The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 45

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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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45
Chapter 45. Ruins and Embers
***
I stood at the edge of the collapsed outer wall of the executive office.
Through the gaping void, a harsh night wind pressed in, gradually washing away the acrid smell of gunpowder and the metallic stench of blood that had lingered at the tip of my nose.
I cast my gaze downward.
The forecourt of Club Arabian—which had blazed as a twenty-four-hour wonderland in the heart of G City’s Old Downtown District—had transformed into a control zone of chaos and carnage.
Red and blue flashing lights from dozens of emergency vehicles flickered and danced, chaotically spilling across the dark street.
The sirens were not of a single kind.
Starting with the mobile units from the local precinct, special vehicles from the Ability Management Department, black vans from the narcotics task force, ambulances ferrying the wounded, and field control personnel from the Hunter Association.
The moment the great trash heap concealed by night’s veil had been overturned, every relevant agency in G City had descended like a pack of hyenas drawn by the stench.
I gazed down silently at the cacophony of noise rising from beneath my feet—frantic, jagged, relentless.
“……”
From behind me came the faint sound of teeth chattering. When I turned, I saw Jung Se-hee huddled in the corner of a slashed leather sofa.
She had pulled her rider jacket up to her chin and cinched it tight, her face buried in her knees, trembling uncontrollably.
The feral intensity she’d shown moments before—when she’d driven her fist into the dying face of Jang Yu-cheong and plummeted with him into the void—had vanished without a trace.
She looked like a stray cat left out in the rain, her form shrunken with defeat.
It was not a reaction I failed to understand.
When adrenaline commands the bloodstream, bodily pain and the terror of death are temporarily anesthetized.
But the moment survival is assured and extreme tension releases, waves of suppressed mental exhaustion and trauma come crashing down like a tsunami.
Tonight, she had been seized by the throat, strangled; thrown into the midst of murderers’ blades; taken hostage by an Awakened maddened by drugs; and finally, she had experienced a freefall from tens of meters above the ground.
A succession of brushes with death that would have sent an ordinary F-rank Hunter into cardiac arrest long ago.
The fact that she, who had been screaming and loud until moments before, had fallen utterly silent was, in fact, biological proof that the human nervous system was functioning normally.
I was about to withdraw my gaze—finding neither reason nor need to speak and console her—when it happened.
“Hunter…!”
The crumpled iron door to the stairwell wrenched open violently, and Kim Dae-han, team leader of the Ability Management Department, rushed in, gasping for breath.
Behind him, armed riot personnel entered cautiously and began securing the interior.
“Ha… ha… Thank goodness!”
Kim Dae-han, drenched in sweat, straightened his bent spine and approached me.
As he opened his mouth to deliver some urgent status report, I gestured with my chin toward Jung Se-hee, who was huddled in the corner of the sofa.
“Ah.”
Kim Dae-han, understanding my silent instruction, closed his mouth.
He quickly removed the thick department-issued jacket he was wearing and approached Jung Se-hee.
“Se-hee. I’m sorry we’re late. Are you alright?”
Kim Dae-han draped the jacket gently over her trembling shoulders with a warm voice.
Jung Se-hee did not lift her head; she simply clutched the hem of the jacket like a lifeline and gave a small, barely perceptible nod.
After turning Jung Se-hee over to the riot personnel, Kim Dae-han returned to my side.
His gaze began to sweep slowly across the interior of the executive office.
And in that moment, his pupils dilated in an expression of utter disbelief.
“This is… what in the world…?”
The collapsed glass dome of the ceiling, the outer wall torn clean through as if struck by a cannonball, the marble floor shattered into fragments, and the massive claw marks gouged deep into the walls.
No one could have imagined that this place, scarcely an hour ago, had resembled a luxury hotel suite.
“I’ve never seen chaos like this.”
Kim Dae-han swallowed hard, his voice dry.
“You were holding back, weren’t you?”
His voice was tinged with awe.
But rather than answer his question, I stared out at the lights below and asked dryly.
“What’s the situation outside?”
At my question, Kim Dae-han’s expression twisted into something complex—neither quite a smile nor a frown, nor even dismay, but rather something grotesque and weary.
“As you can see, everything’s been turned upside down.”
Behind us, personnel in white hazmat suits had begun entering.
From the concealed safe beneath the desk I’d discovered, they carefully withdrew cases of Original Booster and sealed them in airtight containers.
The surface of the thick rubber gloves the containment personnel wore shimmered with overlapping layers of pale blue Mana protective barriers.
It was clear proof of just how toxic and volatile the Mana emanating from the Original Booster was.
