The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 100

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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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100
Chapter 100. The Crossing of Paths
***
Clack, clack.
The screech of the train wheels grinding against the rails at measured intervals scraped against my eardrums.
Vibrations from the worn chassis traveled up through the seat, setting my lower spine trembling with a dull, persistent hum. The air in the first-class cabin hung heavy and stale.
In the wake of Lee Ji-su’s thunderous rebuke, the space felt starved of oxygen—a near vacuum.
Not a single member of Invictus dared part their lips.
Those who had held their heads high with arrogance only moments before now sat as if dead, their eyes fixed on the carpet pattern beneath them, terrified that even their breathing might be audible to others.
Fear bore down on their shoulders like a plague, and I watched the outside world from the center of this strange, suffocating silence.
Beyond the window, the ashen landscape of dawn rushed past in reverse. Pale blue morning light swept the mist from the earth, gradually unveiling the world’s contours.
I swallowed a short breath of resignation inwardly.
This was my first encounter since the Regression with an old comrade from Blade.
There was no word adequate to describe this intricate, grotesquely twisted tangle of fate.
The Lee Ji-su in my memory existed always amid the reek of blood and the roar of battle; but the woman now sitting across from me radiated a vivid, strange aliveness—she still knew nothing of the horrific future waiting for her.
It would have been better to have stood in that reeking standard-class corridor and left, or waited on some shabby bench near the station for my Core’s Mana to recover before summoning Ragus and flying away.
For the comfort of a decent seat and the cool breath of air conditioning, the price was the woman across from me—her incessant glances, her fidgeting fingers, her constant scrutiny of my mood—had grown unbearably exhausting.
Each time her gaze landed on my cheek and neck, a faint chill ran through me.
“Um, excuse me?”
Lee Ji-su swallowed dryly, then opened her mouth with care. Her voice shattered the quiet, resonating through the cabin.
“Yes.”
My answer was dry—a mechanical affirmation stripped of all emotional color.
“I’m really sorry about before. The guys can be so rough, and I should’ve kept better control over them.”
“It’s fine. Don’t worry about it.”
I cut the sentence short, a clear signal that I had no interest in continuing. I turned my gaze back to the window.
But Lee Ji-su didn’t withdraw her leaning frame. She suppressed a small throat-clearing sound and remained angled toward me.
Her eyes held a mixture of curiosity, guilt, and something else—a nameless familiarity.
My gaze caught on the massive rectangular equipment box wedged between her legs. Its proportions were far too long and bulky to be a sword case or bow case.
The surface of the reinforced plastic and alloy box bore countless fine scratches—the scars of past battles.
If my past memory served, that heavy case contained a thick Long Spear disassembled into three or four sections.
When joined, it stretched well beyond two meters—a steel instrument of death, designed for slaughter and nothing else.
‘Lee Ji-su.’
In the world of the past, she was a member of Blade, a Spear Artist wielding overwhelming power second only to Kang Tae-yoon.
Each time she swung her spear, the air itself seemed to cry out; monsters’ corpses piled like leaves in autumn wind.
One Man Against Thousand.
Standing alone at the front line, her back was itself a towering fortress.
Yet during the solo expedition to the massive Gate, she had defended a crumbling line until the very end, falling in brutal fashion.
When the Interdimensional Realm’s lord swung a great sword through her waist, she didn’t even manage a scream.
The image of her final form—a severed corpse, halved and bloody—rose from the recesses of my memory like smoke.
***
The chain of memory did not stop. One gray fragment from ten years ago pierced my chest like a cold blade.
In the memorial photograph, Lee Ji-su smiled brightly—as if death held no relevance to her—her expression pristine and serene.
But the funeral hall, with its wake laid out, held only the acrid reek of flowers and a silence heavy as lead.
The heavy footsteps of mourners fell across white chrysanthemum petals.
Kang Tae-yoon, the captain and her lover, never showed his face from the first day of the funeral through the sending-off.
The guild members raged; the world called him a cowardly hero and pointed in accusation.
