The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 86

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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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86
Chapter 86. The Demon’s Gift
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Before the Regression, I witnessed that horrific Explosion Magic render its carnage so many times the sight had burned itself into my very bones.
In the severed limbs of new recruits sent to the front with nothing but blind faith.
In the charred smell of colleagues screaming beside me, their bodies erupting into handfuls of ash.
And in the inferno of destruction closing in from all sides to claim both Kang Tae-yoon and me—I carved its pattern into my skeleton. Every twist of his muscle, every density at which he condensed Mana from the air, every detonation mechanism that triggered the chain reaction.
Every step of the process, every calculated result—I now unpacked far more clearly than Hong Tae-hwa himself, drunk on newfound power and intoxicated by excitement.
To me, his magic was no longer a refined spell, but a worn-out machine I had dismantled thousands of times before.
His technique was no refined art—it was a decrepit mechanism, stripped bare.
“Guh, black—— Hgh, hack!”
Bestial whimpers leaked from the collapsed rubble.
At least three or four ribs had shattered under the impact. By any normal standard, a Hunter should have lost consciousness from organ rupture.
Yet Hong Tae-hwa spat blood mixed with foam from his lips, trembling arms bracing himself against the ground as his upper body twisted upright with difficulty.
For a Rogue Class—systemically vulnerable on defense—he possessed a deformed, stubborn durability.
Was it the pharmaceutical Booster’s influence? Or the fundamental demonic nature this creature possessed?
‘Something’s wrong about this.’
The concentration of Life Force was thick. At death’s threshold, his Mana flow only grew more refined.
Slick.
The moment my feet touched ground, I adjusted my grip on the Black Iron Longsword’s hilt. The recoil from Dash rippled through my ankles and radiated across my whole body.
I had no use for a sharp blade’s arc.
This heavy slab of metal, its edge dulled, was—paradoxically—balanced perfectly to function as a bludgeon, driving mass and force to crush an opponent beneath its weight.
I swung the flat of the Black Iron blade with full force toward Hong Tae-hwa’s exposed chest as he rose to his knees.
‘Breaker.’
Simultaneously, I detonated the Aura I’d condensed along the blade in a single point.
“Kraaaaagh!!”
The blade tore through the air with a thunderous boom, and Hong Tae-hwa’s body flew skyward once more.
His body, now utterly without control, bounced six times across the rough earth like a punctured ball.
After rolling for what seemed an eternity, he finally came to rest, buried in a dust crater.
“Get up.”
I spoke flatly toward the limp figure sprawled in the dirt.
I knew he hadn’t lost consciousness.
I had given him bone-shattering agony, yes—but before the strike landed, I had precisely dampened the Aura’s output to prevent fatal organ rupture or immediate death.
I wanted him to feel every second of this pain.
“Get up. Murderer.”
Hong Tae-hwa’s fingers, still motionless, trembled faintly. His nails scraped into the dirt, clawing at the black earth.
“—— and—— .”
He slowly lifted his head, bracing himself against the ground.
With his sleeve, he roughly wiped away the thick blood caked around his mouth and jaw.
In his eyes burned a ravenous, bestial malice that had utterly consumed fear. Reason had long since hidden behind the madness of his Magical Power.
“What?”
I asked again. Hong Tae-hwa forced his wobbly legs to obey, rising to his feet. His knees buckled as though they might give way, but he willed himself upright.
“I didn’t! I haven’t—— I haven’t killed anyone!”
His enraged shriek split the heavy air.
A final, pitiful denial—that he had never taken a life, that he was not the aggressor.
It was not born from guilt, but from cowardice—a desperate grip on the thin thread that said he still belonged to the category of ‘ordinary human,’ nothing more.
I held the Black Iron slightly angled downward, meeting his bloodshot eyes with an unwavering stare.
“And you’re not planning to?”
At my question, Hong Tae-hwa’s face twisted grotesquely. The muscle below his eyes twitched in convulsions.
“You bastard—— what do you know!!”
Hong Tae-hwa dropped to all fours like a beast. Mana churned around him, and the air began to thin.
Bang—!
A strange detonation erupted. He did not leap ordinarily.
He instantaneously detonated the air beneath both feet, using the explosion’s recoil as thrust to launch himself like a cannon round, flying in a straight line directly at me.
It was a trajectory of perfect savagery—one that human joints and physics could never produce.
Closing the distance in a blink, he hurled two Daggers from his grip toward me in a brutal throw.
