The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 74

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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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74
Chapter 74. Each Their Own Battlefield, and Acceleration
***
Crack!
The moment Chu Jae-hee’s blunt, calloused fingertips made contact with the Black Sphere resting at the center of the carry-on luggage.
Cyan sparks of Mana erupted violently from the surface that held a primordial darkness, tearing through the empty air.
A razor-sharp grinding sound clawed harshly at the quiet air of the office.
“······!”
With an unexpected burst of Mana, a chill ran through me as if my skin were being pricked by needles. My shoulders flinched reflexively.
My unconscious defense mechanism activated, and the Mana in my Core roiled—yet Chu Jae-hee, the one who had caused all this, didn’t blink an eye.
Instead, as if adjusting the dial of a familiar machine, he swept his palm gently across the surface of the sphere.
It was extraordinary. The wild, thrashing waves subsided instantly along the path his touch traced.
Like a trainer calming a ferocious beast, his movements held not a shred of hesitation or fear.
Chu Jae-hee, dedicated appraiser for the Ability Management Team.
The man who had restored rare-grade equipment from the Dongguryeong Gate with an unprecedented success rate of 99 percent.
Behind the shell of a low-level bureaucrat who guarded the stuffy records room in the basement of City Hall lay his true nature: a fanatical craftsman obsessed with reading the grain of Mana itself.
I had long since grasped that his way of thinking deviated sharply from the orbit of common sense.
But today, as he crouched before the carry-on and gazed at the sphere, his silhouette was peculiarly unsettling. His shoulders trembled faintly.
Not from fear, but from the pure delight of a boy confronted with forbidden treasure.
“How did you obtain this.”
I stepped back from the sphere’s radius and asked flatly. An unpleasant chill conducted up through my shoe heels from the floor.
“An SSR Grade item wouldn’t surface even if you combed through the bottom of the black market like rummaging through junk.”
My observation was grounded in cold reality.
The Hunters Web—where Awakened Ones traded in clandestine information.
SSR-grade equipment appearing on that murky online exchange once, perhaps twice a year, was already a rarity.
Behind the mask of anonymity, fraud and betrayal had become routine in those depths.
High-end Artifacts worth hundreds of billions, even hundreds of billions more, were absolutely conducted off-line in sealed rooms, in the presence of verified guarantors—that was the unbreakable rule.
If even a rumor circulated that a single SSR item of value had been released, domestic mega-guilds and overseas rankers alike would charter private jets to enter the country without hesitation.
Especially now, ten years ago, when Gate protocols had not yet been perfectly codified, illicit trafficking through underground channels was rampant.
For such an absolutely rare object to be sitting bare in a cheap cloth travel carry-on belonging to a low-level city hall staffer was surreal.
It lacked any sense of reality.
“Hunter, this is no item that has passed through legitimate channels.”
Chu Jae-hee adjusted his slipping glasses with his index finger and let out a low laugh. His eyes, dark with fatigue, gleamed with fervor.
“It’s an Excavated Item.”
“Excavated?”
“You know that cursed royal tomb Gate that opened in Egypt? A tomb raider party risked their lives stealing an unidentified raw stone from there. The surface condition was so hideous that no one would touch it, so I purchased it at auction for a pittance. Actually, it was more like salvaging something that was treated as garbage.”
“······Then, could this be.”
My gaze fixed once more on the Black Sphere. It seemed to absorb light itself, devouring the ambient illumination around it.
“Yes, yes. That’s right.”
Chu Jae-hee spread his palm proudly, as though introducing his own child.
“Right now, it’s an Artifact raw stone with layers upon layers of vile and filthy curses tangled throughout.”
“······.”
Instead of answering, I stepped two paces further back from the sphere’s radius. My fingertips trembled faintly. The intuition honed over decades of gazing into the abyss of Mana scraped coldly along my spine, sounding an alarm.
