The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 75

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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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75
Chapter 75. The Frame of an Instant
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The cold dawn air of Wild Mountain cut through my collar.
The biting mountain wind that forced its way deep into my lungs was sharp as a blade, and it cooled my overheated mind all the better for it.
The dark soil beneath my feet, sodden with dew from the night’s rain, was soft and treacherous, yet my two feet planted firmly held their balance without wavering.
Beyond the calluses of my right hand gripping the sword hilt, the Dragon-Head Sword’s cold edge transmitted its chill through my palm. My senses had sharpened to an extreme edge.
My nerves had drawn so taut that even the arc of a single falling leaf appeared as a sluggish afterimage.
[Tree of Sephirot]
As I intoned the Incantation in a low murmur, the empty space behind me twisted. Five branches of cyan Mana unfurled backward, embroidering the dark forest with their eerie light.
It was no mere illusion. It was the overwhelming presence of densified, materialized Mana vibrating the air itself as it radiated outward.
This was no simple overlapping Incantation.
On the surface, it might appear to belong to the common class of multi-casting—stringing together a 1st Circle spell five times in succession—but its essence operated on an entirely different principle.
The miraculous source that the branches of Sephirot emanated was rooted thoroughly in the ‘vertical stacking’ of magical formulas.
It was not mere addition, simply listing the same spell multiple times.
Mana interlocking with Mana geometrically, physical laws layering upon one another—an extreme Phase Shift born from their collision.
Therefore, when Haste was stacked five times over, the resulting value did not remain at the level of childish arithmetic where one plus one becomes five.
It was a substitution of the concept itself.
The moment the acceleration spell enhancing the body’s speed breached the critical threshold of stacking, the very physical phenomena surrounding me twisted into grotesque deformity.
Haste ceased to be mere acceleration—an abnormal state that directly contradicted the common sense of magical theory.
Before my Regression, when I stood at the apex of the world as an Archmage of the 9th Circle, I would not have spared a glance at a 1st Circle acceleration spell.
With Teleportation—the superior art that directly warped spatial coordinates to enable movement—there was no reason whatsoever to crudely boost bodily speed and waste muscle.
For a mage projecting overwhelming firepower from the rear, erasing entire battlefields with magic, mobility was nothing but a shallow trick that squandered Mana.
But now the situation was entirely different. My body was not that of an Archmage, but the vessel of Kang Tae-yoon, the Sword Saint.
I had stepped away from the safe ecosystem of precision wizardry, and now stood in the heart of a killing ground where instants were split and sliced.
Bae Hyun-gyeom, the Divine Blade, and Charles Edward Blake. Monsters who dwelt in the pinnacle of martial skill as though it were their own home.
That extreme realm where a single strike was dissected not in seconds but in Frames, fitted with two, three successive cuts.
To force my way into the cruel gaps of that fleeting Instant, I had no choice but to break through the limit of this acceleration right now, even if it meant scraping bone and twisting flesh.
I had to see beyond the threshold that Mana-strengthened muscle could bear.
“Hah…”
White breath scattered between my lips. My breathing had grown ragged without my realizing it. I tightened my lower abdomen and forced down the breath that had risen to my solar plexus.
A five-fold Incantation.
The formula of Haste stacked five times detonated explosively through my bloodstream, spreading to every inch of my body. Every capillary in my entire frame seemed to swell on the verge of rupture.
My heart began to pump like madness, forcing boiling blood up through my brain like a detonator.
The throb that rang in my eardrums struck my ears like the engine roar of some vast warship.
Overload. The price of forcing open my current Mana Core—barely a 2nd Circle—was merciless. A searing pain as if every muscle in my body was screaming and about to rupture flooded through me.
My skin surface flushed red, and the blood vessels in my eyes burst one after another, staining my vision crimson.
I clenched my teeth and moved my body. Just one step. I lifted my foot lightly and planted it forward.
Whoosh—
“……?!”
My vision warped terrifyingly. My body’s trajectory of movement felt like an afterimage to itself—a bizarre sensation.
Or more precisely, my brain’s response to my body’s movement was a full beat too slow.
The visual information from the outside world entering through my optic nerve could not keep pace with my body’s explosive acceleration, and it poured in fitfully, as though cut short.
The world snapped awkwardly, like still frames stitched together.
