The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 117

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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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117
Chapter 117. The Blind Spot of Regression
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Park Seo-hee.
She was my ex-girlfriend.
The moment her name brushed against my ear, sharpened fragments of old memories etched into my mind rose with jagged edges.
In the world before the flames of ruin consumed everything, and in this timeline where I now carve out a second life against the grain of Causality, that single fact alone held fast like fossilized stone.
In the ruthless Butterfly Effect of regression, much had changed.
Those who should have died lived on; fortresses that should have crumbled stood firm—yet amid this twisted Causality, I seemed bound by a tenacious chain that forced me to cross paths with her at some point in my mid-twenties, no matter what.
At least, I had believed that the way the knot unraveled was identical as well.
In the past world, she and I had met ordinarily on campus and drifted apart for thoroughly common reasons.
There had been no blood feud, no worn-out tragedy of betrayal. Reply messages came half a day late, evening plans were postponed behind research schedules. On the rare days we saw each other face-to-face, we found ourselves staring at each other’s laptop screens before parting ways.
She chased papers and results; I was obsessed with reaching higher peaks of Magic. It became easier to mask discontent behind talk of being busy, and so our frequency of contact dwindled from there.
We both knew the end was near. That didn’t make it painless when the actual words came.
Park Seo-hee was the one who ended it. I received that message on Christmas and spent it lined up on the floor of my studio apartment with Soju bottles.
After my regression, I thought that ending would remain unchanged.
A relationship already over. A past I had no desire to live through twice. So the moment I opened my eyes in this timeline, I blocked her Instagram, and with that, I considered my relationship with Park Seo-hee settled once more.
The only unchanged fact was that she—whether before or after regression—was an existence that kept appearing in my path, throwing down bothersome variables.
“Kim Do-jin, is that you?”
The voice that reached me from behind trembled thinly, like a drawn bowstring pulled taut. The vibration carried through the air scraped against my eardrums. A familiar frequency.
“…Kim Do-jin?”
The voice of the man standing beside her overlapped. Dull, thick tones laden with suspicion and displeasure broke the silence of the hallway.
I turned the heavy door handle of my assigned VIP Dormitory without acknowledging either footsteps or voice.
It wasn’t avoidance.
On this vast chessboard, it was simply a matter of filtering out noise that held no use in my plans.
Conversation with the phantoms of the past was nothing but waste of time.
The sound of the door closing sealed off the hallway. The moment I stepped inside the dormitory, I set down the Carbon Carrier I’d been holding. A dull impact echoed through the living space.
“You seem to know quite a few people at the Academy?”
Jung Se-hui, who had followed me in, set down the carrier roughly and snapped at me.
“If you were going to do this, why ask me specifically? Those people from before—couldn’t you have just mobilized your connections and gotten into the conference one way or another without even needing the Taesung name?”
Instead of answering, I undid the Necktie that had been choking my neck and threw it onto the table. The silk slid smoothly and fell to the floor.
“I don’t know her.”
“Don’t know her? I can read a person at a glance. Do you think I’m an idiot?”
Se-hui pulled out wrinkled shirts and threw them onto the bed, giving me a sidelong glance. Her eyes held clear suspicion and a peculiar displeasure.
“What do you think you know?”
“An ex-girlfriend?”
The veins in the back of my hand tensed minutely as I straightened the clothes.
I couldn’t tell whether her instinct was simply sharp, or whether it came from the eye for people she’d honed while growing up as the heir to the massive Taesung Group.
But it was a hit disturbingly accurate. I felt no compulsion to evade the situation with a lie.
Inefficient excuses only bred greater misunderstandings.
“Yeah.”
“What. So you do everything and live your life?”
At my answer, Se-hui twisted her lips into a scoff. She pretended to organize the clothes scattered across the bed while studying me sideways.
“I thought you were a robot. Turns out you date and break up like everyone else. You actually smell human. Honestly, it’s kind of reassuring.”
“Everyone dates. Nothing special about it.”
……
Se-hui’s hands stilled. The air in the room grew suddenly heavy.
She began shoving the clothes she’d tossed on the bed back into the wardrobe without a word, roughly. Only the rustle of fabric filled the room.
Watching her back, I added shortly,
“Why. You don’t have experience?”
“…Seriously. Every time you open your mouth, you’re incredibly rude!”
Se-hui spun around, her face flushed. Her cry echoed off the living room ceiling.
“Unexpected.”
