The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 2

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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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2
Episode 2. The Price of Succession
***
“Cut Hard, Cut Fast···.”
He couldn’t even muster a hollow laugh.
He rubbed his eyes several times and looked again, but the words remained unchanged.
More than unimaginative, the naming sense had abandoned all sincerity.
“This is··· what my brother left behind?”
For the secret art of Kang Tae-yoon, humanity’s strongest and the Sword Saint, it was far too crude.
Surely it should have had a name like “Moonlight Slash” or “Meteor Blade”—something befitting the legacy.
A long sigh escaped through his damp hair.
But disappointment was premature.
A vulgar name didn’t necessarily mean vulgar power.
Actually, looking back on my experience reaching the 9th Circle, the greatest magic always took the simplest form.
Stripped to the absolute limit of necessity, reduced to pure essence.
If Tae-yoon’s swordsmanship had achieved that level?
He shifted his gaze to the skill level.
[Level: 99999999999···.]
The numbers were running wild.
Multiplying with such force they threatened to break through the system UI itself.
An error message—as if the system had overloaded trying to display infinity.
[Level cannot be displayed.]
“As expected, this thing’s still broken.”
He pushed himself up from the bed and moved to the window.
Beyond the glass stretched Seoul’s night view, impossibly peaceful.
Neon signs flickered, and caroling drifted through the streets.
Just minutes ago, that same city had collapsed into an inferno—it seemed impossible.
The wrongness of it turned his stomach.
More than relief at his survival came a compulsive dread—when would this peace shatter?
Like standing on thin ice.
He couldn’t shake the phantom sense that monsters waited with open jaws beneath those peaceful lights.
[Status Window System.]
A navigator that satellites detected and visualized the mana wavelengths flowing through Awakened bodies.
Made possible thanks to the satellite Elon Musk had launched.
But the early version was garbage-tier, earning the nickname “slower than Notepad.”
‘Entering debug mode.’
The structure of the 5th generation system—which he’d torn apart countless times as an advisor to the Association before returning—was sharp and clear in his mind.
The security walls of an outdated system were mere paper to him.
It wasn’t simple hacking.
He bridged his mind and the system through mana circuits, forcing computational processing.
Overload throbbed at his temples, but he didn’t stop.
[Entering Developer Mode.]
He forcibly twisted the system’s framework, suppressing the error.
A high-pitched whine—and the dancing numbers froze into a single value.
[Proficiency: 999,999,999+]
“······ah.”
Not a simple error. This number vastly exceeded the system’s measurable limit.
Simply cutting hard and cutting fast.
The realm achieved by honing that simple motion to its absolute extreme.
No technique, no tricks.
A skill that concentrated all causality into a single act—the act of cutting itself.
Kang Tae-yoon’s divine-speed sword strike that had stitched the sky above Gwanghwamun.
That absolute, space-rending mastery was compressed within this crude name.
“A monster of a man.”
He felt sorry for ever doubting.
But verification was necessary.
How these impossible numbers would manifest in actual combat had to be tested directly in a Gate.
Theory and practice were different beasts.
Especially since his body was now Level 1, with a newly awakened Mana Hole.
Whether he could withstand this immense power remained uncertain.
Until then, I couldn’t afford to move rashly.
“Breathe.”
I steadied my breathing.
I needed to set priorities. There was no time to be swayed by emotion.
I dragged the creaking chair up to the desk and sat down.
In that instant, the dust piled on the desktop and books scattered in disarray stabbed at my vision.
……
I couldn’t bear it.
With my nerves on edge, disorder itself became stress.
The gray dust settled on the desktop looked like ashes of a ruined future.
The irrational fear that a monster might leap out from some corner of that dust.
I went straight to the drawer and pulled out cleaning tape.
Every strand of hair on the floor, every speck of dust on the desk—I picked them off obsessively.
Stick, stick.
The rhythmic adhesive sounds echoed in my ears.
There was a strange calm that came from simple labor.
Only after I’d lined up the scattered books in order of height and aligned their angles did my ragged breathing finally settle.
The compulsion of a mage who had to perfectly implement Mana control and incantation formulas.
Some called it a disorder, but for me it was a survival instinct.
