The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 81

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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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81
Chapter 81. Fear of the Unknown
***
Plink. Tick-tick.
Dark red droplets of blood fell through the heavy, ash-gray air that hung over the Colosseum.
Swoosh—
The man gripping the massive Black Iron Greatsword at an angle flicked his wrist with casual precision, scattering the daemon’s blood from the blade across the floor.
A movement stripped bare of all emotion—mechanical, utterly mundane.
Yet that single routine motion caused the breath of fifty-six elite members of the Hongxuemeng’s Red Moon assault squad, lying in ambush at the Colosseum’s entrance, to catch sharply in their throats.
[Lü Ting-long.]
The trembling voice of Se Yung-hui, the field commander, crackled through the comm.
On the other end of the screen, Lü Ting-long—an executive of equal rank—sat deep in a sofa at the distant Container Fortress, and his rational composure had frozen solid.
Every premise that had underpinned the operation from start to finish had shattered.
The Gate Cult’s monster client had been cleaved in two with a single stroke, and the hunting ground they were meant to seize had already been perfectly occupied and held by an unknown Hunter.
In moments like these, hasty emotion becomes poison.
Lü Ting-long awakened the survival instinct forged in the Gates, crossing the line of death. When an incomprehensible variable emerged, one had to focus ruthlessly on the physical phenomena before one’s eyes alone.
“What about our exit.”
Lü Ting-long gnawed on the cigar between his lips and spoke quietly.
[Commander, Commander!]
Instead of Se Yung-hui’s answer, the frantic, torn scream of a Barrier user from the rear of the formation tore through the comm.
[A massive reverse Barrier has been erected from outside, covering the Gate entrance.]
[They’ve locked us down!]
“What are you—”
[The Barrier’s strength is at least A-rank or higher!]
[Even at full power, forcibly dismantling it would take me at least three hours… no, four hours or more!]
At that report, Lü Ting-long’s brow twisted into an ugly scowl.
[Lü Ting-long. We’ve been perfectly set up.]
Se Yung-hui’s voice, standing at the vanguard, was thick with bewilderment.
[Our rear is sealed, and that madman’s blocking the path ahead. What do we do?]
A suffocating pressure.
Yet Lü Ting-long quickly exhaled cold breath and cleared his head. Through the vision transmitted from his Familiar to the screen, he scanned the Colosseum’s perimeter once more, inch by inch.
“Don’t panic. There is only one enemy.”
The Hongxuemeng assault squad currently arrayed at the Colosseum entrance numbered fifty-six. Among them was Se Yung-hui, a veteran capable of matching A-rank power.
According to real-time verification through the hacked database provided by Management Bureau agent Jung Chan-hyun, no S-rank Hunter capable of independently reversing a battlefield of this scale currently existed within South Korea’s borders.
No matter how strong the man wielding that Black Iron was, it was physically impossible for him to rampage through more than fifty elite killers in an isolated space alone.
Moreover, the comm channel was open. The unknown enemy was concerning, but with him monitoring the situation from behind the screen and feeding real-time tactical feedback, it was a chessboard entirely within their control.
The formation included expendable junior operatives whose combat data could be extracted, and he had no qualms about sacrificing them.
The advantage still belonged to them.
The moment Lü Ting-long moved to press the microphone switch, having reached that judgment—
“What are you doing.”
A man’s voice, so dry and cold it could tear the speaker, struck Lü Ting-long’s ear.
The Man in Black Suit, staring directly into the Familiar’s lens—the camera eye—delivered his taunt across the screen with a low, level tone.
“If you don’t come in.”
The man tightened his grip on his hanging blade.
“I’m coming out.”
***
“Se Yung-hui, and Red Moon.”
At the man’s provocation, Lü Ting-long’s rational control fractured—minutely, but visibly. He reflexively bellowed into the microphone.
“Tear that bastard to shreds. Now.”
A raw command, furious and uncontrolled—entirely unlike the Lü Ting-long who had made self-preservation his creed. Even he registered his own tongue clicking, but within this tense, suffocating standoff of killing intent, retreat had never been an option to begin with.
He could only hope the man’s composure was a cheap bluff.
The moment the order fell, the fifty-six Hongxuemeng operatives arrayed at the Gate entrance scattered like beasts, dispersing in formation.