Boom—!!
The result was devastating. For just one step, my body, having completely lost its sense of distance, spiraled out of control.
I skidded like a beast across the soil dozens of meters ahead, tumbling pathetically until I collided with a solid tree trunk with my shoulder and finally came to a stop.
Caked in mud, I slid across the ground before managing to stop. My scapula throbbed, and droplets of blood oozed from my torn hand.
But my inner reason had already coolly analyzed the cause of failure. There was no panic. If I understood the cause, finding a solution was merely a matter of time.
I brushed the soil from my knees and slowly got to my feet. The taste of iron filled my mouth.
My body’s current state was like forcing ultra-high-resolution graphics into ancient hardware.
Muscle contraction erupted faster than the input command, and my brain’s visual cognition lagged a beat behind. An extreme input lag.
In this fragmented world where Frame drops occurred, I was no different from a blind man.
My body was already thrashing to break the sound barrier, but my brain’s processing speed could not synchronize with that acceleration—I had become nothing but an uncontrollable shell.
With the input of the next action delayed, I could not manage even consecutive cuts, let alone control my own body.
“I understand.”
The answer was clear. I had to forcibly raise my cognition speed to match my body’s acceleration.
And for an Archmage who had spent decades dissecting the principles of Mana, that task was not so difficult. Magic was not merely a tool for releasing power.
It was a law that redefined the world itself.
I reset my stance. I drew a deep breath and honed my scattered concentration into a blade-sharp point. I pressed the force into the tips of my toes, gripping the ground beneath me.
“Haste.”
I cast the five-layered Incantation again. The branches of the Tree of Sephirot at my back erupted in teal light. The air screamed and warped.
Five layers of acceleration stacked upon one another. But this time, I twisted the entire direction of the formula. The target of the spell was not my body itself.
I fixed my gaze straight ahead into empty space. The void stretched before my eyes. I concentrated perfectly on the very phenomenon that dominated atmosphere and gravity.
The inherent authority of a mage. A high-order manipulation ability that forcibly expands the range of a formula to interfere not with mere physical objects, but with ‘phenomena’ themselves.
‘Vision Control.’
A deceptive divine technique that only those who had touched the 9th Circle could mimic.
Instead of accelerating my own body, I projected the stacked Haste onto the very ‘spatial frame’ itself within a set radius around me.
A high-level magical calculation that forcibly compressed and twisted the spacetime density within this narrow domain where I stood.
Whoooooooosh—!!!
“…….”
With an ear-splitting tinnitus, all the white noise around me was sucked perfectly into a vacuum.
The sound of wind, the chirp of insects, even the ragged sound of my own breathing—all gone. My ears felt blocked, and an eerie silence fell as if the world had stopped.
The afterimage of countless swirling dust motes and the trajectory of each falling leaf became sharp and fixed in the void.
The fragmented shards of my scattered vision locked together with precision, like gears meshing. My focus crystallized.
My body’s explosive acceleration and my brain’s visual perception information had synchronized perfectly. Now the world flowed as slowly as the speed at which I moved.
Shluck—
I drew the Dragon-Head Sword from my waist with a heavy ring. A blue Aura shimmered like heat haze across the cool blade.
The particles of Aura spiraled along the sword’s edge, generating a resonant hum.
Of course, manipulating space itself was never easy.
No matter how much knowledge from my past life I drew upon, my current 2nd Circle Core was woefully inadequate. The limits were crystal clear.
The acceleration space I had twisted extended only about thirty centimeters in radius from my body—an extremely confined area.
The moment I stepped even a fraction beyond that range, I would be back at the mercy of reality’s physical laws.
The time constraint was equally fatal. Two seconds at most. Within that fleeting moment’s Frame, I had to complete every movement flawlessly.
After two seconds, the backlash of the compressed spacetime would engulf me.
I fixed my gaze on the massive stone wall ahead. An ancient rock face covered in moss, weathered by centuries. I had to split that enormous mass in one stroke.
‘Go.’
I stomped the ground violently and triggered Dash. My first entry into the compressed space.
I deployed Fast Slash—Kang Tae-yoon’s instinct and the Sword Saint’s signature skill.
Shsssssssh—!
The sound of air tearing reached my ears, but even that seemed slow and dull, like stretched tape.
Within the space, I held an absolute advantage in speed.
