The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 84

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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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84
Episode 84. The Other Side of Joint Combat
***
[Successor. Synchronization with Wyvern Lagus is complete.]
In the center of the Colosseum, where the stench of blood hung in the air, a silver butterfly descended—Airi, her wings trembling as she settled.
At my feet lay the corpse of the wyvern, a mountain of mass piled upon itself.
Dark crimson blood seeped through the torn hide, trailing sluggishly across the ancient stone floor’s uneven surface, soaking into the weathered ground.
I gazed down at the gruesome traces of slaughter without emotion.
“Good. Store it as Lagus.”
[Understood. I have saved it to a slot under the callsign ‘Lagus’.]
Silver motes of magical power burst from the tips of Airi’s wings, wrapping the wyvern’s corpse in a misty embrace. It was not merely recording its form.
Every fiber of muscle, the density of bone, even the instinctive bloodlust this creature had harbored in life—all converted into waves of mana and seeping into a corner of my mana circuit.
Sync.
The power to perfectly replicate the essence of a slain monster and manifest it anew.
The wyvern’s massive frame scattered as if sucked into a vortex of mana, then recoalesced in the air with a single beat of Airi’s wings.
The dead monster’s husk was gone; in its place stood a form of mana more real than reality itself.
“And you—let’s put on a show.”
At my instruction, the silver butterfly hovering in the air froze. The mana particles floating in the atmosphere stilled, creating an eerie silence.
[Successor. By ‘show,’ what do you mean?]
“Play the role of the guardian watching over the Gate.”
I wiped the mucus and blood caked on the blade’s hilt with my sleeve.
Each time the rough cloth dragged across the steel, a cool metallic ring echoed through the quiet Colosseum. My mind, cataloging the situation, had gone cold and clear.
Emotion was stripped away; only the clean calculus of efficiency and outcome crystallized in my thoughts.
Soon the elite of the Red Blood Alliance would pour into this place. They were the kind—stubborn as serpents, cunning as wolves.
Through their informants, they likely already understood the structure of the incubation-type Gate and the guardian’s presence.
What if they entered the Gate’s interior and saw the guardian already dead, foreign hunters holding their ground?
The answer was obvious.
Despite their numerical advantage, they would tuck tail and retreat. They were the type to choose certain withdrawal over an uncertain battlefield.
To lure them here, into this dead zone with no escape route, I had to exploit their certainty.
A living, breathing monster. A guardian that refused intruders, roaring with threatening force.
That would be the perfect bait to disarm their vigilance.
And in that instant when they focused their full strength to kill the guardian and let their guard slip, I would appear from behind, severing the creature’s neck with my own hand. What then?
Unpredicted cognitive dissonance.
The apex predator that moments before threatened their allies would become a corpse in an instant, and beyond it would emerge a human radiating something worse than death.
The fear they’d feel would be a club more devastating to their will than any grand spell.
“Now you understand?”
[Indeed. Excellent, Successor. I have perfectly grasped your tactical intent.]
As Airi spoke, the scattered remnants of mana from the ground rose with a tremendous surge.
The wyvern’s torn wings sprouted anew, hard scales covering the shattered skull.
An illusion of the wyvern, radiating a presence as if it might tear through the ceiling at any moment, coiled in the center of the Colosseum.
Each time it exhaled deeply, dust from the ground scattered in all directions.
“Bae, did you know he could use Summoning Magic?”
Bae Hyun-gyeom approached from behind, brushing dust from his clothes. His gaze swept up and down the crouching wyvern illusion.
His arm muscles still trembled faintly from the combat’s aftermath, and the hilt in his grip was slick with sweat and blood.
“I can do a lot of things.”
“Looks real. Actually, this pressure in the air—it’s too vivid to call fake.”
“It’s real.”
***
Bae Hyun-gyeom asked nothing more. He was the type to trust action over questions, results over doubt.
I appreciated that he didn’t waste time prying into others’ secrets or the sources of their power.
He simply focused on confirming his own position and identifying the enemies to cut.
“Fine, so what do I do?”
Bae Hyun-gyeom rolled up his torn sleeve roughly. His exposed forearm bore the scars of countless battles, worn like medals.
“When the Red Blood Alliance breaches, I’ll pin their attention from the front. When the wyvern’s corpse hits the ground, that’s your signal.
In that window, Kim will manipulate the boundary from outside and seal the exit.”
I gestured with my chin toward the Colosseum’s vast arched entrance. Darkness pooled there, gaping like the mouth of some immense creature.
