The Archmage’s Destruction Strategy - Chapter 31

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

The guard watching the casino entrance was openly displaying that he was an Awakened by shaking an ornament with three beads attached to his waist.

However, seeing the beads attached to the guard’s waist, Hyeon-jo smiled and said to Sung-jun.

“That’s fake.”

“Fake?”

“It’s a common thing. They search corpses of Awakened to get their insignias and wear them while pretending to be Awakened. Of course, if you’re an Awakened from the same Tianwu Guan, you can roughly guess the opponent’s level just by looking, but ordinary people wouldn’t risk their lives on such a gamble.”

“Well, still, if he’s working as a guard in a place like this, it means he has decent combat ability. Let’s go for now.”

When Sung-jun, having finished his conversation with Hyeon-jo, stood before the guard, the guard looked over Sung-jun’s group with interested eyes.

As if trying to confirm whether the opponent was a customer or a hyena prowling around looking for something to eat.

Then, without even greeting them, he suddenly held out his palm in front of Sung-jun.

“Stakes?”

“Stakes?”

“If you’re going to gamble, you need to bring something worth betting. Looking at your face, you seem new here. Are you Korean?”

“That’s right.”

“You need to present stakes to enter here. It’s like a kind of deposit. If you steal or cheat inside, the casino takes whatever you put up as collateral. If you’re lucky enough to win money, you get your stakes back when you leave.”

“Since you specifically mentioned objects, I assume you don’t accept money?”

“You understand well. Right now, nobody values money. So bring something valuable. Food, decent weapons. Or… those girls next to you wouldn’t be bad either.”

The last bottle of liquor had gone into Hyeon-jo’s stomach, and the cigarettes that were useful as currency substitutes had been paid as boat fare to cross the Yalu River, so Sung-jun had no valuable items except for some emergency rations.

After pondering for a moment, Sung-jun asked the guard who was looking at him with a mocking expression.

“Do you perhaps accept explosives like grenades?”

“Weapons? Weapons are always welcome, but grenades would be even better. Do you really have grenades?”

“Please wait a moment.”

Sung-jun stepped back and began looking around for something.

Then he picked up a fist-sized stone and held it out to the guard.

“Here, a grenade.”

“Are you joking right now?”

“I’d like to show you it actually exploding, but if an explosion happens outside the door, the customers inside might get scared. Besides, grenades are single-use, so once you use them, they lose their value, right? So let’s skip the verification process.”

Hearing Sung-jun’s words, the guard burst into loud laughter as if he was hearing all kinds of ridiculous nonsense.

Then he pointed at the grenade Sung-jun held out and said.

“I don’t mind, so show me that stone exploding like a grenade. If that rock really explodes, I’ll take responsibility for the stakes myself.”

“You seem to be just a guard, so what should I trust to carelessly detonate this precious grenade?”

“Hahaha… You’re really crazy. Fine. Let’s do this. Do you see this wristwatch? The design is a bit rough, but it’s an item with quite a bit of gold in it. If that stone explodes, I’ll give you my watch. You can get quite a few chips if you put that up as deposit.”

When Sung-jun nodded, judging the guard’s proposal to be reasonable, the man added a condition.

“But if that stone doesn’t explode, the two girls behind you will have to stay here.”

When Sung-jun looked back at Seoa, Seoa nodded.

Since the mage Sung-jun must have cast some spell on the stone he was holding anyway.

Then Sung-jun smiled and threw the stone he was holding toward an empty field where no one was around.

-BOOOOOOM!!!-

A powerful explosion, about three times that of a regular grenade, shook the space, and numerous armed security guards poured out from inside.

Then the security guard barely managed to control the situation and approached Sung-jun with a frightened expression.

“Are you an Awakened?”

“At least I’m not crazy.”

To prevent the guard who had lost a weapon that could have been stakes due to his arbitrary judgment from getting into trouble, and to secure more stakes, Sung-jun cast magic on a total of 10 stones and handed them to the security guard.

To avoid confusion with ordinary stones, he even deliberately carved glowing patterns on their surfaces.

Having entered the casino this way, Sung-jun immediately cast Coin of Fate and jumped into the gambling tables.

“Hit.”

“Stand.”

“Split.”

The gambling game Sung-jun chose to accumulate ‘misfortune’ was blackjack.

A simple game with easy rules, where players just need to make the right choices.

However, that simplicity was providing optimal conditions for using the Coin of Fate.

‘Misfortune isn’t accumulating as quickly as I thought.’

