The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 87

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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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87
Chapter 87. Dust and Chains
***
Crash. Boom.
From within the massive rubble of the Colosseum’s collapsed outer wall came the harsh scraping sound of stone being shoved aside.
Between the shattered concrete chunks, a red-haired boy—Hong Tae-hwa—staggered to his feet.
His condition was appalling. His ribs were fractured, his chest caved in at a grotesque angle, and dark blood poured ceaselessly from his mouth and nose.
With his internal organs ruptured, each breath he drew would have sent searing pain through his lungs as they tore.
For a Rogue class—the physically most fragile by system standards—his durability was shockingly, impossibly resilient.
It was the hardened callus of street survival, beaten into his bones through countless brawls in the back alleys.
Yet that very cruel survival instinct had become the deadliest poison choking him now.
To feel pain meant his senses were alive—which meant he had to bear the full weight of the terror approaching death.
I recalled the trajectory of that boy’s devastating explosions from before the regression.
How much blood of high-ranked hunters had the Blade Guild spilled just to contain one of him? A monster that evolved, breaking through his limits with every fight.
His growth rate was so abnormal that the word “talent” itself felt like an insult.
If I let him live today, showing mercy carelessly, he would swallow this defeat entirely and grow into an even greater catastrophe aimed at my throat.
I had no intention of repeating the tragedies of the past. A sprout must be crushed the moment it shows its head.
It was time to drive home a wedge of the most overwhelming, cruelest disparity into his mind—so brutally clear he’d never even think of standing before me again.
“Stand properly.”
I drove the Black Iron Greatsword I’d been gripping deep into the hard earthen ground. The tremor that traveled through my palm began to fade.
And I completely severed the switch to the Mana substitution Incantation I’d been forced to maintain—Synchronization.
Whoosh.
The crude Aura that had been taut across my muscles evaporated into the air.
Instead, the 2nd Circle Mana Core that had been crouched deep in my core expanded like an active volcano, flooding my body with cold, pure magical power through every vein.
The sensation of Mana flowing through my blood vessels was chill and crystalline.
“Let me show you what a real explosion is.”
My breathing became lighter. It was a fundamentally different comfort—not the strain of burning muscle fibers to wring out sword force by sheer will.
For a mage who had spent a lifetime immersed in the depths of Mana, the sensation of pure magical power flowing through the flesh was like wearing the most perfectly tailored custom suit in the world.
The Core rotated with each heartbeat, resonating the surrounding atmosphere.
“……Die———!”
Perhaps sensing the minute fluctuation of Mana instinctively, Hong Tae-hwa—still spewing blood foam—pushed off the ground with his broken legs and charged forward like a beast.
The last death throes of a body pushed past its limits. His hands held compressed detonators of the vicious explosions born from wringing out every ounce of his life force.
The air shrieked as it split apart.
Excellent reaction speed. Yet before his body could launch into the air, the tip of my shoe beat him by a half-step, scraping harshly across the dry earth.
Whoooosh———!
Dozens of kilograms of parched soil and sand dust erupted skyward like shrapnel, enveloping Hong Tae-hwa’s charging form in a dense curtain of earth.
Blinded momentarily, he hesitated mid-air. Into that infinitesimal gap, I drove the cruelest, most meticulously woven spell.
Uuuuuuuung———
With a sharp ringing that seemed to tear through eardrums, the surrounding atmosphere froze as if in perfect vacuum.
The trajectory of falling sand grains, Hong Tae-hwa’s contorted facial muscles beyond the dust, the sound of air splitting—
Everything stretched grotesquely, like videotape playing in slow motion.
It was the result of hammering five layers of overlapping Haste into the one-meter radius frame of space surrounding me.
My heart thrashed violently, but my mind was calm as ice water. The hemorrhaging side effect I’d endured during that first attempt at Dawn Mountain didn’t occur.
The second attempt carved through space far more smoothly than the first.
Once a Mana pathway had been opened, it remembered the optimal trajectory that minimized recoil of its own accord.
In the slowed spacetime, I drew the heavy hilt of the Black Iron blade I’d planted in the ground once more.
