All Jobs and Classes! I Just Wanted One Skill, Not Them All! Chapter 653

Orleandul held Viola’s gaze for one last, asured second.

Then he turned slightly, golden spear shifting with him like the needle of a compass choosing north.

“Periter,” he said.

The word was quiet.

It carried anyway.

His soldiers moved imdiately, disciplined, practiced. Spearn flowed outward in clean arcs, shields locking into a wide ring around the ant castle. Halberdiers took secondary lanes, controlling the streets leading in. Mages fanned out behind them in structured pairs, already murmuring to one another, hands tracing quick signs as they prepared detection work.

Orleandul didn’t look back at Varik. Didn’t look back at Arslan. Didn’t look back at Viola, or the exhausted five on the blood-streaked ground.

“Begin searching,” he continued, voice still even. “Locate the remains of the labyrinth. Catalog anything of value. Secure it.”

A pause, barely a breath.

“Now.”

Orders snapped through the capital wedge like electricity. n set stakes and markers, rune-wagons rolled forward, lanterns lifted. The entire operation pivoted from battle to claim.

Orleandul rode away. Not dramatically. Not angrily. Just… dismissively.

As if the conversation had never happened and the people standing there were scenery, useful only insofar as they stopped being in the way.

His golden spear disappeared into the moving ring of capital troops, leaving behind a periter that felt less like protection and more like ownership.

Viola watched him go, shoulders lowering as the tension finally leaked out of her like steam.

She exhaled, long and annoyed.

“Well,” she said, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “I thought you’d beco less annoying as you grow up.”

She glanced down at Ludger, who was still on the ground because she hadn’t yet decided he deserved the privilege of standing.

“But it looks like you’re still as unnerving as ever.”

Ludger shrugged under her hand, small, careful, like his ribs were filing complaints.

“That’s part of my charms,” he said, deadpan.

Viola’s hand lifted an inch, like she was considering pushing his head back down out of principle.

Then she sighed again, half exasperated, half relieved, and finally let him up.

Because for all his mouth, Ludger was still breathing.

And the castle… was finally quiet.

Ludger watched the capital periter tighten around the ant castle and felt the itch start up behind his eyes.

The labyrinth.

The seal.

The way Rokram had been eaten from the inside and then suddenly produced an ant “king” that could talk, summon weapons, and puppeteer a swarm like it was moving pieces on a board.

There was a story buried under that castle. A chanism. A rule.

Sothing he didn’t know yet, and not knowing it bothered him more than the cuts on his skin.

He wanted to walk up to Orleandul’s neat little periter, shove past the polished spearn, and look for himself. He wanted to see what the capital mages would find. He wanted to know if the “unknown labyrinth” had shattered, shifted, or been hijacked into sothing new.

He was curious enough that it physically hurt.

But curiosity didn’t change the current reality.

Right now, the capital had arrived with clean ranks and sharper politics. Orleandul had made it painfully clear: the empire was here to claim, to catalog, to control the narrative.

And Ludger… Ludger had already poked the bear.

He could act like an asshole at the end of a battle. He could taunt a commander when adrenaline and exhaustion made his mouth faster than his caution.

But he couldn’t push his luck that far.

Not while he was half-dead, blood-soaked, and standing in the middle of an empire operation he wasn’t officially part of.

Not while his people were still catching their breath.

Not while Elaine would eventually hear about this, and his future would depend on more than who could swing the biggest attack.

So he swallowed the itch. Filed it away. Later. He’d have chances.

The labyrinth wasn’t going to vanish overnight, not if it had been there for centuries, not if it could produce sothing like the ant king. If the capital dug into it, rumors would spread. Papers would move. People would whisper. And Lionsguard had always been good at hearing whispers.

Ludger’s eyes lingered on the ant castle one last ti, then he turned away, pretending he wasn’t staring.

Because he could wait. And when he couldn’t? He’d make his own chance.

Rokram didn’t beco “safe” the mont the last ant died.

It beca quiet. And in a city that had been chewed open by monsters, quiet felt like a sickness of its own.

The first hours after the fighting were a blur of controlled chaos. Horns and shouted orders replaced battle screams. Stretcher lines ford where shield walls had been. dics moved through rubble with lanterns and blood-soaked bandages, stepping around broken chitin like it was just another kind of debris.

Then the work began.

People started returning to Rokram.

Not the refugees first, those were still clustered in the camps, still shaking from hunger and shock and loss, but the practical ones: engineers, labor crews, supply runners, city officials with ink-stained hands and grim faces. Soldiers were assigned to street sections, ordered to clear lanes and mark unstable structures. Adventurers who’d survived the assault were “asked” to assist, which in imperial language ant do it or get rembered.

They ca with carts. With picks. With shovels. With ropes and pulleys. They ca to dig out what could still be recovered from a city that had been half-devoured.

The sll hit them the mont they crossed the breached walls.

Death wasn’t a scent anymore, it was an atmosphere.

Rotting bodies in collapsed hos. Dried blood baked into stone. Ant ichor souring in the heat. Smoke that had seeped into wood and cloth and made everything taste like ash.

Even the wind felt dirty.

And still, they worked.

