The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 41

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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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41
Episode 41. The Real and the Fake
***
The moment the heavy soundproofed door swung open, a bass beat hammered straight into the eardrum, pouring through the gap like a physical force.
Waiters dressed in crisp black suits filed in with mechanical precision.
Their hands bore the price of greed—paid for or about to be paid for by this room’s master.
Across the wide marble table, premium crystal glasses descended with a clear, crystalline ring.
Bottles of liquor wrapped in golden ribbons began their gleaming arrangement.
Millions of won in single malts and vintage champagne—the sort of labels you won’t find in ordinary shops. The appetizers were extravagant to the point of grotesqueness.
Over the scarlet beef tartare lay black truffle—”black diamond”—and caviar heaped in abundance, while delicate gold dust scattered across the seasonal fruits with an almost eerie brilliance.
Even as the world crumbled and monsters poured from Gates tearing at human throats, time seemed frozen in this place.
No—time flowed backward here, a paradise in reverse.
A fortress of moths who burned hundreds of millions of won on tonight’s pleasures, oblivious to the approaching apocalypse.
This luxurious, dreamlike space was a malformed aquarium born of human desire—utterly sealed off from the hell beyond its walls.
“Wow. They sell this kind of thing at clubs?”
Jung Se-hee narrowed her eyes with genuine curiosity, scanning the table. The youngest daughter of Taesung Energy, one of the country’s largest conglomerates.
Raised among Korea’s wealthiest elite, even she seemed to be seeing a club’s hospitality for the first time.
She was just reaching for a fork, unable to resist the novelty.
The waiters, moving in perfect unison, stepped aside left and right as if by prior arrangement, opening a narrow passage.
“My apologies for keeping you waiting. Word arrived that distinguished guests had come, and preparations ran slightly behind.”
Crossing the threshold was a man in an immaculate white suit, not a speck of dust on him.
His pomaded hair slicked back neatly; his eyes cut thin and serpentine.
Behind his artificial smile, a fishy desire seeped into the air. Behind him stood a massive guard like a shadow, silent and unmovable.
The bulge near the guard’s upper chest suggested he carried not just Awakener strength, but equipment as well.
The man approached the table and bowed, politely but without servility—the angle was calculated.
“I am the general manager of Club Arabian. Please, call me Manager Kim. It is truly my honor to host two such distinguished guests.”
The dim lighting, the casual clubwear Jung Se-hee had dressed me in.
And the dark sunglasses hiding my eyes—perhaps that’s why Manager Kim didn’t recognize me at all.
It seemed rumors of a City Hall Hunter hadn’t penetrated the sound-sealed walls of this deep underground chamber.
“Yeah?”
I sank deeper into the sofa’s backrest.
The leather was plush against my shoulders, but my senses stretched like tendrils, reading every vibration in the room. I tilted my chin down at him.
“Get to it. We’re wasting time.”
A well-heeled dandy from the Alley who treated VIP Rooms like his own home. Or perhaps a spoiled young Awakener desperate to buy power with his parents’ money.
I delivered the casual rudeness in that register.
Manager Kim’s eyebrow twitched—barely a millimeter—but he recovered instantly with a thoroughly trained customer-service smile and a nod.
“Of course. An impatient sort. I like that.”
He withdrew a palm-sized black velvet case from his jacket and set it carefully in the center of the table.
The way his fingertips handled it was almost priestly—the reverence of someone handling a sacred relic.
Click.
The case opened with a crisp snap, and a lavishly gold-plated Golden Inhaler came into view.
Inside the transparent circular chamber, a flawless orange liquid sloshed—no impurities, no cloudiness.
The way it caught the light, radiant and lustrous, was like holding a fragment of the sun itself.
‘Booster Orange.’
Just by looking at it, I could tell it was qualitatively different from the crude contraption those street thugs had been sucking on in the Alley earlier.
Not a degraded knockoff stuffed into cheap plastic. The finishing was precision-alloyed to block even the finest seepage of Magical Power.
Even the interior cushioning of the case was a specialized material accounting for Magical Power conductivity. On the surface, it bore the full authority of a genuine article.
“The product is guaranteed authentic.”
Manager Kim extended his index finger proudly, pointing to the Golden Inhaler.
