The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 28

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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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28
Chapter 28. The Weight of Wrath
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The air inside the Gate hung damp and thick, reeking of viscous slime that pricked the inside of my nostrils.
This cavity of darkness, nested deep beneath Donggureung, barely admitted light. I extended my hand slowly.
Mana coalesced from my fingertips, blue sparks scattering in its wake.
“Weight.”
With the low chant came a blue mana form from my fingers—a first-Circle construct that shot forward like an arrow, coiling around the massive red skull-helm.
It was a foundational support spell, one that artificially controlled the influence of gravity on a target. But foundational magic did not mean its force was equally basic.
[Physical weight has decreased by approximately 32.5%.]
[Friction resistance at the joints has been adjusted to minimum.]
[Mobility has increased explosively.]
[Successor, your body has become light as a feather!]
Red Mana flared and dimmed within the Red Warrior’s hollow eye sockets.
The creature swung one of its enormous arms experimentally, seeming satisfied by the sound of air splitting, then adjusted its grip on the sword’s hilt.
“Three minutes. That’s all you’ll have. Finish it before then.”
[Understood. Commencing annihilation. Death to your will, Successor.]
To me, who carried the Succession of the Sword Saint, such buffs were technically meaningless. My body had already merged with Aura, transcending the constraints of physical law.
But the calculus was different for that towering bone creature. Over two meters of overwhelming frame, and a sword thick as an adult man’s torso—sheer brutality made manifest.
They guaranteed devastating destructive power, but carried with it the physical limitation of inertia.
The recovery motion after a swing, the half-second delay when changing direction—in high-tier hunting grounds, that fractional gap decides life from death.
The magic I had just woven cut away the creature’s only Achilles heel.
Even a first-Circle spell could multiply its efficiency tenfold if one perfectly understood the target’s mass distribution and moment of inertia, driving Mana into precisely the right points.
That was the essence and application of magic I pursued.
“Conserve your Mana. Waste it, and I’ll reclaim it on the spot.”
I rolled my shoulders lightly and pushed my sleeves up. The loose duty vest draped across my shoulders felt cumbersome.
I peeled it off roughly and hurled it down. It landed with a dull thud upon the puddles below, spattering foam mixed with blood droplets across its surface.
“……This should do for a warm-up.”
My neck crackled as it found its position. I raised my gaze toward the path ahead.
Hundreds of goblins surged forward with grotesque shrieks, their crude spearheads flickering in the darkness.
“Crush them.”
The command had scarcely left my lips when the ground erupted. The bedrock beneath the Red Warrior spiderwebbed with cracks, launching fragments in all directions.
Freed from gravity’s chains, the red skull warrior was fired forward like an enormous cannonball.
This was the true speed of the Named Monster who had ruled as Donggureung’s boss.
“Kee-eek?!”
The Goblin Warriors in the vanguard didn’t even register what was happening.
Before their retinas could even record the Red Warrior’s afterimage, the massive sword sliced horizontally through the air.
Crack! Crash!
A sickening burst of sound echoed through the Gate—living bodies colliding with and pulverizing against dense metal. The sword was not cutting.
It was a colossal club, the product of mass and acceleration merged. Six goblin torsos shattered into formless spray, scattering in all directions.
Blood became mist on the air; fragments of crushed organs plastered themselves to the walls.
The goblins behind, witnessing their comrades’ deaths too late, shrieked in terror. But the Red Warrior’s blade dance had only just opened its curtain.
Shorn of inertial resistance, the great sword was light as down, yet its impact carried the weight of mountains.
With each swing, the trajectory blazed crimson with Aura; along that arc, goblin necks and limbs fell like autumn leaves before the wind.
A sandcastle before a tidal wave—the densely packed goblin formation was utterly torn asunder by a single charge of the red skull.
The ground had already become a swamp, fouled with sticky green blood and scarlet viscera.
‘Yes. That’s how goblins should be.’
Craven before the strong, merciless to the weak—such was their nature.
Watching them being slaughtered while they fled kindled an unpleasant, familiar disdain.
But in that moment, an alien Mana was sensed above the pool of blood.
It was murky and viscous, like a sinister vortex of spoiled paint poured into water.
