The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 73

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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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73
Episode 73. Surrender Without Causality
***
Destruction.
The two syllables that escaped Professor Song Byung-jin’s lips drifted through the night air and struck my chest like a shard of ice. It was not mere metaphor.
It was a terror that existed, the end of the world I had already witnessed once—the perfect ash heap that the descent of the Demonic Dragon Zephyros had wrought upon humanity.
The sky had split like a gaping maw and vomited forth flames, and the earth had melted away without even time to scream.
The afterimage of that overwhelming apocalypse crawled across my retinas like venom, creeping and corrosive.
‘Is the price of borrowed power nothing but annihilation?’
The conclusion Song had reached—he whom many called the highest authority in Ability Engineering—was chilling.
If recklessly drawing Mana from Gates had ultimately caused the structural collapse of dimensions, then his hypothesis aligned with the truth of the future I had experienced so perfectly it made my skin crawl.
Humanity had been blooming brilliant flowers of magic atop a grave we had dug with our own hands.
“I will keep it in mind.”
I gathered the heavy, turbulent thoughts churning within my chest. I regulated my breathing evenly so that no emotional tremor would show on my surface.
“It’s grown quite late. You should rest as well, Professor. I’ll visit you again soon.”
“Yes, yes. Take care on your way. The night air is rather cold. Don’t trust your Awakened body too much.”
“You should get some exercise yourself.”
“Listen to him now, Kim Do-jin.”
Professor Song smiled warmly and waved his hand. I offered a light bow and turned away.
On the campus pathway thick with darkness, the streetlamps drew sparse yellow circles on the ground.
Only the dry, sharp sound of my dress shoes striking the pavement cut through the quiet air.
The familiar landscape of my alma mater receded behind me, peaceful enough. Yet the heavy warning my mentor had cast remained sharp as a thorn, insistently scratching at one corner of my chest.
If I could not escape the coming destruction, there was only one path: to twist and sever the trajectory of that annihilation with my own hands.
I thrust my hands into my pockets and quickened my pace toward the parked car. I let unnecessary emotions sink to the bottom of my reason.
What I needed now was not sentimental worry, but the cold judgment to determine my next move.
***
Professor Song Byung-jin stood beneath the streetlamp on the campus pathway, quietly gazing at the back of his former student disappearing into the distance.
I had always taken him for nothing but an engineering student.
A student armed with logic more precise than any calculator had awakened late, and returned as an A-rank Hunter shaking all of South Korea.
If I, as a scholar, felt no curiosity about such heterogeneous and meteoric growth, I would be lying—but what came before that was pride.
“Professor Shin! Working late tonight?”
Professor Song spotted a man crossing the pathway behind him and raised his hand in greeting.
“Ah, Professor Song. I haven’t finished preparing tomorrow’s lecture yet.”
The man stopped walking and turned his head. Because of the backlit glow from the streetlamp, his silhouette seemed elongated beyond its usual proportion.
He was a man of impressive height and upright bearing. His dark hair was neatly combed back, and thick black-rimmed glasses completed an intellectual impression.
Behind him, four or five female undergraduates followed like shadows, their flushed faces tracking his every movement.
“Well then, I’ll head up to my office.”
The man’s voice was always peculiar. His tone was calm, nearly flat in pitch, yet it carried a deep, resonant baritone that seemed to emanate from the depths of his vocal cords, pleasantly vibrating the surrounding air.
As if his very voice contained Mana meticulously engineered into it—a certain frequency.
A voice of compelling draw that disarmed the listener’s defenses and naturally elicited instinctive favor.
“Yes, yes. You’re newlyweds—don’t overdo it. Head home early. Your wife must be waiting.”
Professor Song chuckled and waved his hand. Professor Shin offered a light bow and began to turn away.
But his deep brown eyes, for the merest instant, swept across the empty space where Kim Do-jin had just vanished into the darkness at the end of the pathway.
“That young man just now—was he your student?”
Professor Shin asked in a tone that seemed casual, yet gentle.
“Ah, Do-jin?”
Color rose to Professor Song’s face—he would never miss a chance to boast about his students.
