The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 49

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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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49
Chapter 49. The Boundary Between Day and Night
***
Four in the morning.
The river wind that flowed through the city’s deepest places was sharp and cold as a blade. Beyond the darkly tinted car windows, pale mist drifted like a ghost.
I leaned back in the driver’s seat, staring blankly at the tablet screen resting on the dashboard, its blue light casting a dull glow.
The screen was packed with a network diagram of the Hongheul Alliance—hundreds of names crammed together in dense clusters.
From money launderers to foot soldiers, a web of interlocking darkness. And buried at the very bottom, in corrupted mud, one name in particular stabbed at my vision.
Nineteen. Hong Tae Hwa.
The USB I’d recovered from the hidden chamber beneath Club Arabian was like a poisoned chalice.
My decision not to hand the full decrypted contents over to Team Lead Kim Dae Han was my prerogative—and my best judgment.
State bureaucracy is bloated and slow, above all vulnerable to the variable of personal emotion.
Kim Dae Han is a capable man. In a civil service society where corruption and compromise have become routine, he maintained a spine that was rarely upright.
He possessed both the macro-level intelligence to survey the situation and the political finesse to pressure an opponent.
I couldn’t deny that he was an essential long-game piece to have at my side against the coming wave of catastrophe.
Yet that very uprightness became poison at times. Especially before the variable named Hong Tae Hwa, he displayed a strangeness akin to weakness.
‘An unfortunate environment simply turned the child into a thorny beast. Do Jin, his nature isn’t fundamentally rotten. If we extend our hand first, he’ll surely come back.’
It was the excuse Kim Dae Han had offered while defending Hong Tae Hwa. A nauseating optimism.
He didn’t know how much of a fool’s errand arrogance dressed up as good intent could be.
My eyes remembered all too clearly what Hong Tae Hwa had become in the timeline before regression.
A rampaging demon who had gone mad with slaughter, using his own hands to drown hunters in seas of blood.
The screams of thousands torn apart by the bloodred mana he wielded still lingered in my ears like a persistent ringing.
Kim Dae Han might have believed in the illusion of that creature’s potential and redemption, but the gears of reality turn without mercy.
Hong Tae Hwa had chosen the path of a beast in this timeline as well.
He’d fastened his own leash, branded with the mark of the Hongheul Alliance, and was sharpening his fangs in the darkness.
Had I handed that list to Kim Dae Han, he would surely have been seized by private guilt and quietly excised Hong Tae Hwa’s name from the roster.
And that would later have become an unmanageable boomerang, piercing everyone’s hearts.
I understand the intention behind bringing him into the same team as Jung Se Hee. But Hong Tae Hwa is fundamentally a different breed than her.
The concentration of malice carved into his soul from birth was different. People don’t change. They are only restrained; the moment that restraint breaks, their true nature emerges.
I had no patience for tedious emotional quarrels or moral lectures.
Rather than rely on the state’s lawful enforcement apparatus, I chose the silence of night.
Hiding behind the respectable façade of a vigilante group, systematically discovering their bases every night and strangling their operations—that was the efficient cleaning method I had selected.
The trail hadn’t led back to him yet.
Over the past few days, I had systematically dismantled four of the Hongheul Alliance’s sites on the outskirts of G City: a gambling den, a smuggling warehouse, a nightclub suspected of human experimentation, and more.
At none of those blood-soaked scenes could I find a single trace of Hong Tae Hwa.
Perhaps he was still too fresh a recruit to be classified as active personnel, or perhaps his animal instinct had sensed the hunter’s scent and driven him deep into his den.
Either way, it didn’t matter.
The hunting ground was narrowing, and when the moment came to face each other in the darkness, I would sever his neck without hesitation.
***
Hisssss—
Rough steam erupted from the private shower stall adjoining my personal maintenance room.
Hot water struck the crown of my head in powerful jets, washing away the fatigue that had accumulated through the night and the sweat and grime accumulated during training with Charles.
Water droplets traced down my skin and were sucked into the drain at the floor.
I brushed my wet hair back and stood before the mirror. As I wiped the moisture from its surface with my hand, an unfamiliar body was revealed.
The gaunt skeleton that had plagued me like malnutrition right after regression no longer existed.
It was the result of Sword Saint Kang Tae Yoon’s memories being etched into every cell, combined with Charles’s merciless training in sword techniques that had tempered my frame.
The muscle fibers rippling beneath the skin were tightly woven and firm, as though braided from steel wire.
To withstand the surge of mana erupting from my core, my tendons and skeleton had restructured themselves, and the line running from my clavicle to my chest bore sharp, defined angles as though carved by a blade.
I dried myself with a towel and stepped out of the shower. Fine particles of mana drifting in the air made contact with my skin and gently dissipated.
