The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 76

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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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76
Episode 76. The Butterfly Effect and the Ghost Sword
***
An ungainly metallic sound fell to the dirt beneath my feet. Two broken pieces of steel tumbled dully, clinging to the morning dew.
I lowered my gaze and stared quietly at the cross-section of the fractured blade.
SR-rank Dragon-Head Sword.
Shortly after my return, I’d claimed it as spoils after striking down the hidden boss monster of Donggureung—a blade of considerable renown.
It had silently endured my abnormal Mana Output all this time, a weapon I’d come to trust.
Yet no matter how expertly a master craftsman had tempered the steel, it was nothing more than crude glass shards before a pressure that violently twisted the laws of physics.
I’d stacked Haste five times over. Forcibly compressed the spatial frames, and crammed Charles Edward Blake’s Fast Slash and Strong Slash simultaneously into that fractional gap.
A destructive Mana acceleration that existed only in theory.
The result was a devastatingly successful strike.
Where the slash swept through, an enormous cliff face split like tofu, triggering a massive rockslide.
A deafening roar struck my eardrums, and the acrid scent of ozone trembled through the air.
But the blade of the Dragon-Head Sword, unable to withstand the reaction force of that overwhelming destruction, had its Mana coating torn away like tissue paper before crumbling into nothing.
An unpleasant vibration from the blade’s breaking lingered still in my palm.
The knuckles of my fingers had gone white, and my forearms twitched faintly from the strain of the reckless maneuver.
“This is bad.”
A dry sigh cut through the cold morning air.
I’d become too absorbed in my training.
With a new level of mastery within reach and adrenaline exploding through my veins, the rational part of my mind that should have calculated the durability limits of my weapon had momentarily shut down. This was the price.
If I was going to uproot the Red Blood Alliance’s network of shadow organizations starting tonight, I needed a reliable weapon in hand.
A flimsy tool like a tactical dagger had clear limitations when facing multiple Awakened Ones and deploying wide-area techniques.
I pulled out my smartphone from my pocket. I scrolled through the Ability Management Bureau’s contacts and fixed my gaze quietly on the name Chu Jae-hee.
She could source any weapon specifications I needed, even at this very moment. But I darkened the screen instead.
Chu Jae-hee is currently dismantling an SSR-rank Cursed Artifact excavated from a royal tomb, her life hanging in the balance.
A state of extreme concentration where a single misstep in the Mana circuit threads could corrupt her soul and lead to death.
It wouldn’t be right to whine to such a craftsman about needing a club to swing around in haste.
“That’s not something I can do.”
Instead, I logged into the trading board of the Hunters Web, the dark network of Awakened Ones.
As I descended the mountain path, I scanned the flood of weapon listings scrolling across the screen with an indifferent eye.
“Hopeless.”
Ten years ago—at this early point in my return where I now stood—the Hunters Web was literally the age of barbarism.
Systems like the Item Authentication Protection System or the Mana Wave Verification System that the Association would later implement didn’t exist.
Nine-tenths of the listings were either fraudulent items with doctored photographs, or worthless junk with internally decayed Mana circuits.
A longsword supposedly forged from B-rank Beast bone was just verbose description hiding shoddy alloy composition, and a shield claimed to have ancient runes engraved on it was a counterfeit that would crumble to dust the moment you channeled Mana into it.
I now viscerally understood why veteran Hunters of this era avoided online transactions.
To find a usable weapon, the only option was to go out in person and search the clandestine offline markets.
I turned off the screen and shoved it into my pocket. Recalling the map in my head, one weathered and dust-covered sign came to mind.
“That’s faster.”
***
Just before noon.
My SUV came to a stop in the quiet old downtown area near Donggureung on the outskirts of G City. I rolled down the window and the calm, dry air of late spring rushed against my nostrils.
Elderly people with shopping baskets walked slowly between dilapidated storefronts along the roadside, and in the distance, from a nearby elementary school’s athletic field, children’s high-pitched shouts echoed faintly as they kicked a ball.
I held the steering wheel and quietly took in the peaceful scene before me.
Donggureung.
The site of an Incubation-Type Gate where, shortly after my return, I threw myself in barehanded and subjugated tens of thousands of skeletons and a boss.
Had I not traveled back ten years and swept through this place that night, the mundane landscape now spread before my eyes would have long since become ashes.
In the original timeline, the skeleton army trapped within the Gate, bloated to horrific proportions, broke containment the following spring, tore through Donggureung’s barrier, and poured into this peaceful residential district.
Tens of thousands of civilians were slaughtered, and my mother and older sister were lost beneath the collapsed ruins—unable even to scream.
And Kim Dae-han would have died heroically here while evacuating residents.
One thought piled upon another, sinking into the abyss.
The cold rationality that had pursued only logic for decades, sizing up the world, now substituted the peaceful variables before my eyes into its calculus.
Extrapolating the butterfly effect of causality was not difficult.