Whoosh—!
I twisted my head at an angle and pivoted my shoulder, letting the flying blades pass lightly over me.
The edges missed my skin and sliced through empty air. A crude attack. But this was merely a smokescreen—a distraction, a veil to obscure my vision.
The real blade was coming from elsewhere.
Using the recoil from the dagger throw, Hong Tae-hwa twisted his body in mid-air and drove his upper frame down directly above my head, his right fist clenched tight.
Crash—!!
He detonated the Mana in the void once more. The colossal blast pressure was completely driven into the striking point of his fist and released downward.
It was no mere physical blow. It was the vicious core of an explosion that would set the interior of the skull boiling and incinerate the brain matter the moment it made contact.
‘Wind. Slash.’
I smoothly pushed the cold Magical Power dwelling in my Core up onto the Black Iron Longsword’s blade.
I layered it with the intense repulsive force summoned by wind-aspected Mana, combined with the ultimate cutting stroke that severed space itself in a single instant.
The blade shot upward diagonally through the empty air, sharp and brilliant.
Shriek—!!!
Before the heat of the explosion even reached my forehead, the colossal Slash wreathed in fierce wind pressure tore apart the blast pressure that enveloped Hong Tae-hwa’s fist in one breath.
It was not a speed that could be reacted to or evaded by thought.
Before the man could even twist his stance in mid-air, his body swept up in the Slash was hurled mercilessly dozens of meters away, tumbling like a leaf caught in a typhoon.
“Cough! Ugh, ahhh······.”
His form, rolling across the ground and spilling blood, was wretched.
His clothes were shredded to pieces, and across the exposed skin were burns from the blast pressure and clear traces of the cutting stroke.
Yet the corners of Hong Tae-hwa’s mouth, in my line of sight, were twisted into a grotesque grin even amid the pain.
‘That wasn’t what he was aiming for.’
Instinct sent a chill of warning through me.
Crash—!!!
In that instant, the entire ground beneath my feet erupted like a massive volcano.
“······!”
Tremendous blast pressure surged upward vertically from beneath my feet, striking my body hard.
The solid earth shattered and crumbled, my perfectly anchored center of gravity convulsed violently, and my body lifted roughly a palm’s span into the air.
Dust and acrid smoke completely obscured my vision. Hot heat crawled up my ankles.
‘Marking and Boom.’
I pushed off the collapsing ground and steadied my posture in mid-air, rapidly deducing the nature of the spell that had just detonated.
One of the many explosive variations wielded by the Explosive Demon, Hong Tae-hwa.
A delayed-detonation spell where he planted an extremely minute catalyst of Magical Power at an opponent’s feet or on a specific object, then forcibly triggered an explosion at his desired moment like a C4 bomb.
Those two Daggers he had feinted throwing into the air earlier.
When I lightly evaded them and the blades pierced the ground, they had laid invisible fuses of Magical Power across the radius beneath my feet.
“Impressive.”
I brushed the dust from my shoulders as I landed.
In my memories from before the Regression, it was only much later, after Hong Tae-hwa had established himself as a core executive of the Hong Hyeol-maeng and slaughtered countless veteran Hunters, that he began to wield this delayed-explosion technique with mastery.
Yet this man before me now, having only just entered the lower ranks of a drug cartel, had grasped the principle of that spell himself and evolved it within this brief clash—our first exchange of blows.
It appeared that the extreme crisis had forcibly awakened his latent potential.
My path had been the exact opposite.
In the previous world, I started from the absolute bottom. Coughing blood from vicious Mana Backflow, enduring pain that scraped bone, overcoming death’s edge dozens of times—only then could I grow stronger.
Every trajectory was painstakingly completed atop meticulous calculation and a record of countless failures.
But he was different.
The more he fought, the closer death’s pressure drove him, his body and Mana instinctively recreated formulas of slaughter. His inborn talent leapt forward, mocking all effort.
He was a living evolution—a demon itself.
“Die! Die, die, die, die! Please, just die already!!!”
In that brief moment when I was straightening my disordered stance, Hong Tae-hwa tore through the billowing smoke and charged at me once more like a madman.
In his two hands were only the hilts of broken Daggers.
Yet the explosive output condensed in those shattered metal pieces was abnormally, ominously vast—incomparable to what he had unleashed in the open air moments before.
It was a final blow, nearly a suicide attack, burning not only his entire Magical Power but Life Force itself as fuel.
