The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 104

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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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104
Episode 104. A Chessboard for Four
***
“Close the door properly.”
In the center of the Maintenance Room on the 4th Floor of the Ability Management Team, a woman in a white sleeveless top and black leather jacket stood with her arms crossed, tilted at an irreverent angle.
It was Jung Se-hui, the youngest daughter of Taiseong Energy, who hadn’t shown her face for over a month.
The zipper of her jacket caught the light and gleamed faintly, and her lips curved in that trademark cold smile.
“Or what, you filming something? Why’d you take your clothes off—doing some kind of guy livestream?”
The provocation was naked, raw. I didn’t rise to it. It wasn’t worth expending emotional energy on bait this transparent.
I pulled the black round-neck shirt from where it hung on the wall.
The dampness still clinging to my back made the cotton cling uncomfortably to my muscles, but I didn’t hesitate—I pulled the shirt on anyway.
Running my fingers carelessly through my disheveled hair, I moved toward her.
My footsteps struck the floor with a dull, sharp crack.
As the distance between us narrowed, a strange perfume scent wove through the smell of oil that had been pricking my nostrils.
“If you’re going to cross a line, get out.”
Se-hui narrowed her eyes as if studying my mood, then let out a derisive snort and jutted her lip.
“Tch, you’ve got a totally poker face going on. Why don’t you close the door properly? What if someone comes in?”
“The door was locked.”
I tossed the towel across the back of a chair. The wet fabric hitting the leather seat made a damp, squelching noise that echoed through the maintenance room. I met her gaze directly.
“You’re the one who forces it open every single time.”
“Oh wow, I had no idea~”
She shrugged her shoulders with brazen innocence.
Instead of answering, I studied the steel door behind her. I caught my lips trying to curve upward and suppressed it by clenching my jaw. This wasn’t simple breaking and entering.
The Mana-locked latch on the double-lock mechanism—a security formula I’d designed myself. But that latch had disengaged without so much as a warning chime.
There was no trace of physical damage anywhere, and even the distinctive resonance that magical interference leaves behind had dissipated into the void.
She hadn’t picked the lock. She’d forced open the fact of the door being locked itself, unraveling it at the spatial seam—a power that transcended conventional barriers.
Unique Skill: Ariadne’s Thread.
It wasn’t merely a radar that tracked Mana traces. It unraveled barriers that the caster’s mind recognized as “labyrinths” or “obstacles,” as easily as untangling thread.
I was seeing the vicious true nature of her detection ability firsthand.
A barrier imbued with strong Mana signatures or complex ancient formulas would take time, but a mere modern security system like this was barely a threshold to her.
“I thought you were staying at the family estate.”
I walked to the window and drew up the blinds. Dust particles shifted, and the afternoon sun sliced through the slats in oblique rays that crossed the maintenance room.
Dust motes drifted lazily through the shafts of light.
“What? Who said that? I wasn’t planning to rot there for life.”
“So it’s a return, then.”
“Yeah. That’s what happened. But…”
Se-hui stepped forward without her arms crossed, moving toward me in a long stride. Her heels striking the floor sounded both brisk and threatening.
Perhaps it was the aftermath of having crawled out of the tiger’s den of her own volition—a certain peculiar composure clung heavily to her gait and shoulders.
She stopped mere inches from my face. In her upturned eyes, curiosity and defiance swirled together in a strange vortex.
“Why’d you suddenly switch to informal speech?”
“Seemed more natural.”
“Huh?”
Leaving her bewildered expression behind, I opened the refrigerator in the Break Room. The low hum of the fridge thrummed through my palm.
I pulled out a cold Carbonated Water bottle, and droplets beading on its surface stung my fingers with cold.
“I’m older anyway, aren’t I? If you don’t like it, just say so.”
“…No.”
She suddenly dropped her eyes to the floor and stammered. Her usual boldness vanished, and the way her fingertips fidgeted with her jacket sleeve felt strange and unfamiliar.
“What?”
“No! Just do it then! If it’s more natural!”
Se-hui let out a sharp cry, yanked off her jacket, and flopped onto the reception room sofa.
The leather sofa groaned as if in pain, creaking audibly.
“Fine, but don’t yell about it.”
“We haven’t seen each other in forever—would a nice welcome kill you?”
Her grumbling voice filled every corner of the maintenance room. I twisted the cap off the bottle. The sound of carbonation escaping—a sharp hiss—tore through the quiet air.
I studied her, rumpled as she was on the sofa. She remained constant. Truly, an inscrutable person.