Although various items from caviar cans to medicine were piled up like a mountain beside Sung-jun, who had already won dozens of consecutive games, his misfortune was accumulating at a very slow pace.

This was because the items Sung-jun had won through gambling weren’t particularly beneficial to him in the first place.

However, unlike Sung-jun’s situation, the management couldn’t stand watching Sung-jun’s consecutive victories and immediately came to pressure him.

“It would have been better to know when to stop.”

A heavy hand landed on Sung-jun’s shoulder. When he turned around, two fierce-looking Awakened were looking down at him. The surrounding noise stopped as if it were a lie.

“Our boss would like to see you. Come along quietly.”

Their voices contained blatant threats that would not tolerate refusal.

Sung-jun stood up from his seat without regret.

After signaling to Hyeon-jo and Seoa with his eyes that everything was fine, he followed the shoulders toward the tightly closed office door in the corner of the casino.

The inside of the office was thick with cigarette smoke. On the luxury leather sofa placed in the center of the room sat a man with snake-like eyes.

Sung-jun realized through the atmosphere inside the room that the man was the boss of this casino.

As soon as he saw Sung-jun, he smiled warmly as if meeting an old friend. But his eyes weren’t smiling at all.

“You’re the Awakened friend who brought those exploding stones as stakes, right? Sit, sit.”

The boss gestured with his chin toward the worn chair across from him.

When Sung-jun sat down, the boss picked up a stone from the table and turned it around this way and that.

“Do you know? Using awakening abilities at the gambling table is against the rules.”

The man who said that carefully placed the stone back on the table and said.

“The problem isn’t the rule itself, but why such a rule was made. Do you think you’re the first person to come here and try to pull tricks?”

“You seem to be speaking as if you’re certain I won at blackjack using awakening abilities.”

“If that’s not it, then it can’t be explained. If it’s not awakening abilities, then it means you’re using card counting, which is blackjack’s only weakness. Either way, it’s a rule violation.”

“Sorry, but I’m just a gambler having a lucky day today.”

When Sung-jun answered cheekily, the boss suddenly burst into loud laughter.

“Luck? Hahaha! Luck! Yeah, lucky. But you know what, friend. In this business, luck is exactly three times. The first game, God helps you, the second game, I do well myself, and from the third game… it means this floor accepts me. But you’ve now far exceeded those three times. This isn’t luck. This is… you declaring war on me right now. Isn’t that right?”

When he snapped his fingers, an Awakened who had been maintaining a dagger silently approached behind Sung-jun.

Even while feeling the sensation of a cold blade touching his nape, Sung-jun calmly opened his mouth.

“I told you. I’m just having good luck.”

Sung-jun didn’t lose his composure even with a knife at his throat. He even smiled.

“If you can’t believe it, let me prove it. Would you like to make a bet with me? Something very fair, with no room for skill to interfere.”

Sung-jun took out a coin from his pocket and rolled it onto the table.

“Coin flipping. I’ll correctly guess heads or tails of a coin you throw yourself, ten times in a row.”

“Among Awakened, there are many people with good dynamic vision who can easily guess heads or tails just by watching a spinning coin, right?”

“I’ll guess without looking.”

The boss’s eyebrows twitched. Guessing heads or tails of a coin 10 times in a row without watching the coin and without throwing it himself. That was impossible even with tricks, it was the realm of gods.

“Huh. Look at this guy. Are you trying to play games with me right now? What are the stakes?”

“Didn’t you see the stones I gave you earlier? My awakening ability is to make things that explode like that. If I lose, I’ll stay here and make sure you never have to worry about grenades for the rest of your life.”

“…”

“Instead, if I win, the money I won becomes mine without any complaints. How about it? Isn’t this a business with nothing to lose for you, boss? Rather than having your establishment disrupted by one ‘lucky guy,’ wouldn’t it be cleaner to have it proven definitively?”

The boss stared at Sung-jun’s eyes as if trying to see through them for a moment. Where does that confidence come from? But as Sung-jun said, it was a gamble with nothing to lose for him.

He smiled coldly and picked up the coin.

“Good. I like that spirit. Let’s begin.”

The stakes riding on this bet were ‘life’ itself. That was the ultimate stake Sung-jun had finally found to explosively amplify his misfortune.

***

Meanwhile, at another table, Shirasaki Miyu was experiencing hell.

The game she had chosen was mahjong.

But her goal wasn’t victory.

Intentional defeat.

However, even ordinary defeat was, for her as a heavenly gamer, like denying her reason for existence, a humiliation worse than death.

Across from her sat a man with greasy hair.