Crash—!!!!!
An overwhelming roar that swallowed all directions shook the Colosseum.
The atmosphere within tens of meters around became a vacuum in an instant, swallowing all sound, then a searing crimson flame and blast pressure that seemed to incinerate everything poured down like a waterfall.
The ground boiled like lava and the shockwave twisted the air itself.
“Gasp, hah—! Hah!”
At the epicenter of the blast.
Hong Tae-hwa’s pupils quivered wildly as he gasped roughly. At the strike point of his ultimate blow where he had poured everything into—nothing should have remained.
But.
Shhh—.
My hand, reaching out from within the acrid smoke and searing heat, clamped brutally around Hong Tae-hwa’s jaw.
“Ku, gag—! Ugh!”
With a faint sound of jawbone fracturing, Hong Tae-hwa gasped for breath and thrashed. His legs dangling in the air kicked futilely at the void.
The form revealed as flame and dust slowly cleared.
Not a thread of my clothing singed, not a strand of my hair displaced—my perfect, wholly intact form stood revealed.
The reason none of Hong Tae-hwa’s horrific Explosion Magic ever touched my skin was simple.
The transparent Mana Shield enveloping my body was not mere defense.
The unique frequency of his Magical Power, the wavelength of his explosions—I had dismantled and analyzed that vicious pattern thousands of times over in past battlefields.
The shield wrapped around my skin now was a dedicated Counter Barrier, reverse-engineered and constructed from ages past, existing solely to perfectly nullify and deflect his Explosion Magic outward.
A perfect scaffold of execution, designed to erase the existence called Hong Tae-hwa.
No matter how brilliantly he evolved his spells in real time through sheer talent, so long as the fundamental grain of his Magical Power remained unchanged, his explosions would never reach me.
My experience ran deeper than the leap of his talent, that was all.
All he had achieved by staking his life was stumbling my center of gravity a single moment ago, making my foot miss its mark once.
A strangled gasp tore from his throat.
Without loosening my grip on his jaw, I drew the Aura from my Core with my right fist, pulling it upward with crushing weight.
Muscle coiled taut, laden with tremendous pressure.
Without hesitation, I drove my fist into the abdomen of the figure hanging in midair.
“Gahhh—cough—ughhhhhhh——!”
Dark crimson blood poured from Hong Tae-hwa’s mouth like a fountain.
His body, torn from my grip, shot backward like a cannonball, tumbled across the ground in a grotesque roll five or six times, and finally came to rest, embedded in a shattered wooden pillar.
Only the wet rasping of breath signaled his survival.
By now, not a single bone in his body remained in place. Blood pooled in his lungs, and each breath would be like swallowing a blade.
……
I watched the spectacle in silence.
Yet he pressed trembling arms against the blood-soaked earth.
Even as his fingers fractured and his elbows twisted, he forced his legs to bear weight, dragging himself upright through sheer will. It was a survival instinct more brutal than that of any beast.
Thunk—
I drove the tip of my Black Iron Longsword hard into the ground. The metal rang out cold and sharp.
“Stand up straight.”
I spoke those words with chill certainty to the figure barely supporting himself on wavering legs. It was a pronouncement: there was nowhere to flee, nowhere to hide.
That was when it came.
‘Master, my Tae-hwa is not at fault. Everything that made him this way—it is all because this useless old man met you…….’
The voice of the Blind Elder, trembling with sorrow, echoed like a phantom in my ears. That voice, woven through with grief and regret, became a sharp thorn, piercing one corner of my heart.
And then, layered over it, came the cold voice of the System, the one that had always clouded my reason.
[Successor. In this world as it is now, what is Hong Tae-hwa to you?]
I closed my eyes firmly.
I forcibly cut the power to the complex computational circuits that had been racing like a runaway engine in my mind.
The old man’s mournful cry lingering at my ears, the System’s mechanical question—I erased all noise perfectly.
I held only one thing.
What I must do. Why I returned. The sole purpose for which I exist.
When I opened my eyes, the Blade Sage’s rough Aura that had wrapped around me vanished without trace. The air fell instantly into silence.
“I’ll show you.”
What filled that space instead was a wave of Magical Power drawn from deep within my Core—bitterly pure, devastatingly cold.
It was not energy for destruction, but an absolute, freezing force that stilled all things.
“What true explosion really is.”
From my fingertips, Magical Power of scarlet light began to spread like capillaries.

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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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