I found him outside the funeral hall, in a dimly lit smoking area behind the Hospital, where rain poured down.
He stood without an umbrella, a wet cigarette between his lips, staring into empty space.
Rain fell from the sky, ran through his hair, and dripped from the edge of his jaw.
His face was hollow—so void of sorrow or agitation that it seemed deformed by its own emptiness.
His eyes were drained of warmth; only a desolate void lingered there.
“You!”
I stepped forward, seized him by his wet shirt collar, and slammed him hard against the wall. The damp fabric slipped through my fingers, but I pressed down with all my strength.
“This isn’t right. She’s dead! And you’re just standing here smoking like it’s nothing?”
His body hit the concrete with a dull thud, but he didn’t resist. His arms hung limp at his sides.
The cigarette fell from his lips into a puddle on the ground and went out with a soft hiss.
“…You’re right.”
The voice that escaped his lips was even drier and colder than the rain pouring around us—the sound of a hollow shell from which the soul had fled.
“What the hell are you saying?”
“Do-jin.”
My brother stared at my face with unfocused eyes. Like a mirror reflecting my fury, my contorted face shimmered in his pupils.
“Ji-su died because I exist.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
I tightened my grip on his collar and shouted. Rain streamed into my mouth, tasting of metal and brine.
But my brother didn’t wrench free from my grasp. Instead, with rainwater trickling down his face, he spoke heavily, almost to himself.
It was less a confession than a verdict he was passing on himself.
“Don’t try to understand. Don’t forgive me either. I’m nothing but a fool.”
That was the end of it. After that day, Kang Tae-yoon never spoke the name Lee Ji-su aloud again.
He acted as though her very existence had been erased from his memory. But I saw it.
Whenever he was alone, he would stare blankly down at his own palms, clenching his fingers as if mourning something he’d failed to grasp. That devastated silhouette burned itself into me.
Years passed. In the waning days of the previous life, as everything crumbled and collapsed—the sky fractured, the earth split asunder, and the gods of the Interdimensional Realm descended like a plague of locusts.
On that day, when my brother shoved the Regression Stone into me and died, I finally understood the meaning of that bizarre sentence he’d uttered in the rain.
‘Do-jin… I’ve failed. I’ll fail again this time too.’
***
“Excuse me, I hope you don’t mind, but could I ask you something?”
Lee Ji-su’s voice dragged my consciousness—floundering in the swamp of fragmented memory—roughly back into the present. Her face reflected in the car window was alive.
Vivid color flushed her cheeks, and her eyes gleamed with clarity.
“Yes.”
“Are you… Hunter Kim Do-jin? The one from the Ability Management Team in City G? The rumored monster newcomer?”
My breath caught in an off-beat rhythm, subtle but unmistakable.
My heartbeat lurched erratically, yet my facial muscles remained as taut and controlled as always. My pupils dilated fractionally before contracting again.
Her dark eyes, fixed intently on my face, locked with mine.
It made sense that she would know me.
Since becoming a Hunter, I’d been mentioned in the news several times. My face and profile had become an open secret among information-savvy Hunters.
‘Ji-su.’
I almost said it. The familiar honorific rose to the tip of my tongue, but I choked it back at the last moment.
In that instant, she—who had once pounded my back covered in blood on a past battlefield, crying ‘Do-jin, let’s survive and get out of here’—was now speaking my name across ten years of time.
The layers of time collapsed in on themselves. Reality and memory collided, and my skull rang with a discordant chime.
“…Yes. That’s correct.”
I carefully relaxed the tension in my jaw before answering. My voice remained steady, though a subtle heat began radiating from my fingertips.
“That’s it, isn’t it! Unbelievable, you’re really him!”
The moment I confirmed her suspicion, Lee Ji-su clapped her hands once and leaned her upper body sharply toward me.
The cautious demeanor from moments before dissipated like mist, and the volume of her voice climbed several decibels.
A clean soap scent mixed with the faint smell of gunpowder drifted from her.
“I’ve seen you in videos a few times. The hat had me second-guessing, but… you look completely different in person than in photos. Oh! I mean you look much better in real life, don’t get me wrong! It’s like seeing a celebrity.”
