The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 43

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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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43
Chapter 43. The Measure of a Sorcerer
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Humans feel their most primal fear when confronted with a variable they cannot comprehend.
It is fundamentally different from the survival instinct that arises when facing an enormous predator.
It is closer to a psychological rejection response—the collapse of common sense that you believed could never occur, and witnessing the distortion of physical law that has completely escaped your control.
The moment you face that unknown realm, reason goes numb, and only the beast’s instinct thrashes upward like a creature drowning.
Right now, Jang Yu-chung rolling across the floor in front of me embodied exactly that.
“Aaaaaahhhhh! It’s burning!! My face!! Damn it all!!”
A piercing shriek scraped across the broad marble floor of the Executive Office.
His agony was proven not only by sound but by the acrid, choking stench of charred protein spreading through the air. I gazed down at that wretched spectacle in silence.
I felt no sadistic pleasure, no twisted satisfaction.
It was simply a dry verification—observing the result of the Sorcery Structure I had just wrung out, correcting the margin of error between theory and observable reality.
Ignition.
As I expanded my Core from the First Circle into the Second, the speed of my Incantation shortened dramatically.
Add to that a clear “catalyst”—the expensive cigar he was holding, the small spark dangling from its tip—and the time needed to convert Mana into flame and detonate it required only an instant.
The true difficulty of this instant-ignition flame magic lies not in casting speed.
It lies in where you detonate it, and how perfectly you control the backlash of Mana that returns to the Sorcerer the moment of casting—these factors determine the sorcery’s level.
A tricky Formula: fail to suppress the Mana wave retroactively, and the caster’s wrist joint shatters first.
For a Grand Sorcerer like myself, basic backlash control was nothing more than an instinctive pattern, as simple as breathing.
“Kim Do-jin… you bastard!!!”
Jang Yu-chung writhed on the floor, cursing, and desperately raised both hands to his face. His fingertips trembled minutely, clawing at empty air.
In that instant, a thin Mana barrier of murky color formed around his palms.
A crude Mana shield, but it began to choke off the oxygen feeding the flames searing his face and forcibly scattered the Mana wave.
Ssssshhhhh—!
With a horrific noise of flesh burning, the flames of Ignition mercifully died away.
So the wretch who trafficked in Mana had intuitive grasp of how to counter flame magic even in a desperate moment.
“H-Healing… Healing!!”
He spat out an Incantation in urgent gasps. A bluish healing aura danced around his unburnt fingertips.
He pressed that glowing hand desperately against his mangled, exposed face.
Whoooosh—
But the result was appalling.
The blue light skimmed over the wound, stemming urgent bleeding and preventing cellular death, but the Mana density fell woefully short of restoring the hideously charred and dripping flesh to its original state.
The limit of the Third Circle. The depth of Core the wretch had reached amounted to barely clinging to the threshold of B-Rank in modern Hunter Rank classification.
Compared to before my Regression, when he could only weave crude hypnosis on me, this was remarkable growth.
“You… bastard…”
Jang Yu-chung staggered to his feet.
Half his face had grotesquely melted away from the burns, and his tongue tip itself was singed, so his words spilled out in a bizarre, slurred hiss.
One eye had blackened from the burns, and only the remaining iris gleamed at me like a serpent’s.
That smug face of his, which once gnawed at my mind and mocked me, twisted now into such squalid deformity that it was, objectively speaking, a rather satisfying sight.
“I’ll… tear you to shreds.”
Jang Yu-chung staggered toward the wall and savagely slammed a hidden switch.
Whiiiiirrrr—
A dull mechanical drone shattered the silence of the Executive Office. The massive glass dome ceiling overhead began to split open and peel back to either side.
Cold, keen night wind rushed unobstructed into the office. The luxurious carpet billowed, and papers on the desk scattered like butterflies into the air.
Jang Yu-chung, who had pressed the switch, thrust both hands heavenward.
BOOOOOM—!!
The murky Mana he drew from his core exploded outward with savage force.
It shattered the remaining glass and frame of the half-opened ceiling with such crude output it was almost senseless.
Massive shards of glass caught the moonlight, glittering like diamonds as they rained down like hail.
The Executive Office became in an instant a battlefield synchronized perfectly with the harsh external currents.
“Aaaaaahhhhh!”
“What is this?! Where is it falling from?!”
The shockwave of destruction traveled through the building’s structure to the lower levels; faint screams and commotion began rising from beyond the thick marble floor.
The gale wind wound roughly around Jang Yu-chung’s coat.
Jang Yu-chung, who had blown away the entire ceiling, glared at me with his remaining left eye and spat blood.
