Chapter 628

The ants didn’t hesitate to climb over bodies. They didn’t break when wounded. They didn’t flinch when stabbed. They just kept pressing forward, forcing the kids to react again and again until fatigue and fear turned their attacks sloppy. A spear line wavered.

An ant slipped into the gap and slashed, steel screamed, someone yelped and fell backward.

Another kid tried to help, panicked, overextended… and the swarm surged, sensing weakness the way predators sensed blood.

Ludger’s eyes narrowed. The veterans could hold their lanes. The problem wasn’t the center. It was the edges. It was the green line buckling under pressure. If that broke, it didn’t matter how well Harold or Selene fought. The swarm would flood through and turn the entire road into a slaughterhouse.

Ludger inhaled, slow. Then he started moving again, this time not just to kill ants… but to keep his people from breaking.

Ludger’s eyes flicked across the line and made a decision so fast it didn’t feel like a decision.

It felt like instinct.

He pulled in a breath and let wind mana coil around his throat. A tight, focused amplification that made his voice cut through screams, chitin clicks, and clashing steel like a blade through cloth.

“JUMP. NOW.”

It wasn’t a suggestion. It was a command with the weight of certainty behind it. And they listened. Everyone, veterans and green recruits alike, jumped without hesitation.

Some of them didn’t even look first. They just

moved

, trusting the order the way you trusted gravity. It was ugly and beautiful at the same time.

It showed how much respect they had for Ludger. And how much fear they had of being caught in whatever he was about to do.

For a brief heartbeat, boots and bodies lifted off the ground. Cloaks flared. Spears rose. Even the trainees who’d been shaking a second ago snapped into motion like the command had yanked a wire inside them.

Ludger didn’t jump. He stepped forward into the pocket of space the order created and planted his right foot. Then he stomped.

Not “stomped” like a person getting ready to attack.

Stomped like a hammerhead meeting an anvil.

He threw everything into that one leg, mana reinforcement, monk control, Overdrive tension, geomantic pressure, and drove his heel down with a force that didn’t belong in a thirteen-year-old body.

The earth answered. It didn’t crack. It buckled.

A shockwave rippled out from the point of impact, a visible distortion in the dust and loose gravel as the ground

shuddered

like something huge had struck it from below. The packed road sank in a shallow ring around his foot, dirt collapsing inward as if the land had briefly forgotten how to be solid.

The tremor hit the ant swarm like a gut punch. Legs lost traction. Chitin feet skated. Bodies jolted upward in unison as the kinetic force traveled through the earth and up into everything standing on it.

A dozen ants, then two dozen, then a whole chunk of the front mass. Lifted.

They rose off the ground, mandibles snapping mid-charge, sword-claws slicing empty air. For a breath, the swarm looked weightless, unbalanced, suspended, their perfect rhythm shattered.

They flailed in the air like puppets whose strings had been cut. Harold’s boots hit the ground first, he landed in a crouch, shield up, eyes already on the nearest airborne targets.

Selene landed like she’d been waiting for this exact moment her whole life, grinning as she rolled her shoulders once. Aleia was already moving, feet settling into a stable stance, bow coming up before the ants even started to drop. Cor landed with a controlled tap of his staff, mana flaring around the base like a brace.

The trainees hit the dirt too, some hard, some messy, but

down

and

ready

, eyes wide with the sudden realization that Ludger hadn’t told them to jump to save them from danger… He’d told them to jump so he could make danger

for the enemy

.

The ants reached the peak of their forced flight. Then gravity reclaimed them. They began to fall. And Ludger’s allies were already grounded, balanced, and armed with the one gift you rarely got in real combat:

A perfect opening.

Harold surged forward with his shield leading, ready to smash the first falling ant out of the sky. Selene’s fists tightened, her stance coiling like a spring. Aleia’s first arrow flew before the monsters hit the dirt. Cor’s mana shifted, shaping the space where the swarm would land into something sharper than “ground.”

Ludger straightened from his stomp, breath steady, eyes cold. He’d bought them a moment. Now it was on them to turn that moment into corpses.

The swarm fell.

Gravity dragged hundred pounds of chitin and hunger back toward the road in a rain of blades and snapping mandibles, and the Lionsguard met them like they’d been handed permission to be cruel.

Harold went first. He didn’t wait for the ants to land cleanly. He stepped into the drop zone and rammed his shield upward into the nearest falling soldier-caste, catching it mid-torso.

The impact sounded like a cart smashing into a wall. Chitin cracked. The ant’s legs flailed in the air, helpless for the first time since it had appeared, and Harold followed through with his sword, one heavy, economical chop that severed the head at the neck seam. The corpse didn’t even hit upright; it hit in pieces.

“Keep them off their feet!” Harold barked, voice thick with battle rhythm. “Don’t let them reform!”

Selene took that as a personal invitation.

She shot forward into the falling mass like a fist thrown by the world itself. An ant came down with both sword-claws angled to scissor her, Selene slid under the strike and drove her knee up into its headplate.