“Ah, seriously! I didn’t fail to do it—I chose not to! Dad keeps going on and on about arranged marriage, so I deliberately shot down every guy! So don’t look at me like I’m weird. Now get out so I can change!”
“I didn’t ask. And I’m going in anyway, so stop making noise.”
I pulled the carrier and opened the door deeper into the dormitory.
The moment I stepped inside, the grotesque structure of the makeshift dormitory—this massive seminar room converted into living quarters—struck my eye.
Decorated with ornate chandeliers and expensive wallpaper, but its essence was nothing more than a hastily repurposed research space.
The two bedrooms flanking either side of the single living area had a traffic flow that was far too compressed.
I sat down at the edge of the bed. The sensation of the rigid mattress traveled up my spine. I closed my eyes and began methodically sorting through the information scattered haphazardly in my mind.
‘How am I supposed to deal with Jeon Byung-jun…….’
No matter how the ties from the past had become entangled, there was only one coordinate that mattered to me now. The head of the Academy, the “Boundary Mage” Jeon Byung-jun.
In the previous world, I had no point of contact with him.
When I first crossed the threshold of the Academy as a graduate student, he had already abruptly resigned from his position as Rector and vanished without a trace.
His subsequent movements were shrouded in secrecy, and since he was not a combat mage, I never encountered him on the frontlines of a Gate.
After the regression, I combed through the Ability Management Team’s classified servers and the Hunter Association’s private intelligence networks, but the data I recovered was pitiful. Even appealing to Lee Min-young at the Management Bureau yielded nothing.
The better part of a year was spent touring overseas academic conferences, with occasional returns to the heart of the Academy before abruptly departing again—that was all the fragmented information I could gather.
More than anything, mages of the 1.5th generation and earlier were figures from before combat data in the Status Window had been standardized.
The properties of the magic he wielded, his unique characteristics, even the scale of his Mana Circuit remained unquantified. Unknown variables are always a threat.
I recalled the papers Jeon Byung-jun had written in the past. Contrary to my expectation that they would reek of the madness of a fanatical heretic, they were almost painfully orthodox.
Textbook prose addressing the fundamentals of Mana Dynamics and flawless logical structure. That itself was unsettling.
I became convinced that he was wearing a mask ruthlessly, concealing his true nature.
I wanted nothing more than to tear apart the defensive magic of his office and march in, my hand at his throat, but this was no Gate overrun with monsters.
It was an ivory tower where political interests and social pretext wielded blades sharper than steel.
Any hasty action would be no different from suicide—turning every magical society and academic alliance in the world into an enemy.
There was only one way.
From the highest place in the Academy, I would force him to reveal himself.
By demonstrating an overwhelming result on the stage of logic and ability they revered, I would crush that petty arrogance of his.
I rose from my seat. I needed to review Jung Se-hui’s presentation materials for tomorrow’s conference once more.
While scaling it down to suit the pre-regression era, I had to embed a revolutionary derivation process that would overturn existing theory.
“Jung Se-hui?”
I opened the door and stepped into the living room.
But the moment I opened it, I was seized by an impulse to track down whoever had designed this dormitory and grind their face into the wall with a mana-infused fist.
The structure was grotesquely asymmetrical—opening my door revealed a direct line of sight straight into Jung Se-hui’s room.
This place was never meant to be a residential suite; it had been hastily cobbled together from two small seminar rooms connected end-to-end to serve as a temporary VIP Dormitory.
The two prep rooms had been converted into bedrooms on either side of the central living space, and their doors faced each other directly with no buffer hallway between them.
During the conference period, the space had been adapted to accommodate visiting dignitaries without any consideration of the possibility that a man and woman might share it.
The shower stall was barely more than a capsule unit hastily crammed into the back of one prep room, nothing resembling a proper bathroom.
Beyond the open door, I heard the violent rush of water from the opaque glass shower stall. Thick steam seeped through the gap in the frame.
I clicked my tongue sharply and turned away. Remaining in the living room would only invite unnecessary friction.
I opened the entrance door and stepped out into the hallway beyond. Cold air brushed against my cheek.
The thought flickered across my mind that a brutal melee on the frontlines of an S-Rank Gate from hell would be far preferable to this.
“Kim Do-jin. You changed your number?”
In the hallway before the dormitory, Park Seo-hee looked up, crouched against the cold marble floor with her back to the wall.
Had she been waiting all this time? Her eyes were bloodshot, and strands of disheveled hair clung to her cheeks.
“Yeah.”
