The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 32

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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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32
Episode 32. The Vanished
***
“……Kim Dae-han, what did you just say?”
Charles’s hand flinched. The rough knuckles gripping the glass went white, trembling visibly.
I didn’t miss the way his empty right sleeve swayed with an unsettling motion.
The alcohol that had dampened his senses moments before evaporated in an instant, as if he’d been doused with water below freezing.
A metallic silence pooled across the worn linoleum of the shabby pojangmacha.
Campania Gate.
The moment that cursed proper noun scattered into the air, thousands of fragments erupted behind my retinas. They were memories from before my regression.
In the history I once knew, that place had been humanity’s shining battlefield of victory.
The symbol of miracle—where the Abyss Knight Beowulf’s neck was severed, and mankind was pulled from the pit of despair.
And at the heart of that miracle, as always, was the cool blade of my brother, Kang Tae-yoon, the Sword Saint.
But the warped world beneath my feet now is different. In this realm where the great axis called my brother has vanished, Campania is not a miracle—it is the name of catastrophe.
Forty-five elite hunters, their flesh torn from living bodies, and a single survivor: the old wolf before me, Charles, who escaped by sacrificing one arm—a descent into hell itself.
Humanity’s worst military defeat on record. A festering wound no one dared revisit.
I set my glass down slowly. The transparent soju cup struck the table with a muted, sharp sound.
Beneath the dim incandescent light, Kim Dae-han’s face showed no trace of the playfulness that had lingered there moments before—it had been wiped clean as if taxidermied.
His eyes behind the glasses gleamed like honed steel.
“Are you certain of this information?”
At my question, Kim Dae-han nodded firmly. He pulled a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket, wiped the sweat from the bridge of his nose, and continued.
“Absolutely certain. This is a matter resolved in strictest confidentiality at the highest levels of the Italian Hunter Association and the EU Union.
On the surface, they’re deceiving the public by claiming it’s in a state of ‘permanent sealing,’ but the reality is that it’s exceeded the critical threshold. It’s like a dam on the verge of collapse.”
A brief silence followed. An old refrigerator in the corner of the shop hummed, emitting a nervously persistent vibration.
Between the sour smell of makgeolli and the damp humidity, a subtly chilling tension burrowed into my skin. Dae-han exhaled quietly and adjusted his glasses.
“The multiple layered sealing incantations that have been suppressing Campania Gate……have reached their limit.”
“Their limit?”
“For the past six months, mana erosion has been progressing rapidly in a 30-kilometer radius around the gate. Land decay and ecosystem distortion are commonplace. The surrounding ground can no longer withstand the mana pressure—massive sinkholes are occurring in succession. In the Naples region, every precision instrument has become scrap metal. The port and airport have been non-functional for a long time now. But this is merely a warning sign.”
Dae-han paused, glancing sideways at Charles. His eyes had sunk to a deep, leaden color.
“People are vanishing.”
Clack.
Charles’s glass. His left hand was trembling faintly.
“You mean disappearances?”
Kim Dae-han nodded, his expression grave.
“Not mere disappearances. Starting from the outer regions where mana erosion is densest, civilians are vanishing without even a scream. No signs of abduction, no traces of crime—not a drop of blood, not a single hair. The Italian government tried to cover it up as simple missing persons at first, but in just the last month, over 150 official disappearances have been filed.”
Over 150 official disappearances.
If you included the unofficial figures—the slums, the undocumented illegal residents—the number would grow exponentially.
Thousands of humans had simply ceased to exist.
This wasn’t a typical Break where a gate spews monsters into the world.
This was a sign of dimensional collapse—where the very boundary between dimensions was crumbling, and the gate’s interior was retroactively absorbing real space.
A harbinger of the end times, where the distinction between the material world and the otherworld had grown obscured.
“The Italian Association has effectively declared surrender. They’ve determined that maintaining the seal with their own forces is impossible. Execution is scheduled exactly eight months from now. The final objective is to conscript the elite S-rank and A-rank hunters from every nation as mercenaries, breach the interior of the gate, and destroy the core at its heart.”
Dae-han spun the empty makgeolli glass between his fingers, a bitter smile crossing his face.
“Through unofficial channels, requests for military deployment with extravagant compensation will reach the major guilds in our country. Though whether outfits like Invictus or Cheongryong would actually take on a suicide mission with no profit margin is debatable……”
He trailed off and looked at Charles. Charles’s gaze remained fixed on his own empty right sleeve. It wasn’t simply a scar.
