The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 55

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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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55
Episode 55. Crossed Inheritances
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Yellow streetlights flickered at regular intervals, casting long shadows across the rusted iron equipment of the playground.
The acrid smell of metal and the earthy scent of dust releasing the day’s accumulated heat drifted through the night air.
“That… what do you mean by that, hyung?”
Kang Tae-min’s voice trembled like a wet leaf. His gaze wandered through empty space, unable to settle on any point in my eyes.
The twenty-two-year-old who had been sipping canned coffee from the Convenience Store just moments ago, laughing brightly, was already ashen-faced.
The killing intent radiating from my body was pressing directly against his lungs.
Even without channeling Magical Power, the scent of blood that had seeped into my skin after countless brushes with death carried an instinctive predator’s oppression to an ordinary person.
The moment our eyes met—his trembling brown pupils to mine—heat surged violently through my chest. It was a bizarre cognitive dissonance.
The Kang Tae-yoon I knew would never wear such an expression. He was a man who always stood before me with an unbreakable, steel-like will.
But the figure standing before my eyes now was nothing more than a small beast confronting a slaughterhouse.
I clenched my teeth hard. The sensation of my jaw muscles tightening ran through me.
‘Either way, I don’t know this bastard.’
I forcibly suppressed the afterimages from before the Regression that kept surfacing in my mind.
The trivial memories that Kim Do-jin and Kang Tae-min had built together in this worldline were none of my concern.
There exists no bond shared with this bastard in my memory’s repository.
He is merely a defect born from the System’s malfunction, a deceptive bait thrown by Causality itself.
Once I defined it that way, a cruel current settled beneath my downturned gaze. Castrating emotion had become easier than blinking.
“Literally.”
I closed the distance until I was inches from his face. My reflection in his pupils was chillingly serene.
“Not hearing me? You die by my hand before you ever step foot in a Gate.”
“No, no—why are you—why are you suddenly doing this!”
A cry full of grievance tore through the silence of the empty playground.
That cry became a fuse. An indefinable, unpleasant heat rose from deep within my chest.
I lunged forward and seized Tae-min by the collar.
“Cough—”
My knuckles turned white as I twisted my grip. Through the rough fabric, the wild pounding of his carotid artery transmitted through my palm.
Tae-min’s heels lifted off the sandy ground. He thrashed, clawing at my forearm for breath, but my arm remained immobile as a colossal iron stake.
“Listen well. Being a Hunter is not some playground game you learn at a Cram School.”
Venom poured from between my lips.
“It’s a gamble with your life as the ante. Hell itself—where your limbs can be torn off at any moment, your entrails spilled. You can’t play hero with some wooden practice sword you’ve been swinging for a few months. That’s what I’m telling you.”
A sense of suffocating déjà vu swept across my entire body.
Why am I so furious? Why am I gripping this bastard’s throat and screaming with such desperation?
An old, acrid memory that had sunk to the bottom surged abruptly to the surface.
The time when I was Non-Awakened. The day Jang Yu-cheong, the ringleader of school violence, had beaten me into a bloody pulp and left me in an alley.
It was my brother, Kang Tae-yoon, who found me that day, cleaned up the garbage, and took my hand.
‘I’m going to become a Hunter like you. I’m going to burn them and kill them in agony.’
The moment that childish oath left my mouth, the kindest brother in the world seized my collar with a beast’s eyes I had never seen before.
And he hurled a merciless fist at my face. As my head snapped back and my nose shattered in agony, my brother snarled.
‘Don’t spout insane bullshit. If you’re going to be a Hunter for such a reason, I’ll break your legs with my own hands first.’
My reflection now bore a chilling resemblance to the Kang Tae-yoon who had poured despair and fury into me that day.
Hot despair surged up inside me. My brother picked up his sword to protect me, and in the end, he died in my stead.
And this hollow shell, born from gnawing away at my brother’s life, was now spouting off about walking of its own accord into that blood-soaked pit again.
“I… I too!”
Tae-min strengthened his grip on my wrist, resisting. Tears welled up on his face, flushed red from oxygen deprivation.
“I can… stake my life too! This isn’t a joke!”
“Stake your life?”
I shoved the collar I’d been gripping roughly away.
“Gah!”
Tae-min, unable to withstand even the crude shove backed by my weight, fell backward. He tumbled across the sand several times and crashed beneath the slide.
“Cough, cough! Hah… hah… hyung, why are you like this, seriously!”
Tae-min, covered in sand, coughed and looked up at me. Instead of answering, I unsnapped the leather buckle of the sword sheath at my hip.
The metal buckle released with a sharp, resonant ping. Without drawing the blade, I hurled the sheath itself toward him.
Whoosh—!
With a dull friction sound, the tip of the Dragon-Head Sword’s sheath buried itself deep in the sand between his legs.
