The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 40

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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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40
Chapter 40. Star Dust
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The moment I pushed through the heavy soundproofed door, a bass so profound it seemed to crush my eardrums struck my entire body.
It was more than mere sound. It had become a physical force—a wave with substance that hammered against my rib cage.
The stale air trapped deep in my lungs was shaken loose and expelled, while my heartbeat was forced into servitude, its rhythm shattered into fragments.
Gaudy laser lights cut through the thick, hanging smog, carving bizarre geometric patterns across the empty air.
It was a furnace of pleasure, artificially constructed to numb both sight and sound simultaneously, paralyzing rational thought itself.
Club Arabian’s interior was far more intricate and, at the same time, far more designed for avarice than I could have imagined from outside.
“Wow—!”
Jung Se-hee, standing beside me, threw her arms up and let out a short cheer.
She tilted her head back, letting the cascade of lights wash over her entire body, and swayed her hips gently to the beat, surrendering herself to the confusion of noise.
The adaptability she displayed seemed impossible—this was the same woman who had been strangled in a dark back alley by an assailant just days ago, brought to the threshold of death.
Not a trace of tension remained; I’d be hard-pressed to find even a hint of it.
Whether she had forgotten fear or had always lacked it, I couldn’t tell. But in this moment, her pupils held nothing but an unbridled thirst for indulgence.
Yet my gaze did not linger on her movements. I continued forward, burning the club’s overall layout into my mind.
The sensation beneath my feet felt foreign. The floor was made of special reinforced glass whose transparency could be adjusted in real time.
Beyond the 1st Floor stage beneath my feet, I could see straight down into the basement, where hundreds of people writhed like beasts in a chaotic mass.
The sight of sweat-slicked skin and bodies twisting in frenzy below filled me with the sensation of observing a pit of pure desire.
It was an interior design that catered to humanity’s basest voyeurism—deliberately crude and in appallingly poor taste.
Butterfly-shaped Mana Constructs, glowing with a soft pale blue light, hovered in clusters throughout the air, dozens of them at a time.
One luminous butterfly descended delicately onto the smooth shoulder of a woman glistening with sweat.
The butterfly’s wings crumbled like powder, and a holographic blue text materialized in the air—a personal SNS account and contact information.
It was a recreational Spell Formula designed to efficiently mediate the breeding urges that unfolded in this place.
As another butterfly fluttered toward me and began to alight on my shoulder, I condensed a minute amount of Mana to the tip of my index finger and flicked it away.
The butterfly dissolved into nothingness in mid-air before it could even touch me.
‘Crude craftsmanship.’
Mana that should have been used to tear apart Otherworld Monsters and sustain human survival had been degraded into an entertainment accessory.
It was a textbook scene of corruption—when those ignorant of true power seize wealth in their hands. I twisted my lips into a cynical sneer and clicked my tongue sharply.
Bzzt—.
My Smartphone in my pocket vibrated with a short, heavy pulse.
[That’s the thing I mentioned earlier.]
It was Kim Dae-han. He had hacked into Club Arabian’s architectural blueprints and sent me the real-time interior layout.
I turned on the screen and a floor plan tangled in complex lines appeared. I scanned the blueprints without breaking stride.
From Basement Level 2 to the 5th Floor above ground. On the surface, it was no different from any other large club in Gangnam.
But the moment I compared the ceiling height of the space before me with the figures recorded on the blueprints, a sharp inconsistency stabbed through my mind.
When I cross-referenced the exterior height of the actual building with the sum of the internal floor-to-floor heights, a blind zone of approximately four meters appeared between the 5th Floor ceiling and the rooftop—one that shouldn’t exist according to the blueprints.
[You noticed, didn’t you? There’s a concealed sector in the upper level that doesn’t show up on the blueprints.]
[There’s a strong possibility it’s sealed with Perception Obstruction Magic rather than a physical bulkhead.]