Examined closely, the sphere’s surface was not simple blackness. A viscous, repugnant shimmer of pitch-darkness coiled through fine fractures across its face.
It was no mere Mana. It was toxic intent meticulously engineered to annihilate someone—or the collective accumulation of ancient resentment.
“Surely you haven’t······.”
I exhaled in disbelief.
“You’ve been restoring a cursed Artifact all this while with your bare hands?”
“No, I did put on rubber gloves I bought at the discount store.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“Curses aren’t as complicated as they seem once you’ve mastered reading the wavelength’s pattern. It’s like untying knots one after another, in a sense. Anyway, I’ve nearly finished.”
“Nearly finished?”
“Yes. I’ve completed about 70 percent of the appraisal, and if I stay up for another week or so to fine-tune the circuitry, it should be completely neutralized. But······ I wanted to show it to you first, so I pushed myself a bit. Once this is complete, I thought it would be a tremendous asset to you.”
Chu Jae-hee began tapping and stroking the sphere at various points, as if nothing were amiss.
It was nothing short of madness.
There were a truckload of issues to object to, and countless aspects that defied common logic.
Excavated Items were unrefined artifacts literally ‘excavated’—dug from monster corpses or ruins within Gates—never processed.
No one knows what divine power might be embedded within, or what catastrophic trap might await to drive the user to death.
Such items routinely cost tens of times more in ‘appraisal and crafting fees’ than the item’s intrinsic value.
What Chu Jae-hee had brought was not only SSR Grade raw stone, but it also had ancient curses firmly tangled throughout.
If it had been entrusted to the Appraisal Department of a proper large guild, the estimate would have required dozens of specialized sorcerers in protective suits laboring for months.
The sickly haze blooming across the sphere’s surface was proof of that lethal curse.
The act of appraising while treading a razor’s edge around the curse’s blind spots.
It was no different from defusing the detonator of a live C4 bomb with activation already triggered—blindfolded, guided only by the sound of a ticking clock in your ears and the faint vibration transmitted through your fingertips.
Should the Mana circuit calculations veer even slightly off course, or the fingertips slip a mere 0.1 millimeter, the curse wave would backflow and rot the appraiser’s flesh where they stood.
Yet this bookish appraiser was stroking that monstrous bomb with bare hands as though it were a gentle pet kept in his own room.
What staggered me was that he was executing this insane task alone and had already completed seventy percent of the disarmament.
Zip.
Chu Jae-hee, wearing a satisfied smile, drew the carry-on luggage’s zipper closed again.
As the sickly aura was sealed within the zipper’s gap, the oppressive pressure that had weighed on the office eased a little.
“In any case, I promise to fully resolve this thing’s true nature and bring it to you by the end of this month. Please be patient just a while longer.”
I stood speechless, watching his receding back as he pulled the handle and made for the elevator.
Pure madness.
Was it always thus—artisans who had shattered their limits through obsessive mastery of their craft, appearing so outwardly unhinged, like wild beasts with a screw loose?
Behind his hunched shoulders, I could almost see some vast, invisible gear grinding away.
At least in that moment, he seemed more unhinged than I was.
“Don’t push yourself too hard.”
I threw the words dryly at his back as he reached for the elevator button. It wasn’t mere politeness.
A genuine warning, born from the real fear that the curse might claim his throat.
At the sound of my voice, Chu Jae-hee stopped mid-pull on his carry-on, standing rigid.
He turned around slowly.
His face was buried under a thick fog of exhaustion, but beyond his glasses, his pupils shone with an eerie clarity and hardness.
“I… I want to be out in the field too.”
Chu Jae-hee gripped the carry-on’s handle tight and spoke in a low voice.
“Team Leader Kim Dae-han and Hunter Kim Do-jin—they risk their lives fighting out there every day. But I’m always stuck in some corner of the city hall basement, just looking over paperwork, safe and sound… It makes me feel so guilty and frustrated. This is all I can do. If I don’t do this properly, I don’t deserve to be on this team.”