As I reached to fasten the buttons of the white shirt slung over my shoulders, I felt an unpleasant resistance.
The back muscles and chest had swollen so taut that the fabric was stretched to its limit, crying out for mercy.
The slightest broad sweep of my arms threatened to tear through the armpits.
I needed new clothes altogether.
I was forcing the buttons closed with a frown when it happened.
Knock-knock—
A dry knocking sound echoed through the heavy double-reinforced door on the outside of the maintenance room.
Glancing at the wall-mounted control panel, I caught the silhouette of Team Lead Kim Dae Han with a file folder tucked under his arm. I flicked my finger lightly.
A subtle wave of mana emanated from my fingertip, traveling through the air and disengaging the door’s latch.
With a metallic click, the door opened and Kim Dae Han stepped in, displaying his characteristic affable smile.
“My apologies for the intrusion. You’re already here early, taking care of your conditioning… truly remarkable.”
“Good morning.”
I rolled up my shirt sleeves and answered without much emotion. Kim Dae Han passed by me, his gaze sweeping deliberately up and down my frame.
Behind his glasses, a flicker of interest crossed his eyes.
“When you first came, you weren’t quite like this, were you? Your shoulders look twice as broad now?”
“I’ve been rolling around the mountain at dawn with Charles every day. You should join us starting tomorrow, Team Lead.”
At my suggestion, Kim Dae Han waved his hand dismissively and broke into a hearty laugh.
“Ha, I’ll have to pass. I’m built to sleep an extra hour at that time of day. For desk workers like me to survive among the field personnel, energy management is everything.”
He sank into the leather sofa in the reception area and tilted his head thoughtfully.
“But it is curious. Your class is registered as a Mage, Do Jin, yet your hand-to-hand combat and swordsmanship overwhelm even the S-rank Hunters who specialize in close quarters. I’ve combed through the Korean database and there’s no precedent for a case like yours.”
Praise that masked a probe. It was an instinctive flicker of suspicion that sprang naturally from him as a bureaucrat and an investigator.
I pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, drank from it, and parried his thrust.
“In times like these, a Hunter who stands in the rear relying on class alone is just asking to have their head taken off. The more of a Mage you are, the better you need to use your body to survive.”
Kim Dae Han moistened his lips as if unsatisfied with my answer, but he didn’t press deeper.
Instead, he set his smartphone down on the table.
“The world’s a frightening place these days. YouTubers have such sharp instincts—sometimes they break stories faster than we do.”
As he touched the screen lightly, a sensational thumbnail and tinny mechanical narration shattered the quiet of the workshop.
[Shocking Report! A Mysterious ‘Night Hunter’ Bathing the Outskirts of G City in Blood?]
[In just the past week, four illegal gambling dens and Booster trafficking sites suspected of Hongheul Alliance involvement have been completely destroyed.]
[At each scene, only the clean marks of a Sword Strike remain—not a trace of Mana left behind! What is the identity of this Dark Hero who arrives before the police to punish the wicked?]
My fingertips didn’t twitch once while watching the video. The sound of beans grinding in the coffee machine filled the workshop. Damn idiots.
Even though I’d torched the scenes and erased the traces, the successive collapse of the organization was sensational enough to become the most lurid gossip in the back alleys.
“All manner of conspiracy theories seem to be circulating.”
At my flat response, Kim Dae Han abruptly cut off the video and fixed his gaze on me.
“Right. This wasn’t you, was it, Do Jin?”
A sudden question thrown out casually as if swatting a fly—an investigator’s signature technique, meant to shatter the target’s composure and catch a moment of vulnerability.
“I don’t have the time for it.”
I set a freshly brewed Americano down in front of Kim Dae Han.
“Just taking care of Charles is enough to keep me occupied. If I had the energy left over to play vigilante every night, I would have transferred departments long ago.”
After hearing my answer, Kim Dae Han stared at my face for a long moment, then let out a soft snort of laughter and settled back deeply into the chair.
“Just joking, just joking. In any case, from the perspective of our management division and the police, someone very useful has appeared. They’re cleaning up the garbage we find too awkward to touch directly, and even gift-wrapping them as caught-in-the-act cases for delivery to our doorstep. Whoever they are, I’d like to give them a state medal.”
Kim Dae Han was a clever man, and clever men sometimes chose efficiency over truth.
If my decimation of the Hongheul Alliance improved the city’s security, he would gladly turn a blind eye.
“Have some coffee. The fact that you came all the way up to my room this morning suggests this wasn’t just to show me some YouTube shorts.”
At my observation, the relaxed smile lingering on Kim Dae Han’s lips vanished in an instant. He adjusted his glasses.
“You really don’t let me get away with anything, do you? Truth is, I felt my mouth itching to burst the whole way up in the elevator.”