“…I don’t know how you crawled in here. But I’m going to tear you to pieces—not even a shred of a corpse left. Along with that bitch behind you.”
The lethal killing intent emanating from him pressed down on the space.
“Who are you calling a bitch, you son of a bitch?!”
Jeong Se-hui, who had been clinging tightly to my back, could not hold herself and thrust her head forward with a cry of rage.
“That drug-dealing bastard, I’ll slice you to—!”
Clang!
Before Jeong Se-hui could finish her sharp cry, I twisted my body reflexively and slashed the Tactical Dagger in my right hand diagonally through the air.
Screech—
The blade collided sharply with something invisible.
Metal friction sparked as air currents collided, and simultaneously, dozens of long strands of hair from Jeong Se-hui standing behind me drifted through the air before dropping.
“…What?”
Jeong Se-hui stared blankly at the empty space that had just grazed her cheek.
Where her gaze fell—on the thick marble wall behind me—a deep, straight slash mark carved out as if struck by a razor-sharp blade lay gouged into the surface.
Had my dagger blocked that trajectory even a moment later, that scar on the wall would have been carved into Jeong Se-hui’s delicate throat instead.
“…Goddamn it. Next time I’ll shred that mouth of yours.”
Jang Yu-chung muttered through teeth split in a bloody grimace.
Two Orbs—transparent spheres of condensed mana formed from compressed air currents—now floated above his palms, spinning rapidly.
‘Third Circle Wind Cutter.’
I finished my analysis, alternating my gaze between the cracked wall and the Orb in his hands.
In that brief moment when his words drew my attention, he manifested the Orb and unleashed a wind blade with ambush speed—skipping the Incantation entirely.
Because my attunement to mana had reached its extreme, I could read the subtle density shifts in the air and deflect them, but an ordinary Awakened One wouldn’t have reacted at all. It would have been a fatal blow.
Magic grows exponentially stronger and faster when the medium is superior. Now I understood why he’d blown out the entire ceiling.
He’d forcibly created an open, wind-swept environment to maximize the destructive power of wind-based magic—his specialty. It was thorough preparation.
‘A rational judgment for a Sorcerer.’
I offered a brief, silent appraisal—not mockery, but the completely objective assessment of a Ninth Circle Grand Sorcerer.
Before the Regression, he’d been a pathetic creature, fumbling with cheap hypnosis and tormenting the weak.
The Jang Yu-chung who survived in this timeline had clawed his way up from the absolute bottom, tempered through brutal street experience until he’d become a formidable, cunning combat Sorcerer.
He understood his own nature precisely, manipulated terrain to his advantage, lured opponents into complacency before striking. Not bad at all.
“Uh…”
Jeong Se-hui, processing what had just happened, collapsed backward with her legs giving way, breathing hard and ragged.
Her hand, clutching the severed strands of her own hair, trembled uncontrollably—the classic reaction of someone who’d glimpsed the edge of death.
Jang Yu-chung showed no panic at the failed ambush.
He kept the spinning Orb trained on me while fishing into his jacket with one hand, producing a golden case.
The pure, hundred-percent Original Booster that his subordinate had thrust at me in the VIP Room downstairs.
“Haaah… Aaaaahhh…”
Jang Yu-chung didn’t hesitate. He clamped the inhaler to his lips and drew the contents deep into his lungs.
His entire body convulsed grotesquely, as though struck by lightning.
“Ghuuuh… Kkhhhh… Haaaaagh!”
A cry that mixed agony with ecstasy. He rolled his eyes back, releasing a long, perverted moan.
From every inch of his body, a turbid, enormous mana began rising like heat shimmer—incomparably vaster than before.
His skin flushed crimson as capillaries ruptured; his Mana Circuit, overloading beyond tolerance, leaked a metallic wheeze from his breath.
“Insane… What the hell is that freak doing…”
Jeong Se-hui, still collapsed, recoiled in disgust.
“How’s that, you bastard—Kim Do-jin!”
Jang Yu-chung’s burn-scarred face twisted into a grotesque shape as he laughed like a madman.
“Getting the picture now? Remembering the old days?”
A massive vortex erupted behind his back. Heavy furniture inside the Executive Office was swept up like tissue paper, shattered, and hurled through the air.
I watched the spectacle calmly and calculated the total mana output from his Core.
‘Amplification ratio: 2.5 times.’
The efficacy of the Original Booster—stripped of impurities—was beyond imagination.
His mana, confined to Third Circle, was now forcibly expanding his Core to generate air currents temporarily equivalent to mid-Fourth Circle power. This wasn’t posturing.
