropping ants mid-charge so their own swarm tripped over them.

That was the only “stall” the ants ever showed. They didn’t stop because of fear. They stopped because physics forced them to. The trainees held, barely.

Spears punched forward in trembling thrusts. One boy managed to plant his spear into an ant’s chest seam, then panicked when the ant didn’t immediately die and tried to climb down the spear toward him.

Ludger moved without drama.

A stone spike snapped up under the ant’s midsection, impaling it and pinning it in place like an insect on a collector’s board. The boy stumbled back, breathing hard, eyes wide.

“Again,” Ludger said, flat.

The boy swallowed and nodded, shaking. Then the swarm hit the center harder. Three ants surged into Harold’s lane at once, trying to overwhelm the shield with layered strikes. Sword-claws hammered down, left, right, high, testing angles, searching gaps.

Harold braced, shield screaming under the assault.

Cor’s staff flared.

A translucent mana wall snapped into existence just off Harold’s shoulder, not a full barrier, but a shaped wedge that caught one sword-claw and redirected it into empty air, saving Harold’s exposed side. Harold took the opening and chopped.

One ant’s arm came off at the joint. Another lost its head. The third surged forward anyway, mandibles snapping, blade-arm stabbing for Harold’s throat… and Ludger shifted the ground beneath it.

The earth turned slick for a split second. The ant’s footing failed. It slid.

Harold’s shield slammed into its face like a battering ram. Chitin cracked. The ant toppled, and Selene finished it with a heel drop that made the road jump.

The line held. But the swarm didn’t thin the way a normal enemy thinned. It simply kept trying, rank after rank, throwing itself into the meat grinder with the patience of something that didn’t value individual lives at all.

And as the ants snarled and clicked and hissed, those ugly, hungry mutters vibrating through their bodies, Ludger felt the same cold understanding settle deeper into his bones:

They weren’t here to win a duel. They were here to eat. And if they couldn’t eat the refugees… They’d start with the people standing in their way.

Ludger stopped treating it like a line fight the moment the first trainee screamed.

Not a death scream, yet, but that sharp, panicked sound you made when something got too close and your body realized you were about to learn a lesson you didn’t want.

He didn’t look back. He just moved. An ant lunged at him from the front rank, sword-claws scissoring in a clean, practiced kill pattern, one blade high for the throat, the other low for the belly. It moved fast for something that size, joints pumping like pistons.

Ludger slid a half-step inside the arc. Not backward. Inside. The high blade hissed past his cheek. The low blade carved air where his ribs had been a heartbeat ago.

His palm came up. A simple strike. No flourish. No roar. Just a short, precise motion with the weight of his whole body behind it.

His recent training didn’t make him “mystical.” It made him efficient.

His hand hit the ant’s headplate dead center… and the creature’s skull didn’t “dent.”

It collapsed. Chitin shattered inward with a sound like wet pottery breaking. The shock traveled through the ant’s body and down its legs, and the monster folded instantly, sword-claws twitching once as its nervous system forgot what “forward” meant.

Ludger caught its falling weight with his forearm and shoved it aside to keep the lane clear. Another ant came in from his right, trying to use the distraction. Sword-claw stabbed toward his shoulder joint.

Ludger turned his torso, letting the blade scrape his cloak instead of his flesh, then snapped his elbow up into the creature’s mandibles. The mandibles broke.

A second later his fingers hooked under the edge of its faceplate and he twisted, not with brute strength, but with leverage and earth-aspected mana reinforcement, ripping the head sideways until the neck seam tore.

The ant’s legs kept running for a heartbeat while the top half stopped being alive. He stepped through the gap before it hit the ground. Two more surged together, one thicker, armored, the other leaner and faster. They didn’t hesitate. They tried to box him in, blades flicking in alternating strikes to force a mistake.

Ludger didn’t make one. He dipped under the first slash, slid left, then planted his heel and redirected his momentum into a short burst of Overdrive that snapped through his limbs like a controlled lightning strike.

Not enough to fry his nerves. Enough to turn a normal human motion into something that hit like a hammer. His open hand slammed into the lean ant’s chest seam. The creature launched backward as if the air itself had punched it, crashing into two of its own and tangling legs. Before any of them could recover, Ludger stepped in and drove a palm down onto the armored one’s head.

The second skull burst. Chitin fragments sprayed.

The third ant tried to rise… Ludger’s foot came down, not on its torso, but on the joint that connected leg to body. He stomped through the hinge, pinning it. Then he struck again, short, brutal, into the soft seam behind its head. It went still.

He wasn’t holding back. Not with five hundred monsters. Not with children behind him. Not with refugees still running.

He moved like a machine designed to delete problems. Every strike had purpose: break the head, sever the neck, destroy the joints. He avoided the blades by inches, slips and pivots that looked almost lazy until you realized how fast the claws were.

A sword-claw swept for his throat, he ducked. Another almost stabbed at his ribs, he turned. A third came down for his shoulder, he stepped inside the arc and shattered the attacker’s face with a palm strike that sounded like a door slammed in a storm.

He didn’t shout. He didn’t breathe hard. He just worked. And for a few seconds, the center lane actually cleared. Then he stopped. Not because he was tired. Because his mind caught up with his body and demanded information.

He lifted his head and scanned.

Cor was fine, staff planted, mana shaping the battlefield in subtle wedges and walls, redirecting strikes, sealing gaps, keeping the veterans’ lanes clean. He looked old and unhurried, which was the most terrifying kind of competence.

Harold was in his element, shield battering, blade chopping, turning each ant into broken parts with efficient brutality.

Selene was laughing under her breath, not from humor but from the pure violent joy of having something that didn’t run from her. She moved like a storm in human shape, elbows and knees snapping joints, crushing heads, never letting the ants’ blade rhythm lock onto her.

Aleia was a quiet death above them, arrows landing with surgical precision, fast ones dropping before they could slip around the line, thicker ones stumbling as she pinned legs and tore apart their momentum.

The masters held.

They always did. But the rest… The trainees and green members were being pushed back. Fast. Not because they were weak. Because the beasts were ruthless.

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