Uncontrolled variables mean death.
My mind only works when my surroundings are perfectly controlled.
I turned on the tablet atop the organized desk.
I launched the mind-mapping app and struck bold lettering in the center of the screen.
[Demon Dragon Zephyros]
Just calling the name to mind sent chills down my spine.
Overwhelming terror. Incarnate despair.
I spread branches across the screen with my fingertips, expanding as I went.
Its weaknesses, patterns, signs of appearance…
I knew nothing.
Information is survival.
The absolute law of the hunter world.
But Zephyros had left no omens, no data, until the moment before it appeared.
It was so abrupt that even the label “Unregistered Monster” seemed like a luxury.
As if it didn’t belong to this world at all.
On a hunch, I accessed the Hunter Wiki.
[Dragon], [Wyrm], [Reptilian Boss]…
[Totally slew a dragon at the Ssangmun-dong Gate.]
[Gave a hatchling a magic stone and it evolved lol]
“Trash,” I muttered.
I shut down the screen.
It was nothing but fantasy stories from attention-seekers.
The early Hunter Wiki wasn’t an ocean of information—it was a garbage dump.
I checked whether any deep web information broker channels were active, but it was too early for them to be operating.
I considered hacking government or guild databases but decided against it.
There’s no secret more valuable than the information I’ve lived through from the future.
Whatever data the government has now would just be ecology reports on orcs and trolls and that’s it.
The conclusion was singular.
I had to find the answer myself.
And that was impossible alone.
“Tae-yoon.”
Kang Tae-yoon.
Would the Tae-yoon from ten years ago believe me?
No—I would have to make him believe.
If I could tell him about the future and prepare together, there was a chance of winning.
In the previous world, Tae-yoon had Awakened before me and already had connections with the industry’s heavyweights.
I opened my phone’s contact list.
I typed the familiar initial consonants into the search box.
[KTY]
No search results.
“…What?”
I wondered if it was a typo and tried typing again.
‘Kang Tae-yoon’, ‘Tae-yoon’, ‘Sword Star’.
I even tried his nickname, ‘Frustration’, but the result was the same.
[Search Results: 0 entries]
A chill crept down my spine.
We’d grown up like blood brothers since elementary school. There was no way I wouldn’t have saved his number.
I dredged up the memory and dialed the number directly.
010-XXXX-XXXX.
A number he’d used for over a decade—an extension of himself.
Beep—beep—
[We apologize. This number does not exist.]
[Please verify and try again.]
The mechanical voice burrowed into my ear.
My fingertips turned numb with cold.
Had he changed his number? But he’d never changed it before.
And even if he had, there was no way he wouldn’t have told me the new one.
I opened the messenger app.
I scrolled through the chat list like a madman.
Nothing.
I rifled through my photos.
Pictures of us together, shots from drinking nights, training footage.
Where a selfie from just days ago—taken over soju—should have been, there remained only a photograph of an empty table.
“What in the—”
My heart hammered out an irregular rhythm.
Even when a monster’s fangs had grazed my throat on the battlefield, I hadn’t felt this afraid.
Had my memory been tampered with? Or was I losing my mind?
I started calling neighborhood friends.
“Hey, you got Tae-yoon’s number?”
“Who? Tae-yoon?”
“Kang Tae-yoon. You know, the guy who was starting up the Blade Guild. We all drank together last week.”
“What are you talking about? We drank together? There’s no one like that. It was just you and me.”
I hung up.
I called again.
Hung up again.
The response was identical.
As if rehearsed, they had no knowledge of Kang Tae-yoon’s existence at all.
Everyone either treated me like a lunatic or brushed it off as a joke.
“This doesn’t make sense.”
The hand holding my phone had gone white.
The youngest S-Rank Hunter. South Korea’s number-one ranked.
That name, plastered across every news outlet, had vanished without a trace even from internet search results.
[Search Results: 0 entries]
I slumped into my chair.
I raked my fingernails across the desk.
An alarm was blaring inside my head.
An instinctive warning that something very large had gone terribly wrong.
This wasn’t a simple error.
Had some transcendent power been at work?
“I’ll see for myself.”
I couldn’t believe it until I verified it with my own eyes.
I’m far more stubborn than most.