“He was our department’s finest talent. If you saw the paper he wrote during his undergraduate years, ‘Non-linear Analysis of Status Window Algorithm,’ I think you’d be quite surprised. He was the type to dig in with relentless, vicious persistence. He should have done his doctorate under me, but well…”
“Not a topic for undergraduate level.”
“Exactly. And he’s that fellow in the news every day lately, you know. An A-rank Hunter at G City Hall—Kim Do-jin.”
“······I see. The City Hall’s A-rank Hunter.”
The man murmured softly. Behind his thick lenses, his eyes seemed unusually large and deep.
Like an abyss that swallowed all surrounding light as a black hole does, a cold and mysterious inscrutability lay sediment in those quiet, unreadable eyes.
“You have a remarkable student. I envy you. Well, I really must take my leave.”
Professor Shin completed his polite farewell and was about to ascend the marble steps of the main building.
“Ah.”
The man halted abruptly midway up the stairs. He did not turn around.
He merely tilted his head slightly over his shoulder, glancing down at Professor Song standing below with a sidelong look.
“Professor Song. The paper cup was put in by mistake.”
His voice—as steady and unwavering as when they had exchanged greetings moments before, soft and measured. It traveled through the air and struck Professor Song’s eardrums.
“Huh? A paper cup? Ah… right, it is.”
At the man’s remark, Professor Song started and looked down at his feet. The paper cup he’d just tossed toward the trash bin beside the vending machine.
The cup, which he’d thought landed perfectly in a graceful arc, had instead slipped into the interior of a plastic-only recycling bin rather than the general waste container.
The young professor ended with that dry comment and turned his head, vanishing silently with the female students beyond the dark glass doors of the main building.
“I must be out of my mind. What on earth was I thinking?”
Professor Song Byung-jin suddenly let out a sharp gasp disguised as a sigh, then strode purposefully toward the recycling bin.
Crackle! Screech!
“Look at me. Making a mistake like this. This can’t be happening.”
Professor Song wrenched open the plastic lid of the recycling bin with rough urgency.
And without the slightest hesitation, he thrust his pale, gaunt hands—hands that had held nothing but pens his entire life—deep into the interior of the trash.
The inside of the recycling bin was riddled with filth.
A container sloshing with the sickly red broth of half-eaten cup noodles, a disposable coffee cup smeared with sticky sugar syrup, and repulsive remnants of jet-black cigarette ash mingled with viscous phlegm.
Into that nauseating heap of refuse, the old professor—a man who had spent his entire life revered in the halls of scholarship—began clawing like a madman with his bare hands.
Not even the minimal rationality to roll up his sleeves engaged.
The sleeves of the neat checkered shirt he wore grew dark and grotesque, soaked through with rotten broth and contaminated liquid.
Unidentifiable food scraps lodged beneath his fingernails, and his skin became tainted with the foul reek of filth.
“Where is it? Where did it go? God, I really am insane. What kind of person am I? Why am I like this?”
From Professor Song’s lips poured an endless stream of obsessive mumbling. His eyes had lost focus, trembling with an almost convulsive rhythm.
The blood vessels surrounding his pupils had burst, staining them a sickly crimson.
“I have to separate the recycling properly. I have to. And yet here I am at this age, committing such an unforgivable mistake. A so-called professor breaking the rules like this… God help me. I’ve sinned so much. So very much.
How can I teach anything after this? I have no right. I’ve committed a sin worthy of death.”
As his hands grew more frantic, trash scattered upward. Sticky liquid splattered against the old professor’s glasses, clouding the lenses, but he didn’t blink once.
In the darkness of the empty Campus, only the harsh breathing of the elderly professor digging through the refuse and the sickening sound of trash being scraped echoed back.
***
It was the third day since Team Leader Kim Dae-han had departed on a provincial business trip to backtrack the source of the incubation-type Gate emitting a crimson wavelength.
I was handling the unfitting duties of acting team leader in the empty Ability Management Team office.
The office clock already pointed past midnight, yet the fluorescent lights still burned harshly against my eyes.
Click-click. Tap-tap-tap.
The sound of the mouse clicking and keyboard tapping filled the silent space with dull monotony.
Dozens of densely packed Korean documents and internal G City Hall approval system windows filled the monitor screen.
Before the regression, during those days soaked in blood and Mana on the battlefield, I’d never imagined such a variable.
