The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 51

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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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51
Chapter 51. The Mage’s Tactics
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He’s no summoner. He’s a mage.
Crack!
At the edge of my vision, a searing blue flash ripped through the air as if the retinas themselves were burning away.
What pricked my nostrils was that distinctive acrid ozone stench that came from space being violently twisted and refracted.
The figure of the man in the deep-hooded robe blurred like heat shimmer. For an instant, his body disseminated at the molecular level, a ghostly afterimage of him being transmitted beyond.
He rematerialized dozens of meters away, atop the steep roof of a half-collapsed red brick building.
But before his footfall even touched the worn tiles with a whisper of friction, the empty space behind his back warped grotesquely and twisted again.
Crack! Crack!
The mage who fled the Plaza did not so much as catch a single breath.
As if he couldn’t spare even a moment to expel the thick, turbid air rising in his chest, he leaped through space in rapid succession.
He cut across narrow, winding alleys and vaulted over the pointed spires like stepping stones.
It was a desperate, life-or-death scramble to escape the shadow of the predator closing in behind him.
I drove off the ground roughly and pursued that flickering blue trajectory.
Hot blood pumped by my thudding heart raced through capillaries across my entire frame.
In the cutting wind that lashed my face, I fixed my gaze coldly on the back of the fleeing figure.
‘Fast.’
Not merely physical speed. It was astonishing casting velocity and exquisite computational power.
Setting the target coordinate, condensing Mana toward it, transmitting his own body with flawless precision—a short-range leap spell.
[Blink].
In wide-open plains or orderly dueling grounds, even mid-tier mages could mimic this technique.
Without obstacles blocking the line of sight, all one need do was mark the visible coordinates and cast. But the environment this mage was leaping through was different.
Here, narrow alleys and dilapidated buildings twisted together in chaotic, grotesque complexity.
The heights of buildings varied wildly, and the alleys were so narrow that a single person could barely squeeze through.
Executing consecutive Blinks at such short intervals in this claustrophobic, intricate terrain was tantamount to suicide.
Misjudge the coordinates of the next space by even a fraction, and the result would be catastrophic.
The body could be wedged into the middle of solid concrete, or fused at the molecular level with surrounding matter, bursting into silent gore where it stood.
A tightrope walk that only those with spatial perception and Mana control refined to extremes could even attempt—the highest-risk mobility spell of all.
He was performing that impossible balance nearly flawlessly.
Moreover, mere moments ago, he had even manifested an ‘Elite Ogre’ exceeding C-rank Hunter caliber as a summoned creature.
Not an opponent to take lightly.
Not the crude Mana-slinging of otherworldly dregs, but the movements of a true mage honed by rigorous training and thousands upon thousands of live engagements. And yet.
‘He’s not an impossible opponent either.’
I ruthlessly shoved the Aura swirling in my core into my thigh muscles.
The muscle fibers screamed as they ballooned to their limit, but the output I gained in return was overwhelming.
[Dash] surged past its threshold, and my body catapulted from the ground like a shell fired through empty air.
A phenomenon unfolded—raw physical footwork overtaking the mage’s spatial leap through sheer force. It was the sort of thing Kang Tae-yoon the Sword Saint used to pull off.
The moment he cast his fourth Blink and materialized atop the weathered Clock Tower.
“······What the—!”
Punching through the warped space, my shadow fell vast and dark across his line of sight.
I watched his pupils quiver with shock. Mid-fall, I twisted my body to channel all the acceleration downward through the blade alone.
The Dragon-Head Sword in my right hand, sheathed in cold Aura, drove down at full force toward his skull.
Crunch!!!
The very crown of the Clock Tower shattered as though struck by a tank round, collapsing inward.
An explosive shockwave pushed the surrounding air outward in a perfect sphere, and shattered red brick and dust-laden debris erupted in all directions.
The mage’s body plummeted helplessly from the center of that destruction toward the ground far below.
Crash!
His body gouged the hard cobbled ground and carved a deep crater.
Toward the center of that billowing dust, I descended in silence.
A killing blow. For any ordinary human, that impact should have cleaved the skull in two and brought instant death.
Yet through the swirling dust, I saw his silhouette stumbling, rising once more.
Shimmer—
A faint golden spherical barrier that had wrapped around his body spiderwebbed with cracks, then scattered in thin waves and dissipated.
