The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 42

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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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42
Chapter 42. Ghosts of the Past
***
Screams and curses mingled with the sharp, metallic screech of steel colliding and shattering, battering my eardrums without cease.
Yet my mind remained anchored to none of it.
Crimson blood sprayed in all directions; torn flesh drifted through the air like confetti across the battlefield.
In the heart of that grotesque stillness, my vision fixed on a single point—the blade of the thin tactical knife gripped in my right hand.
‘Like filling a paper cup with water and sprinting at full speed.’
That was the perfect metaphor for what I was doing now.
This Self-Defense Dagger I’d forcibly taken from Jung Se-hee was nothing more than a cheap piece of iron—the lowest grade among commercial offerings.
If I recklessly poured Swordmaster Power’s Aura from my Core into such a flimsy medium, the blade itself would crumble to dust under the internal pressure before I could complete even a single slash.
Which meant extreme control was necessary—that final threshold where the Aura wouldn’t physically collapse the blade’s molecular structure.
I had to push force up to that razor’s edge and no further.
And only in the split-second instant when the weapon pierced skin and severed muscle could I unleash destruction—a task demanding microscopic precision.
Gripping the blade inverted, I slipped into the blind spots of the brutes closing in from all sides.
Slice—!
“Gaaaah!”
I cleanly severed the wrist tendons of the first man blocking my path.
The instant the tip approached the wrist bone, I cut the Aura’s output to zero and withdrew the blade smoothly.
Feeling through my fingertips, the edge remained unmarked. Satisfactory.
Next, a steel pipe arced toward me from the side with a dull whistle—I slipped it with minimal upper-body movement, the whip of displaced air grazing my ear.
Letting my body flow with the motion, I drew the blade across his femoral artery in passing. Not a wasted millimeter in my trajectory.
No reason for my breathing to stutter. No reason for my heartbeat to quicken.
‘You’re a swordsman through and through, Hunter.’
‘You’re no swordsman. More of a wizard, really.’
The perfectly contradictory assessments of Choo Jae-hee and Charles.
The essence of the dissonance I now experienced, wearing Kang Tae-yoon’s Swordmaster Power in this life while having reached the pinnacle of 9th Circle as an Arch-Mage before my Return, lay precisely in that gap.
I was using this worthless cheap dagger as an experimental tool, conducting precise research to find the convergence point between two extremes. In fact, Charles was right.
I am, in my bones, a wizard.
A lifetime spent dissecting the principles of Mana, reconstructing laws—that rationality could never accept the absence of ‘thought,’ relying only on bodily sensation. It was fundamentally impossible.
If I couldn’t empty my mind, it was more efficient to rewrite the structure of computation itself.
Synchronization—the skill that converts Mana into Aura.
I had to make it so there wasn’t even a moment to consciously chant or activate it.
Just as air enters the lungs when I breathe, and blood circulates when my heart beats—pushing it into a perfectly unconscious realm.
I twisted the method: the meticulous, sprawling computational process inherent to wizardry moved into the brain’s background processes, while real-time precise control of the Aura’s output took the foreground.
And in that foreground, the swordsman’s instinct created only the optimal slash trajectory to bisect my enemy.
Around me stretched a carnage reeking of blood, yet my interior remained as silent and cold as a vacuum laboratory.
The keener my senses became, the slower my enemies moved, and I wandered through the gaps between them at leisure.
Rip—!
Drawing a deep, long diagonal across the chest of the last guard who stood his ground, I watched his massive frame crumple at my feet.
The carpet soaked dark with fresh blood in an instant.
“Ugh… cough…!”
Seven bodies lay sprawled across the floor at various angles.
Not one could grip a weapon anymore, only emitting bestial groans drawn up from deep within their lungs.
I lifted the dagger in my right hand to eye level and examined it.
A faint residue of blue Aura trembled along the blade, dissipating, yet the edge remained intact—no chips, no warping.
‘Half a success, then.’
I’d cut through seven Awakeners with a piece of cheap iron while preserving the weapon’s integrity.
If I could layer my unique trait, the Tree of Sephiroth, onto this delicate balance of power without collision, I could reach the ‘next stage’ Charles had mentioned.
“Excuse me.”
