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

Chapter 637

Dawn didn’t arrive like a sunrise. It arrived like a storm.

The sky went from black to bruised blue, then washed itself clean in slow gradients as the last stars faded. A thin fog clung to the low ground, catching lantern light in pale smears, making the whole camp look like it was floating on smoke.

Then the horns sounded again. Long. Low. Final. And the western containment camp moved in full scale. Not a few squads. Not a patrol. The whole machine.

Tent lines collapsed in practiced motions, canvas folded, poles stacked, ropes coiled. Cookfires were stamped out and buried. Wagons rolled forward in sequence, wheels grinding over packed earth. Supply mules were tugged into formation. Men tightened straps, checked blades, slapped shoulders, and stopped talking.

The adventurers joined too, in their own messy way, some swaggering, some silent, some with that hungry look that only came when the world finally offered them something big enough to justify their ego.

Soldiers formed columns.

Spearmen in front, shields interlocked. Archers and crossbowmen behind, heads down, fingers testing strings. Officers moved along the lines, speaking in short bursts, counting, assigning, correcting stances with the edge of a palm against a shoulder.

Pickets ran in and returned, breath puffing in the cold air. A runner shouted a confirmation from the northern camp. Another from the east. Another from the south. Four jaws closing.

The earth vibrated faintly with all that weight stepping forward at once. It was subtle, but to Ludger’s Seismic Sense it sounded like a giant heartbeat waking up.

From behind the movement, just off the main surge, Ludger watched with Harold, Cor, Aleia, and Selene. They didn’t stand inside the columns. They stood behind them like the shadow of a different plan.

Harold’s arms were crossed, expression hard, eyes scanning the troops like he was counting who would panic first. “Too many idiots,” he muttered, then added, almost reluctantly, “But enough steel.”

Selene bounced once on her toes, cloak shifting, grin thin and sharp. “Look at them,” she whispered, delighted. “All that noise. All that fear. It’s beautiful.”

Aleia said nothing. She simply watched the archers set their spacing, watched how the adventurers tried to crowd the front until officers shoved them back, watched the way men carried themselves when they told themselves they were ready and weren’t.

Cor stood with his staff planted, calm as a grave marker. His eyes moved slowly, taking in every detail like he was committing the scene to memory.

“This is what an empire looks like when it’s scared,” Cor murmured.

Ludger didn’t respond.

His gaze stayed on the forward swell, the living tide of people and weapons moving toward Rokram’s silhouette in the distance. The city sat there like a broken tooth on the horizon, dark against the brightening sky.

He could almost picture what the ants were doing inside. Waiting. Watching. Adjusting.

The marching force advanced in waves: first the disciplined lines, then the wagons, then the clustered irregulars, then more lines to protect the rear. The sound grew, boots, armor, murmured orders, the occasional curse, until it became a single constant rumble rolling over the land.

It felt huge. It felt unstoppable. And Ludger knew better. Big armies didn’t guarantee victory. They just guaranteed that when the plan failed, it failed loudly.

Harold glanced at Ludger. “We go when the noise starts.”

Ludger nodded once.

Selene’s grin sharpened. “So I really don’t get to punch through the front gate with the rest of them.”

“You get to do something useful,” Ludger said.

Selene looked offended for half a heartbeat, then pleased. “Oh. That kind of useful.”

Aleia’s eyes stayed on the moving columns. “They’re committed,” she said quietly. “No turning back.”

Cor’s staff tapped once. “Good. Turning back kills more people than monsters do.”

The camp continued to pour forward, swallowing distance, the western jaw closing toward the city. Far ahead, other containment lines would be doing the same from their own directions.

And behind the marching mass, hidden in plain sight by the scale of it, stood Ludger and his old masters, quiet and still, watching the empire’s blunt instrument swing.

Because while everyone else prepared to fight a swarm in the streets… They were preparing to cut out the mind that made it a swarm at all.

The first scream didn’t come from a man. It came from the wall. A long, scraping shriek of chitin on stone as something up there shifted, too heavy, too many legs, too eager.

Then Rokram answered the empire’s march with its own music.

A black tide crested the battlements. Giant ants, some the size of wolves, others bulkier, plated thick enough that arrows would just skip, poured onto the wallwalks and clung to the vertical stone like it was flat ground. They moved with the same awful certainty Ludger remembered from another life.

No hesitation. No fear. No human instinct to flinch when death got close. The western host slowed as it came into range, like a wave hitting a reef. Officers shouted. Flags snapped. The front ranks tightened.

“Shields!” a captain bellowed, voice cracking over the roar.

Spears angled forward. Tower shields locked in overlapping slabs. The army didn’t stop, but it stopped being a march and became a push, measured steps, weight forward, the whole formation turning into a single moving wall of its own.

And then the ants on the battlements lifted their heads in unison.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. They weren’t looking at the front line. They were looking down the lanes between the shields. Like they understood trajectories. Like they’d learned. A second later the air turned into a pincushion. Arrows, thick, dark shafts, fletched with something that looked too stiff and too sharp to be feather, rained from the walls in a dense, angled sheet. Not a volley meant to scare.

A volley meant to harvest.

