The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 33

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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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33
Chapter 33. Fortress of Blades
***
Exactly one week had passed since we swept through the goblin colony.
In those seven days, the city transformed with startling speed, like a creature shedding its skin.
The forest that had reeked of death was smothered beneath disinfectant fog and the exhaust of sanitation trucks, and citizens who had held their breath in terror poured back out into the streets.
Yet behind all that clamorous wave of recovery, the most dramatic and quietly profound change was in the magnitude of the numbers that had come into my possession.
“Seventy billion. That’s the final total—the special city budget plus the forward trading proceeds from the Mana Stones.”
The stack of documents Kim Dae-han extended was substantial. The fountain pen he handed me trembled faintly at its tip as he smiled.
I accepted the papers and turned the first page.
Zeros were listed in nightmarishly surreal quantities. Seventy billion. Fully one and a half times larger than anticipated.
It far exceeded any budget ceiling a municipal government could ordinarily dispense for merely stopping a single Gate.
“The city council made a fuss, saying there was no precedent. But the mayor was resolute.
He used custody of the Mana Stones as collateral and drove straight through every objection. This isn’t simple compensation.”
Park Gwang-chul.
I’d taken him for a mere administrator backed into a corner, but in the end he proved to be a seasoned gambler who knew when to push all his chips to the center of the table.
He wasn’t simply giving me money. He was making a desperate wager—binding one reliable ally to guard against the greater catastrophe that might one day befall the city.
Not bad instincts. He understood how to read an opponent’s hand and offer exactly what was needed.
That vast capital immediately began taking physical form. There was no more need to wander the moldy office on the second floor of the Cultural Center.
In the heart of G City, a gleaming six-story building that stood out boldly among the dazzling towers.
Walls of reinforced glass reflected the city’s cold sunlight and dominated the surroundings. It was far more than a mere structure.
It was the first wedge I had driven into this land, a fortress built to prepare for the apocalypse to come.
A cold metal nameplate reading “Blade” shone with a chill gleam at the entrance.
The building’s layout had been designed entirely under my consultation.
Kim Dae-han, who had spent his entire career moving between the Cultural Center’s rooftop room and container offices, seemed bewildered when he leased an entire six-story building—as if he’d glimpsed a new world.
He brought building blueprints and asked my opinion daily.
“Honestly, I’ve never worked at this scale… I have no sense of how to handle it. Hunter, what’s the most efficient way to arrange each floor?”
My experience before regression—managing hundreds of billions and personally designing the infrastructure of a massive guild—proved invaluable here.
I already possessed vast data refined through countless failures and successes. All I had to do was transfer the blueprint from my mind onto the blueprints themselves.
“Ugh, just a bit more! To the right!”
Chu Jae-hee was sweating profusely as he pushed a heavy cargo dolly. The boxes stacked on it were disproportionately large compared to his small, lean frame.
I gripped the edge of the dolly with one hand and applied gentle pressure. The squeaking wheels began to roll smoothly.
The new building’s expansive elevator rose toward the upper floors with a soft hum of power.
“Hunter, you must be busy—thank you so much for helping us move all this.”
“I was just warming up anyway. Don’t mention it. But what is this?”
Chu Jae-hee pushed his glasses up self-consciously, though the smile playing at his lips couldn’t be hidden. His eyes were already fixed on the contents of the box.
“This? It’s the latest model, specially ordered and direct-imported from an American hunter shop! An X-700 Appraisal Scanner and a Phase Deconstructor!”
He stroked the surface of the box tenderly, as though caressing a lover’s skin, his voice trembling with excitement.
“Is this equipment really that exceptional?”
“Exceptional doesn’t even begin to cover it! Each unit costs over five hundred million. The maintenance fees alone burn through a small guild’s annual budget. I’ve heard the Invictus Guild only has one of this model at their headquarters—but Team Lead Kim allocated four units, exclusively for our team.”
His eyes gleamed with fervent enthusiasm—the pure joy of a true equipment aficionado. I smiled slightly and nodded. In truth, I had pressed Kim Dae-han strongly on this matter.
Talented people deserve the finest equipment available, given without hesitation.
In the previous world, I witnessed countless parties annihilated because an appraiser using cheap equipment failed to read the trap in a cursed artifact.
Investment in an appraiser is not merely the cost of a machine. It is the cheapest insurance premium that guarantees the lives of the entire guild.
Kim Dae-han understood this principle well and executed the budget without question, exactly as I requested.
The completed building layout was flawless.
The first floor contained general reception and security gates.
Newly hired administrative staff served as a shield, filtering through the steady stream of minor complaints and media attention from outside at the first checkpoint.
Two specialized Armed Bulletproof SUVs, modified with reinforced alloys, remained on constant standby in the basement parking garage for rapid deployment.
At the first signal, they were prepared to tear through the pavement and launch into action.
The second floor held general offices and a strategic conference room. Kim Dae-han’s office was located here, where he oversaw the guild’s administration and external political dealings.
The third floor contained equipment storage, a central command center, and a large server room.