‘Two cuts.’
The Innate Trait blazing magnificently at my back—the Tree of Sephirot—pulsed.
Strands of Mana wound like serpents, binding entirely different attribute Incantations into a single Chain with perfect completion. The fusion was flawless.
The blade tore through the frozen air. First trajectory. The Swordmaster’s Slash merged with the 1st Circle wind-attribute Magic, Wind, cutting horizontally across.
Crash————————!!
As the sword force cleaved through empty air, tens of thousands of dust and sand particles I’d kicked up moments before swept upward in the gale’s rotation.
This was no mere veil of obscuring sand.
The wind’s trajectory was compressed entirely under my control, trapping Hong Tae-hwa’s suspended form in a circular vice like a giant blender.
An airtight space of densely concentrated atmospheric oxygen and pulverized earth. Fine particles crowded thickly around his respiratory system and skin.
He would meet death without ever realizing that what awaited him was no simple dust storm.
And within the unbroken frame of an instant, the second trajectory descended.
Into the tip of the Black Iron blade falling vertically, I drove both the Swordmaster’s point-detonation Breaker and the flame-attribute Ignition simultaneously.
Shriiiiiek———!
No physical strike was needed. Where my blade tip reached was not Hong Tae-hwa’s body, but the center of the dense sand storm encircling him.
A sealed chamber where combustible dust and oxygen were mixed in perfect proportion. A single spark of extreme heat cast into the center of that enormous bomb. The conclusion was clear.
It was an extraordinarily violent and scientific principle that transcended magical destruction.
‘Burst.’
The moment the quiet command left my lips, the frame of time that had been forcibly compressed snapped back to its original speed and detonated.
Crash-!!!!!!
My vision burned white. The murky ash-grey sky of the Incubation-type Gate seemed to crack apart at the seams, and a horrifying massive explosion swallowed the entire Colosseum.
It did not end with a single blast. Fine particles of earth ignited in rapid succession, triggering an endless chain of infernal explosions from within the epicenter.
Crimson flashes erupted like lightning through the sandstorm, and temperatures thousands of degrees consumed the oxygen in the atmosphere in an instant.
Even Hong Tae-hwa’s tearing screams were buried beneath the deafening roar within that towering inferno.
The shockwave of the explosion shook the floor of the Colosseum, and massive stones rained down like torrents.
The earth wailed and shrieked for nearly ten minutes straight.
***
“…Kim Do-jin, that monster bastard. What on earth did he do?”
Bae Hyeon-gyeom, who had reduced the remnants of the Red Blood Alliance to pulp and was now trampling the squad leader’s throat beneath his heel, muttered while turning to face me.
Even the Godly Being who had been locked in that blood-soaked slaughter seemed horrified by the explosion’s crude scale, casually dropping the Blade Guild operative he’d been holding by the collar.
And that was not all.
The Red Blood Alliance assassins clashing from every direction, the goblin illusions that the fairy Airi had been commanding—even they froze and halted their movements in the face of that overwhelming calamity.
Primal fear gripped the battlefield.
This is the true caliber of a mage. Lesser mages blindly trust only the size of their Mana Core and the destructive power of the incantation itself.
They squeeze their Core dry to enlarge flames and pour out reckless Incantations.
But one who has ascended to the rank of 9th Circle treats the surrounding terrain, environment, and all physical laws as a single vast computational circuit.
The dirt I kicked up, the sandstorm confined by Wind spells, and the fine dust particles packed densely within.
I merely tossed in a single spark.
Even the Black Iron Greatsword, with its worst Mana conductivity, was nothing more than a sturdy poker for carrying the ignition source in this tactic.
The rest—the catastrophic explosion, the firepower—was entirely the result of nature’s laws amplifying and completing themselves.
Maximum destruction achieved with minimal Mana expenditure. That is what a true mage is.
Pitter-patter, thud.
The towering crimson pillar of flame that had shot skyward gradually subsided, and melted grains of sand fell as glass shards.
I stared steadily at the center of the settled ash.
The bodily fatigue that had been forcibly compressed into that savage, momentary combat of swordsmen seemed to wash away completely with this single, overwhelming and perfect arc of magic.