A tentative voice came from behind. When I didn’t respond, sunk in deep contemplation, a more urgent, sharper cry pierced my eardrums.
“You crazy bastard!!”
At Jung Se-hee’s sharp call, rationality snapped fully back into external reality.
As my vision cleared, the thick stench of blood seized my senses first.
The VIP Room that moments ago had evoked a five-star hotel suite had transformed into what could only be called a slaughterhouse.
An Italian leather sofa worth tens of millions of won lay shredded, its white stuffing spilling out grotesquely, and across the ornate silk wallpaper, blood splatters scattered in all directions had dried into an eerie pointillist painting.
I’d deliberately avoided fatal wounds—never touching vital points like the heart or throat, only methodically severing joints and tendons.
With proper bleeding controlled, they’d survive. Not yet the time to kill.
I tossed the blood-stained dagger carelessly onto the table and clicked my tongue.
‘Weaker than I expected.’
Since my Return, the only things I’ve cut through with this body have been thick-skinned, tough monsters from the Other World—orcs, goblins, creatures like that.
I hadn’t factored in how fragile human flesh and muscle would be, how easily it would slice apart.
If I’d miscalculated the force even slightly, everyone in this room would’ve scattered as literal chunks of meat.
“Haa…….”
Jung Se-hee approached me with both hands clamped over her mouth, carefully sidestepping the pools of blood scattered across the floor.
Her eyes trembled violently, like an aspen leaf, struggling to process the carnage she’d just witnessed.
I moved toward Manager Kim, who remained pinned against the wall’s concrete skeleton, gasping for breath on the edge of consciousness.
I grabbed his ruined collar and dragged him roughly down to the floor.
“Gah—hack! P-please……spare me, I beg you……!”
Gone was the ridiculous bluster he’d shown moments before. He clung desperately to my pant leg, pleading with pathetic desperation.
I pressed my blood-stained heel down against the back of his hand and spoke quietly.
“Where. The Executive Office.”
“U-up! Right above us! The very top……the topmost floor!”
Space existed beyond the sixth floor? My brow furrowed involuntarily.
Even recalling the blueprints Kim Dae-han had sent me, the building’s layout had the concealed sixth-floor VIP Room as its terminus.
What he was saying was that they’d illegally added extra ceiling height between the roof and that level, creating a hidden chamber invisible from outside.
What kind of structure was this?
The fact that a large commercial building could undergo this much illegal expansion without a single inspection from City Hall or the District Office made it obvious—there were corrupt bureaucrats higher up who’d deliberately turned a blind eye to the whole thing.
Once I’d completely cleaned out this garbage den, I’d decided I’d start by systematically taking out whoever had authorized this construction.
I was about to lift my heel away.
“Wait.”
Jung Se-hee, her face drained of color, crept closer and began rifling through Manager Kim’s inner jacket pockets and sleeves with ruthless efficiency.
“Found it!”
She pulled a single black plastic card from Manager Kim’s blood-soaked inner jacket pocket.
A worn magnetic stripe ran along one edge—unmistakably a Master Card Key for controlling special elevators or security sectors.
“Here. Without this, you won’t even be able to press the button to go up, right? Bosses like these are naturally paranoid—they block off the stairs completely.”
Jung Se-hee held out the card key with a slightly smug expression.
The fragile image from moments before—suppressing her urge to vomit at the sight of blood—had vanished without a trace. It was a strange adaptability.
“How did you know?”
“You can just tell by looking. There’s a feeling to it, you know? This guy kept guarding this pocket the whole time.”
She shrugged lightly. Feeling. That damned intuition again.
As a Swordmaster, my nature rebelled against such superstitious nonsense as “instinct” or “fortune,” but I couldn’t deny the efficiency of what she’d just accomplished in this moment.
Without a word, I took the card key from her hand. It was cold to the touch.
I left Manager Kim discarded on the floor like garbage and stepped out of the VIP Room. In the hallway, a mechanical whirring emanated faintly from the ceiling corner.
Whirrr—.
A surveillance camera, its lens rotating and focusing toward us. With the lower levels in this kind of state, there was no way the head honcho upstairs didn’t know about it.
Someone was definitely watching my every move on a monitor behind that lens.
