The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 69

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————

69
Chapter 69. Blindness and the Fall
***
A cluster of high school students pushed through the apartment entrance, their footsteps thundering roughly against the worn cement stairs as they climbed upward in a chaotic mass.
“Get out of the way, you bastard.”
They shoved past an elderly security guard who’d tried to block their path, muscling their way up toward the upper floors without hesitation.
Their gait carried an unmistakable hostility, a crude violence laid bare for anyone to see.
Nine times out of ten, this was a shallow revenge plot aimed at someone.
As I gauged where they were headed, the contents of the briefing document Kim Dae-han had walked me through flashed coldly through my mind.
Hong Tae-hwa.
A student with a unique ability called Explosion, who had detonated it against classmates who’d tormented him relentlessly, leaving them gravely injured before fleeing the scene.
He’d been a victim of severe school violence and ostracism. According to the file, insulting remarks directed at his grandparents—the ones who’d raised him—had snapped the thread of his reason and become the spark that set everything ablaze.
School is a small, closed society.
Within that narrow fence, the weak are hunted and ravaged by predators in a twisted ecosystem that repeats itself day after day.
I too had experienced the bitter depths of that irrational food chain.
I’d been trampled relentlessly by Jang Yu-cheong, a cunning predator, enduring suffocating harassment night after night. Every time I lay down to sleep, I imagined snapping his neck with my bare hands.
Yet even after I gained power, I’d never once entertained the thought of exacting personal revenge.
An Awakened One’s ability isn’t a shallow tool handed out to lord over others and crush the weak.
It exists to protect.
That was the only noble creed of a hunter that Kang Tae-yoon had ever taught me.
Hong Tae-hwa’s transformation from victim to perpetrator had begun the moment he obtained a destructive power he couldn’t control.
Unable to rein in his Explosion ability, he’d abused it in shallow acts of revenge. In the end, to cover up the bloodstains, he’d waded willingly into the great swamp of crime that was the Red Blood Alliance.
Intoxicated by power, overstepping boundaries, leaving trails of slaughter in his wake—countless innocent lives erased.
At this moment in the timeline, he was either on the verge of formally launching his activities as a member of the Red Blood Alliance, or already deep in the darkness, operating in its murk.
His name had appeared with unmistakable clarity on the list from the Black USB we’d secured from Club Arabian’s office.
In any case, the probability that Hong Tae-hwa, our target, was actually hiding in this dilapidated, crumbling apartment was vanishingly small. Still, as a member of the Ability Management Team, I couldn’t escape the mandatory administrative procedure of a home visit as documented in the file.
I gazed silently toward the hallway on the 3rd Floor.
***
Before a rust-streaked old iron door, a group of high school students wielding a steel pipe and wooden clubs had taken their positions.
“Come out! Hong Tae-hwa, you son of a bitch!”
A dull impact sound tore through the air. Each time the steel pipe struck, the corroded metal door rang out and began caving in. The eerie noise echoed long and unpleasantly through the entire old hallway.
“Move aside, kid.”
One particularly large youth from the group stepped forward, flexing his shoulders.
An Early Awakened One with a Core only partially opened. Above his thick fist, a faint, murky Mana began to shimmer like heat haze.
“Is this what they call an Aura?”
“Damn, that’s so cool.”
“Watch how I break it down.”
Emboldened by his friends’ praise, the large youth’s voice swelled with arrogance. White energy gathered roughly around his fist.
A crude, forcibly squeezed burst of power—knowledge without restraint.
The large youth drove his full force into his fist and drove it straight toward the locked iron door.
Crash—!
The rusted hinges tore clean away with a sickening shriek. The old door twisted hideously and flew helplessly into the darkness beyond the entrance, trailing cement dust. Through the haze of that powder, a thick darkness yawned open.
“……Who—who is it?”
Through the swirling dust, an elderly man emerged from the dark interior of the home, his back severely bent, moving with difficulty.
The old man limped heavily, waving his wrinkled hands into empty space as he took uncertain steps forward. His eyes had lost all focus, their surfaces now clouded and dim.
“Who are you people, breaking down someone’s door like this……? Cough, cough.”
“This is crazy. Where did this geezer come crawling out from?”
The youth with the steel pipe spat on the floor and snickered.
“That bastard Hong Tae-hwa ran off on his own.”
The old man reached out with trembling hands to grip the dented doorframe. When his fingers touched the cold metal, his face drained of color, fear flooding his features.