Equipment management. A non-combatant with zero combat ability.
The inferiority complex he carried, the debt he felt toward the team—that was what drove this meek-looking man into the quagmire of reckless curse disarmament.
“That’s not true.”
I cut through his self-doubt curtly and decisively, my tone cold and brooking no compromise.
“Appraiser Chu Jae-hee, your battlefield is simply different.”
……
“Each team member bleeds on a different front line. Without the weapon you risk your life to forge, I cannot cut down the monsters’ necks outside. I can pull the trigger only because you’ve removed the detonator.”
Chu Jae-hee’s stiffened mouth corners relaxed, and then he broke into a bright, honest smile. The tension that had gripped his eyes melted away like snow.
“Yes! I’ll keep that in mind!”
With that cheerful reply, Chu Jae-hee dragged his carry-on—as large as himself—through the elevator doors and disappeared in good spirits. The office was left empty.
I exhaled deeply, cutting through the vacant air.
He was right. The battlefield’s location is all that differs.
***
Outskirts of G City, deep in a remote mountain with no sign of people.
A dark night with even the moon swallowed by dark clouds. Standing on rough, uneven earth, sword in hand, I was breathing in ragged gasps.
The mountain wind struck my cheeks coldly, but the heat radiating from my entire body made it feel refreshing instead.
Charles Edward Blake. That drunken knight commander had thrust a harsh task upon me.
The next stage to reach after the extreme acceleration of One-Point Explosion—it was Double Slash.
Charles himself, tongue twisted with drunkenness, had brushed past it with lazy onomatopoeia like “whoosh, slash,” but I analyzed the phenomenon in my own way.
I gathered the scattered fragments and assigned them an intuitive name.
Double Slash.
The concept was deceptively simple: the first entry, burrowing into the opponent’s space at explosive speed.
And before that one blink of an exchange could end, slipping through the gap of an instant to force in a second strike.
“Does this even make sense?”
I unscrewed a water bottle and poured the cold liquid roughly down my parched throat, venting my frustration into the dark void around me.
Only the chill of the water sliding down my throat offered meager relief to my burning insides.
I understand the theory. In my mind, I’ve traced the perfect trajectory hundreds of times. But my body won’t comply.
My muscles and nervous system respond half a beat slower than my will commands.
This is breaking the rules.
In combat, a mage is said to consume an entire “turn”—computing Mana circuits, designating coordinates, chanting an Incantation to complete a single action.
Logic turning with the precision of interlocking gears.
Thus battles between high-level mages become not artillery exchanges but vicious tactical games—reading ahead what formula the opponent prepares and striking a counter.
But the swordsmen’s ecosystem I was now forcing myself into operated on completely different principles than that turn-based logic.
A swordsman’s fight is real-time.
A single frame, the slightest muscle tremor, a single shift in the opponent’s gaze—every sense and nerve must be tensed to animal awareness and react instinctively.
The moment I calculate with my mind and draw out logic, I’m already on a battlefield where heads roll.
When I subdued Jang Yu-cheong at Club Arabian, when I could overwhelm Bae Hyun-gyeom, called the Suicide Specialist—it wasn’t because my swordplay was superior.
It was because I already held perfect information about their attack patterns, habits, and the flow of their auras locked in my mind.
My magical calculations were a trap laid one step ahead of that beast’s raw instinct.
But what if I faced an unknown powerhouse outside my intelligence network?
Then the story would be entirely different.
Suddenly, the face of a massive man like a block of iron flashed across my mind.
Ryu Gang-jin, the Section Chief of Combat Operations.
An overwhelming mass and destructive force, honed by passage through countless Gates and sharpened by seasoned instinct—a perfect powerhouse. If I faced that man?
I couldn’t easily picture my blade piercing through his heavy aura, my sword tip reaching his nape.
The moment a single thrust was blocked, the counterattack that would come flying at me had a ninety-nine percent chance of crushing my skull.