Without breaking stride, I flicked my finger lightly toward the camera.
Snap!
An invisible bullet of Mana cut through the air and pierced the camera lens with perfect accuracy.
Sparks flew, and the sound of the lens shattering fell away behind me as I stepped before the dedicated elevator in the center of the corridor.
I held the Master Card Key up to the receiver.
Beep—.
With a cheerful confirmation tone, the metal doors slid open on both sides.
After checking the interior, I stepped in, and the elevator began its smooth, silent ascent toward the top floor.
Jung Se-hee remained pressed against my back, swallowing hard, struggling to suppress her mounting tension.
In that narrow space, her ragged breathing and my steady heartbeat crossed paths.
At last, the doors opened again.
“Wow…….”
An exclamation escaped Jung Se-hee’s lips. The landscape that unfolded beyond the elevator was utterly unlike any space on the floors below.
An enormous open-plan Executive Office formed by completely removing all the walls on the building’s top floor.
The floor was densely laid with premium black marble that seemed to absorb light, and the air carried a subtle, weighty wood-scent incense—far removed from the cheap liquor stench or rank smell of blood.
Yet that very tranquility gave off a discordant sense of revulsion.
The ceiling was the most overwhelming element.
The entire roof had been retrofitted with floor-to-ceiling glass, allowing G City’s murky night sky and pale moonlight to flood the vast Executive Office.
It was an interior design that embodied the pinnacle of warped arrogance—trampling the vermin of the ground underfoot while claiming exclusive dominion over the heavens.
And at the far end of that expansive space, someone sat in a leather chair behind an enormous mahogany desk, their back to us.
The chair turned slowly, deliberately slowly, to face us.
“…….”
The moment I took in the figure’s appearance, my brow furrowed involuntarily at a sense of alienation difficult to articulate.
The drug cartel boss didn’t fit the usual image—not the brutal features or heavy suit one would expect from a major crime kingpin.
The man wore a silk robe in shades of red and gold, haphazardly clashing in a pattern so garish it verged on obscene.
Across his exposed chest hung a gold necklace thick as a finger, and between his hands curled the smoke from an expensive cigar.
A human being corroded from the inside out—madness and narcissism twisted grotesquely together.
The man exhaled cigar smoke toward the ceiling in a long plume, giggling to himself.
“Shit, I nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw you on the monitor. Who the hell breaks into someone’s bedroom at this hour?”
His voice rasped like metal scraping metal. He rose from his chair with an unsteady sway, his slippers dragging across the floor as he shuffled slowly toward us.
“This guy’s completely insane.”
Behind me, Jung Se-hee muttered under her breath, her voice tight with disgust. But my attention had already erased hers from my mind.
The face drifting toward me.
Pupils dilated and slack from drugs. Lips curled upward in a snarl. And beneath his left eye, a long serpentine scar, twisted and ugly.
The moment those visual details reached my retina and transmitted to my brain, something that had settled heavy as stone in the depths of my core for decades—a cold, ancient killing intent—began to roil up like molten lava.
“You’re Kim Do-jin, right?”
The man stared directly into my eyes behind the dark glasses and let out a soft cackle.
“Kim Do-jin from Beomho High. You son of a bitch. It’s you, isn’t it?”
***
Shards of memory drove in sharp and cold.
Before the return. Long before the world began its descent into annihilation—just a fragment from an ordinary school days.
Those early days when gates to the Other World were only just beginning to open, when the System granted Awakening to a select few. An era of chaos and lawlessness.
In those days before the state could establish its control network, there were early Awakeners who seized power quickly.
Beomho High School. Jang Yu-cheong.
That was the name of the thing now giggling in front of me, dragging on a cigar.
If Hong Tae-hwa—the mad dog of the Ability Management Team—was a crude beast with uncontrollable violence, then Jang Yu-cheong was a snake through and through: cunning and vile to the bone.
He never displayed his abilities openly within the closed confines of the school.
He didn’t swing fists recklessly or smash property to draw attention.
Instead, he wielded his shallow awakened powers—Mental Domination and Body Control—covertly and maliciously against his peers, establishing himself as the school’s invisible apex predator.
He manipulated classmates’ minds with subtle precision, forcing them to hand over their wallets, trapping them in hallucinations to dance on the roof’s edge, savoring their terror.