Kim Dae-han’s message appended below the blueprints. My intuition and his analysis aligned perfectly. This was the moment the hunting ground’s location was confirmed.
I stood motionless and slowly closed my eyes.
Shutting out unnecessary visual information, I honed every sensory cell in my body to razor sharpness.
The evolution of Mana I had achieved by expanding my core from 1st Circle to 2nd Circle had transformed me into a detector of an entirely different dimension.
The club’s interior was saturated with every conceivable stench—harsh alcohol vapors, cheap perfume, the sweat reeking from excited bodies.
And the crude, viscous Mana Residue shed by low-grade Hunters indulging in their pleasures.
Traces of Mana imperceptible to ordinary senses drifted through the air.
But beneath all those stenches, seeping from the very depths, I detected a faint, sickening stench that made my skin crawl.
That same murky, oppressive reek emanating from the drug dealers in the back alley.
The distinctive afterscent of artificially concentrated Mana enhancement agent—Booster—was leaking subtly through the building’s ventilation system.
The smell grew more potent as I moved toward the upper levels.
I opened my eyes.
I snagged the nape of a waiter passing nearby.
He concealed a toned, muscular frame beneath his black shirt, and his gaze held a killer’s intent you’d never find in ordinary service workers.
He was security personnel doubling as a club staff member.
“What the—? Let go—!”
Spitting curses, the employee spun around, and his eyes collided directly with my gaze beyond the tinted sunglasses.
Without releasing any Mana externally, I constricted his breathing with my eyes alone—the Predator’s Gaze honed through countless crossings into the Otherworld.
The employee’s facial muscles convulsed, and his open mouth froze mid-scream.
“I want to see Star Dust.”
My voice was low, yet it pierced through the club’s roar and embedded itself precisely in his eardrums. His pupils trembled violently, dilating slightly.
“From the highest place.”
His eyes sharpened in an instant. Now he no longer saw me as a mere drunk or a nuisance.
It was clear he’d pegged me as an uninvited guest proposing a dangerous deal—or worse, a top predator. He swallowed hard, then bowed his waist with exaggerated courtesy to show me the way.
“······This way, sir.”
The employee turned and began cutting through the crowd. I seized Jung Se-hee’s wrist as she lounged at the corner of the stage, brandishing a vodka bottle, and gripped it like cargo.
“You found it already?”
“Come on. We’re going up.”
I half-dragged the complaining woman in tow as I followed the employee.
Beyond the glittering stage lay a dead end at the far side of the ground floor corridor, blocked by an enormous decorative wall panel.
When the employee pressed a specific pattern on the wall, the smooth marble split silently, revealing the concealed entrance to an elevator.
A passage that didn’t exist on any building blueprint. A shadow’s doorway.
Before it stood two bear-sized guards. They spotted the employee’s hand signal but made no move to step aside.
Instead, they began frisking my shoulder and torso with rough hands.
Each time a fingertip grazed a pressure point on my body, muscle fibers contracted instinctively, mapping trajectories of counterattack—but I forced myself to swallow it down.
They conducted a thorough search with physical weapons like blades and guns, as well as small Mana Stones, recording devices, and even Mana detectors.
It was the kind of meticulous screening that could catch artifacts hidden even by a 1st Circle sorcerer.
Once the search was complete, one guard lifted his chin and silently extended a thick palm.
I produced a thick envelope of documents I’d prepared beforehand and pressed it into his hand.
As the weight of the envelope transferred, a trace of sordid satisfaction flickered across the guard’s eyes.
The guards stepped aside, and I ushered Jung Se-hee into the elevator and stepped in after her.
The doors closed. I studied the interior. There was no floor display whatsoever. Only a single button decorated with gold leaf—a ‘J’ mark.
I pressed the button. In silence so absolute that not even mechanical sound could be heard, a sensation of weightlessness took hold. The shift in vertical gravity climbed up my spine.
“How do you even know about a place like this? What is your real identity, anyway?”