“Tae-hwa……? Are you boys Tae-hwa’s friends?”
To the old man’s desperate question, the group of high school students erupted in crude, mocking laughter.
“Friends? Who’d be friends with a trash like that?”
“Hey, I think this old geezer’s eyes don’t work at all.”
“What’s wrong with you boys? What did Tae-hwa possibly do wrong……? Ugh!”
One of the group drove the end of his steel pipe hard into the old man’s solar plexus. Caught off guard by the impact, the elderly man staggered backward and collapsed helplessly onto the worn linoleum floor.
“Shut your mouth. You rotten old fool. Where is Hong Tae-hwa? Tell us straight before we knock all your teeth out.”
“Stop this! What could Tae-hwa possibly have done wrong——!”
“This is so damn annoying. Are you deaf too? We already told you.”
The large Early Awakened One who’d been channeling his Aura stepped forward impatiently, looming over the blind old man. He raised his hand roughly, about to bring it down in a merciless strike across the defenseless man’s face.
“Hong Tae-hwa. That bastard’s original sin was being born. His grandfather, who fathered his father—he carries guilt too, doesn’t he?”
The elderly man’s massive palm swept through the air, descending toward the old man’s face in the final instant before impact.
Boom—!
A sound like lightning striking—a terrible, ear-splitting crack that shook the entire dilapidated hallway with crushing force.
***
My original plan was to climb the stairs slowly, walk up at my leisure, and control the situation. But the temperament of these half-baked beasts proved far more impatient and savage than I’d anticipated.
Give some Early Awakened One a title and a pittance of power, and muscle and brutality erupt before reason can even intervene. My patience wasn’t nearly generous enough to overlook such line-crossing when drunk on newfound might.
Shmp—!
I drove my Aura from my Dantian through the muscle fibers of my legs in a heavy surge. Using the crumbling drain pipes jutting from the apartment’s exterior and a corroded air conditioning unit as springboards, I kicked off the ground with force and launched myself skyward.
A leap that defied gravity entirely—an overwhelming bound that carried me in a single breath atop the old cement railing of the 3rd Floor hallway.
The scene that came into view was bleak.
A blind elderly man crouched on the ground, trembling violently, while a hulking high school student raised his hand mercilessly above him.
“······?!”
Several of them noticed my sudden emergence over the railing, their eyes widening in shock. An unidentified intruder materializing from thin air would certainly give anyone a fright.
‘This is insane.’
Never has there been an end times quite like this. Pittance of power pressed into the hands of children whose values haven’t even properly formed yet. Uncontrolled strength, stripped of reason, degenerates instantly into the basest tool of violence.
From my position suspended in mid-air, I twisted my core and extended my right leg in a long, sweeping kick.
My heel drove squarely into the back of the Early Awakened One’s hand, the very hand that had been about to strike the old man’s cheek.
“Ahhhhhhh—!!”
A dull, sickening crunch as bone fractured.
The large youth screamed, his eardrums nearly splitting, and was sent sliding across the worn hallway floor with foam flecking his lips, his wrist bent at a grotesque angle, convulsing in agony.
“What—what are you?!”
One of the group, stunned by the overwhelming turn of events, backpedaled and cursed.
“Then.”
I landed on the floor without a sound, brushing the dust from my clothes, and replied flatly.
“Who are you?”
Behind me, a figure wielding a steel pipe suddenly swung it at my back. A dull whooshing sound cut through the air toward the back of my head.
But his clumsy movement appeared extraordinarily slow, fragmenting like a video with dropped frames.
I twisted my head slightly, lowered my shoulder, and let the steel pipe’s awkward trajectory slide past me. In the same motion, I seized his wrist with my extended right hand and snatched the pipe in one clean motion.
Crack—!
A perfect reversal of his own momentum and force. I gripped the stolen steel pipe and drove it hard into his thigh.
“Ahhhhhhh—!!”
A terrible sound of bone fracturing in the femur. He collapsed to the floor, clutching his leg, and began to wail pitifully, tears and snot streaming down his face as he screamed through gasping breath.
“Remember that pain well.”
I tossed the blood-stained steel pipe onto the ground beside him and spoke in a low, chilling voice.
“That’s how much it hurts.”
The overwhelming gap in strength. Several of the others, finally grasping their situation, had already gone deathly pale, trembling like aspen leaves.
High school age—they enjoy cheap thrills and mob mentality, but face real violence, and this much is enough to break them, to make them soil themselves in fear and collapse.