‘What is this?’
My eyes widened. The five-layered acceleration space.
When the extreme limit of Fast Slash overlapped with the cracks of this warped spacetime, a bizarre phenomenon unfolded that my mind couldn’t possibly comprehend.
I had clearly completed the trajectory of the first horizontal slash. The blade had already cut through the air and passed through my target point.
And yet my wrist and vision still overflowed with an irrepressible, overwhelming abundance of spare capacity.
Even though the blade’s tip had finished cutting and come to rest, the fleeting instant that bound the space left my perceptual Frame completely empty.
As if I were the only one moving in a world where time had stopped. The next turn.
No—even the turn after that was becoming vividly visible to my eyes like slow motion.
A temporal gap vast enough to control even the inertia after swinging the blade.
‘I can do it.’
A cold smile curved across my lips. The empty fleeting Frame. Into that gap, I forced a vicious calculation.
In that gap of less than 0.1 seconds, I overlaid the next formula.
‘If I layer Heavy Slash here and trigger a single-point detonation……!’
I forcibly twisted the excess Frame.
Before the trajectory of Fast Slash even faded, I violently rotated my wrist to forcibly wedge in the trajectory of Heavy Slash falling vertically this time.
A grotesque rotation that ignored the human skeletal structure. My shoulder muscle screamed, but I ignored it.
An impossible Double Strike executed within a single Strike.
And I didn’t stop there. Toward the impact point where the blade of the second trajectory would land, I drew my Core’s Aura to its absolute limit and detonated it all at once.
A single-point detonation where Heavy Slash merged with Breaker.
A bone-chilling, tearing sound erupted through space.
It wasn’t the sound of metal scraping—it was closer to the sound of the world’s fabric being split by a sharp blade. Visual devastation followed.
The empty space in a thirty-centimeter radius where my blade’s tip had passed was literally warping, cut as if by a black line.
An optical distortion created by the density differential of space. The realization of a physical cutting strike that severed space itself.
As the compressed fleeting Frame released, two overlapping fierce wind cuts formed a fierce cross shape and exploded toward the stone wall ahead.
The lingering light of the deep-blue Aura tore through the dawn darkness and struck the stone face.
BOOM—!!!!!!!!!
An ear-shattering explosion shook the entire mountain. The massive stone wall, weighing tens of tons, split cleanly into an X with a deafening roar.
The surface of the solid granite crumpled like paper and collapsed to the ground in fragments.
The shockwave bent the surrounding trees in all directions, and dust erupted like a massive curtain. The force of that slash far exceeded my expectations.
This was no mere swordsmanship—it was the crystallization of destruction born from the collapse of physical law itself.
Yet I was given no chance to savor that overwhelming exhilaration.
Whoosh—
The stacked duration of Haste space had ended. The grotesquely bound physical laws surged back like a violent wave, seeking their original state—a violent backlash.
The terrible phase shift born from spatial distortion crashed down on my body mercilessly. All the suppressed temporal acceleration poured into my flesh at once.
“Cough—!”
Hot, dark blood erupted from my mouth. My organs twisted and my blood vessels felt on the verge of tearing—a sickening pressure consumed my entire body.
My vision flashed white, flickering. It wasn’t that I’d failed to prepare for the backlash.
I knew that forcing a strike into the gap of a Single Strike by prying it open was a mad act that defied human physiology.
But the extreme temporal discord that arose between space and flesh proved far worse than I’d imagined.
During those two seconds trapped in that warped frame, my body had concentrated hours’ worth of fatigue and received it all at once.
My Core’s durability far exceeded its limits, and Mana began to backflow.
“Hah…”
On my knees, I gasped for breath. My hands trembled so badly I could barely grip the sword’s hilt. The taste of blood filled my mouth, and cold sweat poured down like rain.
But more urgent than that were the tens of tons of rock debris cascading down before my eyes.
The boulders, split in a cross pattern, began to tumble down the mountainside, overcome by gravity.
If left unchecked, the earth of Wild Mountain would collapse into a massive landslide.
“Entangle!”
I frantically pressed my trembling hand to the ground and spoke the Incantation.
Through the gaps in the crumbling rockface, dozens of thick, tough Mana vines burst explosively upward.
The vines tangled like a spider’s web, snatching at each falling boulder.