Assassins and vanguard-class Hunters closed in from all sides with savage momentum, converging the encirclement to annihilate a single foe.
It was the instant they drew their weapons and unleashed their killing intent.
Paaaaaash—
Toward the dark sky of the Colosseum, a blinding silver light erupted explosively, as if the sun itself had fallen.
“Gaaaaaah!”
“Damn it, my eyes—!”
The Hongxuemeng operatives surging forward all shrieked in unison, clutching their eyes against the searing radiance that scorched their vision white.
The last image burned onto their blinded retinas was the sudden, towering form of a colossal Silver Golem, several meters tall, materializing in the void above them.
And the instant the Flash consumed the air.
Screeeech—!!
Blood fountained upward, flesh tore away, and only the cold screech of rending matter filled the pitch-black void where sight had been stolen, relentlessly, without pause.
“Hold the formation! Track by Mana wavelength!!”
Se Yung-hui, the first to recover his wits despite his blindness, hurled a thunderous command into the darkness.
A veteran’s bark—precise, exact.
The mercenaries who grasped his meaning in an instant drew Mana from their core and sensed the ripples around them; by a hair’s breadth, they deflected the lethal arcs hurtling toward them or rolled across the ground and lived.
But the green Awakened Ones, their real-world experience still meager, were another story.
They thrashed their weapons at empty air in terror they could not see, and when the Silver Golem’s heavy steel fists came down without mercy, they crashed helplessly to the ground.
Those lucky enough to evade the Golem’s blows found themselves bearing the mark of the Black Iron Greatsword—a swordsman of unknown identity had slipped through the blind spots in utter silence, and the blade punched deep into their napes.
Massacre.
It was not a battle but a perfect slaughter—a pen of blind sheep with a starving wolf unleashed among them.
***
Whiiiine—
The Flash that had burned the retinas faded gradually, and the piercing tinnitus in the ears began to subside.
Across the dirt floor of the Colosseum lay the bodies of more than a dozen Hongxuemeng members, pooling blood where they had fallen.
“Haaa······ hah······.”
Se Yung-hui, his vision just returning, swept his gaze across the arena between ragged breaths.
The enormous Silver Golem that had raged so loudly had vanished without a trace, as if it had never appeared at all.
Se Yung-hui’s hand shot to his communicator.
“Lü Ting-long! Answer me, Lü Ting-long!”
Crackle—
Screeeech—
Nothing but static clawed at his eardrums. The headset linked to the outside had gone completely dead, likely caught in the aftershock of the overwhelming Mana wavelength.
“Damn it!”
Se Yung-hui’s tongue clicked against his teeth as he turned his head.
“What happened to the scouts? Where are the scouts?!”
“······The casters who were lying in ambush on the perimeter—they took the first hit when the Flash detonated. All of them were incinerated, sir.”
At his adjutant’s report, Se Yung-hui’s jaw tightened.
The rear Barrier was breached. Communications with command were severed. Even the radar network—their only window on the field—was utterly destroyed.
A rat in a jar. Here in this sprawling Colosseum, Hongxuemeng was completely isolated.
“Damn it.”
Yet Se Yung-hui was no panicked amateur losing strength in his legs. He too was an A-rank veteran—a mercenary who had walked through war zones across the globe and lived.
“Everyone, to the center! Back-to-back, now!”
At his command, some forty surviving members rushed to the center and locked into a circular defensive formation.
Numerically, they still held the advantage.
The enemy had employed textbook guerrilla tactics—disrupting sight, striking the scouts first. This very fact paradoxically proved the enemy’s numbers were laughably insufficient for a head-on assault.
‘And that white Golem…’
Se Yung-hui’s mind raced through the bizarre sequence he’d just witnessed.
A massive concentration of Mana that had erupted from nowhere. And the moment the Flash receded, it dissolved like smoke—mobility that defied explanation.
The conclusion was unmistakable.
That man in the black suit was undoubtedly a Summoner class, wielding a powerful Demon Beast.
The blood smeared casually on his Black Iron Greatsword when he first appeared had been a high-level bluff—a disguise to pose as a swordsman while protecting his true form.
Se Yung-hui drew two sharp Tactical Daggers from his belt and gripped them firmly in reverse grip.