Had Team Lead Kim Dae-han died at Donggureung as in the previous world, the Ability Management Team would have lost its center of gravity and fallen apart.
Se-hui, whom he’d taken under his wing, would have wandered lost and drifted through the back alleys of G City—and at some dark end, perhaps the fatal temptation of Booster, the drug that melts the brain, would have awaited her.
And what of Hong Tae-hwa?
That boy who habitually disobeyed orders yet secretly looked to Kim Dae-han as his mentor.
Had the one gloomy fence that alone restrained him vanished, his destructive nature would have gone awry far earlier.
In the incident just days ago when thugs broke into his dilapidated apartment and threatened his blind grandfather, had I not been there, that boy would have lost his reason, reduced the perpetrators to ash, and been branded an irreversible criminal.
Was Airi right?
“No, that’s just a pleasant assumption.”
I cut through the thought cleanly and swallowed a short, cold laugh. I wasn’t so soft as to indulge in cheap heroics while dwelling on horrors that never came to pass.
I simply cleared away the troublesome stones in my path to sever the neck of the evil dragon that would burn the world. Nothing more.
That someone’s life was saved was merely a byproduct derived in the process—or luck within the margin of error.
As I gazed blankly past the car window, a familiar sign nestled in one corner of a back road caught my eye.
[Hunter Shop – Donggureung Branch]
A shabby, crude sign with rusted letters half-fallen away.
Right after the regression, I’d swept up crude weapons with the pocket change I had—in that very worn-out store.
I flicked on the turn signal and parked the SUV in the empty lot in front of the dusty shop. When I killed the engine, the mechanical roar faded and an unpleasant silence settled in.
Ding—
As I pushed open the heavy glass door, a rusted bell above it gave a dull scraping sound.
The stale air—a mixture of old leather, dust, and the sour chemical smell of cheap mana potions—hit me all at once.
The interior of the shop, visited again after several months, was in exactly the same mess as my first visit.
Potion boxes scattered across the floor in disarray, low-grade artifacts thick with dust sitting on display shelves.
“Welcome~”
A lazy, drawn-out voice came from behind the counter.
Even though a customer had entered, the shop owner remained half-slouched in his chair, not even lifting his head.
He rattled off the greeting carelessly, thick glasses balanced on the tip of his nose, eyes fixed on his smartphone screen.
That attitude—uncertain whether he was actually running a business or not—drew a thin smile from me. He was exactly as I’d seen him months before.
But to my eyes, the owner’s outward appearance was far from that of a lazy man.
The forearms exposed beneath his short-sleeved shirt bore the thick, dense musculature of someone who’d handled heavy metal his whole life.
The grain of his muscles was tightly woven, like layered-hammered steel.
I shifted my gaze to the worn display case beside the counter. In one corner, dusted over, I saw glass bottles containing a dark reddish liquid.
‘Mana Backflow Suppression Potion.’
Days ago, I’d forced it down Lee Do-hyun’s throat in the Hunter Association’s medical room while his core was burning out of control.
After the regression, when I’d first visited this place, I’d bought a few bottles on the chance I’d need them in an emergency.
At the time, I’d held little hope for the quality of potions sold in such a backwater shop—but I’ll admit, I was genuinely surprised by the efficacy with which it suppressed Do-hyun’s runaway core in a single stroke.
The bizarrely superior quality of goods stood in stark contrast to the shabby interior.
I passed by the counter and made my way to the deepest corner of the shop, where all manner of weapons were haphazardly wedged in place.
‘Much like last time.’
Beneath the pale incandescent light hanging from the ceiling, dozens of blades revealed themselves.
Weapons sold in a hunter shop out on the outskirts like this were typically “standard-issue” equipment that freshly awakened novices or low-tier mercenaries would use for a few days then discard.
The inventory hadn’t changed much from my first visit here months ago.
There were no expensive weapons decorated with elaborate engravings or complex mana circuits. Just modest objects smelted crudely from a mixture of steel and otherworldly ore.
But that was exactly why I’d returned to this shabby shop today.
I didn’t need a legendary blade.
Facing the space distortion wrought by my hyperexpanded Two-Circle Aura and Five-Stage Haste, even a decent SR-rank piece of metal would crumble and shatter within days.
What I needed right now wasn’t a sharp legendary sword, but a “fundamentally sound steel club” that would patiently withstand the brute force of mana overload.
In other words, a makeshift weapon to rough it through until I could acquire high-grade equipment worth keeping.
The rank would probably hover at the lower end of Normal or Rare, but if the frame was solid, I could simply layer my Aura Output to compensate for what it lacked in power.
Shink—
I drew out one of the heavy longswords wedged in its stand.
Back when I first stepped into this shop, I’d had to appraise weapons by enveloping my fingertips in a gossamer-thin layer of Aura and carefully tracing the blade’s grain to discern its durability and mana conductivity.
A shallow method of measurement, but one I’d had to rely on as a mage with no experience wielding blades.