Until I confirmed it through my own senses, through my own perception, I could accept nothing.
***
I hailed a taxi in haste.
Toward Tae-yoon’s family home.
Christmas lights flashed brilliantly past the taxi window.
Carols echoed through the streets and couples laughed and chattered, yet the world felt eerily silent.
The smiling faces of all those happy people struck me as grotesquely mask-like.
A familiar alley.
A humble single-story house.
Warm light seeping over the fence.
Everything was exactly as I remembered it.
The bicycle propped beside the gate, the weathered mailbox.
I paid the taxi and stood before the entrance.
Any moment now, I thought, he’d come bounding out. “Oh, Do-jin!”
My palms were slick with sweat.
Ding-dong—
The doorbell rang, loud and clear.
A moment later, the front door opened.
“Who is it? My goodness, is that Do-jin?”
It was her. Tae-yoon’s Mother.
It was Tae-yoon’s Mother.
Her kind smile, her warm voice—unchanged.
The rich aroma of soybean paste stew drifted from beyond the threshold.
“Oh… hello, ma’am.”
Relief nearly buckled my knees.
She remembers me. Then my memories aren’t wrong.
It was that damned machine malfunction, or else my friends pulled some elaborate hidden-camera prank.
Yes, the world was playing a cruel joke on me.
“It’s Christmas—shouldn’t you be with your girlfriend?”
“Ah, well… it got a bit complicated.”
“Oh dear, there are plenty of girls out there. Come inside. You came to see Tae-min, didn’t you?”
“…I’m sorry?”
Did I mishear?
The smile froze on my face.
“Tae-min?”
“Yes, Tae-min. He’s at the gym right now. Says he wants to become a Hunter, so he trains even on Christmas. That boy’s always been something else. Shouldn’t he go through an Awakening first?”
“Ma’am… what about Tae-yoon? Where is he?”
She tilted her head, confused.
“Tae-yoon? Who is Tae-yoon?”
……
My breath caught in my throat.
My heart plummeted.
A family photo hanging on the living room wall caught my eye.
Her, her husband, and… a strange boy I didn’t know.
There was no place for him. No sign of him.
No—someone who looked like him, subtly different, occupied that space instead.
I knew.
With the same clarity that could pierce the lies of high demons, I could say it with certainty.
There was not a trace of falsehood in her eyes.
No trace of brainwashing. No dark magic.
Only truth.
In her world, a son named Kang Tae-yoon had never existed.
Even his mother had forgotten him.
“I… I think the drink’s still in my system. I’ll come back later when Tae-min gets home.”
I backed away as if fleeing. I couldn’t even remember how I’d said goodbye.
I stepped through the gate and into the darkness of the narrow alley.
The bitter winter wind struck my cheek, but I felt nothing.
The pieces fell into place in my mind.
A terrible, cruel picture.
[EX Succession]
[You inherit everything from the previous Successor.]
Everything.
Yes, it wasn’t just power that was passed down.
I had consumed his very existence.
“Damn it.”
The world had erased Kang Tae-yoon to correct the causality, inserting a false substitute in his place—Kang Tae-min.
He hadn’t just given his life for me.
His past, his present, his future. Even his name, the name people remembered.
He had sacrificed everything to save me.
“Ha··· ha ha···.”
A hollow laugh tore from his throat.
Heat stung his eyes, but no tears came.
Instead, a burning knot rose from deep within his chest.
He fumbled in his pocket and pulled out the severed metal cord.
The one that had held the Regression Magic Stone. His brother’s possession.
Now, in this world, only this worn scrap of metal and I remember him.
“Brother.”
He concentrated Magical Power into his hands.
Red sparks flew as the metal melted and fused together.
He slipped the crudely welded Bracelet onto his left wrist.
The cold metal bit into his flesh.
“Idiot.”
This was a curse, undoubtedly.
A resentment toward his brother for dumping everything on him and vanishing,
and an atonement for a brother who had erased himself to keep me alive.
And a declaration of war against those bastards who were the root of all this tragedy.
He clenched the Bracelet.
Hard enough that blood welled from his palm.
Evil God Dragon Zephyros.
I’ll stake my very existence on erasing yours from this world.

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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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