“Fresh-refined, direct import from our contacts in China—the highest grade available. You can search all of Korea; no other establishment handles this concentration. Anything sold elsewhere is counterfeit.”
An ugly chill crawled up my spine. Fragments of memory surged backward like floodwater.
Before the Regression—the cursed organization mass-producing these Boosters, poisoning entire continents with addictive Mana.
The Red Blood Alliance. That massive organization that had enslaved countless Awakeners, addicting them to the fleeting rush of power, turning them into expendable meat shields.
There was no way a two-month-old club in the G City Old Downtown was directly connected to the Red Blood Alliance.
They would have used far more covert, far more expansive distribution networks.
Which meant these men were either a subsidiary cell or mere lackeys.
“The price is a clean ten million won, if you please.”
Manager Kim continued softly, gauging my reaction.
“The young lady over here will be joining in too, I assume? Twenty-two million for both, but I’ll give you a special discount of two million—so let’s say twenty million total.”
“Yeah? Not gouging me?”
“Impossible. It’s not a cheap product. It doesn’t strain the Core, leaves no aftereffects—it’s premium merchandise that flows into the mind cleanly. Once you’ve tasted it, you’ll never be satisfied with ordinary Mana again.”
I kicked off from the floor. Before his words had even finished.
Pure physical force erased the narrow indoor distance in an instant.
My vision narrowed like a flickering strobe, and the next moment my hand was already at Manager Kim’s collar across the wide marble table.
“Ack—ack—urgh—?!”
Beyond perception. His pupils shook violently as though torn, losing focus.
Jung Se-hee, who had been leaning against the sofa, gasped sharply and slapped her hand over her mouth in alarm at the situation that had unfolded in an instant.
The glasses on the table trembled and emitted thin, piercing cries.
“Sir!”
The massive guard standing behind reacted instinctively, rushing forward to draw a Machete from inside his jacket.
But Manager Kim, his feet half-lifted off the ground by his collar, waved his hand frantically through the air and stopped him. He must have felt it.
Each of the fingers wrapped around his neck squeezing with a firmness harder than a steel vise.
“D-don’t—come any closer—! Stay back—!”
He, too, was an Awakener, however lowborn.
The moment the guard moved rashly, he would instinctively sense that his cervical spine would crumble first under my grip and his neck would snap.
A faint Aura bloomed from my fingertips, coiling around his carotid artery like a serpent.
“How dare you.”
A dry, low voice froze the air in the room.
“Bring me garbage like this? Do I look like a complete fool to you?”
“I—I don’t—what are you—! Gag—cough!”
I added just a fraction more pressure to my grip. Manager Kim’s face turned purple in an instant.
Unable to secure his airway, I stared straight into his bloodshot eyes. In those eyes, pierced with terror, my expressionless face was reflected.
“I made myself perfectly clear.”
I whispered, my grip on his throat tight, my voice audible only to him.
“I said bring me the brightest one. You show up with counterfeit garbage that doesn’t even match the composition? Are you running some kind of con, trying to pull a quick one on some mark?”
Manager Kim’s gaze wavered openly. The smell of sweat seeping from his body and the fishy pulse of his Mana made my skin crawl.
Only when genuine tears born of terror seeped from his eyes, when fear was imprinted deep into his bones, did I release his collar without hesitation.
He crumpled pathetically onto the carpet.
“I’m—I’m terribly sorry—! Cough! Hack!”
Manager Kim, doubled over on the floor, clutched at his neck and coughed harshly. His torn suit jacket and disheveled hair were a far cry from the composed manager of moments before.
“If you pull another stunt like this next time, the Owner herself will have to come down.”
I returned to the sofa as though nothing had happened. I drained the beer in one gulp—lukewarm now, its carbonation long since faded in the ice bucket.
The fizz sliding down my throat cooled my head.
“I’ll—I’ll remember, remember this! Sir, I truly apologize. My judgment was lacking. I’ll bring the genuine article right away!”
Manager Kim hastily gathered the scattered bills from the floor, then hurried out of the VIP Room with his guard in tow.
Even as the door closed, his shoulders trembled faintly.
Jung Se-hee, rigid as stone beside me, finally exhaled the breath she’d been holding and collapsed onto the sofa.
“What the—! Are you insane? I seriously thought my heart was going to stop! Why did you do that? I thought you were killing him!”