My eyes narrowed slightly. In that briefest of moments before the Dragon-Head Sword’s blade touched his crown.
Despite his Mana circuits being severely twisted from the backlash of consecutive Blinks, he had deployed [Magic Shield].
Not merely deployed it—but concentrated Mana at the point of impact to disperse the destructive force in all directions.
‘Not conscious thought. Not calculated defense.’
It was the ultimate defensive reflex—something only a seasoned mage could possess, carved into body and soul through thousands upon thousands of live battles.
‘Impressive.’
The words escaped between my lips—genuine admiration, whispered low. This sorcerer was in an entirely different league from the thug Jang Yu-cheong I’d faced before.
It was the perfect, textbook response of a mage fighting for survival.
The mage suppressed his ragged breathing and brought the worn wooden Staff down toward the ground with a sharp crack.
Boom—!
In that instant, dense ochre Mana surged from the tip of his Staff, spreading across the earth in exponential waves. The ominous vibration traveled through my soles.
‘Earthquake?’
A fourth-Circle earth-attribute spell. An area-of-effect battlefield control technique that forcibly twisted and inverted the crust across dozens of meters.
‘He’s casting that with Silent Casting, at this timing?’
Boom-boom-boom-boom—!!
The earth wailed like a starving beast. The solid stone floor beneath me began to heave and surge like the violent waves of a savage sea.
Tens of tons of soil and gravel shot skyward defying gravity, while the crumbling buildings around me screamed and collapsed under the ground’s convulsion.
An ordinary vanguard Hunter would have found it impossible to maintain balance in this maddened earthquake.
They would lose their footing, crash to the ground, and take the full force of whatever follow-up attack he’d prepared.
But instead of bracing my lower body against the shaking earth, I let my weight ride lightly on the seismic waves themselves.
When the waves rise, you ride them.
I launched into the air. My body spun a half-rotation mid-flight, and my feet found purchase on a massive rock fragment jutting upward.
Snap!
I kicked off the stone and shifted my trajectory. Zigzagging through the void, using collapsing building facades as stepping stones. The airtime control of a creature that mocked gravity and inertia.
‘This is working.’
Surveying the battlefield from above, I was seized by a strange sensation. This acrobatic body control—something my pre-regression form could never have imagined.
When my brain calculated the spatial vectors, my bones and muscles executed the answer instantly without error.
Even as the world crumbled and debris flew in all directions, my gaze remained fixed and unwavering on the mage’s throat.
“[Lightning that tears the heavens, chains of judgment become…]”
As I hurtled across the sky toward him, the mage began his Incantation.
Blue-white sparks erupted wildly around his Staff. The air burned with a sharp, cutting howl.
‘Just as I thought.’
The Earthquake hadn’t been his main attack—it was a perfect ‘setup’ tactic. Seal the opponent’s mobility, shatter their stance, then safely land a follow-up that required long casting and brutal power.
Such textbook, elegant Hunter magic doctrine. Against an ordinary human, this combo chain would have left not even bone dust behind.
“[Chain Lightning]”
The moment his Incantation finished, a flash detonated that burned my vision white.
A thick, violent bolt of lightning screamed toward me with a deafening crack, tearing the air asunder.
A deadly electrical chain that pursued the target’s bioelectric current, flying like a living predator with its trajectory bending sharply at acute angles.
The surrounding atmosphere superheated to thousands of degrees in an instant—I felt my entire body bristle with static.
If Silent Casting specializes in ‘speed,’ then magic woven through long Incantations achieves a ‘potency’ and ‘tracking capability’ that dwarfs any Silent Cast by an abyss.
Had I failed to predict it, the direct hit would have taken me down. But prediction had a response ready.
‘The most direct way to neutralize electrical discharge.’
I pushed my Aura output to its absolute limit. My veins screamed and my muscles burned with recoil, but this was no moment to compromise with my boundaries.
‘Force greater mass at even greater speed.’
My body, which had been hurtling through the air, drew taut as a bow. I condensed dense, compressed Mana onto the Dragon-Head Sword in my right hand.
‘Remember.’
That cold sensation when I seized the wind from Jang Yu-cheong’s palm in Club Arabian.
I forcibly suppressed the old Archmage’s habit of expanding formulas and calculating barrier thickness, hurling it into the unconscious background.