The answer was clear.
An anomaly: cramming two attacks into a single turn. A cascade of acceleration that erases the opponent’s counterattack timing itself. I had to reach that extreme realm.
I hurled an empty water bottle roughly to the ground. The dented plastic bottle rolled across the dirt with an oddly loud sound. I repositioned myself and stood again.
I drew up the aura coiled at the base of my Core and laid it thin across the sword’s edge. I steadied my breathing and contracted the muscles of both legs until they burned.
‘Fast entry.’
The earth gouged deeply as my body snapped forward like an arrow. The impact of the high-speed movement stretched my vision long and thin.
‘And before that trajectory stops, the next slash—!’
A sharp sound of air being rent echoed.
But contrary to my expectation, my center of gravity lurched backward.
“Damn it. How did that bastard manage that?”
My blade’s tip, which had cut through the empty point I’d aimed for, shook uselessly in the air.
This was already the thousandth attempt. A single slash, all crude momentum and no finesse. Still, that was all I could manage.
Unable to overcome the explosive inertia released on the initial charge, the physical balance needed for a second slash shattered completely.
My muscles screamed as if torn, my joints buckled.
Charles hadn’t given me the answer.
He simply showed me the completed result once, then vanished.
So in the end, it was all meant for me to find the answer myself within the broken failures—the teachings of a master who silently guards the path toward truth.
Training accompanied by relentless patience and physical pain.
“Haah…….”
I exhaled in rough gasps, wiping beads of sweat from my brow with the back of my hand. My shirt was already soaked through, clinging to my body.
“Wait.”
That was when it came—a slightly odd, audacious idea that brushed across my exhausted mind.
The combat logic of a mage. One action consumes one turn.
But if my body’s limits couldn’t keep up with that ‘second turn’ needed to reach the real-time combat realm of swordsmen—if the hardware of flesh couldn’t withstand the computation?
‘If the body is slow, then slow the world.’
I plunged the sword I’d been gripping deep into the ground and squeezed my eyes shut.
[Synchronization]
I converted everything so I could unleash my aura whenever I wanted, then moved to the next task.
This was something close to forbidden. But I was no ordinary mage anymore.
Fwaaaash—!
I focused my consciousness toward my essence, rooted in the deepest place of my soul beyond my Core.
In the middle of the darkened mountain, intricate geometric magical circles spread out like a web from beneath my feet.
Blue magical force drank in the earth’s moisture and formed threads of light.
Opening my unique property: Sephiroth’s Tree.
At the heart of a magnificent vortex of power, an enormous phantom tree began to bloom behind my back.
Though not a physical form visible to the eye, the surrounding trees trembled, their branches pushed back by the overwhelming pressure.
As I honed my consciousness more keenly, five branches among the countless ones stretching from the trunk gleamed brilliantly, taking on a sharp cyan hue.
Uuuoong—!
The surrounding air was pressed down heavily, as if by thousands of tons of water pressure.
For the first time since my return, I attempted to break through my limits. Opening five calculation circuits simultaneously and forcibly overlaying the formula of identical magic—the extreme.
Multiple Casting (5x).
The coordinates and formula of Mana drawn in my mind were one and only one.
My lips slowly parted as I began to trace in the void the incantation commanding acceleration that would deceive the laws of physics.
“Haste.”
The first branch trembled. Electrical signals flooded my nervous system.
“Haste.”
The second branch blazed. My muscles’ contraction speed began to defy reason.
“Haste.”
The third branch resonated. My heartbeat spiraled out of control, my blood burning like magma.
“Haste.”
The fourth branch shattered. Now the dust falling before my eyes began to move like slow-motion video. Time itself was warping.
And then I drew up the resonance of the final branch.
“Haste.”
The moment five layers of acceleration magic stacked upon each other.
The air surrounding my body vaporized into white. Now only one thing remained—enduring this overwhelming speed.

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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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