He trampled human dignity into the mud. The fact that he ended up in my class in first year was the overture to my hell.
One day, I witnessed him casting a hypnotic spell on a female classmate—one that would enslave her for life. It wasn’t some grand sense of justice that drove me.
I was still unawakened back then, with no core yet opened, but the crude, sloppy tangles of mana he’d woven together offended my eyes.
Even without wielding mana directly, interpreting and unraveling the structure of a spell logically was something anyone could reach with knowledge and a good eye.
I dug through overseas forums, found a few herbs, and brewed a crude antidote. I secretly gave it to that girl and forcibly broke his hypnosis.
It was the first moment the ordinary me interfered with the world of abilities—and the clear trigger for Jang Yu-cheong’s twisted rage.
“Shit, you clever bastard.”
Because I’d dared to damage his perfect toy, he hounded me with relentless malice.
Physical beatings were the ambient music of my days. He clawed into my mind, forcing me to experience hallucinations each night—flesh tearing from bone while still alive.
There were limits to what reason could endure. What pulled me from that hell was my older brother, Kang Tae-yoon, who happened to learn of my condition.
Already awakened as a prodigy of Swordmaster Power and drawing the Association’s attention, he stormed into the school, shattered Jang Yu-cheong’s magic with a single Sword Aura, and left him a permanent cripple.
After that day, Jang Yu-cheong vanished like smoke, and Kang Tae-yoon became everyone’s hero.
Later, rumors had him drifting into some nameless underground gang, looting illegal gates until a monster tore into him and left him dead in some pathetic gutter.
That was my last memory of him.
Yet in this world where history’s axis had twisted, he’d clung to life and risen to become the head of a massive drug cartel consuming all of G City.
“Man, the world really is small, isn’t it?”
Jang Yu-cheong adjusted the cigar between his fingers—the right hand that had been severed by my brother, now replaced by an intricate mechanical prosthetic—and grinned.
The metallic clinking of the artificial fingers grated.
“Bastard. I almost didn’t recognize you. So you became a Hunter, huh? A-rank?”
He exhaled smoke in a long stream, his eyes slowly raking over my entire body. His gaze was thick with mockery, contempt, and a formless jealousy.
“Shit, they’re handing out Hunter licenses to every mutt on the street now. Or how’d you make A-rank? Bribes? Payoffs? Or—”
Jang Yu-cheong struck his forehead dramatically and giggled.
“Did you sleep your way up with that old crone who runs the Association? Your pretty-boy face always went over well with the girls, right?”
Jang Yu-cheong continued, his shoulders shaking with what he clearly thought was hilarious.
“You got stronger, didn’t you? The way you pushed past our boys and climbed up—and Manager Kim was only B-rank. Did you maybe suck off one of our boosters?”
His lip curled upward in a sneer.
“That’s it, isn’t it? You sucked off some genuine booster for free and clawed your way up from the bottom pulling this shit. Isn’t that right?”
Jang Yu-cheong gasped out laughter, breathless.
A phantom from the past was barking crudely in my face, but I didn’t flare with anger or let loose premature killing intent.
Instead, my mind had gone ice-cold, as though submerged in glacial water. The flow of mana had stilled to absolute quiet.
Before his filthy laughter had even scattered into the air—
Crack!
It took less than a second for the laugh to transform into a grotesque scream. The cigar that had been held between the fingers of Jang Yu-cheong’s right hand, his mechanical prosthetic—
The small ember burning red at its tip exploded like a grenade the instant it collided with my mana.
Searing crimson flames consumed Jang Yu-cheong’s face directly.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhh—!!”
The stench of charred protein mixed with burning flesh filled the air as he crashed backward.
With his face still aflame, he thrashed pathetically across the marble floor, and I looked down at him with eyes as dry and unmoved as stone.
The flames burrowed into his skin, consuming fat, ravaging nerve endings.
“Ah! My eyes! My eyes!!!”
Half his face ravaged by horrible burns, he crawled across the floor, shrieking. His anguished cries tore through the stale air of the Executive Office.
“What was that?”
I walked slowly to his head and stood over him.
“If those are your last words, you might want to speak more clearly.”

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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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