The Magical Power infused in the blade collided with the earth, sending out a fine vibration.
“Pick it up.”
It was a dry command.
Kang Tae-min trembled as he stared at the blue-glowing blade embedded inches from his face. The dragon’s eye, intricately carved into the hilt, gleamed as it caught the moonlight.
“This… what is this, brother…?”
“You said you’d stake your life on it. Then you need to grip a real blade, not some wooden stick.”
I stood before him with my arms hanging loose at my sides, completely defenseless. The Mana core in my Dantian was fully suppressed.
My body was nothing more than that of a trained ordinary human.
“I won’t move a single step from here. Draw it and stab me. Then I’ll acknowledge whatever meager resolve you have.”
“Don’t… don’t say crazy things! Why would I stab you!!”
Kang Tae-min recoiled in horror, crawling backward on all fours. A demand to point a blade at one’s own brother—it was madness no sane person could accept.
Yet I observed his weakness with an unwavering gaze, as if dissecting it piece by piece.
“Why? You think this won’t happen inside a Gate?”
My voice sank heavily into the silence of the night.
“A comrade you trusted, whose back you covered—they could be possessed by a Demonic Beast and try to kill you. Or they could contract a vicious Curse and transform into some abomination. What will you do then?”
“That’s… that’s…”
“Will you persuade them? Or die alongside them? No. If you want to survive that hell and make it out, you’ll have to drive your own blade straight through the heart of the comrade who saved your life moments before.”
It wasn’t a lie. Before my return, when the Evil God Dragon descended upon this land, I remember the foul breath of that calamity filling the very air.
Countless Awakened Ones lost their reason and tore at each other’s throats. I burned my own comrades in hellfire with these hands, and with each act, I carved away another piece of my humanity.
“The moment you grip that blade, you forfeit your right to be human. If you don’t have the backbone for that, then calling yourself a Hunter is disgusting hypocrisy.”
I gestured with my chin toward the Dragon-Head Sword embedded in the sand.
“If you don’t have the resolve to stab, get out of here right now. And never let that word—Hunter—pass your lips again as long as you live.”
Kang Tae-min swallowed hard. His eyes darted frantically left and right, then fixed on the hilt of the Dragon-Head Sword buried in the ground.
Squelch.
His trembling hands gripped the hilt of the Dragon-Head Sword.
‘Foolish bastard.’
I clicked my tongue inwardly at his reckless choice.
The Dragon-Head Sword was no mere hunk of metal. It was a Rare Grade weapon reserved for Awakened Ones.
When a Non-Awakened grasped such a high-concentration Mana conductor with bare hands, the residual Mana fluctuations within the blade triggered a pain like being stabbed by needles through an ordinary person’s nervous system.
“Ngh—!”
As expected, a strangled groan tore from his mouth.
Kang Tae-min’s arms trembled like aspen leaves as he raised the blade. His facial muscles contorted grotesquely from the Mana rejection coursing through his nerves. His focus blurred, and his legs lost their center, drawing an erratic zigzag.
He’d barely managed to raise the sword and point it at me, but he looked ready to collapse at any moment.
‘Just as expected.’
The limit of an ordinary human. The result fell not a whisker outside my prediction. In such a pathetic state, he couldn’t even brush the fabric of my robe.
If I dealt him some disappointment here and sent him away, this nauseating charade would finally end.
I was about to push him back when—
“I can! I can do this!!”
The sand exploded backward. Kang Tae-min surged toward me with a roar that sounded like he was coughing blood.
My pupils dilated for a single, sharp moment.
It happened the instant he began his charge.
His arms, which moments before had trembled uncontrollably against the Mana resistance, suddenly locked rigid as if reinforced with steel.
His stumbling footwork instantly corrected itself into the most stable weight distribution, and the dull blade that had been wandering through the air traced a shockingly sharp and straight trajectory directly toward my heart.
“What the hell are you doing!!”
A sound of wind being split.
It was a strike so devastatingly precise and explosive that it was impossible to believe it came from a Non-Awakened who hadn’t opened their core.
‘Insane.’
I twisted my upper body back a half-step, deflecting the blade of the Dragon-Head Sword by the thinnest margin. The cool metal grazed my chest as it passed.
Simultaneously, I extended my right foot and flicked his supporting leg from under him.
“Ugh!”
Kang Tae-min’s upper body pitched forward as his lower balance collapsed.
I didn’t waste the opening. I pivoted and drove a kick straight into his abdomen.
“Kgh—hack!”
A dull, wet crunch echoed across the Playground. Kang Tae-min’s body launched into the air. He slammed hard into the weathered concrete wall at the far end of the Playground.
Crack—a spider web of fractures spread across the concrete. He released the Dragon-Head Sword and collapsed, coughing blood.
“…”
I lowered my extended foot to the ground, my face hard as stone, staring at the empty space where his blade had just grazed my collar.