At my answer, Park Seo-hee irritably hurled the sharp-heeled shoes she’d been wearing onto the floor. The leather shoes struck the wall with a dull thud.
She rose barefoot and strode toward me in quick, aggressive steps.
“Why did you change it? What’s the reason?”
Sharp Busan dialect cut through her words.
The fact that her accent—usually held rigidly to standard speech to maintain an intellectual image—had crumbled was proof that she had already reached her limit of reason.
In my memory, the end of our relationship was clear.
In the previous world, she had asked for the breakup first, and I had drunk alone on Christmas. Even after the regression, I had not doubted that memory.
My decision to change my phone number afterward was not out of concern for Park Seo-hee alone. I had simply severed all human relationships that would drain my emotions in order to prevent the imminent descent of the Evil God Dragon and the destruction of the world.
That she felt hurt by the number change was understandable. But I could not fathom why, eight months later, she would still burn with such violent rage over a relationship that was already finished.
At least, not until I heard her next words.
“It was time to change it, so I changed it. If you’ve got nothing to say, get out of my way.”
I felt no value in continuing the conversation and turned to move past her. As I did, cold fingers seized my wrist roughly.
“Wait. I’ve lost my mind so completely I can’t even speak.”
Park Seo-hee’s grip tightened. It was strong enough that her fingertips dug into the skin of my wrist.
“What are you doing?”
“What? Did you just ask me what I’m doing to you?”
Her voice swelled loud enough to echo down the entire hallway. Simultaneously, I heard the sound of the heavy door of Koo Hyung-seo’s room at the far end of the corridor beginning to open.
Whether he’d reacted to the commotion in the hallway or had come out looking for Park Seo-hee because she hadn’t returned late, the timing could not have been worse.
“You texted me a breakup message and just threw it at me! Blocked me on Kakao! Changed your number?! Do you have any idea how long I stood shaking outside that restaurant on Christmas, snow falling, waiting for you?!!!”
Park Seo-hee’s sharp cry struck my eardrums. For a moment my mind went blank, and even the sensation in my fingertips seemed distant and remote.
‘……Me?’
Time seemed to fracture in an instant.
I had never mishandled my memories. Especially the vision from the first day after regression remained etched into my mind like a shard of glass driven into the palm of my hand.
When I opened my eyes, an empty Soju Bottle lay rolling on the floor, and the date marked Christmas—the very day I had received the breakup notice in the previous world.
After that, all I did was block her on Instagram. I had no memory of sending a breakup message first, no memory of leaving Park Seo-hee standing in front of the restaurant.
But Park Seo-hee was telling me about a Christmas I didn’t know.
The bloodshot eyes, the trembling lips, the force in the fingers gripping her own wrist—there was no chance that reaction was a lie. She wasn’t repeating something she’d heard from someone else.
‘She really was waiting.’
In front of the restaurant where we’d promised to meet, holding on to the breakup message I’d supposedly sent.
Two versions of the past collided inside my head—incompatible, irreconcilable.
The Kim Do-jin I remembered had been dumped by Park Seo-hee. But the traces left in this world told a different story: Kim Do-jin had been the one to abandon her first.
The Blind Spot of Regression.
Since the moment I returned, I’d believed I knew the entire past. But I couldn’t remember a past that had already been different before I arrived.
Besides, Son Ho-sung was alive too. The past I’d believed in was never an absolute truth from the start.
“You bastard. How could you—!”
Park Seo-hee was about to bring her fist down on my chest.
Click—!
The door to the VIP Dormitory behind me swung wide open again.
“What’s all that noise out here? Why is it so loud—”
Jung Se-hui burst out from inside. Fresh from the shower, her wet hair was loosely wrapped in a towel.
She wore nothing but a sleeveless top held up by thin straps and shorts cut dangerously short.
The warm scent of shampoo mingled with the cold air of the hallway.
Jung Se-hui pressed close against my back, leaning her face out toward the hallway.
“…Oh?”
Park Seo-hee standing barefoot, radiating venom.
Koo Hyung-seo, who’d been walking down the opposite hallway and had frozen in place at the sight of it all.
And Jung Se-hui, towel still on her head, dressed scandalously thin, reaching out to grab my arm.
The air in the hallway turned frigid, as if the temperature had plummeted below zero. A silence fell so complete it seemed even my Mana Core had stopped vibrating.
I could be certain of one thing: since my regression, this was a crisis far more impossible to salvage and far more fatal than facing the breath of the Evil God Dragon Zephyros.
It was a catastrophe that even Magic couldn’t solve.

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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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