The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 36

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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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36
Chapter 36. Sword Logic and Threads
***
Four in the morning. The air in the Mountain Behind City Hall was cold and sharp as a beast’s fang.
Darkness still clung thickly to every hollow of the mountainside, and dry twigs clattered against each other with each gust of wind, crying out in petulant irritation.
In the heart of that desolate darkness, only one sound persisted—the regular whoosh of the blade cutting through empty air.
Swish,
Swooosh.
Each time the wooden sword tore through the air, a weighty vibration began at my feet and traveled up my spine to my wrists.
The tremor hammered through my joints, awakening the body to its own existence.
If training in the predecessor’s altar was an endless contemplation of spirit and mind, an abstract struggle, then training here in reality was utterly primal labor—scraping against the body’s limits, wringing them dry, twisting them beyond breaking.
Before the Regression, when I’d stood at the pinnacle as a mage, I had despised physical conditioning with a savage passion.
The sensation of sweat pouring out, breath rising to the very edge of my throat, the cries my muscles made as they tore and knitted back together—I’d deemed it all the exclusive domain of primitive beasts.
I’d believed that only burning brain cells while sitting in lotus position, touching the truths of the world, was the sole and noble path a mage ought to walk.
But now, having inherited the Sword Saint Kang Tae-yoon, the situation is different. This body does not tire.
Or rather, to be precise—each time I break through a barrier, memories inscribed in Kang Tae-yoon’s muscle fiber awaken cell by cell, sending out a strange, relentless pulse.
Before my mind can issue a logical command, my body has already found the optimal trajectory and moved.
My joints and tendons drink in mana like a sponge and convert it into destructive force, and in that process, the contraction and expansion of my muscles granted a raw, unfamiliar exhilaration.
Intuitive destruction born of pure physical force. It was proving an efficiency of a wholly different order from magic’s meticulous composition.
Since the goblin nest Gate was cleared, I haven’t missed a single dawn—I come to this mountain every day.
Charles sometimes showed up on time, and sometimes didn’t appear until the sun was high overhead, reeking of cheap liquor.
But whether he came or not, my task remained always the same.
‘Imbue with Aura, yet drain the force from it. Swing the blade fifty thousand times or more.’
Tedious, agonizing repetition. Yet there was no resentment.
Back in my 1st Circle days, when I’d first opened my mana channels, I’d repeated incantations tens of thousands of times just to conjure a single spark at my fingertip—this was no different from that patience.
In boxing terms, it was like jumping rope hundreds of thousands of times before stepping into the ring.
I know better than anyone that without such grueling foundation work, a blade technique built like a sandcastle will crumble without hesitation before unforeseen variables in actual combat.
Even in my Archmage days, I’d been a faithful believer in the importance of fundamentals.
“Remarkable. Diligently committed, aren’t you.”
A thick voice sounded behind me, accompanied by the rustle of fallen leaves underfoot. Exactly one hour late to our appointment.
Charles was walking over slowly, wiping the whitish stain of alcohol from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve.
One of his hands held a green soju bottle, as always, and he reeked of stale tobacco mixed with cheap spirits.
I delivered one final strike into the void and lowered the wooden sword slowly. Fifty thousand swings before Charles arrived, and now fifty thousand more beginning from this moment.
A journey toward one hundred thousand total cuts.
From the many times my palms had blistered and callused, then blistered again, the wooden sword’s hilt was already stained dark red with blood.
My lungs felt as though they might tear open from their expansion, and heat rose from every pore of my body like steam. My heartbeat struck against my ears like a relentless drum.
Charles sat on a rock, sipping his soju, and spoke with casual indifference.
“Now, at last, the form is taking shape.”
I caught my breath, gasping roughly. The coppery taste of blood rose in my throat.
“Is that… praise?”
“No. You’ve simply moved beyond crude club-swinging and can now wield a blade that’s at least passable.”
I didn’t argue. I felt it keenly myself—that thin, bitter limit.
Over the past weeks, I’d mentally simulated that overwhelming point-force slash Charles had demonstrated thousands upon thousands of times.
I’d tried to logically deconstruct how his muscles moved, how mana concentrated along the path to the blade’s edge, and to imitate it.
But while I could copy the external form, I couldn’t touch even the edges of that weighty essence he’d unleashed.
The blade I wielded was sharp and merciless, yes—but I couldn’t shake a sense of artificiality, of stiffness.