The skull burst with a dull

pop

.

She landed, pivoted, and caught another ant’s blade-arm with her forearm guard, sparks and shards, then spun and drove an elbow into the joint. The arm snapped sideways, useless. She finished with a palm strike to the throat seam that collapsed the creature like someone had unplugged it.

Selene didn’t “fight” so much as she edited the swarm, removing limbs, removing heads, removing momentum. Every movement had bite. Every pause was a lie; she only looked still right before she exploded again.

Aleia made the air lethal.

Her bowstring thrummed in rapid cadence, each arrow placed with a kind of calm that felt unfair. She didn’t aim for “center mass.” She aimed for control points, eye slits, neck seams, leg joints, anything that kept an ant from landing, from stabilizing, from getting its sword-claws back into a usable arc.

An ant tried to twist midair to land on its feet. Aleia put an arrow through its hip joint. It hit the ground sideways, legs tangling. Another looked thicker, a commander-caste maybe, armor plates ridged and heavier. Aleia’s arrow struck the thin seam under its jaw. The head snapped back like it had been yanked by a wire, and it slammed into the dirt already dead.

She didn’t speak. She didn’t flinch. She just fed the swarm holes it couldn’t patch fast enough. Ludger wanted to ask where she was getting arrows from, but she was probably recovery them midfight.

Cor shaped the battlefield. Not with grand spells. With brutal geometry.

A falling ant dropped toward the trainees’ line, Cor’s staff tapped once, and a slanted mana plane flickered into existence. The ant struck it and skidded, redirected into Harold’s lane where a shield bash broke its spine. Another tried to land behind Selene, Cor twisted his wrist and the ground rose in a low ridge, tripping the creature mid-step and exposing its neck.

Cor’s magic didn’t kill.

It made killing easy. It made the swarm’s numbers matter less. It made the line feel like one organism instead of scattered fighters.

And Ludger… Ludger watched the timing like a conductor watching a chorus hit the right note. He didn’t waste the opening on more raw shockwaves. This wasn’t about one big attack anymore. This was about turning chaos into a slaughter pattern.

“Now!” Ludger snapped.

The recruits moved. Not perfectly. Not elegantly. But they moved together.

They’d been drilled for this, Spinning Splash, the “weird” technique that looked like a party trick until you used it on something that couldn’t dodge in midair.

Water mana condensed around their hands in tight spirals. Not gentle streams, pressurized, rotating bands of liquid that formed like transparent blades. The air around their palms whined as the spinning water bit into it, gaining cohesion through motion.

Then they released. Spinning Splash erupted as a coordinated sweep, multiple arcs of rotating water lashing upward into the falling monsters.

The first hit an ant mid-torso. And the result wasn’t a “cut.” It was an obliteration.

The spinning water sheared through chitin like a saw through wet wood, tearing plates apart, ripping legs free, carving deep into the creature’s body and scattering shards of armor across the road. The ant’s sword-claws spun away, end over end, before clattering uselessly into dirt.

A second Splash caught two ants at once. The water’s rotation didn’t slow. It simply continued through the first body and into the second, shredding both into ragged halves that dropped like butcher scraps.

The recruits’ eyes were wide as they watched the technique actually work, really work, on a target that should’ve terrified them.

One boy staggered from the recoil of mana expenditure, but his Splash still landed true. An ant’s headplate split cleanly, mandibles flinging off in opposite directions like broken tools.

A girl with shaking hands overcommitted, pouring too much mana into the spin. Her Splash didn’t just slice. It tore.

The water arc hit the ant’s shoulder seam and ripped downward in a spiraling gouge that peeled the creature open. The inside wasn’t gore the way mammal gore was—thicker, darker, wrong, but it still splattered the road in sickening streaks.

Selene whooped once, breathless and feral. “THAT’S IT! KEEP DOING THAT!”

Harold’s voice thundered, using momentum like a weapon. “Cut them before they land! Don’t give them feet!”

Aleia’s arrows continued to punctuate the falling mass, forcing bad landings and exposing seams. Cor’s mana planes redirected, tripped, and fed targets into the kill zones.

The result was not a battle line. It was a meat grinder. Ants hit the air and got shredded. Ants hit the ground and got crushed.

Ants tried to regain rhythm and found that the rhythm had been replaced by steel, fists, and spinning water that chewed through armor like it had a personal grudge.

And for the first time since the swarm appeared… The ants’ advance didn’t look inevitable.

After the two big attacks, Ludger

could

have pushed forward and turned it into his personal slaughter.

He felt it in his body—the stored tension, the urge to finish the job with his own hands, the calm certainty that he could keep breaking them until nothing moved.

But he didn’t.

Not this time.

The line had stabilized. The veterans were doing what veterans did. The recruits—shaking and wide-eyed, were still standing, still following orders, still landing Spinning Splash in clean arcs.

This wasn’t the moment to prove he was the strongest.

It was the moment to make sure nobody else died and gained as much experience as possible.So Ludger shifted into support.

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