“This isn’t just about nabbing a few drug dealers. The quantity and ledgers of the Booster that poured out of here, along with the financial scale of the club—it’s beyond what our Ability Management Department can handle alone. Starting tomorrow morning, the National Police Agency’s drug investigation unit and the Hunter Association’s audit team will be mobilizing for a joint investigation.”
Of course it would be.
A drug cartel headquarters had been operating openly in the heart of the city for two months.
This wasn’t possible simply because Jang Yu-cheong was a clever snake.
It was clear evidence that enormous capital and the countless corrupt powers that had fed upon it were firmly supporting the roots of this club.
“When the sun rises tomorrow morning, all of G City will become a war zone.”
Kim Dae-han kicked at the rubble of the collapsed outer wall with a bitter smile.
“Thanks to Do-jin, or rather because of Do-jin. Tomorrow there’ll be a whole truckload of uniformed officers losing their heads—starting with the building permits people at City Hall and the District Office, all the way up to the precinct captain. They’ll all come tumbling down like a row of dominoes.”
“That works out well.”
I leaned against a fractured marble pillar and glanced toward the emergency stairwell leading downstairs.
“The building’s structure itself was plainly illegal from the start. They were openly using an unauthorized sixth floor—one that didn’t even appear on the blueprints—yet inspections never came. Someone’s wallet must have gotten very thick.”
At my cold observation, Kim Dae-han scratched the back of his head and laughed awkwardly.
“Truly, as a civil servant eating the same bread, I’m ashamed and sorry for it.”
Brushing past the uncomfortable exchange, Kim Dae-han approached the gaping hole in the outer wall and carefully looked down at the first-floor ground.
Where his gaze settled: dozens of meters below on the asphalt, what remained of Jang Yu-cheong’s body—crushed beyond recognition—was being collected by Hunter Association field personnel into black vinyl body bags.
Beyond the police lines controlling the scene, camera flashes were going off like hyenas that had caught the scent too late—journalists mobbing in.
An age reeking of violent bloodshed.
The phantom of my past that had once gnawed at my mind had become nothing but a pathetic lump of meat, ready to be consumed as news.
“I’m leaving.”
A flat voice breaking the silence. I turned around to see Jung Se-hee standing up, tossing Kim Dae-han’s jacket back at him.
The trembling had mostly stopped, but her face remained ashen and drained.
“H-hey? Se-hee! You should at least take an ambulance to the hospital and get checked out—”
Kim Dae-han caught the jacket in confusion, but Jung Se-hee waved him off dismissively.
“I’m fine. Nothing’s broken, no bleeding. If I go to the hospital they’ll want personal information, and the cops will be a hassle. I hate that.”
“Sigh. Understood. Get plenty of rest for now. I’ll handle your work days.”
Even at Kim Dae-han’s generous offer, she showed no real interest—just a dry laugh.
“I’ll take care of it myself. You just keep your promises.”
She picked up her sunglasses from the floor and brushed the dust and dirt from her leather skirt.
Then, as she turned toward the stairwell, her gaze shifted toward me.
……
Her brown eyes met my gaze beyond the sunglasses, silent and suspended in the air between us.
Not fear, not curiosity—something more complex and subtle flickered in her eyes.
Then the corners of her mouth, stiff until now, lifted faintly.
“Today was fun.”
What came from her lips was a polite and sincere greeting that seemed utterly out of place in this gutter of a life.
“See you next time, Do-jin.”
I didn’t answer. What was there to see next time?
I simply nodded quietly in return.
Jung Se-hee let out a soft laugh, then turned and disappeared into the ruins of Club Arabian.
I didn’t take my eyes off her until the sound of her walker boots had completely vanished beyond the stairwell.
……Unbelievable.
Kim Dae-han’s eyes beside me had gone wide. His mouth hung open like he’d witnessed something he shouldn’t have.
“I’m not hearing things wrong, am I? I’ve never seen Se-hee act like that before.”
Kim Dae-han looked at me with obvious interest, scanning me up and down.
“What on earth happened in a single day?”
“One thing and another.”
I answered dryly and brushed off the dirt clinging to me.
Though I hate to admit it, that uncanny intuition of hers.
Without that abnormally persistent grit for an F-rank Hunter, tonight’s operation would have been far more exhausting and complicated.
I might have wandered lost in the labyrinth of the club’s interior searching for the Original Booster’s hiding place, and in the worst case, let Jang Yu-cheong slip away and followed his trail instead.
Too frail to stand on a battlefield, yet she acts as a useful detector, instinctively drawing out the threads of what I cannot see.