Like a precisely engineered machine moving only along its prescribed trajectory.
Movements carved from meticulous analysis. I’d tried to deconstruct every element like solving an equation, deriving the answer—but no answer appeared.
“Does that sword technique you use have a name, by any chance?”
At my earnest question, Charles burst into laughter—not a mocking laugh, but rather the bittersweet smile of an old man recalling distant memories.
“Well, back when I was green, I too once chased after such glittering things. Some kind of sword art, some school or another, all that nonsense. As if having a name attached to yourself made you something great.”
He tossed the last of his soju down his throat and stared vacantly out at the ridge of the mountain as dawn approached.
In the depths of his blue eyes lay layered sediment—the world-weariness and solitude of accumulated years, dark and deep.
“There’s nothing grand about it. Just cut faster and cut harder, that’s all.”
“…What do you mean by that?”
“Sword technique is ultimately nothing but a combination of those two things. To move faster and reach your opponent before they perceive you—and to strike harder, shattering their defense and cleaving their body. That’s all there is. Everything else is decoration.”
An answer that made no sense. At first, I thought it was an old man’s idle jest. But then a sharp, eerie sense of déjà vu flickered through my mind.
[Cut faster.]
[Cut harder.]
The two foundational skills of the Sword Saint that I’d inherited after Kang Tae-yoon’s existence was erased from the system.
When I first saw that childish, blunt skill name, I’d scoffed aloud.
But if every intricate principle of the sword—whittled down and refined to its absolute essence—truly converged on “cutting fast and hard,” then the equation changed entirely.
The problem lay in my body’s limits.
The two skills etched in my current skill window, Slash and Breaker, both bore the Sword Saint’s mark and were already calibrated to their absolute threshold.
My flesh, tasked with channeling their output, was woefully inadequate for the job. My physical output remained brutally low.
Without the Synchronization process—forcibly converting magical mana into physical Aura—the blade itself became uncontrollable, impossible to wield.
I was wringing out this power by sheer force, choking off its output and overloading my circuits in the process.
An unavoidable, minute delay emerged in the act of binding Aura to the blade and striking.
Without bridging this cognitive gap, I would never reach that seamless mastery which Charles and my brother had attained.
“What must I do?”
I’d abandoned pride long ago.
Charles, for all that he now lived like a cripple and a failure, was among the finest swordsmen of his generation—a man who’d survived the wreckage of his own collapse.
The senior studied me in silence, then slowly raised his intact left arm in place of the empty right sleeve. His hand was bare, gripping no blade.
He spread his palm flat, shaped it into an edge, and gently flicked it through the empty air.
Thwick!
In an instant, the forest’s air shrieked and tore. A clean, cold slash of Aura—invisible wave—shot toward the ridge line.
Dozens of thick branches fell in neat, diagonal lines. No deafening blast. No sparks from mana overload.
A single strike that poured out as naturally as breathing—less a technique of slaughter than a finely tuned, exquisite melody.
‘That’s it.’
Goosebumps rippled across my skin. Before the Regression, my brother’s sword strokes had felt exactly like this when he carved through armies of Demons alone.
No straining for power, no wringing force—just destruction as perfect and inevitable as water flowing downhill.
“You’re no swordsman,” Charles said.
He withdrew his hand, murmuring low.
“You can’t become a swordsman. You’re closer to a mage to your very bones.”
It was pure instinct speaking—the clarity that only a beast who’d crossed countless lines could possess. He’d sensed something alien in the way I wielded a blade.
“Tell me the answer, then. You spent a million won on groceries with my card yesterday. Shouldn’t that at least buy one proper piece of advice?”
Charles coughed and broke into an easy grin.
“Rich kids are stingy. Grumbling over a little meat for an old man.”
“That was team budget earned from Mana Stones. The card you’re scratching? That’s my personal salary.”
“Fine, fine.”
Charles rose from the stone and tapped my shoulder. His eyes, stripped of mischief, were deep and solid.
“You can’t become a swordsman because you think too much.”
“Stop thinking?”
“That’s right. Watching you swing that blade, it’s like you’re solving some incredibly complex equation in your head. Drawing mana, compressing it into muscle, timing every stroke, adjusting trajectory. Meticulous, flawless—but the very time that computation takes is what slows your blade down.”
He’d struck the nerve dead center.
My method of converting mana to Aura through Synchronization was itself one vast magical construct.