“Ah. Yes.”
“You really did start your own solo guild, right? The name was… Blade. Yes, Blade. It’s the kind of name that just sticks with you.”
At the mention of the guild’s name from her lips, I gently bit the inside of my mouth.
The guild that Kang Tae-yoon had founded in the past, and to which Lee Ji-su standing before me had devoted her entire life as vanguard.
Watching an alternate version of her casually mention that name as if it were some curious proper noun she’d just discovered.
That name—which I had chosen to honor the will of the previous world—was returning to me through her mouth.
“The Red Blood Alliance bastards really were at that Colosseum, you know. When I saw the news later, I got chills. How did you even come up with that operation?”
“My superior is extremely capable.”
“Right, an organization needs a sharp leader. Oh! And the Mana Measurement Device—you all developed that directly, right? The collaboration with Taesung Energy?”
“Yes.”
Even my terse, clipped replies didn’t dampen her spirits. Her energy threatened to drown out even the rumble of the train’s engine.
“That’s insane. Why didn’t we think of that? The idea of pre-measuring Mana and responding efficiently… it’s really brilliant. There’s a rumor it’ll be released to the public—is that true?”
“Nothing concrete has been decided yet. There are security concerns.”
“Aw… I see. That’s a shame. If we could hand one to each of our guild members, it’d be perfect. We’ve got more than a few idiots who screw up because they can’t calculate their remaining Mana.”
Lee Ji-su propped her chin on her hand and pouted her lips. When light from the window illuminated her profile, a small scar on the back of her neck became visible between the strands of her short hair.
It was in a different location from the scar the Ji-su of the past had carried. This world’s version of her bore the marks of a life lived just as fiercely.
She talked a great deal. Her voice was loud and brash, and despite the carnage of just moments before in the predawn hours, it was almost jarringly bright.
The reckless, bull-headed spirit that paid no heed to my dry replies and barreled forward with her own momentum.
She was the Lee Ji-su I had known all those years ago.
Though she wore the exterior of a fierce warrior, beneath it she was warm-hearted and talkative—like a neighborhood older sister. That image overlapped with the woman before me now.
***
A crushing fatigue pressed down on me. The area around my temples throbbed with a sharp, electric pain, but I didn’t interrupt her torrent of words.
Or perhaps I didn’t want to. It was a voice I’d never thought I’d hear again.
I didn’t need to fish for information or ask pointed questions. Lee Ji-su sat across from me and poured out her guild’s circumstances and her own struggles without prompting.
It was like a pressure valve for something she couldn’t bear to contain any longer.
From her relentless conversation, I gathered fragments of information.
Invictus in this timeline had drifted from the worthless organization I’d once known, but only by the slimmest margin.
They had been greedy creatures who wouldn’t spare a glance at raids that turned no profit or civilian rescues.
But ever since Lee Ji-su took the position of vice-captain, the atmosphere had shifted in subtle ways.
Invictus’s flag had begun appearing in operations against C-rank Gates and monster-infested civilian zones—places that yielded no profit whatsoever.
“Hunters are supposed to save people, right? That’s why we awakened, isn’t it? But our captain is just merciless. Like a walking calculator. Every single time, I have to twist his arm just to get him to agree.”
She twisted the leather equipment strap fastened around her waist back and forth between her fingers, then released it.
Her fingertips bore the hard calluses that come from gripping a Long Spear for years on end.
“This expedition to Paju too—the guild wouldn’t fund it because the Gate was low-rank, so I had to give up my entire commission for this quarter just to convince the team members to come down. Seriously, is this any way to treat a vice-captain? I’m completely broke now.”
“I see.”
“Right? You understand, don’t you? If we hadn’t cleared this today, it would’ve been a real disaster. There’s an elementary school and a middle school right next to the Gate. If monsters had poured out during morning rush… Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl.”
Lee Ji-su released the strap she’d been twisting and folded her hands on her lap.
The lighthearted chatter that had filled her face moments before gave way to a shadow—the complex, heavy burden of thought peculiar to her age.
