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

Chapter 641

Ludger felt his mana pulsing steady, controlled. He couldn’t afford to waste it all here. But he also couldn’t leave until the first line was broken enough that the others could breathe. So he became a scalpel in the middle of a brawl. He didn’t strike where the armor was thick.

He struck where the armor ended. Under the shield lip. At the shoulder seam. At the knee joint. At the base of the spear arm where the plate shifted with motion. Pinpoint precision. Speed. No flourish.

Every hit either crippled a guard or killed it. And slowly, slowly, the perfect shield wall began to lose its perfection.

A gap appeared.

Harold saw it instantly. He drove into it like a wedge, roaring in pain and fury as spears scraped his armor. Selene followed, laughing through clenched teeth as she tore open space with her fists. Cor raised a short barrier to the side, preventing the ranks from collapsing inward. Aleia’s arrows thinned the reinforcements trying to seal the breach.

Ludger stepped into that gap and looked past it, into the dark mouth of the ant castle.

Deeper vibrations. Denser pressure. A heartbeat under the earth. His target. He swallowed the impulse to stay. He hated the idea of leaving them to grind through a tide of royal guards. But he also knew the truth. If he didn’t cut the brain fast, the guards would never stop coming.

So Ludger gathered himself for one last, decisive burst, enough to crack the front line wider, enough to give his allies a fighting lane… and then he would run straight into the castle’s throat, alone, chasing the thing that made a hundred thousand bodies move like one.

“NOW!” Harold roared.

The word didn’t cut through the courtyard.

It punched through it, raw command, raw certainty, the kind of shout that made bodies obey before minds caught up. Ludger moved on instinct.

He didn’t draw breath for a spell. He didn’t posture. He simply planted his foot and kicked the world.

The ground cracked.

Not a hairline fracture, an ugly spiderweb that burst outward from his heel as Terra Burst fired and Stone Flow followed like a clenched fist. Packed ant-road and courtyard earth split, lifted, and buckled as if something massive beneath it had flexed.

Ludger used that recoil like a spring. He launched forward. The acceleration was violent enough that for a heartbeat it felt like the air resisted him, like the city itself tried to catch and hold. Then he hit the royal guard line like a thrown boulder.

Chitin shields shattered on impact.

Not all at once, there was a fraction of a second where the wall tried to hold, where spears jabbed desperately, where armored bodies braced… and then Ludger’s momentum won.

He slammed through three guards in the front rank, shoulder-first, driving them backward into their own formation. Armor plates exploded in shards. Spear shafts snapped like dry twigs. Bodies flew in all directions—one launched sideways and smashed into a resin pillar hard enough to leave a dark smear, another tumbled end over end and disappeared under the feet of its own allies.

The line broke.

A real break, space opened, breathing room created, a corridor of chaos carved into disciplined death.

Harold surged into it instantly, weapon rising and falling like a guillotine. Selene slipped into the gap with a grin that had turned feral, fists already turning chitin into pulp. Cor’s staff struck once and the earth rose to block a counter-rotation, forcing the guards to funnel. Aleia’s arrows stitched the edges of the breach shut, dropping anything that tried to seal it.

Ludger didn’t stop.

He used the opening like it was his only oxygen. He sprinted toward the mouth of the ant castle, toward that sloping, resin-lined tunnel that swallowed sound and light.

A spear thrust grazed his scarf. He didn’t look.

Another guard tried to step into his lane, shield raised. Ludger clipped it with a short, brutal strike that knocked it aside like a door kicked off its hinges.

He was two strides from the entrance when something, habit, instinct, maybe guilt, made him glance back over his shoulder.

For a single heartbeat, he saw them.

Harold standing in the breach like a wall of iron, blood on his armor, eyes locked and burning. Selene laughing through clenched teeth as she drove a fist through a guard’s faceplate. Cor calm and unyielding, shaping the ground in sharp, efficient motions that kept the flank from collapsing. Aleia steady and cold, bowstring singing, every shot purposeful.

All four of them looked at him. And they nodded. Not dramatic. Not sentimental.

Just confirmation.

Go. Do the job. We hold. Behind them, the city’s streets were shifting.

New vibrations surged in from the outer districts, fast, dense streams of movement converging on the courtyard. A wave of more monsters, drawn by the breach, spilling toward them from other parts of town like the nest had finally realized where the pain was coming from.

Ludger felt the pull of it like gravity. Felt how quickly the situation could turn from “holding” to “being drowned.” He didn’t turn around. He didn’t shout. He didn’t promise anything. He just moved faster.

He crossed the threshold into the ant castle’s mouth, resin walls closing around him like a throat, and the noise of the courtyard vanished behind him in an instant. Only the deeper vibrations remained.

Only the heartbeat under the earth. Only the target. Ludger’s expression flattened into something cold and focused.

Be fast.

That was the only way this ended with anyone walking out. The breach didn’t stay a breach for long.

Royal guards poured into it like a living plug, shields locking, spears stabbing, bodies stepping over their own dead without breaking cadence. From the streets behind them, the wider swarm began to arrive, streams of ants converging on the courtyard from multiple lanes, drawn by the violence like sharks to blood.

Harold became the hinge that kept the door from snapping shut.