It was a stigma—the screams of comrades and the brand of his own helplessness, forever preserved.
“Are you thinking of going, Charles?”
Silence descended again. Charles sat with his head bowed for a long moment.
His hunched back seemed heavier than usual, as though crushed beneath an enormous stone. Forty-five comrades, dead eight years ago in that place.
Their final eyes, their severed breath—they were summoning him once more to Campania, eight months hence.
A bitter, sorrowful smile spread across Charles’s lips. It wasn’t the expression of one wishing to live, but something closer to the serenity of one who has finally found his grave.
“This old man……has finally found his tomb.”
The words, laced with dark humor, pierced through the stale air.
The old wolf’s solemn vow: to walk of his own accord into that inferno where his comrades’ bones lay scattered, seeking atonement.
But I had no intention of watching him escape through death.
I reached across the table and grasped Charles’s rough, weathered left hand slowly, but with unmistakable force.
The callused skin of his palm was cold to the touch.
“That’s not your grave, senior.”
Charles’s blue eyes widened in surprise as he looked at me. In the trembling of his pupils, I read my own cold certainty reflected back.
I spoke each word with deliberate weight.
“That place is not your grave, but the ground where you reclaim your lost honor and stand once more. Do not run.”
“Kim Do-jin…….”
“Your lost right arm—I will be it for you. Cast aside any thought of death. That place will become the monsters’ tomb instead. We will make it so.”
Charles fell silent for a long moment. His tightly compressed lips trembled, and between the deep-set lines of his face, a surge of raw emotion seemed to crest and break.
He gripped my hand in return. The strength in his grip was bone-crushing, but it was evidence that his heart still beat.
“……Help me. No—come with me.”
“Of course.”
“Thank you. Really……I think I’m going to need you.”
Kim Dae-han, who had been silently observing our exchange, removed his glasses and cleaned them with a quiet chuckle. He seemed intent on lightening the mood, clinking his glass with a brighter tone of voice.
“Here, here—we’re stopping drinking makgeolli and suddenly the atmosphere’s gotten far too solemn, hasn’t it? We’ll worry about what comes later when it comes. Come now, one last round and then we’re up. You’ll need to get to work soon, after all.”
I glanced at the worn clock hanging on the wall. Four thirty in the morning. Outside the window, deep darkness still held the city.
“……Four and a half hours until work, then.”
“Ah, in the civil service, being late is a cardinal sin. A little shut-eye and then straight to the office!”
We laughed heartily and drained the remaining makgeolli in one go. The cold liquid slid down my throat and settled in my stomach, yet my mind was sharper than ever.
Campania, Italy. I had to set those misaligned gears back in place. Perhaps that was the reason I’d been thrown into this world.
***
As we stepped out of the pojangmacha, the chill of early dawn pierced deep into my lungs. Kim Dae-han pulled out his smartphone and opened a taxi app. “Should I call you a cab? It’ll be hard to catch one at this hour.”
“Should I call you a cab? It’ll be hard to catch one at this hour.”
“No, that’s all right.”
I waved my hand lightly. I needed time to settle the mana and residual aura filling my body.
“I’ll walk for a bit. Clear my head of the alcohol, and I have some things to think through.”
“Suit yourself. Then I’ll see you at the office tomorrow. Get home safely, Do-jin. And you too, senior.”
Kim Dae-han supported Charles and headed toward his battered car. The two figures receded into the distance, their shadows stretching long beneath the streetlights before dissolving into darkness.
I turned toward the opposite street and began walking slowly.
In the deserted early-morning streets, only the regularly spaced streetlights cast my shadow long, then short, over and over again.
In the profound silence, only the rhythmic sound of my leather soles echoed out. Then, a soft, luminous glow blossomed above my shoulder.
“Victor, are you returning on foot?”
Airi, disabling her stealth mode, materialized in the air before me in the form of a small, luminescent butterfly.
Her wingbeats were silent and graceful, and the fine scales she shed dissolved into motes of mana that seeped into the atmosphere around us.
“Yeah. Give me a status report on the way.”
“Understood. Your current official Level is 15.”
“Analysis of the data from subjugating multiple goblins, shamans, and mirror golems indicates your growth rate falls 12% below expectations.”
“That figures. Experience from trash mobs is always predictable.”
Slaying one powerful enemy does more for growth than cutting down a hundred weak ones.
The mirror golems had been artificial lifeforms calibrated for testing—their mana stones were impure, and the experience gains equally poor.
