The Archmage’s Destruction Strategy - Chapter 143

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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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#143. Sacrifice

Upon detecting the Level 9 Corrosion Entity that had begun moving from the center of Manhattan Island toward our forces, I immediately dispatched a mana phantom to confirm its position.
The spider-form Corrosion Entity advanced with tremendous strides, each of its eight colossal legs nearly the size of buildings, creating the impression of a fortress itself walking across the landscape.

‘That enormous face attached to its abdomen… it resembles something closer to a goblin than human.’

The creature possessed two heads.
A massive spider-like visage where the spider’s head should be, and a grotesque goblin-shaped face attached to its abdomen—both equipped with mouths and eyes, suggesting neither was merely decorative.
Realizing this, I immediately summoned a phantom near the General to inform him that the Corrosion Entity had begun moving.

“The Corrosion Entity has commenced movement. It’s heading directly toward this position.”
“Can we intercept its approach?”

My phantom paused briefly before shaking its head.
Even if the Hive Hornet expended all its mana-powered missiles—weapons capable of annihilating a Level 8 Corrosion Entity in a single strike—it remained questionable whether we could inflict even a scratch upon this creature.
The greatest obstacle was the maelstrom of mana enveloping its body.
Though invisible to the naked eye, my refined senses as a mage could perceive an intense storm of mana that completely isolated the creature’s form and the very reality it inhabited behind a dimensional barrier of sorts.

“I’ll need direct engagement to gather detailed intelligence, but I suspect even mobilizing every resource at our disposal would prove insufficient to defeat it. A troublesome adversary—perhaps even more so than Yejigwi or the Dungeon Master.”

Had I detected the mana maelstrom surrounding its body from the outset, I would have exercised greater caution before committing to an attack.
Yet the creature had cunningly concealed this ability, moving as though no such power existed, revealing its true nature only after I unleashed Meteor Strike.
Where Yejigwi possessed absolute future prescience to ‘evade’ all attacks, and the Dungeon Master warped reality’s very rules to counter magic, this Corrosion Entity that emerged in the United States had evolved by pushing mana resistance statistics to their absolute limits.
Elevated mana resistance alone wouldn’t pose a critical problem.
By attacking with the physical destructive force of materialized mana rather than mana damage itself, I could penetrate the creature’s magical defenses and inflict harm.
Yet the true issue lay in the creature’s physical durability—its body could withstand even the shockwave from a Meteor Strike that had fallen mere meters away.

‘Has it truly reached the pinnacle in both physical and magical defense?’

Of course, this didn’t mean I lacked options entirely.
My next card possessed the unique property of bypassing both physical and magical defenses, capable of striking directly at the creature’s very soul.
The problem was that preparing this next card required the same tremendous mana expenditure as the Meteor Strike I had just deployed.
After a moment of contemplation, I fixed the General with a grave expression and spoke.

“General.”
“Yes. Speak.”
“I need more time.”

The General understood.
He grasped the true meaning behind Sung-jun’s words—that he needed more time.

“Trust me and leave it to me.”

I forcibly swallowed the words that had risen to my throat: “Perhaps we should retreat for now?”
The Meteor Strike spell I had cast this time was a single-use incantation that could only be deployed once.
Because I had forced the casting of such a massive spell—one that should have required hundreds of Mages pooling their strength—the mana circuits I had pre-inscribed within Atlas were shattered beyond any possibility of regeneration.
Of course, I had known from the start that Meteor Strike could only be cast once, so I had designed the mana circuits for my next spell as a completely independent structure, meaning there was no problem with casting a new incantation.
The problem was that if we retreated now, the next time we would have to face an even larger enemy force without the support of Meteor Strike.
Ultimately, this moment—when enemy numbers were at their lowest—represented our best chance of victory.

‘He’s deliberating. He must have judged that retreating would actually disadvantage our forces.’

General MacFarlane decided this was the moment to finally say something he had wanted to tell Sung-jun for a long time.

“Sung-jun. Aren’t you perhaps misunderstanding something?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is our fight, not yours.”

This was a war in which Americans fought invaders who had invaded American territory to reclaim it for the American people.
Not a war in which a South Korean who had never set foot on American soil even once fought alone to save humanity.
General MacFarlane, not being American himself, was speaking of an important truth that Sung-jun could not comprehend.