One of them still hadn’t regained his senses.
“You—you bastard!!”
He rushed at me in blind fury—the hulking Early Awakened One whose wrist had shattered when he’d tried to strike the old man.
Pain forgotten in his rage, he charged like a runaway locomotive, both hands blazing with Aura.
A mindless, crushing assault. He meant to force a straight confrontation, a raw test of strength, anything to seize the advantage. Only beast-like killing intent flickered in his uncontrolled pupils.
This one is of the worst type—should never have awakened at all.
The kind who can’t contain the meager power granted to him, who wields violence against others, who’ll run amok. Left unchecked, he’d become a time bomb, trampling others mercilessly and sliding into crime just like Jang Yu-cheong, who plagued me in the past.
He needed to learn the terror of power burned into his very bones.
I didn’t evade his charge.
I simply laid my hand lightly atop the trajectory of his heavy incoming punch, perfectly absorbed the straight-line energy he unleashed, and smoothly diverted it outward. Simultaneously, I gripped his shoulder firmly and drove him hard toward the decaying concrete railing at the hallway’s edge.
“Urgh—!”
When my redirection was added to his mindless forward momentum, his body slammed against the old concrete railing at full force. The corroded guardrail cracked with a sharp sound and immediately collapsed.
His body careened straight out into the dark void beyond. If I let go, he’d plummet three stories headfirst into the asphalt below.
“Gu—ugh—!”
Just before he fell, my right hand, outstretched into the air, seized his school uniform collar with a firm grip.
He hung suspended in the void, his eyes fixed on the vertiginous drop beneath his feet, and his face went corpse-pale as he gasped, drawing in air.
The madness and arrogance that had blazed with Aura evaporated in an instant, leaving not a trace.
“From now on.”
I looked down at him, dangling in the pitch darkness beyond the railing, and delivered my sentence in a flat, cold voice.
“Answer only when you’re asked.”
“Yes—yes—yes, sir!!”
His face was a wreck of tears and snot. The monster drunk on power had vanished, replaced by a pathetic, terrified high school student whose eyes held only the feeble light of fear and shame.
“What’s your connection to Hong Tae-hwa?”
“I… I’m not connected to him at all!!”
“Say it again.”
“H-Hong Tae-hwa, that bastard—he attacked my friend first! He crippled my friend’s arm!”
“So that’s why you came here with all these people to get revenge?”
“Yes, yes, yes! That’s right! Please, please spare me—!”
“But.”
I loosened my grip ever so slightly, the fingers that had been locked around his collar relaxing. His body lurched downward through the air, dropping half a span below where he’d been suspended.
“Ahhhhhhh!!”
“Why torment someone who’s done you nothing? If you felt wronged, you should’ve gone straight to Hong Tae-hwa and demanded answers from him.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry! I was completely insane! I was truly in the wrong! Please, let me live!”
The boy was drowning in terror, his uniform pants darkened by his own shame, wailing in utter despair. It was absolute surrender to violence—the pathetic sight of someone who had just grasped how utterly insignificant his own strength truly was.
“How long have you been an Awakened One?”
“A… a month… just about a month now!”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, yes! Truly!”
“Then that should be fine.”
“Yes…? Ah, ahhhhhhh—!!”
I released my grip entirely.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!”
His massive frame plummeted from the 3rd Floor, his scream tearing through the darkness as he fell—a sound of pure anguish echoing downward.
The body of an Early Awakened One, his Core barely opened and beginning to circulate Mana.
Even a fall from the 3rd Floor that would’ve killed an ordinary person—for an Awakened One, the baseline durability of their body meant he’d survive with merely a few broken leg bones and shattered ribs.
So I felt not the slightest twinge of regret.
There was a brutal truth that needed searing into flesh: if you couldn’t control the power in your own hands and carelessly trampled others beneath you, then you too could be driven into that cold bottom and crushed at any moment.
That cruel truth had to be carved directly into the body and taught through experience. Because that was the true weight of responsibility that real power carried—and the fear it should inspire.
I had no doubt that the terrible horror he felt tonight would serve as a rather excellent cautionary lesson for whatever remained of his life ahead.
Thud—!
A heavy impact reverberated through the asphalt below the darkened apartment complex.
“Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!”
The sound was a bit loud, which was slightly bothersome.

—————
This chapter was translated by Lunox Novels. To support us and help keep this series going, visit our website: LunoxScans.com
—————