He fought with the ugly efficiency of someone who’d stopped believing in fair fights years ago. Every swing was meant to remove a problem, not impress anyone. He chopped spear shafts in half, then split the hands holding them. He drove shield edges into mandibles, then used the stagger to crush heads. When two guards tried to pin him with simultaneous thrusts, he took one on the shoulder plate, metal screaming, just to get close enough to bury his blade into the other’s throat seam.

Selene held the left flank like a storm given fists.

She moved in tight arcs, snapping in and out of spear range, striking joints and seams with monk precision and a brawler’s cruelty. One guard raised its chitin shield to absorb her punch, she didn’t punch the shield again. She punched the ground beside it, sent a shock through the ant’s stance, and then drove a knee into the exposed side where the armor overlapped. The chitin plate cracked and folded inward like a broken rib.

She laughed once, short, sharp, then spat blood from a cut lip and kept going. 

Cor anchored the right with quiet, brutal control.

He didn’t try to outkill the swarm. He shaped denial. He raised ribs of earth to split incoming lanes, collapsed rubble into choke points, and turned open space into a series of forced angles where spear lines couldn’t fully extend. When a heavy guard tried to muscle through anyway, Cor slammed his staff down and the ground grabbed the ant’s legs, pinning it long enough for Harold to take its head off.

Aleia made the rear and the high angles a dead zone.

Any archer that peeked from a slit window died. Any flanker that thought it could slip around got an arrow through a knee, an elbow, or an eye, whatever stopped it fastest. She didn’t shout. She didn’t boast. The only sound she made was the controlled exhale of someone who refused to panic.

They were holding. But holding wasn’t free.

The courtyard was filling with bodies, chitin shards and broken spear shafts, resin slicking the ground, the smell of crushed insects thick enough to taste. Their arms were starting to burn. Their breathing had turned harsh. Harold’s shoulder bled slow through a seam. Selene’s knuckles were split. Cor’s fingers trembled faintly from repeated shaping. Aleia had already swapped quivers once.

And still the ants came.

Selene ducked under a spear thrust, snapped the attacker’s leg with a low kick, then used the falling body as cover from an incoming arrow that thudded into chitin instead of her ribs. She glanced toward Harold in the same motion, voice carrying just enough to reach him over the grinding noise.

“Harold!”

He answered with a grunt and a backhanded chop that cracked a guard’s faceplate.

Selene’s grin flashed, reckless, familiar. “This is bringing back memories.”

Harold didn’t look at her, but his laugh burst out anyway, short and surprised, like it had been sitting in his chest for years and finally found a reason.

“Of course it is,” he rasped.

Selene smashed another guard aside and kept talking like they weren’t standing in the middle of a nightmare. “The times we fought alongside Arslan… and almost died a bunch of times.”

Harold snorted as he blocked a spear with his forearm guard and drove his blade into the ant’s throat seam. “That’s one way to put it.”

Selene leaned into a punch that folded a shield inward and sent the guard staggering back. “Now we’re fighting with his son.” She jerked her chin toward the castle mouth Ludger had vanished into. “Why do our secret weapons always have the same bloodline and make us fight these crazy fights?”

Harold actually laughed this time, an ugly, breathless sound that might’ve been joy if joy hadn’t been beaten out of him by a decade of battles. He parried, stepped, killed, and answered between strikes.

“Ludger isn’t like Arslan,” he said. “Doesn’t swing swords. Doesn’t show off. Doesn’t trying to look cool.”

Selene dodged and cracked a mandible off with a palm strike. “Yeah?”

Harold’s eyes narrowed, tracking the waves, tracking the angles, tracking how long their lanes could hold before something snapped.

“But I can see the similarities,” he admitted. “Same damned look. Same damned habit of doing the impossible like it’s just… work.”

Aleia’s voice cut through them, calm and sharp as an arrowhead. “Stop talking like we are dead already.”

Selene shot her a grin over her shoulder. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m alive,” Aleia replied, and put an arrow through an ant archer’s eye slit before it could loose.

Cor, who had been silent for most of it, chose that moment to speak, dry as old parchment.

“If we die,” he said, “and Ludger falls as well… Elaine will haunt us in the afterlife. So, fight harder.”

Selene actually hesitated mid-step. It was the smallest pause, barely a stutter in her rhythm, but it was real. Then she scoffed, because scoffing was easier than imagining Elaine’s expression. “How would she haunt us while we’re dead and she’s alive?”

Cor’s eyes didn’t leave the incoming line as he raised a waist-high ridge to split their lane. “She would find a way.”

Selene opened her mouth… Then closed it.

Her grin faltered into something thoughtful for half a heartbeat, like her brain had just tried to picture Elaine Graves deciding the laws of death were a suggestion.

“…She would,” Selene said finally, and her voice came out quieter than usual. “Somehow.”

Harold’s laugh came again, rough and brief. “Good. Let that thought keep you moving.”

Selene’s grin returned, smaller now, but sharper.

“Fine,” she muttered, and slammed back into the royal guards with renewed brutality. “I’m not getting haunted.”

And the four of them held the breach, steel, fists, stone, and arrows, while somewhere deep inside the ant castle, Arslan’s son ran toward the thing that had turned Rokram into a hive-shaped graveyard.

Thank you for reading!

Don't forget to follow, favorite, and rate. If you want to read 400 chapters ahead, you can check my patreon: /Comedian0