“You’re right. They’ll die. Many will die. Not just here, but many soldiers died in Kansas City as well. But do you know what? I cannot speak for all the fallen soldiers, but I believe those soldiers gave their lives willingly, with hope in their hearts.”
“No one can face death with joy.”
“They can. If there is hope.”

On D-day, General MacFarlane had sent countless subordinates to their deaths, feeling only overwhelming despair.
Before enemies that guns and cannons could not harm, the world’s mightiest military force that the United States had cultivated proved utterly useless, and even the Awakened forces that could stand against them provided little help.
But what tormented General MacFarlane most was not the fact that he had to send his subordinates to their deaths knowing they could not protect civilians and would perish alongside them, nor was it the fact that no matter what desperate measures he took, he could not prevent the collapse of a city where hundreds of millions lived.
It was the fact that even if he and his subordinates threw away all their remaining lives, humanity’s extinction could not be averted.
A bleak future where any death would be meaningless had darkened the General’s heart.

“But now it’s different. If we can seize that terrible Monster by the ankles, I believe you will find a way.”

Of course, the General didn’t know the specifics of what card Sung-jun had prepared next.
He simply believed that a man like Ma Sungjun, having prepared for even this situation, must have something ready that would ultimately allow him to strike down the enemy with 100% certainty.

“Isn’t that right?”

When Sung-jun nodded silently, the General slapped both his cheeks hard.
Then he picked up the communication device in front of him and spoke.

“Listen up. From this moment forward, we buy time against the Level 9 Corrosion Entity. Our objective is to hold until Sung-jun’s next spell is complete. Resources to be deployed are unlimited. We throw everything we have at this moment—sink your teeth into the enemy’s ankles and don’t let go.”

The General’s orders weren’t directed only at the Pilots engaged in combat outside the Hive Hornet.
Without releasing the microphone from his grip, the General immediately issued his next command to the crew operating the Hive Hornet.

“The enemy’s level is 9. Borrowing Sung-jun’s terminology, it’s what we call an ‘Apocalypse-class’ Corrosion Entity. What we call Level 9, the Awakened of South Korea apparently call by that name. It’s a fitting designation. If we fail to bring that creature down here, it will surely annihilate every human remaining on this land. So even if we die in this place, don’t spare your lives. Whether we die fleeing or die fighting—at the very least, we must show that soldiers of the United States of America are not cowards.”
“Yes, sir!”
“Sung-jun. If you return too late, we might just bring down that spider bastard ourselves?”
“Then we begin combat with the Level 9 Corrosion Entity now. Its code name is ‘Abyss-Walker’. On my signal, fire missiles from the Hive Hornet’s mana reactor sequentially from number 1 through 8 at the target. Ignore the minor ones.”
“I’m going out as well. While facing that massive spider might be beyond me, I should at least be able to grab its legs and prevent its subordinates from reaching the Soldiers.”

Karcerion, mounted on his horse atop the deck, leaped down toward the surface while still in the saddle.
Then Argen beside him spoke with a smile.

“Well, as long as we buy time, that’s a win, my lord. You’re definitely prepared to bring that creature down, aren’t you?”
“With time, absolutely.”
“Then that’s settled. I’m a body that doesn’t die anyway. When it comes to enduring, I’m more confident than anyone.”

As Argen finished speaking and vanished from the deck like a gust of wind, Barden finally gripped his hammer.
Then he sighed and spoke toward Sung-jun.

“Strictly speaking, I’m an engineer, not a combat specialist…”
“If you don’t want to fight, don’t go.”
“Fine. Better to die fighting than to suffer. But I want to demand a clear improvement in treatment proportional to the merits I earn in this battle.”
“I’ll make sure of it. On the condition that you earn merits obvious enough for anyone to acknowledge.”
“That’s good enough for me.”

Barden tossed his hammer lightly into the air, caught the falling weapon, and leaped down from the deck.
Then Yeonse-a, Sung-jun’s disciple who had been in the control tower with the General, bit her lips tightly and approached him.

“I want to go too.”