Now, however, there was no need for such cumbersome magical appraisal.
Whoosh—whoosh—
Using only a wrist snap, I swung the heavy longsword lightly through the air a couple of times.
The sharp crack of the blade cutting wind, the vibration traveling through the hilt and into my palm—transmitted along my nerves to my brain.
For months, every dawn in the foothills, I’d clashed blades with Charles Edward Blake.
Over a hundred thousand strikes—enduring the agony of bones creaking and muscles tearing.
That brutal, relentless training had perfectly synchronized the physical intuition of swordsmanship with decades of honed mana insight.
Now I needed only to pick up a weapon and rotate it lightly once to know.
I could see through to the bone the blade’s center of gravity, the steel’s density, and exactly how far my Aura Output could push it.
“This would snap before I even applied force.”
I clicked my tongue and tossed the blade back into its stand.
Then I drew out the slightly cruder-looking black iron longsword beside it and continued my inspection.
The blade was thick and crude, but that very bluntness appealed to me.
About ten minutes had passed.
As I turned through the weapons one by one, swinging them lightly in arcs through the air, a thick, stale smell of cigarette smoke suddenly wafted toward me.
“You know how to read a blade.”
The shop owner had slipped out from behind the counter at some point and now stood beside me, his weathered apron cinched between his hands.
Those eyes that had been listlessly fixed on his smartphone moments before were gone without a trace.
Instead, they gleamed with sharp interest and the keen curiosity peculiar to a craftsman as he watched the minute arc of my wrist rotating to check the weapon’s center of gravity.
He clearly didn’t remember me from a few months back, fumbling clumsily through his inventory.
I flicked the flat of the crude black iron longsword in my grip with my finger and answered evenly. A clear, ringing metallic note sang out.
“Yes, the foundational craftsmanship that forms a blade’s backbone is truly excellent. The durability alone is held with impressive solidity. I can see the marks of careful tempering work.”
My dry praise made the shop owner’s mouth twitch, and then a hearty laugh burst forth.
“Ha! That’s right, you’ve got it. Our shop doesn’t stock trash toys just polished for show. We deal only in real hunks of metal meant to keep you alive on the battlefield.
And most of those stuck over there have been through my hands directly.”
“Through your hands?”
I narrowed my brow and asked again, and the owner crossed his arms, showing off his thick forearms.
“Yeah, weapons that came back from gates all over, chipped and broken. I take them in the back, re-temper them, and work them over myself.
Kids these days only chase after flashy grades, but real weapons demand that you see the obstinacy of the steel forged within them.”
He gestured toward the black iron longsword I held with his chin.
“That one you’re holding right now—I actually forged it from scratch, pouring raw steel from the start. It’s only Rare grade on paper, but durability-wise it’ll outperform most SR-rank weapons.”
Forged it himself.
Only then did the question mark in my mind transform into a definite period.
The reason the potions sold at this worn hunter shop in a remote neighborhood had abnormally superior efficacy, and why even Normal-grade weapons boasted such relentlessly solid durability.
“Could it be…”
I slotted the longsword back into its stand and met his gaze directly.
“Are you a Blacksmith?”
A creator who refines ores from the Other World and channels mana’s circuits into metal. A rare crafting-class Awakening that manifests at odds far more brutal than those of combat hunters.
At my direct hit, the man stalled for a moment, then broke into another hearty laugh.
But beneath the tail end of that laughter lay something deeply worn—a bittersweet emotion steeped in regret.
“Heh. Once upon a time, once upon a time. That’s a tale from when my blood still burned hot. Now I’m just a retired neighborhood hardware shop guy tinkering with his hammer. I can’t remember the last time I met someone with an eye as sharp as yours.”
“With that level of skill, you must have belonged to somewhere quite prominent. Which organization were you affiliated with?”
At my matter-of-fact question, the man fell silent.
He drew deeply on the cigarette between his lips, exhaled a plume of smoke, and without a word rolled up the right sleeve of his short-sleeved shirt past his shoulder.
“It’s a bit embarrassing, but what can you do.”
Across his thick, bronze-hued triceps sprawled a massive tattoo in vivid red and black ink, intersecting with stark clarity.
A grotesque red demon with a fierce blue blade clenched between its teeth.
Its eyes seemed to smolder with the glow of blood-light, and beneath the bizarre pattern, four characters in crude, archaic script lay carved deep.
‘······.’
The moment I confirmed that tattoo, my thoughts froze entirely.
A guild mark bearing an absolute weight that no hunter dealing with Other World weapons could ignore—no one with any seasoning in this world could fail to recognize it.
“······The Ghost Sword Iron Guild?”
At that weighty name that slipped between my lips, the shop owner lowered his sleeve again with a bitter smile.
Behind my sunglasses, I desperately suppressed pupils dilating wildly.
A fragment of that legend was now standing right here, behind the counter of this shabby, backwater shop, tinkering with his smartphone.

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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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