Difficult to handle, that’s all.
“Since Do-jin joined our team, we really do see all manner of strange things.”
Kim Dae-han chuckled and shook his head.
As the pleasant mood that had lingered faded, Kim Dae-han’s genial smile vanished in an instant, replaced by the face of a bureaucrat.
“Just as I was coming up, I received a direct call from the Hunter Association.”
“What kind of call?”
“About how to handle the club owner, Jang Yu-cheong.”
Kim Dae-han lowered his voice and stepped close beside me.
“Jang Yu-cheong will officially be classified as a Villain Hunter and handled on the spot. More precisely, it’ll be ruled accidental death from a fall while fleeing, but the Association plans to frame it as a legitimate suppression operation.”
……Summary execution.
“Yes. It’s the justification that lets them muzzle the media and control the situation most cleanly.”
I ran through the situation rapidly in my mind.
A massive cartel’s kingpin had died—not some ordinary drug offender.
There was no way a front-line police precinct or district office could conclude such a sensitive matter so quickly and unilaterally.
This was clear evidence of direct involvement by Hunter Association Director Jung Eun-jin.
She too had been watching in real time the unrest unfolding beneath G City’s streets.
Thanks to that, I could avoid the tedious preliminary investigations.
“On the way here, I activated our information network as well.”
Kim Dae-han withdrew a tablet from his inner jacket pocket and brought the screen to life.
“As suspected, this man Jang Yu-cheong was no mere figurehead. There’s a backing force behind him—one that provided both his initial capital and the core supply chain for that Original Booster.”
“China, I’d imagine.”
At my flat prediction, Kim Dae-han’s eyebrows shot up in surprise.
“How did you know? You’re right. It’s the Hong Xue Meng—a massive pan-Asian villain organization operating out of China as a base. We’ve detected evidence that they co-opted Jang Yu-cheong to use G City as a testing ground for the Booster.”
My suspicion had been correct.
Before the Regression, the worst malignancy that had poisoned the world with addictive Mana and eroded humanity’s strength.
The Hong Xue Meng—on this timeline, they had begun their operations at a point far earlier than I remembered.
The gears of history were grinding in directions I didn’t know, twisting ever so slightly but with fatal consequences.
“Even so, there are far too many inconsistencies.”
Kim Dae-han swiped through the tablet screen, his brow furrowed deeply.
“No matter how brilliant and ruthless Jang Yu-cheong might be, it doesn’t make sense that a massive organization like the Hong Xue Meng would entrust an entire operation of this scale to a single small-time thug.”
I agreed with that assessment. Jang Yu-cheong would have made a fitting pawn to swallow up G City.
But given the scale of Club Arabian and the bribes paid to the officials backing it, the operation exceeded what Jang Yu-cheong alone could have managed.
Jang Yu-cheong was merely a tail.
The probability was high that the true head—the one who designed this vast criminal enterprise and moved the money—was still hidden somewhere.
This wasn’t over.
“By any chance, did you find something here? Do-jin?”
A sharp question from Kim Dae-han. His probing gaze fixed past my sunglasses, searching.
Without a word, I handed Kim Dae-han several thick Hard Disk Drives.
“Oh!”
Kim Dae-han’s eyes widened as he hurriedly accepted the drives, gleaming like a pirate who’d discovered bars of gold.
“They were plugged into Jang Yu-cheong’s office server. Unless it’s all just flashy exterior, there should be records inside—money laundering routes, ledgers of payoffs to the officials. Dig into it, and you’ll definitely find something.”
“This is a jackpot. If Club Arabian was running their own server, there’s almost certainly something useful in there.”
An excited Kim Dae-han cradled the Hard Disk Drives protectively and let out a satisfied laugh.
Watching him quietly, I felt the cold metal object still resting in my pocket—and traced it gently with my fingertips.
Jang Yu-cheong’s main computer. The small black USB Drive, no larger than a thumb, that had been plugged discreetly into the deepest port.
I pushed it deeper into my pocket, as if to erase the trace of its touch from my fingertips.
“Are there no more? Looking at these USB port marks, it seems something else was plugged in here too…”
Kim Dae-han tilted his head questioningly as he examined the device carefully.
“No. There was nothing.”
“…I see.”
“I’ll be heading home now.”
I turned without waiting for a response.
“Yes! I’ll wrap up the scene. Do-jin, thank you so much for all your hard work tonight.”
Behind me, the wail of ambulance sirens and the static of radios mingled into a cacophony.
The long, unpleasant night that had thrummed with the stench of blood was slowly fading into the ash-gray veil of dawn.

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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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