The Archmage’s Destruction Strategy - Chapter 134

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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#134. Awakening

-Whiiiiiine-

To withstand the tremendous strain generated by moving such a colossal frame, Atlas’s internal skeleton was constructed from a special alloy far harder than its external armor.
Massive solid ingots of metal, each several meters thick.
Completed through Barden’s unique authority—a power that could finish any structure in an instant merely by swinging a hammer, no matter how long it normally took to construct—Atlas’s internal skeleton was sturdy enough to withstand attacks from Level 8 Corrosion Entities and even the catastrophic strikes of Level 9 Corrosion Entities. The lesser Corrosion Entities swarming across Atlas’s hull like a living hillside had failed to destroy that skeleton.
Thanks to this, when Sung-jun awoke and infused his mana, Atlas maintained barely functional mobility despite its frame now resembling a colossal fortress with skeletal limbs swollen beneath it.

‘The mana cannons are inoperable. Nearly all internal systems have been torn away. The right hand holding the shield has lost its ring and pinky fingers….’

As I assessed Atlas’s current condition, I noticed that some smaller Corrosion Entities had infiltrated the hangar space itself.
They must have squeezed through gaps created when the external armor was torn away, using their compact bodies to force their way in.
Worse still, palm-sized beetle-type Corrosion Entities had burrowed into every moving component within Atlas, gnawing through every visible piece of equipment.

‘First, I need to eliminate the intruders inside my body.’

As I concentrated my consciousness and forcefully channeled the mana surrounding me, countless Corrosion Entities gnawing through the mana circuits and components inside Atlas began shrieking and convulsing.
Then they were engulfed in blue flames and began evaporating into ash.

“Screeeeeech!!!!!”

My mana overload was not an attack effective only against the palm-sized Corrosion Entities.
The 2-meter-class smaller Corrosion Entity forcing its fangs through the hole in the hangar and the 4-to-8-meter-class Corrosion Entities that had driven their teeth into the internal skeleton during Atlas’s rise and desperately refused to release their grip on the hull all fell like rain from the intense shockwave that pierced their entire bodies.
Because I had wielded mana with the nature of lightning during this process, the exterior of Atlas erupted simultaneously with deafening explosions and sparks, as if an electric fly swatter had been used on a densely swarming cloud of mosquitoes.
However, unlike the “tap-tap” sound of an electric mosquito swatter, Atlas’s electrical shock produced continuous explosive booms of “crackle-pop-bang!”

-Whoooosh-

As insectoid Corrosion Entities engulfed in blue flames rained down from Atlas’s body, I immediately began assessing the surrounding battlefield.
Since I had been asleep, only the Hive Hornet and Atlas’s crew would have had to hold back the enemies, so I suspected the battle situation wouldn’t be favorable.
Yet the battlefield I perceived was in far better condition than I had anticipated.

‘Wait, they managed to take down 9 out of 10? At this rate, they fought far better than I would have?’

The issue was that the Hive Hornet had suffered irreparable damage in the process of eliminating nine Level 8 Corrosion Entities—but in terms of exchange rate, it was not a bad strategy.
If I hadn’t employed that insane tactic of firing the mana reactor like a missile, the Hive Hornet itself would have remained safely aloft, but the assault troops deployed to the ground would have been annihilated.
Having grasped the general state of Atlas and the situation facing the Hive Hornet, Sung-jun immediately began preparing for combat.
The last Level 8 Corrosion Entity, having sensed that Atlas had awakened, was rushing toward me after forcefully shoving back Barden and Karcerion, who had been charging at it.
Seeing this, I gripped the tattered, massive mana cannon mounted on my left arm with my right hand and tore it away by force.

—Crack-crack-crack! Crunch! Bang-clang!—

With a deafening roar of the enormous metal structure being wrenched free, the colossal mana cannon crashed to the ground.
As the ultra-massive Corrosion Entity closed the vast distance in an instant and swung its foreleg, Atlas’s body tilted sharply, barely evading the attack.
Like a boxer leaning back with a sway to slip an opponent’s punch.
Having moved Atlas to dodge the enemy’s strike, I quickly scanned the ground, then lifted the skeletal remains of a leg and brought it down hard against the floor.

—Boom-crack!—

In that instant, the exterior armor plates lying scattered on the ground shot skyward in a brilliant flash of light.
The fragments of armor that had launched into the air began adhering en masse to the bare skeletal frame of Atlas, following the motion of the right arm I had swung, as though possessed by sentience.

‘First things first.’

It wasn’t that the exterior armor pieces were flying back to their original positions and reassembling themselves because I had cast a spell—far from it.
The original form was so thoroughly shattered as to be unrecognizable, and the precision of the spell I had employed was not refined enough to match Barden’s unique authority.
Instead, the magic I used was a spell that ‘adequately’ affixed the haphazardly broken armor fragments to the exoskeleton and fixed them in place.
Like slipping a steel glove made from scrap metal over one’s hand—emergency repairs designed to maximize ‘striking power’ by abandoning elegance and precision.
As a result, armor that had originally wrapped around the calf was now stuck to the knuckle section of the glove, and armor that had covered the shoulder was clinging to the abdomen, creating a chaotic appearance—but one thing was certain.
At least if that massive fist struck now, even a Level 8 Corrosion Entity would struggle to maintain its integrity.
Thus, Atlas—stripped of its original ornate form and now clad in brutally thick steel armor—was reborn not as a steel knight, but rather as a boxer forged from scrap metal.

“I’ll crush you.”

The colossal glove, layered hundreds of times with mana armor that boasted tremendous defensive power even in a single layer, collided in mid-air.
At the same moment, the small armor fragments that had been forcibly adhered by mana scattered in all directions like fireworks between the massive glove and its target.