The cords of Mana pulled taut, holding the massive rocks firmly suspended in midair.
I barely averted the landslide and, catching my breath, wiped the blood from my chin with my sleeve. The muscles in my arms twitched with spasms.
‘I made it back…’
Even through the searing pain in my veins, something cool and exultant was bubbling up from the deepest part of my being.
That strange euphoria only those who’ve brushed the threshold of death can feel.
‘Finally!’
I had crossed the threshold into that same cursed realm of Fleeting Moments that Charles inhabited.
With magic as the key, I’d forced open the door to that “world moving in slow motion” that only monsters had shared.
No—the sensation just now had been undeniable.
Even after chaining Fast Slash and Heavy Slash together, my perception still had room to squeeze in ‘one more turn’ of a Fleeting Moment.
If I could layer a 1st Circle spell into that razor-thin margin of surplus, or force in another Fast Slash—
The long-dreamed Triple Strike.
It wasn’t impossible fantasy. It was a perfectly achievable calculation within the bounds of physics.
So long as my body could withstand that pressure, I could deal three deaths with a single swing.
Of course, the weakness was fatal. To squeeze in this chained strike on an actual battlefield, I’d be forced into point-blank range, skin pressed against skin.
And then there was the worst condition of all: deploying a Haste Circle barely thirty centimeters in radius, and unleashing every slash within that two-second window.
If my enemy retreated slightly or dodged to the side, the technique would cut empty air, and I’d be exposed to defenseless backlash.
Enemies on the battlefield are not scarecrows.
There exists no opponent merciful and patient enough to wait for me to complete this elaborate setup and land the blow.
It was far too precise, too fragile—a technique like a glass blade.
I’d have to find a way. Either expand the Circle’s interference range from thirty centimeters to several meters, cutting off the enemy’s evasion options.
Or else endure endless training through bleeding, raising my Core’s durability and loosening the conditions for five-fold Haste Stacking to drastically cut activation time.
Yet I was glad. Decades of magical research had taught me one bitter truth.
Whether magic or swordplay, the difference between having directly experienced that “realm” beyond theory, even once, and having never touched it—is immeasurable.
Now that I’ve carved that one sensation into my flesh, I need only hone it through bone-grinding practice until someday I can make it my perfect weapon. The path lies open.
Now I simply walk it.
“I’m crazy, I swear.”
A low laugh escaped me. The blood on my lips stiffened in the cold dawn air.
Anew, the figure of Kang Tae-yoon—the Sword Saint who’d walked that path before Regression—loomed vast before me.
I’d only managed to imitate him once, deploying cheap tricks of magical calculation and spatial warping, enduring backlash that threatened to shatter my bones.
Yet that monster had walked in and out of this terrifying Fleeting Moment realm like it was his own home, slaughtering enemies with ease.
An existence who’d laughed at the constraints of spacetime through nothing but pure muscular training and will, with no magical aid. My suppressed awe surged anew.
But alongside it rose my competitive fire—not the pride of a mage, but the will of one who’d begun to walk the way of the sword.
“Exhale.”
I steadied my breathing and withdrew the hand pressing against the ground, rising back to my feet. I had no room to collapse under the guise of pain. In the end, it was training.
Only relentless repetition.
Until my body breaks past its limits and I master the frame of Fleeting Moments perfectly, even if my brain burns out and my muscles tear, I have no choice but to swing the sword steadily on.
I reached toward the hilt of the Dragon-Head Sword planted deep in the ground and gripped it firmly. Now we begin again.
Clink—
“……What?”
A sharp, crystalline metallic fracture sang through his fingertips.
The Dragon-Head Sword—usually so familiar to draw from the earth—felt wrong in his grip. The weight had vanished.
Before he could even exert force, the blade split cleanly in half and crumbled to the ground with a hollow whisper.
The sword edge that had gleamed so luminously in moonlight tumbled across the dirt with pathetic finality. Its fractured surface was ragged and scorched, as though melted by intense heat.
He stared numbly at the broken blade. What remained in his hand was nothing but a worthless hilt and a short fragment of steel.
A cold system window materialized before him.
[Warning: Equipment can no longer be used.]
[Target: SR-Grade ‘Dragon-Head Sword’]
[Reason: Permanent durability damage from Mana overload and physical impact collision exceeding tolerance limits]

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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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