The habit of Multi-casting that I’d maintained as an Archmage was bleeding directly into my swordwork.
“Stop thinking. Don’t calculate. Just release the tension and surrender to the flow. Make the blade move before thought, from the depths of the unconscious. That’s the next threshold you need to break.”
In theory, it was simple.
But for a mage who’d spent a lifetime in meticulous calculation and control, being told to empty the mind was like being told to stop breathing—a grotesque, fundamental contradiction.
I stared at my hands in silence, their skin blistered and torn.
I had to silence the tangled branches of thought, reach down to the roots of instinct, if I ever wanted to climb to where those monsters dwelled.
“See? You’re thinking again!”
***
As Charles came down the muddy path, wet with overnight dew, he suddenly spoke.
“You’re heading out on a mission with the Taeseong Energy girl, yeah?”
My footsteps faltered.
“Taeseong Energy? What do you mean?”
Charles turned his head, seeming genuinely puzzled.
“That youngest daughter. Didn’t you know? Kim Dae-han never mentioned it?”
Fragments of scattered information in my mind suddenly collided, forming a massive vortex.
That foul-mouthed, arrogant F-rank Hunter who’d walked into my locked Maintenance Room yesterday as if it were her own bedroom—Jung Se-hee. She was bloodline to Taeseong Energy?
“First I’m hearing of it.”
Taeseong Energy.
Not merely a conglomerate of vast assets.
They were the premier enterprise that had succeeded in commercializing Mana Stone Cartridges—converting the volatile, ferocious energy extracted from the Other World into stabilized electricity for everyday use.
A symbol of colossal capital and power that held thirty percent of the world’s energy dominance, not just Korea’s.
So why was the youngest daughter of this invincible dynasty slumming it as a phantom Hunter in some backwater bureau? A runaway?
Judging by how she’d cowered at a single mention of a disciplinary committee, it wasn’t voluntary escape.
It was a staggering revelation, yet I showed no sign of disturbance.
“How did you end up here? This doesn’t seem like the kind of muddy ground a wealthy heiress would step into.”
Charles exhaled a short sigh at my question and shook his head. Compassion flickered across his eyes for a moment.
“I don’t know the details myself. In this business, everyone who washes ashore has something they can’t talk about. You know that, and so do I.”
Charles pressed his lips together, unwilling to dredge up her past further. Since I had no interest in other people’s tedious stories either, I steered the conversation elsewhere.
“In any case, tomorrow I’ll be tracking the Booster distribution network alongside her on Kim Dae-han’s orders.”
The moment the word “Booster” left my mouth, Charles’s steps stiffened.
“So it’s only she who can track that rotten stench. Guide her well.
She puts on spines and spews venom on the surface, but underneath she’s falling apart.”
“I’m not interested. As long as I earn my keep in tomorrow’s operation, I won’t be treated like baggage.”
“Kim Dae-han didn’t pair you with her for nothing. Have you ever seen that cunning bastard throw a card without reason? There’s intent behind it.”
“We’ll see soon enough.”
At the fork where the mountain path ended and the asphalt streets began, just before Charles turned toward the dark alley opposite, he glanced back with a faint smirk.
“Still, try following Jung Se-hee’s thread.”
“Thread, you say?”
“Yes. The answer to the uncertainty you were wrestling with up on that mountain—it might well hang from the end of that very thread.”
Charles ended with that cryptic remark, waving vaguely as he disappeared into the grimy alley.
Morning sunlight shattered across his departing back, yet his words lingered in my mind like a heavy riddle.
Following the current without thinking.
The sensation of abandoning the meticulous calculations of magic and surrendering to the body’s instinct.
Perhaps, as Charles said, this hunt might hand me a clue far greater than simply uprooting the Booster operation.
Then my smartphone vibrated faintly in my pocket. The caller ID was unknown—an anonymous number.
When I lit the screen, a single sentence brazenly filled the display.
[You got the right asshole’s number?]
[Get to the Cafe in front of the Office right now. I’m only waiting 10 minutes.]
“This is something else.”
How long had it been since I’d received a message in such a rough, commanding tone from anyone?
I turned the smartphone lightly in my grip and cast my gaze toward the direction of the Cafe.
Before beginning the hunt in earnest, it seemed I would need to properly establish the hierarchy with one untamed wild pup first.
The fatigue from dawn training was sharpening my mind instead.

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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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