“Screeeeeech!!”

“If you’ve come to Earth, learn to speak Earth’s language, you filthy insect!”

Perhaps sensing the current scrap-metal form as an even greater threat than its previous ornate appearance, the colossal Corrosion Entity before Atlas launched its assault, sweeping its massive foreleg in a devastating arc.
Sung-jun responded by slowly swinging the enormous mass of steel attached to his left arm, meeting the creature’s attack head-on.
A titanic wrecking ball—its entire surface composed of armor plating stripped from the main body and concentrated solely at the fist.
Hundreds of times heavier than the ponderous iron sphere suspended from a crane’s cable to demolish towering buildings, this mass of living tissue crashed against the colossal Corrosion Entity’s foreleg with devastating force.

-CRASH!!!-

Though dozens of layers of composite armor shattered like grenade shrapnel in the thunderous explosion, Atlas’s steel gauntlet remained relatively intact.
Conversely, the Level 8 Corrosion Entity’s foreleg—forced to absorb both the velocity of its own swing and the velocity of Atlas’s counterattack—bent at a grotesque angle with the sickening crack of breaking bone.
With a single exchange making it abundantly clear which weapon possessed superior durability, Sung-jun immediately swung the steel gauntlet on his opposite hand, delivering a powerful uppercut to the Level 8 Corrosion Entity’s jaw.

-CRACK!-

“SCREEEECH!!”

The description “one-sided beating” fit perfectly—the sixty-meter steel boxer unleashed a relentless barrage of slow but devastatingly powerful strikes, pummeling its opponent mercilessly.
Watching from a distance, Karcerion muttered in a bewildered voice.

“If my memory serves, my lord was certainly a Mage… Is that really him?”

Barden, who had been buried deep underground by the Level 8 Corrosion Entity’s previous attack, brushed the dirt from his body and replied.

“No, that’s magic.”

Hearing Barden’s matter-of-fact response, Karcerion turned to him with an incredulous expression.
Then he turned his gaze back toward Atlas, who was pounding the enormous creature with his fists, and spoke.

“That’s magic?”

“The massive gauntlet itself is magic. Rather than reshaping and fixing the material’s form, he roughly crumpled it to fit, then fixed it with magic. In other words, the steel is just the material—he’s forcibly holding it together with mana as an adhesive.”

Barden gazed at the scrap-metal boxer Sung-jun had created, his expression weary.
He couldn’t even fathom how much real-time computation would be required to maintain and hold tens of thousands of coordinates of those heavy mana-infused armor fragments in place simultaneously.

‘I wake up and he’s become a monster. If we fought now, I’d be crushed without a trace.’

The battles Sung-jun had fought against the Yejigwi in China, the Dungeon Master in Japan, and Barden in the United States had left his mana circuits tangled and complex. Now, after meticulously reorganizing them, his current state possessed more than enough computational capacity to handle real-time calculations.
While reorganizing, he had consolidated most of the overlapping magical functions to create free space, converted unused spells into standby mode, and arranged everything as cleanly as a defragmented hard drive.
As a result, Sung-jun had been reborn as a Monster who surpassed even his Teacher in magical execution speed and computational ability, capable of freely manipulating mana with virtually zero delay time.
He could simultaneously fix hundreds of thousands of heavy mana-infused gauntlets in glove form within space while driving dozens of Void Spear attacks into the enemy’s back.
Now fully acclimated to combat, Sung-jun unleashed devastatingly powerful attacks in rapid succession, leaving his opponent gasping for breath, while simultaneously deploying long-range offensive spells.

—Boom! Crack! Boom-boom-boom! Crack!—

As the colossal steel gauntlets pulverized living creatures into minced flesh and hypersonic torrents of superheated steel columns burrowed through bodies with deafening roars, the small and medium-sized Corrosion Entities swarming around Atlas didn’t dare even consider approaching it.
Every time the steel colossus, weighing over twenty thousand tons, took a boxer’s step, the resulting mana shockwaves rippled outward in all directions, obliterating everything that ventured near.
As if that weren’t enough, Sung-jun cast flame-attribute spells specialized in area attacks in parallel, cleanly vaporizing any enemies attempting to approach the Hive Hornet while bypassing Atlas.
It was overwhelming combat power so absolute that the sacrifices of his comrades who had died protecting Sung-jun felt anything but wasted.

“That’s absolutely ridiculous. Isn’t he stronger in this steel boxer form than his original state?”

“Probably. If he’d fought in that state from the beginning, he could have handled ten of those massive insect creatures simultaneously by himself. However, that doesn’t mean your sacrifice and that of your comrades was meaningless. After all, the reason he was able to recover to this state in the first place was because you all bought him the necessary time.”

Barden’s words were truth.
Had the Hive Hornet not pushed itself to eliminate nine Level 8 Corrosion Entities beforehand, and had Karcerion and Barden not desperately pinned down the remaining one’s legs, Atlas’s core would have been destroyed before Sung-jun even awakened.

“So what he’s doing now—openly pummeling that insect creature—is also for your benefit.”

“For our benefit, sir?”

“Exactly as it sounds. He’s giving you all a satisfying show.”

In that instant, both of Atlas’s fists rose simultaneously from left and right, converging toward the center.
Between them, the massive head of the Level 8 Corrosion Entity—half its face already pulverized—cascaded torrents of green and crimson bodily fluids.

—SPLOOOOOSH!—

Like a water balloon filled with paint bursting, the Level 8 Corrosion Entity’s head vanished without a trace, and the forty-meter-tall insectoid monster’s body began collapsing slowly to the ground.
Simultaneously, the countless remaining Corrosion Entities still writhing in agony shrieked and began fleeing like a receding tide.

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This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
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