“You catch anyone who slips into your blind spot. Not a single one leaves this Colosseum.”
“Simple enough. Nothing enters my zone and sees daylight again.”
His answer was brief and weighty. From just a summary of the tactical flow, he’d instinctively found his own role.
Within the shifting variables of the Gate’s interior, elaborate operational briefings are a luxury. Combat intelligence ultimately hinges on the speed of situational awareness.
Bae Hyun-gyeom. The makings of a man who would one day be called the War God were already complete.
Setting aside his usual arrogance, there was no more reliable colleague to trust your back to in battle.
The aura that clung to him had already become like a finely honed blade.
The stage for the hunt was set.
Airi, taking on the form of a Wyvern Lagus, flaunted her presence with a subtle release of Magical Power, while I adjusted my grip on the sword instead of my staff.
I cast Breeze, a first-circle wind spell.
A soft breeze rising from beneath our feet swept across and erased the dizzying footprints and traces of blood we had left behind, burying them under clouds of sand.
Not merely the physical traces—even the faint ripples of Magical Power lingering in the air were naturally assimilated into the Gate’s flow.
“Exhale.”
It was only after I concealed myself behind one of the Colosseum’s massive marble columns, in the deepest shadows, that a brief silence finally descended.
The cold sensation of the stone wall transmitted through my back.
By now, the outside world would be in chaos. This was the moment when City G Mayor Park Gwang-cheol’s press conference to the nation was being broadcast nationwide.
The Red Blood Alliance thugs must be panicking at the discovery of their hideout, and even now hurling themselves toward this Gate with desperate fury, intent on destroying evidence and escaping.
“Kim Do-jin. How’d you end up in a backwater like the Ability Management Team?”
Bae Hyun-gyeom pulled black tactical combat fatigues from his duffel bag and changed into them, asking without inflection. The rustle of fabric broke the silence.
“What?”
“I heard even Invictus made an unconventional offer. You turned down that giant guild’s proposal and chose to be a mere low-level civil servant instead. I’m curious about the reason. Someone with your skill doesn’t belong in a place like that.”
“Invictus? That place is full of lunatics from top to bottom. I’d rather be unemployed than hand over my leash to them.”
At my response, Bae Hyun-gyeom pulled his combat boots’ laces tight and wore a faint, cold smile.
“Fair enough. Those guys are closer to merchants than Hunters anyway. Though I heard things changed a bit after a new vice-commander came in recently.”
“Is that so.”
This bastard was either trying to loosen his tension before the fight, or he was genuinely curious—either way, his words were stretching on.
Under normal circumstances I would have ignored him, but now even I needed to ease the grip of muscles pulled tight with tension.
“Still, Kim Do-jin, there were plenty of other major guilds to choose from… Guardians isn’t so bad, is it?”
“It’s because of the team leader.”
“Kim Dae-han?”
“Yeah. He’s an excellent person, someone who gives me solid support without nitpicking my methods. More than anything, the logic of a guild as a profit-making organization doesn’t suit me.”
There was no lie in it.
Waiting for someone’s orders, tailoring interviews to sponsors’ tastes, pouring energy into factional squabbles within a guild—nothing could be more inefficient.
Rather, using administrative authority as a legitimate shield to move according to my own will was far more effective at purifying this corrupt world.
“So being shackled to a guild’s leash doesn’t suit your nature.”
“That’s part of it.”
I looked up at the Colosseum’s ceiling, shrouded in darkness. Light from the otherworld squeezed through the cracks and scattered in strange trajectories.
“There’s also a certain meaning to watching over people while using complaints as a pretext to get around. At least within my line of sight, I don’t have to witness death.”
Bae Hyun-gyeom’s movements stopped. From the darkness, he stared intently at my face. It was a gaze that suggested either genuine surprise, or a strange sense of kinship.
“And you?”
This time it was my turn. One of the old questions that had sunk deep in my heart since before the Regression.
A man who would one day be called the War God and revered as one of humanity’s saviors.
Why did someone with such overwhelming force have to spend what could be called the golden years of his life as the Management Bureau’s hunting dog?
“With that much skill, what’s the reason you crawl in the shadows of the Management Bureau?”
Bae Hyun-gyeom silently tightened the velcro on his Tactical Gloves.
His gaze was fixed on a single point in the void, but beyond those eyes lay a very deep and dark abyss.
“Kim Do-jin. I lost my family in the Gate Break Incident.”