If the Wind Cutter that came at me before was a pistol bullet, the slash coming next would carry the destructive force of a high-caliber sniper rifle tearing through space itself.
Slowly, I looked down at my right hand. The Tactical Dagger I’d used to block his ambush Wind Cutter was in critical condition.
Crack.
With a delicate sound, a spiderweb of fractures ran down the center of the blade. Half the edge immediately crumbled and fell to the cold marble floor.
I’d barely maintained the balance of mana, but this crude hunk of metal couldn’t withstand the physical impact of colliding with Third Circle magic. It had reached its limit.
There was no way to block the next slash, amplified 2.5 times over, with this broken toy.
Clink.
Without hesitation, I released my grip. The half-broken dagger fell to the ground with a crisp metallic ring.
“Why, you bastard! Begging for mercy now?!”
Jang Yu-chung, interpreting my discarding of the dagger as surrender, burst into manic laughter.
The Orb in his hand swelled frantically, transforming into a massive sphere of wind glowing deep green.
Compressed air currents spun around him, carving the marble floor like a chessboard.
“Too late, you worthless bitch! You think you’re getting a clean death after doing this to me?!”
Life flickered back into Jang Yu-chung’s eyes.
Even as his mouth poured forth endless curses, his hands and mind were weaving a deadly sorcery structure with flawless precision.
“I’ll dice you up—your face, your legs, everything—fine as tofu and grind you down the drain! And I’ll find your mother and tear her apart the same way······!”
I watched his mouth carefully.
He spewed insults and murderous intent without pause while his brain simultaneously orchestrated a complex Mana Circuit, constructing a high-density sorcery formula that rivaled 4-Circle power.
This was no simple technique.
From a magical theory standpoint, it demanded the kind of extreme parallel processing that would be like fluently conversing in a foreign language while simultaneously solving complex calculus problems in your native tongue.
The foundational stage of what they call Dual Casting.
He leaned on chemical enhancement, yes, but to maintain that level of concentration even while drowning in rage—he was a stronger Sorcerer than I’d given him credit for.
This world’s Jang Yu-chung far surpassed anything I’d known of him before.
Before the Regression, back when I was an E-Rank Hunter, I wouldn’t have lasted a heartbeat—his boasts would have been prophecy, my bones scattered beyond recovery.
“Die, you bastard!!!”
With Jang Yu-chung’s final curse, a colossal flash of condensed wind erupted from his Orb.
Shriek!
A sound that tore the very air of the Executive Office apart hammered into my eardrums. A crescent-shaped massive green current of energy tore across the marble floor, shattering it to fragments.
A perfect, lethal wind blade—even a grazing would pulverize the upper body. A variant form of the Wind Cutter.
“Eeek!”
I seized Jeong Se-hui by the nape of her neck as she cowered behind me and shoved her into the blind spot directly behind my back.
Then I fixed my gaze steadily on the onrushing current of destruction. I had no intention of dodging.
Boom—!!!
An ear-splitting detonation slammed through the entire Executive Office. A blinding cloud of dust and razor-sharp marble shards scattered in all directions like a tempest.
Vibrations shook the floor from where it tore away beneath me.
“Die! Die!!!”
Beyond the chaos, Jang Yu-chung’s manic laughter rang out, drunk on what he was certain was victory.
He knew all too well the physical devastation that came when that volume of Mana struck true.
But that triumphant joy was choked off abruptly, as if something had seized him by the throat.
“······What?”
The thick dust that had filled the Executive Office was swept away on the gale, dispersing slowly.
“What······ What is this, damn it······?!”
Jang Yu-chung’s remaining eye bulged grotesquely from its socket. A hollow wheeze escaped between his parted lips.
What his pupils reflected was not my corpse, shredded and drenched in blood.
“Impressive.”
I withdrew my right hand, which had been hanging casually in mid-air, and whispered softly.
“I’ll give you a 75.”
Upon my palm. The massive, vicious wind blade that Jang Yu-chung had fired with everything he had—draining even his booster, staking his life—no longer existed.
Instead, a modest green sphere of Mana, barely the size of a baseball, floated serenely above my hand.
The mechanism was simple. I had infiltrated my own Mana into the incoming wave of power, twisted its structure in reverse, and compressed it.
For a 9-Circle Sorcerer, dismantling and rearranging another person’s crude magical structure was simpler than knocking down a child’s block tower.
“How… how is this possible… why…?”
I turned a cold smile toward his face, completely frozen in shock.
“Don’t bother trying to understand. Your head couldn’t grasp it anyway.”

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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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