The first impacts slammed into shields with wet thuds and wood-splitting cracks. A few punched through, the tips bursting out the other side like teeth.

Men grunted, staggered, cursed. A couple went down anyway, arrows finding gaps in armor, sliding into thighs, shoulders, necks. Healers surged forward instantly, hands glowing in soft greens and pale blues, dragging the wounded back while the formation kept moving over them.

“Keep formation!” someone screamed. “KEEP—!”

A second volley came before the first even finished landing. The ants didn’t wait for reload calls. They didn’t pace themselves. They just fired like their bodies were siege engines. And they didn’t care, didn’t even acknowledge, that men and spells were already tearing their wall line apart.

Because the empire finally answered. A row of mages stepped out between shield lines, each one protected by two spearmen and a man holding a broad tower shield at his side. They raised staffs, rods, bare hands.

Mana flared.

Bolts of fire streaked up and exploded across the battlements, turning clusters of ants into sizzling black fragments. Ice spears hammered into chitin and pinned bodies to stone. Wind blades carved through legs and sent twitching pieces tumbling off the wall.

For a heartbeat, the wall looked like it might break. Then the ants crawled over their dead like the dead were just part of the architecture. An ant took a fireball to the head, collapsed in a smoking heap. The one beside it stepped forward, climbed onto the corpse, and fired over it without slowing.

Another got shattered by an ice spear. Its legs spasmed. The ant behind it simply pushed past, using the broken body as cover. No panic. No confusion. No scream. Just fighting instinct. Just work.

Selene let out a low whistle from behind the lines. “That’s… unsettling.”

Harold’s jaw was clenched hard enough to grind stone. “They don’t even flinch.”

Aleia’s gaze tracked the ranged variants, cold and precise. “They’re prioritizing lanes. They’ve learned how humans move.”

Cor’s fingers tightened on his staff. “And they have numbers to burn.”

Ludger watched it all in silence as usual. He felt the western host’s pressure, the way it surged and stalled. He felt the impacts against shields like tiny tremors. He felt arrows striking stone, felt bodies hit the dirt.

And deeper, beneath all the noise, he felt the city itself when he used Seismic Sense.

Rokram’s ground was crawling. Not just on the walls. Inside. Under the streets. Through collapsed buildings. Like a nest had replaced a city and decided it would keep the shape.

The army pushed closer. The first siege ladders came up, rough wood, iron hooks. Men ran them forward under shield cover, shouting, tripping, dying. The ants reacted instantly. They didn’t try to hold the top of the wall like humans would.

They leaned out and poured themselves downward, dropping onto ladders, onto shield ranks, onto the dirt. Some splattered when they hit, legs snapping, but they still tried to bite as they died.

The ones that landed intact moved like blades. Mandibles clicked. Carapace plates slid over muscle. And the arrows didn’t stop.

Nearby, mages kept firing, grim-faced, sweating, burning through mana while officers screamed for spacing and discipline.

Ahead, the ants fought like the concept of retreat didn’t exist in their biology. They died without caring. They killed without joy. They were just… obedient.

Ludger exhaled through his nose, the breath fogging. A normal swarm could be broken. A scared swarm could be routed. A hungry swarm could be baited.

This?

This was an army. And armies had brains. He turned slightly, meeting Cor’s eyes. Cor read his expression immediately and nodded once, slow.

Harold glanced between them, then the wall, then the men dying beneath it. His voice was low. “Noise is starting.”

Selene cracked her knuckles, grin returning like a knife sliding back into its sheath. “Finally.”

Aleia shifted her bow on her shoulder, face flat. “Get me away from that wall before I decide to solve it from here.”

Ludger watched one more volley arc down. Watched men raise shields. Watched fire and ice bloom against the battlements. Then he spoke, calm and final.

“It’s time to move.”

He turned away from the spectacle of the main assault, away from the empire’s blunt instrument smashing into the wall, and started walking toward their destination. Where his tunnel waited.

Behind them, Rokram roared. Ahead of them, Rokram whispered through the earth… And somewhere in the middle of that city-shaped nest, something was directing the whole nightmare like a conductor. Ludger smiled faintly, dry as dust.

“Let’s go kill the brain.”

They vanished into the earth like a bad decision made confidently.

The entrance was nothing, just a slit of shadow behind stacked crates and a tarp “accidentally” slumped over the wrong pile of stone. One step in and the noise of the army became muffled. Two steps and it became a distant pressure in the bones.

Then the tunnel swallowed them.

Ludger took point. Harold right behind him, broad shoulders nearly scraping the stone. Selene moved like she was trying not to laugh, excitement sharp in her breathing. Aleia kept her steps light, eyes constantly flicking upward as if she expected the ceiling to betray them. Cor’s staff clicked softly against rock with each stride, a steady metronome in the dark.

Above them, the battle wasn’t sound anymore.

It was weight.

Seismic Sense turned the world into a living map beneath Ludger’s skin. He could feel boots hammering dirt in synchronized surges. Shields slamming. Bodies falling. The impact of spells, fire blooms, ice spikes, shockwaves, like thunder that didn’t need air to travel.

And it wasn’t only above.

The pressure came from all directions.

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