I had failed to calculate that the profession of a South Korean civil servant meant living in such a grueling hell of text and official documents.
Sometimes finding typos in paperwork and balancing budget items demanded greater endurance than severing a monster’s neck.
Just three days. The documents I’d drafted, reviewed, and approved already exceeded three hundred.
Overtime was no longer optional—it was a necessary condition for survival.
In the mornings, I had to process an endless stream of Gate-related complaints from every sort of undesirable across G City.
[A slime urinated on the neighbor’s wall, so please compensate the wallpapering cost with taxes]
[A Gate opened in the local hills and caused noise that made my Hanwoo cattle miscarry]
Such irrational nonsense that defied reasonable response filled my inbox to bursting.
After mechanically processing complaints while suppressing rising murderous intent, afternoons awaited me with grueling budget negotiations with other departments and report writing.
‘Kim Dae-han has been handling all of this alone this whole time?’
I rubbed the back of my neck—numb beyond mere soreness—and scrolled through records of past official documents stored in the system folder.
My gaze stopped on aftercare files from the incidents I’d recently caused in the Old City District of G City.
The incident where I’d blown out the entire outer wall of the 6th Floor of Club Arabian. The battle where I’d incinerated the Abandoned Factory with Ignition.
Mountain upon mountain of budget documents lay stacked, compiled to skillfully cover those overwhelming traces of destruction as “fires of unknown cause” or “structural collapse from aging facilities,” and to smoothly process compensation for innocent citizens.
I had been able to sever the throats of those bastards without trace in the darkness only because someone had stood in the light, quietly wiping away the blood-stained marks and serving as an administrative shield.
Without Kim Dae-han, I might well have become a wanted criminal under investigation long ago.
“Does this guy even go home?”
A subtle feeling mixed into the muttered words as I shut down the monitor.
Toward Kim Dae-han—whom I’d considered a cunning, calculating bureaucrat—something shifted: a faint apology mixed with genuine respect bloomed in my chest.
He too was waging his own battle on his own battlefield.
Screeeek—
Then the office glass door opened, breaking the silence. A familiar face poked through the gap.
“Hunter, working late again? Aren’t you tired?”
It was Chu Jae-hee, the Awakened One who handled equipment management and repairs for the Ability Management Division.
His sunken cheeks and dark circles that extended to his cheekbones made him look like a zombie.
I should apply the same sense of kinship I’d felt toward Kim Dae-han to this man as well. There’s no one normal in this department.
It seemed less like an office and more like a detention center for workaholics who’d forgotten how to go home.
“I’m planning to process a few more draft documents and then leave. But… what is that?”
I shifted my gaze to the enormous travel suitcase placed beside him.
Chu Jae-hee’s gaze shone with an almost unbearable brightness, as though he’d been waiting eagerly for my question.
His entire face laid bare a transparent desire—*please ask, let me boast*—written plain as day.
“Ah! This is it!”
The moment I showed interest, Chu Jae-hee dragged a carry-case toward my desk with theatrical fanfare and opened the zipper with careful hands.
The interior was packed completely with high-density shock-absorbent foam.
At its center sat a jet-black sphere, slightly larger than a basketball, radiating a weighty presence.
Its surface was inscribed with geometric Mana circuits that glowed blood-red like veins, with intermittent pulses flowing through the gaps.
The air around it warped subtly—an object that felt deeply ominous and far from ordinary.
“It’s an Artifact!”
Chu Jae-hee exhaled sharply, declaring the words with unmistakable triumph.
“An Artifact?”
I leaned forward, intrigued, and he pushed his glasses up with intellectual precision, driving home his point in an excited voice.
“Yes! And it’s SSR-grade, no less! I spent months combing through the black market, hacking into overseas auctions, and finally managed to complete the purchase. I scraped together every last penny for it!”
An SSR-grade Artifact.
A thing you couldn’t even catch a glimpse of, no matter how many billions you brought to the market.
A legendary item that even the masters of great guilds could scarcely hope to lay hands on.
After weeks of drowning in repetitive administrative work, my senses—which had grown parched and dull—stirred with genuine fascination.
The Mana emanating from the black sphere felt dense and profound, its depth unfathomable.

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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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