“Cheap beer. Just water with a barley gloss on it.”
I shoved the empty glass roughly toward the corner of the table. It slid across the marble with a sharp, grating sound.
Jung Se-hee stared at me in disbelief, her eyes wide.
“Wait—how did you even know? That stuff looked completely legit a second ago. Gold dust all over it, the consistency looked super concentrated. That was fake too?”
“Common trick. They never show their whole hand from the start.”
I pointed with my chin at the Golden Inhaler left alone on the table—the one Manager Kim hadn’t managed to grab.
“The packaging looks convincing, the color and viscosity match perfectly at first glance, but the substance is garbage. The Mana resonance is superficial. It’s just flavored water, like coffee grounds left in hot water. Breathe that directly and your Core would get contaminated, or you’d suffer Magical Power imbalance for a week.”
“Isn’t that kind of casual speech? That wasn’t in our contract terms as far as I remember.”
“I’m in character. Don’t interfere with my role. One more complaint and I’m walking out of here.”
“You really are a nightmare to deal with.”
This was the sensibility of a Grand Mage who had spent decades immersed in the depths of Mana, dissecting and weaving together every vibration in the world.
In the 0.1 seconds it took for the case to open, I could calculate the contamination level without error—merely from the density and frequency of the Mana that leaked out.
No matter how flashily they mimicked the exterior, the harmonic coherence of the substance inside was fundamentally no different from the crude Orange-grade garbage street thugs puffed.
If anything, the toxic compounds added to disguise the appearance made it closer to an outright poison, more harmful to the human body.
Such shallow deception could never fool the eyes of a Grand Mage.
Manager Kim, now gone, wouldn’t fetch the real deal either.
The ecology of this world wasn’t so naive that they’d hand over precious originals to an unknown visitor appearing for the first time.
By now, they’d be watching my every move through the CCTV, waiting for orders from above.
But confirming that an original Booster—the real thing—actually existed somewhere inside Club Arabian was enough to make today’s street thug act worth the effort.
“You’re done now.”
I turned my gaze toward Jung Se-hee. Behind the dark glasses, her eyes held a mixture of curiosity and fear.
“Use your common sense to find the staff corridor and leave through the back. What happens next isn’t a place for someone like you. This isn’t consideration—it’s a warning.”
We’re in the heart of the enemy’s stronghold. The entire basement could be one massive trap.
I had no luxury to drag a non-combat Hunter—fragile as paper—across my back while fighting.
It was a cold, tactical retreat order, calculated purely on efficiency and survival odds.
But instead of running, Jung Se-hee opened another beer and gulped it down greedily. The amber liquid spilled down her pale chin, tracing the bottle’s edge.
“Don’t bark orders at me. I got out because I’m sick of hearing that garbage at home.”
Her fingertips trembled faintly. Yet she forced a grin and added:
“Where else would I see a show this entertaining? Some guy from City Hall causing trouble—obviously I’ve got to witness it firsthand. Who knows, maybe I’ll testify later?”
My head throbbed. I couldn’t tell if she was simply ignorant, treating combat like a movie matinee, or if this was the peculiar resignation of someone who’d already danced with death.
I realized I’d been too considerate.
Taking the full weight of my cold stare, Jung Se-hee reached into her walker boots and drew out a Tactical Dagger that gleamed silver.
A crude, poorly enchanted self-defense blade—the kind you’d find at any Hunter shop.
“I know how to protect myself. Don’t worry about me. Just focus on what you’re doing.”
Her insistence on defending herself with a toy dagger was infuriating, but I didn’t press further.
The Jung Se-hee I’d seen so far was stubbornness incarnate.
***
Bang!
The door burst open without a knock. The soundproofed panel crashed against the wall with a sickening boom, and Manager Kim appeared once more.
This time, it wasn’t just the bear-like guard from before.
Six or seven hulking figures in black suits radiated menace, packed tightly behind him.
He’d clearly swept up every armed operative waiting in the hallway.
The acrid, metallic stench of Awakener mana and steel surged into the VIP Room.
Jung Se-hee grasped the new weight of the atmosphere, and she slipped backward behind me, dagger still clutched.
Her ragged breathing hit my ears. I remained seated on the sofa, turning my head slightly to study Manager Kim.