Instead, I poured every fiber of my senses into the sword’s physical trajectory and the explosive release of my Aura alone.
‘[Synchronization].’
Maintaining explosive Aura output, I simultaneously amplified and fused earth-attribute Mana onto the sword’s blade.
Not dispersed dust—but something laden with the fundamental weight of the earth itself, concentrated at the sword’s tip.
‘[Rock Slash].’
Clang—!!
As I swung the Dragon-Head Sword in a brutal horizontal arc, a massive slash infused with the heavy mass of stone shot forth in a crescent moon shape, tearing through the air.
Blue lightning and deep brown earthen slash collided head-on in midair.
The result was utter, one-sided annihilation.
The ferocious current of Chain Lightning could not pierce the density of my slash, tightly packed as stone, and scattered helplessly into sparks across the blade’s surface.
The earthen slash, having completely consumed the lightning’s fangs, surged onward unobstructed and drove heavily into the mage’s undefended chest.
Bang-bang-bang—!!
The mage’s body, denied even a moment to raise another barrier, was swept away by the physical pressure of the slash and sent careening backward.
Blood sprayed like mist into the void, and he tumbled across the Plaza’s stone floor until he collided with a fallen statue and finally came to rest.
“Cough… hack…”
The mage lay there coughing blood. The residual Mana that had shaken the ground moments ago drained away as if it had never been.
Silence descended on the surroundings once more, broken only by the hollow sound of debris from the collapsed buildings falling intermittently.
“Hah.”
I landed lightly on the ground and exhaled the scorching air that had filled my lungs, brushing away dust from the Dragon-Head Sword’s flat blade with a flick of my wrist.
It had been a flawless strike—perfectly shattering both the enemy’s will to fight and his Mana Core.
I walked slowly toward the man convulsing on the ground, his body wracked with tremors.
With each step, fragments of shattered roof tiles crunched beneath my feet. My mind was churning with questions that refused to settle.
‘What in the world is this thing?’
‘A monster? No.’
The emergence of intelligent entities commanding monsters within dungeons and Gates—particularly Otherworldly Beings of the mage class—was hardly rare.
But this creature was fundamentally different.
The way it wielded magic, the tempo of its combat, the tactical flexibility with which it sought safety in disadvantageous positions and prepared follow-up attacks.
None of these were movements a wild Otherworldly Being could possess.
This was the movement of an expert—one trained through rigorous, systematic instruction and honed through countless one-on-one battles with Hunters.
I knelt beside the fallen figure and crouched down to examine its condition. My eyes narrowed as I studied it closely.
Even as consciousness slipped away, the creature continued to tremble, each movement accompanied by sounds of agony.
“······This is.”
The hood of the robe had been torn away by my slash, revealing the creature’s pale neck.
There, encircling it, was a metal device identical to the ones I’d seen on the Kobolds’ necks earlier. A Mana Choker.
But this one was incomparably more intricate than those.
It was no crude chain meant to control some brutish low-rank monster.
This was an artifact designed to perfectly dominate the complex mind of a high-level Awakened One and forcibly suppress its nervous system.
A sinister, elaborate instrument of brainwashing—layer upon layer of complex Mana circuits intertwined in dizzying patterns.
The creature hadn’t retained its own will. Someone had systematically stripped away its sense of self and reduced it to nothing more than a cog in this underground factory.
What kind of madman possessed the power to enslave a battle mage of such caliber?
Desperate for answers, I tore away the black mask that covered half of the man’s face.
“······.”
The moment I saw the face beneath the mask, a hairline fracture appeared in the cold logic that had always defined my reason.
Even for someone who had spent a lifetime walking battlefields without feeling, the face that stared back at me—a face that by all logic should not exist in this world—struck me speechless.
“Insane… bastard.”
A curse escaped my lips. I knew this face far too well. And I wasn’t alone.
Any Hunter in South Korea who had wielded a staff in pursuit of magic, any ordinary citizen who kept up with the news, would have seen this face countless times—on the very first page of their textbooks.
The face of a hero who had closed countless Gates and saved humanity. Yet it was the face of a man officially declared missing during the Great Rift Incident years ago.
“Lee Do-hyun······ a Hunter?”
The legendary hero known as the greatest mage alive—Lee Do-hyun—was bleeding red beneath my feet.

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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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