“………”
The goblin corpses scattered across the ground began convulsing grotesquely. With the sound of bones grinding, their bodies were forced upright.
Severed heads hanging from single strips of skin swayed; bodies with burst bellies and intestines spilling forth grasped weapons once more.
“So you think you’ll keep rising even after death?”
From deep within that charnel scene, a shadow emerged slowly. A skull staff stretched to length, and around its entire form, a bloodred curtain of Mana billowed.
It was a Goblin Shaman.
Its eyes were hollow and empty, yet within them burned red light—a gaze brimming with hatred and killing intent.
“Human……Can you overcome the wall our kind has built?”
That grotesque phonation, as if metal shards scraped the inside of a throat. Yet it was unmistakably human speech.
The shaman slammed his staff into the ground with a crack, and the shockwave rippled outward through the entire Gate. An invisible pressure of Mana crushed down on the air.
In response to the incantation, hundreds of surviving goblins blocked my path. They pressed their bodies tightly together, layering themselves one upon another.
Shields held forward, crude spear points jutting through the gaps between them. They were so densely packed that their shoulders seemed to consume one another—a massive wall of flesh.
It was less a formation than a living rampart.
“Using your own kind as a shield—I see honor runs deep in your species.”
Cowardice was supposed to be their nature, yes, but never this naked. The degradation of sacrificing their own kin’s lives to save their own skin.
Yet they still had the audacity to speak of themselves as a great race.
“You think you can block me?”
I extended my right hand slowly. The Core buried deep in my chest began to pulse roughly.
As I entered a state of Synchronization, the Mana flowing through my veins collided with my Aura, sending a sharp, electric pain across my entire body.
My nervous system awakened, and everything around me began to move as if in slow motion.
Their arrogance, and that metallic stench of blood—it was stoking my reason into a furious blaze.
“Goblins are best handled one way: crushed.”
I dropped my upper body into an extreme crouch. Like a sprinter in the starting blocks, I compressed every muscle for explosive forward acceleration.
My thigh muscles pulled taut, bulging so hard against my trousers they seemed ready to tear. From my feet, an Aura rose like heat shimmer.
“Fire.”
With the command uttered low, a massive flame erupted from the point of my stance. This was no chaotic blaze meant merely to incinerate what lay around me.
This was the focused source of propulsive force, directed entirely backward. I confined the expansive energy of the flame beneath my feet, then layered it with my Aura’s acceleration.
A single instant of calculation that twisted and redefined the laws of physics. Across my vision, the flow of Mana traced itself in the shortest possible path.
“Dash.”
Detonation.
All the compressed energy discharged backward, hurling my body forward like a cannonball.
The moment my first foot left the ground, the earth where I’d been standing collapsed inward by dozens of centimeters, melting like lava.
As my second foot pushed off, a massive shock wave of flame erupted behind me, consuming everything in its path.
A sprint that had reached supersonic speed. The shock wave born from the tearing of air struck my eardrums.
I became a single massive fireball, driving in a straight line toward their vaunted “wall of flesh.”
“Stop it! Stop him! Don’t let that human through!!”
The panicked shaman’s voice shattered the air like a scream. The goblins, seized by primal terror, gripped their shields even tighter. But it made no difference.
You cannot stop a steel juggernaut traveling hundreds of kilometers per hour with a cardboard box.
BOOM!
At the moment of impact, the entire Gate shook with a collision so violent it seemed the world would split open. The goblins holding shields at the front didn’t even have time to scream—they simply ceased to exist.
Or more precisely, they were pulverized by the force of impact and simultaneously seared to ash by the searing heat.
My breakthrough was unstoppable. The solid wall built by hundreds of goblins layered atop one another split down the middle in a single collision, as cleanly as Moses parting the sea.
Goblin remains erupted like a fountain along my trajectory. What scattered through the air was nothing but charred flesh and crushed bone.
Even the fifth Circle Fire spell, Fire Pillar, could not have demonstrated such overwhelming destructive power.
The violence of mass accelerated by speed far transcends the boundaries of magical destruction. My heart thundered in my chest, adrenaline commanding my entire body.
At the edge of my vision, as the flames gradually cleared, I saw his face—twisted with terror. The Goblin Shaman, stripped of his shield wall, standing alone.