“Did you bring it? If it’s fake again, I’m setting your head on this table as a centerpiece.”
The obsequious smile vanished from Manager Kim’s face entirely.
The proprietor who’d been begging for his life moments ago was gone.
“I deeply apologize, guest. Or rather, you’re no longer a guest, are you?”
Manager Kim loosened his necktie with visible frustration and cocked his head at an angle. The sound of bone joints grinding echoed sickly.
“What?”
“Our boss has given orders. There’s no need to show our precious goods to rats who don’t know their place. He says to make examples of those who run their mouths without understanding the hierarchy.”
Manager Kim fished something from his pocket and tossed it to my feet.
Rolling across the carpet, it thudded against my shoe—a crude Plastic Booster, the exact same kind those street dealers had been sucking on in the alley.
Half empty, its opening smeared with someone’s spit, grimy and disgusting.
“He wanted me to tell you: suck on this garbage and leave quietly. Of course, that’s only if you manage to leave alive.”
The sneering laughter, and behind it Awakeners releasing their Magical Power with killing intent. Certainty crystallized.
This was the massive hub of Booster distribution—a factory where human souls were bought and sold.
Before the Regression, I’d been powerless. Back then, I’d been too busy fending off the Monsters pouring from low-tier Gates in rural regions.
I’d had no energy to care about whatever filth these alley scavengers committed.
But now everything had changed.
In my hometown, in my own backyard, I had no reason to quietly watch poison flow through the city’s veins.
The plastic container on the floor wasn’t mere insult. It was a malignant tumor pulsing through the city’s bloodstream, slowly drowning it in death.
I bent slowly and picked up the cheap Booster from the floor.
“That’s five hundred each, so you’ll need to pay up before you—”
Manager Kim’s mocking words snapped like breaking bone.
Whoosh!
Crimson flame erupted across the plastic in my hand. No complex incantations or formations were needed.
Pure Friction Heat radiating from my fingertips sufficed.
The cheap plastic lost its form, melting into nauseating, acrid smoke, then evaporated entirely into nothing but ash drifting into the air.
“—?!”
Manager Kim’s eyes bulged, terror flashing across his face. His Awakener instincts were screaming.
I stared into the empty space where the plastic had burned, and spoke with a cold, measured grip on reason:
“I asked for the real one. Are your ears ornamental?”
“You crazy bastard! Break his legs! Now!”
Manager Kim shrieked, his face crimson, and the guards surged forward in unison.
Crack!
My fist drove into the first one’s face. No complex Magic calculus, no Mana conversion—nothing wasted.
I simply drew the pure Aura pooled in my dantian and traced a primitive, flawless arc into him.
“Ugh—!!”
A dull, explosive crack shattered the air, and the wall fractured violently.
The man flew as if hit by a cannonball, punching through the soundproofed wall and slamming grotesquely twisted into the concrete frame.
The man with his ribs completely caved in clawed at the floor, spewing blood and foam like a beast.
An overwhelming, instantaneous domination. The remaining guards hesitated, then tightened their grips on machetes and steel pipes.
Sharp blades cut through the air in unison, blazing with Mana’s cold light. All seventeen of them—Awakeners who had opened their Mana Cores and sent them into overdrive simultaneously.
The thought that they might actually flood this narrow, ornate room with blood made a low sigh escape my lips.
“What do we do?! Sir, they really mean to kill us!”
Jung Se-hee’s hands, gripping the hem of my jacket from behind, trembled uncontrollably. Her breath, thick with terror, tickled the back of my neck.
“Look at their eyes! They’re different from before! They really mean to—”
I moved past her shaking form and stepped forward slowly. Then, without ceremony, I took the thin dagger from her hands and gripped it in my own.
“It doesn’t matter.”
Over the cold blade in my grip, a blue Aura shimmered like heat haze. It wasn’t simple Aura coating.
I threaded Magical Power between the molecular structure of the blade itself, pushing its strength to the absolute limit—a crude enchantment.
The crude metal blade suddenly rang with a clear, crystalline tone and began to glow.
“Doesn’t concern me.”
“Y-yes?! What doesn’t concern you?”
Behind Jung Se-hee’s bewildered cry, the guards swung their weapons at me in unison. The sharp sound of air being torn echoed from all directions.
“Because I’m about to get serious now too.”

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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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