I’d made it this far largely thanks to the shamans and the blood trial at Donggureung.
“How shall I allocate your skill points? Will you concentrate them all in Synchronization as before?”
At Airi’s question, I slowed my pace.
I stopped beneath a streetlight and looked down at my palms. Deep scars crisscrossed them.
Until now, I’d poured every point into the Synchronization skill.
It had been a survival instinct—to prevent the collision of mana and aura, two fundamentally different energies, from gnawing away at my body.
But when I summoned the Red Warrior, I understood something new.
The replicated summon manifested through Airi’s Sync ability shares my mana in real time.
If the vessel itself is too small, no matter how efficient it is, I cannot maintain a top-tier entity for long. Even three minutes with a First Circle mana pool is a luxury.
“No. I’m holding off on skill point investment.”
“An unusual decision. This deviates from your typical pattern of prioritizing efficiency. May I ask your reasoning?”
“I’ll learn aura control directly from Kang Tae-yoon through hands-on experience. That’s a realm I can overcome without the system’s help.
What I need now is absolute total mana—expanding my vessel. I’ll save the points and pour them all into breaking my stat caps later.”
“Updating tactical parameters. Your will is now set as the highest priority.”
Airi fell quietly into agreement and pulsed her light. I resumed walking. Today, I’d gained far more than I expected.
But the greatest treasure was what I grasped during combat—the legacy of the Sword Sage.
It was not merely a movement technique that increased speed. It was a footwork that twisted the vector of mana instantaneously, erasing spatial resistance.
The erratic trajectory it displayed when chained with Blink was paradigm-shifting for tactics.
‘Come to think of it.’
I suddenly lifted my head and gazed at Airi. The Altar of the Victor, existing in the deepest depths of my consciousness.
Beyond the stone statue of Kang Tae-yoon standing there, countless empty statues shrouded in darkness came to mind.
“Airi. The techniques Kang Tae-yoon used—there’s no way that’s all of them.”
Airi hovered motionless in the air and slowed her wingbeats. Her blue eyes blinked irregularly, like a vast CPU processing enormous data.
“I cannot establish exact data parameters either, Victor.”
“You don’t know? You’re an auxiliary system designed based on Kang Tae-yoon’s data.”
[Yes. However, my authority to unlock information is entirely dependent on the Victor’s ‘Synchronization rate’.]
[As the Victor advances in Synchronization, the data of higher-tier skills that have been obscured will be unlocked in sequence.]
“So you’re saying I have to reach that man’s level before you’ll open the next chapter for me.”
[The weight of Victorship is the weight of life itself, after all.]
I stopped walking as I listened to Airi’s dry answer. The silence of dawn grew even deeper.
I asked a question I had harbored in a corner of my chest for so long, yet never dared voice aloud.
“Then… do you have any memories of the previous Victor, Kang Tae-yoon?”
Airi’s wings stiffened for a moment, then ceased their movement. The flow of silver dust stopped.
“Do you mean whether any trace of the man Kang Tae-yoon himself remains within you?
Things like what food he liked, what expression he wore when he fought—those small, trivial things.”
Airi fell silent for a time.
It was not the hesitation of mechanical computation. It felt like the faltering of a human searching for words that would not come.
Then her colorless voice reached me.
[The physical data and combat logs of the previous Victor as an Awakened One, his methods of mana manipulation—all of these are fully preserved.]
[However… the narrative memories of the personality known as ‘Kang Tae-yoon,’ the fluctuations of emotion, the private records.]
[These do not exist in my database.]
[The existence itself has been processed as a blank.]
I swallowed a hollow laugh. The information remained as an Awakened One, but his life as a human had been erased.
Even from Mother’s memory, from the scraps of the internet, from the minds of every soul in the world—his name had been wiped clean.
A vast correction force that had forcibly twisted the world’s causality. He had paid with his entire existence so that I might live.
“Not even a trace left behind. Utterly erased. Except for me.”
A piercing sorrow crawled up my throat, but I forced it back down.
In this world, only I remained to remember him—I alone, carrying memories that did not belong.
The stronger I became, the more his power would be proven through my body, yet his name would never be spoken. That was the curse and blessing of Victorship alike.
The keepsake he left me in that final moment—the hollow where the mana stone, severed from the regression, had been embedded.
I gripped the bracelet tighter. Not comfort, but a sharp, stabbing pain that pierced my heart. The chill of metal seeped into my very bones.
He, too, had become a person who no longer existed.

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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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