That attack was no accident.
He hadn’t surrendered to my pressure. Instead, when cornered at the brink, he’d twisted his own muscle fibers and nervous system by force, bending them to his will like some feral beast.
He’d charged at me with genuine intent to kill.
Something unspeakable crawled up from the depths of my chest.
He was insane. In that instant of his charge, his eyes were those of a madman completely devoid of reason.

Blind obsession—ignoring pain, indifferent to whether his own body shattered, fixated solely on piercing through his target.
‘Where have I seen this before?’
The machinery of memory wound again, dredging up another fragment from the past.
That’s right.
Before the regression, that man had charged headlong into a dragon’s breath—a creature ten times his size—and even as his body charred black in the inferno, he’d driven his sword straight into the enemy’s heart.
The mad glint in Kang Tae-yoon’s eyes and the pupils I’d just seen in Kang Tae-min overlapped with bone-chilling perfection.
A replacement born from inverted causality. A hollow shell shaped by the System.
I’d tried to dismiss him as nothing more, to ignore him—yet deep in that creature’s soul, the seeds of the Way of the Sword and the madness that had belonged to Kang Tae-yoon still clung to life, tenacious and breathing.
I walked slowly forward and approached Tae-min, who lay convulsing beneath the wall. I picked up the Dragon-Head Sword from the ground and sheathed it.
“Ugh… hah…”
Tae-min, gasping for breath with his body curled tight, had taken the full force of the kick.
Dark droplets of blood beaded at the corners of his mouth, and both hands that had gripped the Magical Power weapon were blistered scarlet, as though burned.
I knelt beside him on one knee.
I drew Mana up in a thin thread from my core. Pure, life-giving Healing Magic gathered in my palm, radiating soft blue light. I placed my hand over his bruised abdomen.
“Nngh…”
Warm luminescence enfolded Tae-min’s body. His twisted organs found their rightful place, and the ruptured capillaries knitted together in an instant.
The blistered skin of his palms began to smooth and regenerate.
“I… I really… truly…”
Clinging to consciousness thanks to the warmth of the Healing Magic, Tae-min murmured through blood-flecked spittle.
“I’ll really become a Hunter… like you do.”
I said nothing. Instead, I pulled my jacket sleeve down and roughly wiped the dirt and blood from his face.
‘You’re not Kang Tae-yoon.’
I repeated it inwardly, a self-imposed incantation.
Even if Kang Tae-yoon’s instincts lingered within him, even if those eyes bore an uncanny resemblance to the madness I’d both longed for and despised in my brother.
In this world, this one creature had to breathe not on blood-soaked battlefields, but in the mundane, tedious quiet of ordinary days.
He was a novice who hadn’t even opened his core.
I could not—would not—shove the remnants of causality that had abandoned me and vanished, dumping all its burden in my lap, back into that hellish nightmare a second time.
I rose once I confirmed the wounds had begun to close.
“If I hear one more word about Hunter exam prep from anywhere, I’ll break your legs for real this time.”
I spoke coldly to Tae-min, who looked up at me.
“I’ll give you plenty of money. Starting tomorrow, drop out of that shabby cram school right now and enroll in the most expensive prep academy you can find.”
“……….”
“Sit at a desk and roll a pen. The world changes far more by clever people wielding pens than by creatures like you swinging swords.”
This was no act. It was the only genuine sincerity I could offer him in this hollow world of mere appearances.
“That’s the real way to save the world. Understand?”
I left the Playground behind, abandoning Tae-min to his stifled sobs.
The night air pierced sharply cold.
The back alleys of City G seethed with Booster-addled madmen, and those claiming to be the nation’s pillars bred monsters and gorged themselves on greed.
And even in that chaos, the creature wearing my brother’s face thrashed and clawed, determined to drag himself into hell.
‘They’re all insane.’
As I walked the streets, a cold, heavy stone lodged in my chest refused to shift.
These bitter dregs of emotion muddled my thoughts.
My heart would not settle.
On nights like these, I needed something potent. Strong enough alcohol to numb the brain, to stop this tangled machinery of thought, if only for a moment.
I stopped and looked around.
The night streets, with their sparse streetlamps, lay still and empty.
In my past life, whenever my mood turned foul, I would have wedged myself into a corner of some dingy Hof Bar that had been Kang Tae-yoon’s regular haunt, tilting glass after glass.
But in this world, neither that bar—stained with my brother’s memory—nor the man who would sit across from me and pour without hesitation, exists.
And yet I had no desire to return to the Penthouse I’d newly secured, to let this rot-stained expression show before my mother and sister, who looked at me and smiled.
There was nowhere to go.
In the heart of this sprawling city, the fact that I had no refuge to quietly nurse a drink struck me anew, cutting to the bone.
I thrust both hands deep into my coat pockets and took heavy steps toward the dark road.
For now, only one place came to mind.

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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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