She leaned back deeply into her seat and let out a long sigh.
“But here’s the thing, Hunter.”
……
“Because I keep pushing operations that don’t match the guild’s revenue, the team members below have plenty of complaints. Honestly, it doesn’t feel like they’re following me—more like they’re being dragged along.”
She leaned forward slightly and lowered her voice, glancing around cautiously. It was the look of someone checking on team members who were feigning sleep.
“That Seong-min I scolded earlier—you know, that big hairless guy? He’s a good person by nature, but he’s been getting irritable lately.”
Lee Ji-su touched her head with her index finger and mouthed words so softly they were barely a whisper.
“Invictus runs entirely on the logic of power. The weak get devoured, the strong take what they want. But I keep pushing my team to risk their lives for work that pays nothing. I’m forcing them down with my strength, but it’s like carrying a time bomb in my chest—one that could go off any moment. Do you know that feeling? Like your breath keeps catching, and every night you’re afraid of tomorrow coming?”
……
“I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing here. Should I just be like my captain and turn a blind eye, close my ears, and earn money? I wish someone would tell me what the right answer is.”
Invictus—that massive wheel turning on the logic of capital and violence.
And she, wedged between its gears, was singlemindedly forcing the conviction of ‘human life’ into those grinding teeth.
She was forcing a moral leash onto a pack of greedy strays and compelling them to play at being knights.
If not for the overwhelming force of her Spear Arts, she would have been torn to shreds by those teeth long ago. It was a perilous path she walked.
She was performing a precarious tightrope walk at the edge of a cliff.
The futility of trying to break stone with an egg pressed heavy upon her slender shoulders.
The dawn light through the window laid bare the exhaustion gathering at the corners of her eyes.
I did not answer.
Clumsy reassurance or cheap sympathy would do nothing for the terrible weight of the life she carried. It would only poison her further.
I had learned this deep in my bones through countless deaths in the past, and through my own ruin.
Advice can break the will of those who hear it, and false hope can destroy someone more cruelly than despair itself.
Whirrr—
With the mechanical announcement, the train’s speed began to slow. The screech of brakes vibrated through the floor of the cabin.
The view beyond the window slid toward the platform. Gray concrete pillars and fluorescent lights passed one by one.
The Invictus team members had several more stops before their destination, but I needed to get off here.
From this point, the path diverged toward my battlefield.
I stood and tightened the Black Iron Strap across my back. Fine Mana generated from the Core flowed through my entire body, releasing the tension from my muscles.
“Oh, you’re getting off?”
Lee Ji-su startled and lifted her head.
“Yes. It was a pleasure.”
“Me too! Wow, time flew by. If we cross paths at a Gate site later, please pretend you know me. I’ll buy you a coffee, Hunter Kim Do-jin!”
She returned to her usual spirited demeanor, smiling brightly and waving her hand. Behind that smile, the weariness she carried glowed transparent in my eyes.
“If such an opportunity arises.”
“It will! We’re hunters—we’re destined to meet on the battlefield eventually, aren’t we?”
I left a brief response and moved toward the corridor.
I stood before the automatic door, my hand reaching for the open button.
With a soft hiss, the door began to slide open, and the cold morning air of the platform rushed back in. That chill made my steps falter.
I stopped and turned my head. I looked at Lee Ji-su sitting in her seat, watching me—the living Lee Ji-su of this timeline.
The words I had never managed to speak to her portrait at the funeral, rain pouring down, before the Regression.
The sincerest truth that Kang Tae-yoon, consumed by guilt and dying, had so desperately wanted to tell her.
I looked directly into her eyes. I pushed out the clearest voice I could muster from my lips.
“Hunter Lee Ji-su.”
“Yes? Yes? Did you forget something?”
She half-rose from her seat, puzzled, her eyes rounding in confusion.
“You’re doing well. You are doing well.”
Her lips moved as if to question, but I did not wait for her response or reaction.
I stepped out through the open automatic door.
The friction of the door closing behind him blended into the platform’s din.

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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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