What reflected in his vacant, glassy eyes was not a human, but a predator incarnate—death itself given form.
“Your kind wears that look best. That desperation burning in your eyes.”
The shaman thrashed about, swinging his staff wildly. Curses poured from his mouth in frantic incantations, and crude fireballs hurtled toward my face.
The Mana density was pathetic, the structural integrity worse than useless.
Crack!
I didn’t dodge. I reached out with my left hand and seized the fireball directly, then crushed it with all my might like shattering a marble.
The flames scattered uselessly across my glove.
“What—what is this?! Dispelling magic with your bare hand?!”
The shaman stumbled backward and fell hard on his backside. This was a moment of meticulously calculated domination.
The artifact covering my left shoulder—the General’s Red Head Armor—negates at least forty percent of all magical damage.
Layered with my own Aura on top of that, crude magic like his was nothing more than child’s play with fire.
To etch an absolute gap into his very bones. To grant him a terror far deeper than death itself. This was my final gift to these wretches.
I closed the remaining distance in a single stride and seized him by the collar. The stench radiating from his body made my nose recoil.
As my vision burned red with rage, something caught my eye—a grotesque ornament hanging around his neck.
………
It was a necklace. But not made of beast bone or stone. Dozens of human fingers hung from it like trophies.
The pale, sunless fingers of a child, the manicured fingers of a woman, and the weathered, calloused fingers of a man who’d known hard labor.
Some of the fingers hadn’t even begun to decay—fresh blood still wept from the severed ends. A memory flickered through my mind.
Kim Dae-han’s dry voice, recounting how his daughter’s pinky finger was all that remained of her.
And today, the cowardly members of the Buckler guild who had abandoned their duty to maintain this Gate and fled.
This necklace was proof of the atrocity their dereliction of duty had wrought. I heard, with perfect clarity, the sound of reason snapping in my mind.
My rage did not burn hot—instead, it froze over with a cold that transcended all heat.
“What did you say?”
At the sound of my guttural voice, the Shaman trembled like aspen leaves, pleading desperately.
“Mercy… mercy… human… please…”
“Haven’t I heard those exact words before?”
I tightened my grip on the collar I’d seized, squeezing as though I meant to crush it. The Shaman’s windpipe constricted, a choking rattle escaping his throat, but my hand did not relent.
Crunch!
I drove its skull directly into the solid bedrock beneath. The impact cratered the ground, and the sickening crack of fracturing bone split the air.
I didn’t stop there. I condensed my Mana at the center of its skull.
Boom! Bang!
Successive explosions detonated inside the crater. Dust and smoke billowed upward in thick clouds, and the charred stench of its flesh hung heavy in the air.
Looking down at the creature, barely clinging to breath beneath a mask of blood, I drew the Dragon Head Sword from my waist.
“You are… what exactly…”
“Don’t speak. Anything that comes from your mouth isn’t worth the air it taints.”
I poured every flame from my Mana Core onto the blade, which gleamed with a blue light.
The Dragon Head Sword’s special option, the Protection of Dragon Gate, responded, and crimson runes blazed sharp and clear across the blade’s surface.
The temperature of the flames now burned with an almost white-hot radiance.
I layered this with the Fire Circle’s firepower and the destructive force of Heavy Strike, pushing both to extreme convergence.
‘Fire Breaker.’
I drove the blade into the center of its chest. This was not a simple cutting motion.
It was a technique—channeling destructive flame energy directly into its body through the blade itself.
A massive pillar of fire erupted from within, tearing through the Shaman’s back and rising skyward. Its entire body melted like a wax figure cast into a furnace.
“Kiiiieeeeeeeeee!!”
A scream that shattered eardrums echoed through the interior of the Gate. Greenish flesh boiled, blood evaporated into vapor, and black smoke rose in thick plumes.
Its body became the wick of a vast flame, burning away to nothing.
“Hush. Be quiet.”
I pushed the burning hilt deeper still.
The roaring inferno painted my face red, and in my eyes burned the image of garbage finding its end.
The pillar of fire burned on for a long time, unrelenting.
As though comforting the countless wronged souls hanging from that necklace, and as though this terrible bloodlust lodged within me would turn completely to ash and sink into oblivion.
I watched his end to the very finish.

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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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