From the moment he shuffled the tiles, he made unnecessarily loud noises, and every time he drew a tile, he leered at Shirasaki Miyu’s body with lecherous eyes.

The man had figured out that she was a beginner and a young girl with valuable ‘goods,’ so he was deliberately exposing obvious weaknesses and provoking Shirasaki Miyu.

“Ron.”

The man grinned lecherously as he laid down his tiles. He showed his hand and even added an explanation.

“Are you colorblind? Even a beginner should know that I haven’t been discarding any green tiles. But you threw that away? I think you should go to a mahjong academy first instead of a casino.”

His voice was exaggerated as if for everyone around to hear, and it was filled with blatant mockery.

Shirasaki Miyu bit her lip.

Even without the Fortune Coin’s guidance, she already knew that she shouldn’t have discarded that tile.

But since her goal was defeat, not victory, she continued to ignore the coin’s guidance and discarded the most dangerous tiles.

Discarding obvious trap tiles and cutting off the only path to completing her own hand.

Her fingers knew the path to perfect victory, but her brain was forcibly commanding her to turn away from that path.

For someone with such strong competitive instincts, the stress caused by this contradiction was beyond imagination.

“Another ron. Oh my, I’m so sorry.”

The man now began openly mocking her. He was getting more pleasure from breaking this young girl’s pride than from winning.

“Miss, are you losing on purpose? Even so, if you make it this obvious, it’s no fun. Try losing more convincingly. For example, that tile you just discarded shouldn’t have been thrown away, but rather…”

As he compared the tile she had just discarded with his own hand and reviewed the game as if teaching a child, snickering laughter erupted from the surroundings.

Shirasaki Miyu’s face grew cold and rigid.

‘Who does he think he’s teaching, when he’s such a scrub himself!’

Finally, when all the point sticks in front of her had disappeared, the man blew cigarette smoke into Shirasaki Miyu’s face and delivered the final blow.

“Tsk tsk, caught in the end. Miss, having no talent isn’t a sin. But getting involved in such a rough game when you have no talent is sinful. The food you lost today could have been someone’s lifeline. To throw it away like this, don’t you think you’ll be punished?”

-Snap-

At that moment, Shirasaki Miyu’s last thread of reason snapped upon hearing those words.

She was a genius gamer.

Even without something like the Fortune Coin, she could see right through what this scrub among scrubs was thinking next and what tiles he was waiting for, as clearly as reading his palm.

A man who was getting cocky and mocking an opponent far superior to him, even though she was deliberately losing.

Listening to the man’s mockery, she felt like a master being lectured by a newbie.

And at that moment, as she was about to get up while suppressing her anger, she spotted a 1000-point stick that had fallen under her chair.

A small stick that seemed to have fallen out of the container when she had slammed the mahjong table in anger earlier.

It was the last bit of pride she could use.

She slowly sat back down. Then she smiled coldly.

“I thought I was broke, but there’s one 1000-point stick left. Let’s play another round.”

Saying this, she canceled the Fortune Coin spell and for the first time since sitting at the table, began making choices based on her own instincts rather than choices meant to go against the spell.

And at that moment, the mahjong players at the table all began to feel the same sensation simultaneously.

The terrible sensation that they had pulled the whiskers of a sleeping dragon that they should never have touched.

“Pong.”

“Ron. 1000 points.”

“Ron. 3000 points.”

“That’s a ron.”

“Sorry, but that’s also a ron.”

She no longer relied on luck.

She predicted what tiles her opponents would discard and called them to make them her own.

Like a snake strangling its prey’s throat, slowly and surely dominating the game.

She didn’t allow a single direct hit while scoring all her points by directly hitting her opponents.

As if she could see right through her opponents’ hands.

As she completely cleaned out the point sticks of the man who had been mocking her, the atmosphere at the table was filled with shock.

“With skills like this… why on earth…?”

In the final round, the man asked with an expression close to tears.

Then Shirasaki Miyu swept up the last point sticks he handed over and answered in an ice-cold voice.

“I needed to have bad luck.”

The moment she stood up from her seat, tremendous cheers exploded from one corner of the casino.

It was because Sung-jun, who had successfully guessed heads or tails 10 times in his bet with the Boss, had started a new gamble near the ring inside the casino.

It was a high-stakes gamble where he was betting everything he had won so far.

“From now on, I’ll be recruiting opponents to fight me in that ring. No restrictions on participants. Awakened are welcome too. I’ll fight barehanded, and if you succeed in killing me, I’ll give you everything here.”

Where he pointed was a massive iron cage covered in blood and flesh, installed for use as a fighting arena.

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