Instead of the file folder at his side, he produced a heavy black handheld device from his inner jacket pocket and set it on the table.
“We found it. The second Incubation-type Gate.”
***
“Where?”
My eyes sharpened in an instant. The steam rising from the coffee cup scattered across my gaze. An Incubation-type Gate.
Not a simple passage where monsters pour out temporarily like an ordinary Gate.
A grotesque calamity where the space itself transforms into a vast biological factory and incubator, where monsters are ‘produced’ and ‘evolved’ within.
The first time since confronting the Skeleton Gate at Donggureung. The timeline was moving far faster than my memories from before the regression.
The only reason I’d cooperated with Kim Dae Han and tolerated his rudeness was precisely because of this sophisticated intelligence network.
“Before I explain, take a look at this first.”
The handheld device Kim Dae Han produced was unlike any smartphone on the market.
Its form was clunky, with an analog dial on the side and an oddly elongated antenna protruding from the top.
At first glance it resembled an old military radio, but the faint ripple of Mana flowing around it proved this was a product of artifice and engineering.
“A measurement device.”
“Yes, a Mana Wave Navigator. More precisely, it’s a radar system that filters out only the residue of specific Mana and backtracks its location.”
Kim Dae Han powered on the device. With a weighty vibration, a blue boot sequence began flowing across the LCD screen.
“After the Club incident, Jung Se Hee became absolutely obsessed. She spent the whole night digitizing her unique skill, Ariadne’s Thread, into data. Whenever Se Hee describes the grain of Mana, I translate it into frequency bands, quantify it numerically, and embed it in programming code.”
A low exclamation escaped between my lips.
Converting organic flows of Mana into the binary bits of zeros and ones? That was a problem that had existed only in theory within modern magical engineering.
“Of course, an ordinary semiconductor substrate couldn’t handle the Mana load, so we needed special Artifact material—which Chu Jae Hee from our team cooked up by mixing 3D printing with alchemy. That kid’s handiwork with machines is extraordinary.”
Chu Jae Hee. With that genius-level dexterity, it would have been possible. On the device’s LCD screen, a green concentric circle appeared, and dozens of faint waveforms began flickering into existence.
I lifted the device and observed its internal structure as if looking through it.
To be honest, from an engineer’s perspective, this device was crude in the extreme.
The UX/UI was military radar caliber—readability was terrible—and the Mana filtering algorithm running in the background was completely unoptimized, tangled like spaghetti.
Memory leaks were severe; encounter anything with a strong Mana field and the processor would obviously burn out from overheating.
They were amateurs who didn’t even understand the fundamentals of Mana fusion—a patchwork miracle held together by blind luck.
But.
‘The concept alone is flawless.’
What I was praising wasn’t the crude execution.
The innovation lay in the idea itself—modulizing Jung Se Hee’s intuitive ability so that anyone could track the target even without her presence at the scene.
With a solid foundation in place, optimizing the code or adjusting the circuit board’s overclocking would be child’s play.
Beep—beep—beep!
The green waveforms drifting across the screen began to fade one by one as they passed through specific frequency filtering.
Soon, only a single sharp red line remained at the center of the display, pointing fiercely toward the northeast.
It was the frequency of the Mana emanating from the Booster Original, tainted with the stench of corrupted Mana stones.
“This terminal is pointing us toward that location.”
Kim Dae Han pulled out his smartphone and opened the map application.
[Northeast outskirts of G City, near the District 4 Waste Processing Facility.]
An abandoned dump where human footsteps had long ceased to tread. There was no better place to hide.
I stared at the screen until it burned into my eyes, already planning to strip the circuit board from this terminal.
I’d need to directly link the map API to the radar grid and amplify the reception sensitivity by over two hundred percent. But the modifications could wait.
Now that the target was locked, hesitation was a luxury I couldn’t afford.
I rose from the sofa and pulled on a black leather jacket over my shirt. The hilt of the Dragon Head Sword hanging from my waist fit snugly into my palm.
The cool touch of metal spread through my entire body.
“Let’s move.”
Kim Dae Han, who’d been leisurely reaching for a sip of coffee, choked in surprise.
“What? Now, sir? The support team hasn’t even been assembled yet, and there’s been no briefing—”
“We have the scent. Would you really let it slip through our fingers? Call up the support team on the way. I’ll clear the path first.”
I gestured with my chin toward the dark terminal sitting on the table.
“Leave that on your desk. I’ll give it proper attention when I return this evening.”
I finished speaking and pushed through the maintenance room door, leaving the bewildered Kim Dae Han behind. Cold air from the corridor rushed deep into my lungs.
It was time to begin a legitimate hunt as a Hunter of the Ability Management Team.

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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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