Jung Se-hee leaned her back against the elevator wall and asked, her tone suggesting utter disbelief.
Her voice was pitched higher than usual, and her fingertips trembled faintly.
The psychological pressure of the soundproofed space, cut off from the club’s noise, had finally caught up with her.
“Kim Dae-han told me about it.”
“I figured as much. Is that man actually a civil servant? Or is he someone dispatched from the National Intelligence Service or somewhere like that? How would a city official know the underground structure of a club?”
I agreed entirely. Kim Dae-han understood the value of information and knew how to weaponize it once processed.
That he was rotting away in an ordinary administrative post was either a national waste, or evidence that this society itself had decayed beyond redemption.
“How much did you slip the guard? The envelope was pretty thick.”
“Five hundred.”
“Insane. You burned five hundred just for entry fees? Must be rolling in money.”
“I got a good deal.”
Whatever circulated in this VIP room was likely to be a high-grade Booster worth far more. The link between drug cartels and corrupt Hunters.
Five hundred was practically free admission to the secret heart of that machinery.
Ding.
The elevator doors opened with a soft friction sound.
The vista that opened before my eyes was a world apart from the crude clamor below.
A long corridor carpeted so thickly and luxuriously that footsteps sank into it. As suspected, this was the 6th Floor hidden in the blueprint.
The entire floor divided into just three or four enormous rooms.
The air was chilled, undercut with the subtle scent of lilies, but beneath that layer coiled an uncanny murderous intent and the ghost-trace of narcotics.
Following the employee’s lead, I entered the largest room at the corridor’s end. The moment the door opened, a short exclamation burst from Jung Se-hee’s lips.
“Wow······.”
It was a luxurious interior as if a five-star hotel’s presidential suite had been transplanted wholesale into this space.
Across the marble floor sat premium nubuck leather sofas, while a massive screen that consumed an entire wall displayed hypnotic, geometric imagery in silence.
A chandelier crafted from precisely worked Mana Stones hung from the ceiling, scattering subtle Mana as it gleamed.
“That’s one fancy sofa. Better than what we have in our living room, I’d say?”
Jung Se-hee threw herself onto the sofa, feigning brightness to suppress her wariness. She dangled her feet in the plush cushions, but her gaze never stopped darting toward the entrance.
I ignored her cheerful theater and picked up the gold-finished intercom phone resting on the table. An answer came immediately from the other end of the line.
“Set up the room with your most expensive liquor. And.”
I paused, letting a cool smile settle across my lips. The smile of a hunter calling in his prey.
“Bring the one that shines the brightest. Today’s finest stock.”
I hung up the receiver. Jung Se-hee, sprawled on the sofa gazing at the ceiling, suddenly whipped her head around.
“What is it? Are you hungry? Why order appetizers so grandly? Do you think this is some kind of fancy restaurant?”
Finding no reason to respond, I cast my gaze toward the window.
The nightscape of Gangnam viewed from the 6th Floor was brilliant, yet to my eyes it looked like nothing but a sandcastle about to crumble.
To remain so relaxed even after penetrating the enemy’s nerve center—whether it was a lack of crisis awareness or a breakdown in situational comprehension, I couldn’t say.
“Look at you, ignoring people like that.”

She grumbled as she reached for the welcome-drink beer bottle wedged in the ice bucket on the table.
Her throat worked busily as she twisted off the cap and drank straight from the bottle. It was pathetic to drink during a mission, but I saw no reason to stop her.
From the start, I’d never expected her to provide combat support or sharp tactical judgment.
Her role was simply to be the signpost leading me to this concealed place, and the bait to put our enemies at ease.
The work of slitting the throats of insects fell entirely to me.
“······Ahhh.”
Silence settled over us for a moment. Jung Se-hee set down the beer bottle and wiped her lips roughly with the back of her hand, stealing a quick glance at me.