Crackle, snap-crackle.
Embers still burning in the center of the epicenter belched acrid smoke.
As the thick smoke scattered on the night wind, the form of Hong Tae-hwa, collapsed in the center of a crater charred black as charcoal, revealed itself.
Like a poorly cooked steak, his entire body was singed pitch-black, his skin grotesquely melted and dripping.
The black tactical suit he’d been wearing had turned to ash without a trace, and from his body sprawled on the ground came the sickening stench of burning protein.
The acrid reek clung to the air like mucus.
I slung the Black Iron Greatsword over my shoulder and pushed through the smoke toward him. My gaze fixed on his chest, which rose and fell faintly.
The remarkable thing was that he was still breathing, convulsing. I had not swung my blade in jest.
There had never been any intention of merely frightening him and leaving him alive.
Hong Tae-hwa’s latent potential was beyond imagination.
In this single battle alone, he had read the timing of my explosion and created a new variable—the delayed explosion—entirely on his own.
If I carelessly left him alive here, he would swallow this defeat and inevitably emerge as an even more horrifying demon of evolution.
If flushing the remnants of the Red Blood Alliance into the Incubation-type Gate and annihilating them was the first objective, then completely crushing and severing Hong Tae-hwa’s potential here on this corrupted battlefield was a core task above all else.
That was the desperate resolve I had driven into that final strike. Yet despite it, his heart had not stopped. His grip on life was stubborn.
Thud.
I stopped beside the collapsed Hong Tae-hwa. I kicked his shoulder with the toe of my shoe, flipping his body from the ground into the air.
Thump.
His entire body was in terrible condition, half-melted, yet his face alone maintained a grotesquely intact shape.
It did not take long to find the reason. His two palms, charred pitch-black.
Above them, the lingering Mana of his Unique Characteristic—Explosion—shimmered faintly like heat waves before dispersing.
My eyes narrowed sharply.
“Remarkable talent.”
In that precise instant when my dust explosion descended upon him, he had squeezed every last drop of Mana remaining in both his hands and triggered an explosion in front of his face in the opposite direction.
Pushing explosion against explosion, he had forcibly twisted the trajectory of the inferno that would have poured into his most vital points—his brain and respiratory system.
Of course, he could not completely neutralize the absolute mass of my spell.
So he managed only a half-defense that burned his entire body, but because of that bestial cunning, he had nonetheless succeeded in preserving the thread of his life.
“Ha… ha…”
Flipped upright, Hong Tae-hwa’s lips trembled faintly as he stared into empty space. It was a horrible, metallic wheeze—his throat completely raw.
Clear tears streamed down his cheeks through the pitch-black soot, tracking through the ash on his face.
“Ha… Grandfather…”
It was only when death stared me in the face that the name of blood kin spilled from his lips. I lifted my chin and looked down at him.
Here he was, grip tight on the Red Blood Alliance’s leash, having planned to turn innocent people into meat—and now he dared remember his blind grandfather’s face and speak of repentance?
I felt nothing but contempt for those cheap tears.
Human sentiment held no sway over the outcome of battle.
I was in the act of raising the tip of my Black Iron Greatsword to drive it through his neck when something stopped me.
“……?”
My wrist froze mid-thrust, suspended in empty air. A strange dissonance had caught my attention. My gaze bored into the back of his neck.
His clothes burned away in the flames, leaving exposed the pale, fragile curve of his cervical spine.
Across that white skin, a thick chain-like incantation pulsed in an ominous, sickly blue, flashing with terrible clarity.
My pupils dilated unnaturally. Unpleasant data buried deep in memory began to align in sequence, all pointing toward a single conclusion.
There was no room for doubt. The match was perfect.
The shackle of brainwashing that had bound the necks of the Kobolds mining Mana Stones in the Incubation-type Gate.
That Mana Choker—the same device that had forcibly detonated the mind of Lee Do-hyeon, the first-generation hero lying in the Hunter Association’s underground ward.
That vile brainwashing incantation was now fastened around the neck of Hong Tae-hwa, the Red Blood Alliance’s newest recruit.

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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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