Yet she had unmistakably changed. The depth in her gaze, the density of Mana enveloping her body—both had moved to a different trajectory than before.
A cool, edgy tension that only those who’ve walked the razor’s edge could possess lingered around her.
***
“So quite a lot must have happened, huh?”
“Seems so.”
Jung Se-hui drew a cushion into her arms and crossed her legs on the sofa. With each word she spoke, the silence of the past two months began to fill in.
The story was far from simple.
She swallowed a mouthful of carbonated water. The sharp, refreshing sting scratched down her throat, the cold seeping all the way to her stomach. Her mind felt clearer.
It had been five years since she’d walked through the front door of Taiseong Energy headquarters on her own two feet.
Five years. She’d left home at nineteen, drifting through the back alleys of G City—and the reasons were both unmistakable and brutal.
A biological father desperate to find her, and two half-brothers who’d sent assassins to claim her life, always watching for their chance.
Within the murky depths of a sprawling corporation where power and blood relations were grotesquely tangled, her survival had demanded something ruthless: complete identity cleansing.
She’d applied for the Hunter exam, received an F-Rank classification, and then met Kim Dae-han—a team leader who saw through her warped detection ability and grasped its potential.
Once he understood the situation, Kim Dae-han had hidden her perfectly within the administrative records of the Ability Management Team as a “ghost hunter.”
The surveillance net of the most dangerous government institution had paradoxically become her safest refuge.
“When they said they’d file a disciplinary hearing for unauthorized absence, you were terrified.”
“I’m not a high school student—did you really think I was nervous about attendance checks? I just can’t stand the nagging. Anyway, where’s Kim Dae-han? Haven’t seen him.”
“We’ve had plenty to handle in the meantime. The team leader’s away on a business trip.”
I set the carbonated water bottle down on the table. The clear sound of its base touching the surface cut through the conversation. I threw the real question at her.
“So how did you get your brothers to agree to this?”
It was the most critical question.
I thought back to the past, to the world before the Regression. After this point in time, Kim Dae-han would lose his life in the Donggureung Gate incident.
Once that sole shield vanished, the succession dispute at Taiseong Energy would spiral into catastrophe.
I don’t know what final fate befell Jung Se-hui in that previous world.
But the image remained sharp in my mind: Taiseong Energy descending into a black corporation that wielded Magic Stone Cartridges as weapons, driving the world toward extinction.
The devastation wrought by that colossal capital’s rampage gnawed at humanity far more cruelly than any monster’s claw.
She must have been torn apart and erased in that vortex as well.
“I handed over management rights.”
The answer that fell from her lips was unexpected.
“What?”
“It’s exactly what my brothers wanted most from me.”
Jung Se-hui rested her chin on the cushion and spoke with such casual indifference about surrendering the core power of Taiseong Energy.
Her gaze was fixed on the water droplets beading on the table—as if she’d locked away her entire past within those small spheres.
“I didn’t hate my father or my brothers. What I hated was that suffocating situation, that disgusting scenario where if I just vanished, the succession dispute would stop and everyone could coexist peacefully.”
“A pathological escape artist, then.”
“Yeah, guilty.”
I folded my arms and looked down at her.
“So you ran for five years.”
“I did. But I don’t regret it. Because of it, I got to see how filthy the real world actually works outside the greenhouse. And I met someone like you.”
I didn’t bother picking up the unnecessary subtext. What mattered to me wasn’t the exchange of emotion—it was the shift in circumstances.
“Then why go back? It can’t have been just because of Dekima.”
“Are you interrogating me?”
Jung Se-hui’s brow furrowed sharply as she looked up. Her keen eyes fixed on me.
“Offer a weary traveler something to drink before you start questioning them. I’m parched.”
I gently pushed the carbonated water bottle I’d left on the table toward her. Jung Se-hui picked it up and glanced around.
“Don’t you have a cup?”
“It’s right there.”
I gestured toward the shelf in the corner of the Break Room.
“Ugh, what a hassle.”
Without hesitation, Jung Se-hui brought the opening of the bottle I’d been drinking from straight to her lips, swallowing the remaining carbonated water in steady gulps. Her throat moved with a rhythmic pulse.
Through the transparent plastic, I could see the carbonated water and bubbles traveling down her throat. I watched in silence, organizing my thoughts quietly.
That bottle would need to go straight into medical waste, not recycling.
“Ahh.”
She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and gave a small laugh.
“You drink it too, huh? I have this all the time myself. Anyway, think about it—you think I just wandered in there, gave away my management rights with nothing but my bare word, and got thrown out?”
“So what’s the catch?”