“What, nervous? You’ve been staring at that door like it owes you money. You’re not actually scared, are you?”
The taunt was laced with mockery. Yet in my vision, I read her trembling fingers and the tension knotted in her trapezius with perfect clarity.
“No.”
I turned my body and looked down at her sprawled across the sofa—a gaze emptied of all emotion, colorless and flat.
“Seems to me you’re the one who’s nervous.”
“······Ah, no I’m not! Why would I be nervous? I’m Jung Se-hee!”
She flushed and bristled. A remarkably transparent woman. She gulped down the rest of the beer.
Beneath the gaudy veneer and her affected nonchalance, the white knuckles gripping the table’s edge and the anxious flutter of her pupils betrayed her completely.
“Better than home, honestly~”
She set the empty bottle down on the table and forced out a laugh. I said nothing, keeping my arms crossed and my eyes fixed on the closed door.
The moment the bait-takers opened that door, this peaceful room would transform into a slaughterhouse reeking of blood.
“You’re pretty strange, you know.”
Unable to bear the silence any longer, she spoke again.
“How so.”
“You know I’m the youngest daughter of Taeseong Energy, right? You must have heard the Guild people talking about it earlier.”
“I’m aware.”
“Right, so. Usually when people find out my background, they jump straight to questions. Whether my father’s scary, if our wealth is really in the hundreds of billions, why I’m running around making trouble in places like this—stuff like that. But you? Not once. Not from the very beginning until now.”
“I don’t see any particular reason to ask.”
My curt response drew a deflated laugh from Jung Se-hee. For the first time, a flicker of genuine curiosity lit her eyes.
“It’s just… strange. Most big shots grovel the moment they hear our family name, but you treat me like I’m just some annoying baggage.”
It wasn’t that I felt no curiosity about Taeseong Energy and its clan.
Only that the arrow of my questions pointed not at the abandoned youngest daughter before me, but at the core of the corporation accelerating this world’s destruction.
Taeseong Energy—the corporation that held a monopoly on “Mana Stone Cartridge” technology, which refined Mana Stones, byproducts of the Otherworld, into civilian energy.
They were the true rulers of this age, having accumulated vast wealth on the backs of human survival.
Before the regression, Taeseong Energy transformed at some pivotal moment.
They abruptly scaled back civilian energy distribution and began supplying Mana exclusively to defense contractors and corrupted major Guilds. The result was catastrophe.
The energy-poor could not maintain even the minimum Barriers to protect themselves from Monsters, and the world’s most impoverished were thrown as food to the beasts.
Before the Demon Dragon God descended, the world was already an apocalypse created by demons wearing the mask of capital.
It had not always been such a corporation. In its early days, it had preached humanity’s salvation. That made the mystery deeper still.
What drove them to stand idle while mankind perished?
At this point in time, they had not yet fully bared their claws.
Perhaps this foolish youngest daughter would become the trigger that unraveled that vast conspiracy’s threads.
Knock-knock.
A heavy knock cut through the thread of my thoughts.
Between the door’s gap, a Mana aura chillingly thick and the reek of sickening drugs began to seep through simultaneously.
This was not the presence of a mere waiter or low-level dealer. It was the aura of true predators from this world, come to tear into their prey.
I lifted my back from the sofa and issued an order to Jung Se-hee.
“Step back. Over there in the corner.”
“Huh? Why all of a sudden? You’re scaring me.”
She blinked in confusion and asked again, but I had already erased her from my awareness.
I slowly drew up the 2nd Circle Mana I’d suppressed deep in my core, and the sensation of Aura carved into my very marrow. My heartbeat began to slow once more.
No—the world was slowing down.
The trajectory of dust drifting through the air, the minute tremor of the door’s hinges, the ragged breathing beyond it—everything decomposed and imprinted itself on my mind.
I immersed myself. The pinnacle of deception, here tonight, about to stain this place with blood.
The role of madness that would make Satan himself turn away in horror.

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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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