Bodies were collected first. That was the rule. That was the rcy. Dead were dragged to temporary pyre zones outside the walls because leaving them inside invited plague and scavengers. Ant corpses were piled separately, massive stacks of chitin and resin that would later be burned, buried, or hauled away to be processed for usable materials by whoever had the stomach for it.

Then ca the inventory of ruin.

Streets that used to be markets were now trenches of debris. Rooftops had collapsed into living rooms. Entire alleys were filled with hardened resin growth and broken brick. People marked buildings with symbols, safe, unstable, condemned, turning what used to be hos into a map of losses.

There were casualties on the imperial side.

No one lied about that, not when there were too many witnesses and too much blood for denial.

But when the numbers were tallied over the next day, the empire’s victory was obscene.

A landslide. The ants were exterminated. The city was reclaid. The containnt camps held.

And the empire, despite fighting a coordinated swarm in the streets of a ruined city—lost only a couple thousand.

“Only,” they said, because the armies involved had been massive. Because the alternative had been another breach, another wave, another Rokram. Because the empire had learned the hard way that numbers could be replaced faster than cities could be rebuilt.

People still mourned.

They just did it quietly, with dirt under their nails and smoke in their hair.

Then ca the rumor that spread faster than any official report.

It started as whispers in the camps.

Then moved to the soldiers.

Then jumped to rchants and scribes and officers who loved stories more than truth.

The Lionsguard kids didn’t die.

Not one. No casualties.

A guild that was “mostly children under fifteen”—kids who should’ve been the first to break, the first to bleed out when the lines collapsed, ca out of Rokram without losing a single one of their own.

People didn’t know what to do with that.

So said it was luck.

Others said it was cowardice, until veterans who’d fought beside them shut that down with hard stares and harsher words.

So said they must have been hidden behind the lines.

Then soone pointed out that those “kids” had been healing, supplying, and fighting at the front during the assault, spinning water into shredding arcs and dragging wounded n to safety under arrow fire.

Then the myth-making began.

They talked about Ludger like he was a weapon the border had grown on purpose. About Harold and the old masters like they were ghosts that refused to die. About how the swarm broke the mont the ant castle was struck, and how an ice spear had pierced the fortress like a god’s judgent.

By the ti the sun set on the day after the battle, the story was already wrong in a dozen places.

But the core didn’t change.

The empire had won.

Rokram would be cleaned.

And sowhere out there, far from the smoke and the corpses, people began to say the sa sentence with a mix of fear and hope:

“The Lionsguard sends children to war… and none of them die.”

Rumors like that didn’t stay in one city.They traveled.

And once they reached the capital, they would beco sothing else entirely. Amid the smoke and grief, Rokram did what cities always did after disaster.

It adapted. People couldn’t rebuild everything with pride. They rebuilt with what they had, what was close, cheap, and plentiful.

And nothing was more plentiful than the ants.

The chitin piles beca the city’s ugliest resource deposit. At first, everyone treated them like garbage that needed to be burned before it poisoned the air. Then soone cut a plate free, scraped it clean, tapped it with a hamr, and realized it rang like hard horn.

Then soone else realized it didn’t rot quickly once cured. Then the rchants showed up.

The first money: salvage contracts and sorting crews The city administration and imperial quartermasters began issuing contracts: collect, sort, clean, stack.

It was miserable work, but it paid. Whole families signed up because coins didn’t care about dignity. Crews learned to separate the piles.

Once sorted, chitin stopped being “dead monster” and beca “material.” Armor and shields: cheap protection for a scared empire The first crafters to profit were the practical ones. Chitin plates could be boiled, scraped, then cured with oils and ash mixtures until they hardened even more. They weren’t as good as proper steel plate, but steel was expensive, and the empire had just burned through a lot of it.

So chitin beca:

Lallar armor, overlapping plates laced onto leather backing.

Shield faces, chitin layered over wood to make shields lighter and tougher.

Bracers and greaves, quick protection for militia, guards, and caravans.

There was imdiate demand because everyone had just watched a city fall. Fear is a market.

Tools and hardware: light, tough, and easy to shape

Once craftsn figured out how to cut and drill the material without it splintering, chitin beca a cheap substitute for horn and low-grade tal in non-critical parts.

Carter guilds paid for anything that made hauling easier. Arrowheads, spear tips, and “guard work” weapons The legs and mandibles were where the real “quick coin” lived. Mandible tips held an edge after grinding. Leg spikes were naturally tapered and hard. They weren’t better than quality steel, but they were available.

So people made:

Arrowheads and bolts, Spear and javelin tips, Caltrops and road spikes, Hooks and climbing picks.

Not glamorous, but it sold fast.

Resin as glue, sealant, and waterproofing The ant resin, once it was filtered and reprocessed, beca a minor goldmine. Boiled down, mixed with ash or li, it turned into a strong adhesive and sealant. Not elegant, but useful.

Carpenters and builders paid well for anything that reduced waste. Alchemy ingredients and mage curios The last category was where prices got weird.

Certain inner mbranes, glands, and “odd bits” fetched higher coin, not because common folk understood them, but because alchemists and mages did.

This was the dangerous work, easy to poison yourself, easy to get cheated. But the payouts attracted desperate hands anyway.

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