“In exchange for signing the document giving up management rights to my brothers, I made sure to get something concrete and officially stamped.”
She shook the empty bottle. The remaining ice chips clinked inside the hollow plastic.
“Full authority over the Magic Stone Cartridge development division. And complete operational control of the Dekima business unit.”
My eyes narrowed by the slightest margin.
“There’s no way your brothers handed over those crown jewels willingly.”
Cartridge and measurement device operations—the lifeline that allows Taiseong Energy to monopolize and control the Hunter world’s energy. The future seat of power itself.
The title of chairman and board seats are nothing but empty shells.
Control over the technology that refines and distributes Magic Stones—that’s what grasps the real substance of power in this world.
Jung Se-hui left her two brothers to fight like dogs over a hollow throne while she herself slipped away with perfect control of the corporation’s heart and its deadliest weapon.
Whether this was instinctive perception or a meticulously calculated gambit, I couldn’t say—but the result was overwhelming.
“Of course. Dad loves me most, after all. Chairman Jung himself personally vouched for my credentials.”
Bold, absurd logic. Yet beneath that rebellious shell lay moves that were ruthlessly clear-headed and rational.
This version of Jung Se-hui hadn’t fled from tragedy—instead, she’d seized the most vital core of the corporation and forcibly bent Taiseong Energy’s trajectory to her will.
Freezing Magic Stone Cartridge prices. Mass-producing the Dekima to track Irregular Gates.
A hopeless future from the past was having its course corrected by the sheer force of this woman’s resolve.
I set my hand on the mouse and turned my attention to the monitor. The conversation had lasted longer than expected.
Time was precious, but Taiseong Energy was one of this world’s massive pillars—one we absolutely had to control to prevent the coming collapse.
If Jung Se-hui now held the steering wheel at its center, her movements deserved careful study.
“Fine.”
I moved the mouse pointer as I spoke. Blue light from the screen washed across my face.
“Then there’s no real reason for you to commute back here. You won’t have time to come to City Hall if you’re going to control the Cartridge division.”
“Why not?”
Jung Se-hui sprang up from the sofa and moved toward my desk. Her shadow stretched long across its surface.
“What?”
“I’m still a legitimate member of the Ability Management Team—and a guild member, on top of that.”
My fingers froze on the mouse. An unpleasant premonition ran down my spine.
“What are you talking about?”
Click.
I opened the Hunter Association’s guild management database tab, which had been sitting in the background. The loading bar spun; moments later, the guild information window activated.
[Guild Member Search: 4 Records]
The moment I saw that number, my jaw tightened. My brow furrowed deeply.
“What? Why are there four of them?”
Blade Guild. A name I’d set up as a strictly solo, one-person operation.
With no personnel to manage, there was no reason to even look at the database.
A nest where I handled everything alone—when had these unwelcome intruders slipped in?
I scrolled the mouse wheel roughly downward. The list flowed past.
[Guild Master: Kim Do-jin]
[Guild Member: Kim Dae-han]
[Guild Member: Charles Edward Blake]
[Guild Member: Jung Se-hui]
“See? There they are.”
Jung Se-hui leaned in close to the desk, bending at the waist to tap the monitor. The ends of her hair brushed against my shoulder, then fell away.
“Kim Dae-han.”
A heavy sigh escaped between my lips.
Before leaving for his provincial assignment, that cunning bureaucrat had touched the administrative network and covertly shoved his own name, Charles’s, and Jung Se-hui’s directly into my guild’s records below.
Was it an excuse to meet guild maintenance requirements, or a deliberate move to lock me completely within the organization’s frame? Either way, it was infuriating.
“This is finished.”
I shut the window roughly.
“I’m closing this guild, effective immediately.”
“Don’t do that—my License is bound here right now!”
“Be quiet. You’re part of this too.”
As I gripped the mouse and hunted for the guild withdrawal and closure menu, Jung Se-hui’s voice suddenly shifted. The playfulness drained from it.
“I actually came because I had something to tell you.”
“What is it? If you’re going to say something strange, get out now.”
I answered without taking my eyes from the screen. But she didn’t back down. Instead, she pressed both palms against my desk, leaning in.
“No, really! It’s not personal—it’s official. This is a formal agenda request from a guild member.”
The Jung Se-hui who’d been lounging moments ago was gone. She gripped the desk hard, her gaze meeting mine directly.
The seriousness in her eyes settled like a weight over the air in the maintenance room.
Silence stretched. In the stillness where even the machine noise had faded, she opened her mouth.
“Come to the Academy with me.”
The mouse in my hand went still.

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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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