A main control facility operated twenty-four hours a day, monitoring Mana Fluctuations throughout G City in real time and analyzing Gate emergence signs on a second-by-second basis.
The fifth floor—where Chu Jae-hee was heading now—served as his exclusive Appraisal and Mana Engineering research lab. The Mana vibrations radiating from the cutting-edge equipment could be felt even in the corridor.
The final sixth floor was left empty.
Even so, the budget remained comfortably abundant. The surplus was reserved for strengthening equipment for guild members and an emergency reserve fund.
Ding—
The elevator doors slid open. The fifth floor was already furnished like a massive research laboratory.
As I rolled the dolly inside and unloaded the boxes, Chu Jae-hee rushed over as though drawn by a magnet and connected the scanner’s power supply.
Whirrrrr—
A pleasant low-frequency hum accompanied the emergence of a massive hologram screen suspended in midair. The news channel auto-played to calibrate and synchronize the display.
[···And now, this news. Public opinion is running hot regarding the Blade, a newly established guild under G City Hall.]
The female anchor’s crisp voice shattered the silence and filled the laboratory.
My ID photo appeared on screen alongside footage from in front of the gymnasium a few days prior, when I’d rejected Invictus Guild’s ten-billion-won offer—now playing as archival material.
[A-rank Hunter Kim Do-jin, who burst onto the scene like a comet, has registered as guild master, but the only confirmed affiliated hunter is Kim Do-jin himself.]
[Experts express skepticism about how long a solo operation can survive without the systematic backing of a major guild.]
The so-called expert on screen adjusted his glasses and began pontificating.
Typical logic from those who believed the virtue of a guild lay in filling out roster numbers with lower-ranked hunters.
“Did you see the news, Hunter? The whole world’s been plastered with your story.”
“Yeah, well.”
Chu Jae-hee adjusted the screen’s resolution while surreptitiously gauging my reaction. I fixed my gaze on the display without expression.
It made sense. Gates were the kind of place where even a hundred hunters got shredded to pieces—establishing a guild alone meant getting treated like a madman. There was nothing unreasonable about it.
The hunter society operated on the logic of capital and numbers, nothing else. But I had no intention of dancing to their shallow arithmetic.
My scale and my vision were different from theirs.
Chu Jae-hee powered down the screen and tilted his head.
“But Hunter, why did you choose the name Blade? There are plenty of grandiose English names trendy these days.”
I lowered my gaze at the simple question. Blade.
A name left behind by my brother and comrades. A word stained with blood and sweat, dusted with the ashes of burned-out companions.
Back then, for us, this name was not mere signage—it was the only proof that we could entrust each other with our lives.
“It’s like a hometown to me.”
I had wrestled with bringing this name back into the world through countless nights. Was it truly right to shoulder forgotten traces alone?
Yet I could not avoid it. This name was no mere banner—it was my own vow to fight this twisted world until the bitter end.
At my sparse answer, Chu Jae-hee did not press further and shifted the subject. He was the kind of perceptive friend who understood the weight of silence.
“About the Dragon-head Sword I worked on last time—how was it in actual combat? Did you have any balance issues?”
“It was excellent.”
I drew the Dragon-head Sword from my waist.
The sharp metallic screech of metal scraping against metal tore through the quiet. The blade, gleaming with a bluish inner light, exhaled a chill beneath the fluorescent lamp.
As my palm closed around the hilt, the muscles in my hand contracted minutely, and I felt the sensation of the sword becoming one with me.
“Thanks to your work, the Mana Amplification efficiency has increased noticeably. And when mixing Aura and Mana, the sense of dissonance has diminished considerably.”
Chu Jae-hee’s mouth quirked at the praise. He approached carefully and traced his finger along the blade.
I felt a faint Mana Fluctuation at his fingertip. But as his finger moved down the middle section of the sword, his expression hardened abruptly.
“No… that’s not it.”
He furrowed his brow deeply. After pooling Mana in his fingertips to check the sword’s durability, he shook his head decisively.
“This sword doesn’t suit you, Hunter. Rather, you’re not being supported by it.”
“It doesn’t suit me? The balance is good, and the conductivity should be upper-tier even among rare grades.”
“The sword’s specs are excellent in themselves. But the vessel is too small to withstand your output. Look here.
Microscopic fractures are beginning to form in the Mana circuits inside the blade. This isn’t something caused by simple repeated swings.
It’s proof that your Mana pressure has repeatedly shattered the threshold the sword can tolerate. You’re hammering your output in brutally.”
Chu Jae-hee’s eyes grew sharp behind his glasses.
“You’re not a mage, Hunter. You’re a swordsman.”
A chill ran through my chest.
My mind still clung to the pride of a ninth-circle mage, yet my body had already rewritten the laws of the battlefield. A physique where the sword moves before the incantation.
The perceptiveness of this young Appraiser, who grasped the nature of combat at a glance, was remarkable. I smiled genuinely and turned the question back on him.
“Then in your opinion, what kind of sword would suit me?”
“One that can withstand you.”