His tone was flat. Yet in that short sentence lay the full weight of ten years he had been carrying. I remained silent, waiting for his next words.
“My house collapsed right before my eyes. I could only watch from underneath the rubble as my sister, who was shielding me, was torn to death by a Demonic Beast’s claws. Helplessly, without being able to do anything.”
“······.”
“The person who took me in when I was about to be sent to an orphanage and secretly supported me from behind was Director Ryu Gang-jin.”
I nodded quietly. Ryu Gang-jin. A man known to be a real power in the Management Bureau and a cold idealist. I never knew he had this side to him.
“Even before I awakened, when I was just throwing punches in dark alleys full of nothing but rage, the director never gave up on me. Without his support, I would have been dead on the streets long before I ever made a name for myself in MMA.”
For the briefest moment, Bae Hyun-gyeom’s rough eyes held a gentle warmth, before settling into a cool calm once more.
“Director Ryu Gang-jin is more than just my superior. He’s someone like a father—the man who saved my life and made it possible for me to live as a human being.”
“······I see.”
“That’s why I stayed with the Management Bureau. Wherever the director points, even if it’s the bottom of hell itself, I’ll carve a path with my bare fists and go in.”
As Bae Hyun-gyeom finished speaking, he clenched his gloved fist. The dull thud of bone joints colliding echoed through the silence.
“Understood.”
I pulled an Energy Bar from my pocket and tossed it to him. Bae Hyun-gyeom caught it with one hand as if snatching it from the air and tore open the wrapper.
The riddle was solved. Why he was so blindly loyal to the Management Bureau, why he prioritized the organization’s welfare over his own honor.
It was neither some grand cause nor political ambition.
It was the debt he owed to his benefactor, and the deeply primal human emotion of trying to fill the void left by the loss of someone precious.
There is no Hunter in this world who has not been wounded by their entanglement with Gates. But what seized my consciousness relentlessly in his story was a different word altogether.
‘……Father.’
That ordinary word spilled from Bae Hyun-gyeom’s lips shattered something inside me—dredging up memories I’d rather leave buried.
My father, a 1st Generation Hunter. That era of chaos when the Mana signatures of unexplored Gates had consumed the world in darkness.
The sight of his back disappearing into the colossal portal, promising to protect Mother and us—I’d dismissed it as just another missing person case, one more failed return among countless others.
But days ago, in the Hunter Association’s medical ward after extracting Lee Do-hyun, I glimpsed the seam in that truth, and everything began to unravel.
Incubation-type Gates, artificially constructed by human hands. And the horrifying reality of the Gate Cult—that fanatic congregation which had abducted 1st Generation heroes, brainwashed them like beasts, and bent them to their will.
‘Even one in a million chance…’
I forced down the suffocating hypothesis. What if my father, too, wasn’t dead but imprisoned somewhere in the darkness?
As that spiral of thought threatened to consume me, a chill knifed through my chest. I clamped down on my quickening heartbeat with sheer will.
This wasn’t the time to be governed by private emotion. I had to cool my reason to its absolute limit.
The hunt before me was a battlefield that would not forgive a single misstep.
Click—
Kim Dae-han’s voice crackled through the tiny earset in my right ear, riding a whisper of static.
[Hunter, can you hear me? The Red Blood Alliance’s vanguard has closed to within 500 meters of the Gate entrance.]
His tone was low and measured, yet threaded through it was the tension of a gathering storm.
[They’re following the projected route exactly as expected.]
[No vehicles. We’re counting approximately fifty personnel.]
[Time to entry: three minutes.]
The timing was flawless. I welcomed this report.
To purge the sickening, churning memories that clouded my mind, there was no better anesthetic than the raw brutality of bloodshed.
“Kim Do-jin, looks like our guests have finally arrived.”
Bae Hyun-gyeom crumpled the energy bar wrapper and rose to his feet. The killing intent that radiated from him turned the air crystalline with cold.
“Yeah.”
Shhhhk—
I drew the dark iron blade from its sheath with agonizing slowness. The smooth metal’s friction sang against the Colosseum’s stone, echoing strangely through the space.
“Ready yourself, hunting hound. The hunt begins now.”
I read the flow of air, layering a thin thread of Detect magic to sense the tremors drifting from the entrance.
Multiple footsteps carried through the ground—urgent, charged with murderous intent—drawing inexorably closer.
The moment they passed beneath this arch, hell would be unleashed.

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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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