Sung-jun’s brow furrowed slightly in that moment.
Under normal circumstances, it might have been different, but the battlefield where he stood was a chaotic maelstrom of unstable mana flow—courtesy of the mana storm spawned by the Meteor Strike’s aftermath, combined with the wavelengths that the Apocalypse-class Corrosion Entity, Abyss Walker, scattered throughout the vicinity, intense enough to make even ordinary Mages cough blood and collapse the instant they entered.
It was a battlefield so devastated that even Sung-jun, capable of single-handedly casting large-scale magic that would normally require thousands of casters, struggled to maintain his spellcasting.
The fact that Seoa, his disciple and now a Mage of considerable standing, would overlook such reality and insist on joining the battle irritated me.

“You’ve studied magic long enough to understand the battlefield’s condition. It’s impossible. Even if you cast from outside the affected range and hurl the spell inward, the moment it’s caught in the flow, the incantation itself will collapse.”
“I understand that, Teacher.”
“Then you’re saying you know it won’t help at all, yet you’ll throw yourself into the fight anyway, swept up by the moment?”
“No. It’s difficult to explain, but… for some reason, I have a feeling I could do it.”

Upon hearing Seoa’s words, I stared at her with my mouth agape.
Then I turned my gaze beyond the deck’s glass window to the maelstrom of mana visible only to Mages.

“Look at that.”

I spoke while turning back to Seoa, whose stern expression fixed upon the battlefield.

“You think you could do it?”

Remarkably, the emotion that bloomed in my heart was not anger, but admiration.
For someone like me who cast all magic through theory and calculation, the heart of that mana storm—changing far too rapidly to compute—was a terrifying space where I couldn’t muster the courage to cast magic even if I wanted to.
The very act of looking at it and thinking “Could I manage it?” was something wondrous for a Mage.
If anything, it was akin to gazing down into a volcanic crater with boiling lava and thinking, “Hmm, I could probably swim in there, couldn’t I?”

‘The ability to think such a thing means one of two things: either she’s too foolish to recognize the danger itself, or she possesses the ability to perceive a path through that chaos I cannot even analyze.’

My disciple Seoa was an entirely different type of Mage than I was.
Where I handled everything through theory and calculation, Seoa was a Mage who cast spells through her sense of manipulating mana.
Because of this, I couldn’t understand the sensations Seoa felt, and she couldn’t comprehend how I wielded magic.
Yet despite this mutual incomprehension, we held a unique trust in each other—a trust only possible between two people who don’t understand one another.
Seoa believed that her teacher Sung-jun could flawlessly cast any magic that existed in this world, while I believed that my disciple Seoa possessed a special talent to perceive something I could not see.
And now, I instinctively realized that Seoa’s unique talent—something I lacked—was finally blossoming, reaching the moment of its flowering.

“Seoa.”
“Yes, Teacher.”
“If any other Mage had spoken as you just did, I would have beaten them until they came to their senses. For a Mage to look upon that landscape and claim they might somehow manage it is proof of madness. But you’re not mad. And you’re no fool ignorant of what that storm means.”
“Yes. I understand.”
“Then I’ll trust you.”

Seoa gazed at me with eyes so brimming with emotion that tears seemed ready to spill forth at any moment.
Then she bowed deeply toward me in greeting.

“I will do my very best.”
“Even if you can cast spells, it will be difficult to cast ones potent enough to inflict meaningful damage on the enemy. So use these instead.”

My phantom withdrew ten crimson spheres, each the size of a fingernail, from the Subspace and handed them to Seoa.

“You would grasp their usage immediately. But to wield them properly, you must precisely locate and guide the flow of mana within that tempest. Actually, guidance is impossible. It’s a technique of finding that gossamer thread of connection to the enemy in a single instant and channeling magic through it. Let me be clear—I cannot do this. That is not how I cast magic. I doubt even my Teacher could perform such a feat.”

My phantom stroked Seoa’s head as I spoke.

“But I believe you can. Because you are not me, and you are not my Teacher.”

Feeling tears stream down her pale cheeks, Seoa nodded silently.

“Go now. Yeonse-a, Mage of the Eighth Circle. Go and show our enemies what the Demon King’s disciple can accomplish.”

It was the first moment Sung-jun had ever explicitly named Yeonse-a’s Circle—a designation he had never before given her.

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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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