Chu Jae-hee answered without a moment’s hesitation. He handed the Dragon-head Sword back to me and continued.
“You don’t need shallow tricks to amplify Mana. What you need is a crude, solid vessel—something that can contain, without breaking, that mad pressure and killing intent you pour out. A truly sturdy blade. This Dragon-head Sword won’t make it through the next Gate.”
“I see.”
“For now, I’ll reinforce this sword by layering runes onto it bit by bit. But that’s only a temporary fix. Once good equipment hits the market, I’ll bid on it immediately from my end. Money’s no issue.”
“Thank you.”
A truly likeable young man. He held strong convictions about his field, and possessed the skill to back those convictions up.
***
I turned and walked as I watched Chu Jae-hee depart to handle repairs.
Airi, who had been dozing in cloaked form on my shoulder, revealed her shape as a silver butterfly and rustled her wings. Fine Mana powder scattered with each flutter.
[An excellent Appraiser, Successor.]
[Predictive analysis indicates the guild’s asset value has been adjusted upward by fifteen percent.]
[His growth will make a decisive contribution to your combat force preservation.]
“True. He’s got a sharp eye.”
I agreed with Airi’s assessment and exited the fifth-floor laboratory. I pressed the elevator button. My destination was the fourth floor.
The fourth floor was entirely my personal space. During the design phase, I’d made a strong demand—removing walls across more than half the floor to create one massive private office combined with a maintenance room.
The remaining space belongs to an F-rank female Hunter. Ordinarily, the general office on the second floor would have sufficed, but Kim Dae-han had asked earnestly otherwise.
“If you put Tae-hwa and that person on the same floor, I’m certain the entire building will be torn to shreds within a day. Please, I’m begging you—separate them.”
After all, she was a phantom Hunter who clocked in on her access card only to clock out thirty seconds later. I accepted the arrangement, treating it as leaving half the spacious floor vacant.
Her presence was the quietest and most alien sound in this building.
Ding—
I arrived on the fourth floor. At the end of the corridor, above a heavy soundproof door, a nameplate read [Maintenance Room A].
I pressed my fingerprint against the biometric scanner, and the door hissed open on a cushion of compressed air.
“Not bad.”
The moment I stepped inside, a familiar quiet enveloped me entirely. The space spanned roughly twenty-six hundred square feet.
The floor was covered with matte acoustic matting that swallowed sound perfectly. Every window was coated with bulletproof film, cutting off all sight lines from the outside.
Half the room was a training space. Weighted heavy bags for sword work, and a small sparring room ringed with impact-absorbing walls.
The other half was a perfect office. At its center sat an enormous ebony desk.
Three curved thirty-two-inch monitors arced gracefully across its surface.
Below the desk, the tower ran a liquid-cooled system whose blue light pulsed steadily—a state-of-the-art workstation.
I’d asked Kim Dae-han to push the RAM to its absolute limit so the machine could process server-grade volumes of data without lag. A beast of a thing.
I moved slowly around the desk. The interior design, the furniture arrangement, even the temperature of the air itself.
I’d recreated the office as faithfully as memory allowed, modeling it on the one from before the regression.
I knew from experience that the most familiar space sharpens the mind to its coldest, keenest edge. Familiarity, sometimes, becomes your greatest weapon.
Yet it wasn’t identical. The Blade Guild before the regression had been similar in almost every way, save for one unmistakable difference—precisely this: the windows.
Whoosh.
I moved to the window and drew the heavy blackout curtains. Sunlight vanished, and the room sank into deep darkness.
In the corner by the window, a premium Italian leather recliner came into view.
Clap.
I clapped my hands, the voice recognition system responded, and the room’s lighting dimmed to five percent brightness. A space of perfect silence, temperature and humidity precisely controlled.
I settled deep into the recliner.
Soft leather embraced my entire body in perfect comfort.
Paradoxically, that sweet sensation only sharpened the invisible weight pressing down on my shoulders.
The leather felt cool beneath my fingertips, yet my heartbeat grew only quieter.
Compared to the ten years before the regression, I had compressed time into something approaching a miracle.
At this point in the past, I’d been trapped in the cage of an F-rank Hunter, bleeding my way through low-level Gates like a rat fleeing from wall to wall.
Those miserable days of licking my wounds each night, worrying about survival the next morning. But now I held cards incomparably stronger than anything that past could offer.
Money, power, and knowledge of what was to come.
Which is precisely why I cannot stop. The privilege of regression was not given to be wasted. I have no luxury for complacency in this meager peace.
The more I grasp in my hands, the harder I must hone myself.
The moment my eyes close, monsters lurking in darkness will bare their fangs through that gap.
It is time to walk again into the depths of that hellish abyss where the stench of blood reverberates.
‘Always remember.’
A world reduced to ash, and that catastrophic force that had burned everything away. The vast shadow of the Evil God Dragon that would bring extinction upon humanity.
I slowly closed my eyes. In the darkness, my consciousness grew even sharper.
I gave an order to the silver butterfly perched upon my shoulder.
“Airi. Open the Successor’s Altar. It’s time to assess my strength.”

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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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