A Summoner must necessarily face casting delay. If they closed to melee distance, flesh against flesh, that lag would be their advantage—pure combat logic.
“Don’t trust your eyes. Ignore afterimages and summons. Hunt only the one thing your instinct can follow—the Mana wavelength pouring from his body!”
A cruel smile of certainty spread across Se Yung-hui’s lips.
“Take him by the throat!”
The moment his cry fell silent.
“Hehehehe—!!”
A bizarre, grating laughter rang out, circling the Colosseum’s arena and raising the hair on their necks.
“······What? Goblins, suddenly?!”
Horror burst from the attack team as they braced their formation.
Hundreds of Goblins—from where they’d been hiding, none could say—cascaded down like a waterfall from the curved stands of the Colosseum. Monsters from another world, their eyes burning red, crude rusted blades and spears clutched in their claws.
And at the center rear of this horde stood a towering Goblin Shaman, Skull Staff in hand, chanting in a grotesque voice as it endlessly shaped fresh Goblins from the earth itself.
“This insane—how many is he summoning?!”
Se Yung-hui’s teeth ground as he watched the crimson blades surge toward him. The physical sensation of things piercing through his guard. Not illusion—the reality of death itself.
“Don’t let the formation break! They’re just low-rank Goblins! Cut down what comes through!”
Se Yung-hui slashed a Goblin’s neck with his dagger as he shouted, moving past it.
As he’d said, the Goblins themselves held little combat prowess. Each time the Red Moon’s Awakened Ones swung their Aura-wrapped weapons, seven or eight Goblins crumbled to ash and scattered.
But there were simply too many of them.
No matter how many he killed, an endless legion poured forth from the tip of the Shaman’s staff.
His subordinates were completely pinned down. If this dragged into a war of attrition, it would be his side that ran dry first—stamina and Mana both.
“Find the Shaman! I’ll deal with the caster myself!”
Swoosh—
Swoosh—
Se Yung-hui burst through the defensive formation, unleashing an explosive Aura Step.
He whirled the pair of Tactical Daggers in both hands, cutting down the Goblins that blocked his path, and drove forward like an arrow toward the center of the Colosseum where the Shaman lay.
If he could find the Summoner’s true body and sever its lifeline, all these vile summoned creatures would collapse at once.
‘Where is the rat-bastard······!’
Se Yung-hui’s pupils spun like a madman’s, tracking the faint Mana Wavelength of Black Iron that pulsed through the chaos of battle.
That was when it happened.
Above the Colosseum’s murky ash-gray sky, a massive shadow—black as pitch, blotting out the sun—dropped down with a dull thud.
“······What?”
Se Yung-hui’s instincts shrieked a desperate warning.
“Overhead!”
He was scrambling to cross his daggers in defense when—
Crack—!
“Cough—gagh—!!”
A blunt kick, heavy with falling momentum and thick with Aura, struck Se Yung-hui square in the solar plexus.
With the dull crack of breaking ribs, his body flew backward a dozen meters. He skidded across the dirt, coughing up a mouthful of blood-dark phlegm.
“Hack, cough······!”
Pain as though his organs were tearing. His vision flashed red, focus blurring.
‘The, the Summoner······ struck like that······?’
Se Yung-hui braced himself against the ground with trembling arms, forcing his body upright. It made no sense—no sense at all. How could a Summoner hiding in the rear, channeling Magic Power, pierce a front-line Hunter’s sternum with a single blow?
Through his blurred vision, a figure in black Hunter gear was slowly materializing through the billowing dust.
The man stood about ten meters away, utterly still.
In his right hand, he held an enormous Black Iron Greatsword, its edge brimming with cold Aura, angled at a slant toward Se Yung-hui’s throat.
‘······From that distance?’
Se Yung-hui’s mind turned to ice.
The gap between them was easily ten meters. Even if the man unleashed Blade Energy, there was more than enough range to see the trajectory and evade.
‘That’s impossible.’
The man’s sword stroke descended lightly from above, top to bottom.
He saw it with his eyes. He clearly witnessed it.
“······Huh?”
Se Yung-hui understood then.
By the moment his eyes registered the slash, a flash of blade was already driving down through the crown of his head.
A True Slash that transcended the speed of perception.
The instant when thought could no longer follow reality—when unknown terror reached its completion.

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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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