The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 89

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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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89
Episode 89. The Proof of 3326
***
The doubt had finally dissolved into complete clarity.
In the deepest abyss of the soul, amid the cold silence that dwelt within the Altar of the Successor.
A fragment of spirit wearing the form of an eight-year-old child knelt motionless, sobbing without sound.
And clinging to the back of that fragile child like a parasite, a massive black beast whose true form defied comprehension.
The fragmented clues gathered so far swirled through the mind like a tempest, until in a single moment the gears meshed—converging into one merciless conclusion.
Why Lee Do-hyeon the Hunter had to die, and what lay at the heart of that horrific assassination technique that had ruptured the first-generation hero’s cerebral blood vessels from within.
They had not targeted physical shells—blood vessels, muscles, neural tissue.
They had infected the very soul itself.
An otherworldly parasite driven deep into the spirit body, planted at the roots of the self, to gnaw away slowly. It was a kind of spiritual switch.
In normal times it fed on the host’s mana to grow in size, but whenever needed it could seize control of the detonator and trigger—a living curse.
So no matter how many precise mana scans were run, no matter how many blood samples were extracted and analyzed down to the genetic level, the physical diagnostics could never have found the presence of that foreign substance.
Because it was a cancer cell existing beyond dimensions, in the realm of spirit.
‘To lay hands upon the soul itself.’
My gaze fell upon the small figure of Hong Tae-hwa crouched on the floor.
The form of a soul is like a mirror that rawly projects the unconscious of its subject.
The fact that his self was not that of a defiant nineteen-year-old high school student, but rather remained frozen in the form of a mere eight or nine-year-old child.
It was unmistakable proof that the moment when this horrific parasite—the Berserk Entity—began to infest his soul was precisely that age, when he was nothing but a bloodied mote of a thing.
No creature on earth would willfully drive such vicious sorcery into a child’s spirit.
This was calculated malice, an atrocity only demons wearing the mask of man could commit.
The will of someone who had sought to use another’s life as a sacrifice, to rear a human weapon—it filled this entire space.
Shing—
I drew the Black Iron Sword hanging at my waist slowly from its sheath.
Though the space was a mental realm where no physical body existed, the crude weight transmitted through my grip and the cold bite of metal pressing into my palm were perfectly identical to those of reality.
If anything, my senses had grown so keen that I could feel even the faint vibrations of air flowing across the blade’s surface against my skin.
Thang—!
I brought the heavy point of the Black Iron Sword crashing down brutally against the deep blue floor of the altar.
A dull concussive sound tore through the silence of the wavering space. In the same instant, the black beast that had been shambling toward the child with its jaws agape shuddered and froze.
It twisted its grotesquely contorted neck, turning its hideous head slowly toward me.
“······.”
The beast’s form was grotesque.
A black, viscous aura covered its entire body, yet its silhouette bore a chilling resemblance to the nineteen-year-old Hong Tae-hwa hunched over, his shoulders bent.
Only the bloodshot eyes burning crimson spoke of the beast’s true nature—all reason stripped away—flickering in the darkness.
“Grrrrrr······!”
The beast, its hunt interrupted, hurled sticky malice toward me, growling low.
I gripped the pommel of the dangling Black Iron Sword firmly with both hands. My knuckles dug into the leather wrapping of the hilt, anchoring themselves.
Complex hexes of dark sorcery, or the purification incantations murmured by noble priests—none of it fit this situation.
The method for taming and crushing the parasite of madness clinging to the soul was seared into my memory from my past in a way that was simple and unmistakable.
Until the beast was completely laid out, unable to twitch a single finger.
Pound it endlessly, break it without mercy.
Etching a terror that transcended surrender into the soul—that alone was the only physical means to forcibly separate the parasite from its host.
***
Kwaaaang—!!
The flat of the Black Iron Sword, screaming through the darkness, struck the beast’s ribcage without mercy.
The massive concussive explosion hurled the black beast’s body dozens of meters away like a shell from a cannon.
As it rolled across the floor of the altar, the creature finally came to rest, leaving long scratches across the deep blue marble.
The Altar of the Successor.
It is an absolute sanctuary granted to the master of consciousness.
No matter how violently I move my body or how mercilessly I strike, I feel no physical fatigue.
My aura and mana are not consumed even a drop—a space of infinite training where causality is twisted.
Certainly, I had been inwardly cautious lest, having forcibly dragged another’s soul into this place, my opponent too might share in the benefits of this infinite mana.
But that caution proved entirely unfounded. So long as the Creator does not permit it, the absolute dominance of this space belongs to me alone.
A predator with an endless magazine and a punching bag forced to take blow after blow until its breath stops—a one-sided structure.
Of course, even in this twisted space, risk exists.
If I were to meet a spiritual death here, my body would synchronize and fall into a state of permanent vegetative unconsciousness.
Because the specifications in the Altar of the Successor are set identical to the limits of my physical body in reality.
“Kraaaaagh!!”
The moment I allow that Berserk Entity even a single fatal, effective blow, my self will be contaminated by its madness and die instantly.
But such risks didn’t even factor into consideration.
Because I had no doubt.
Not against anyone else. Certainly not against that Hong Tae-hwa.
The Berserk Entity that had been driven into the ground let out a grotesque shriek and hauled itself upright again.
Despite the black aura covering its upper body being torn away by more than half from the last blow, it moved like a machine stripped of pain—pushing off the floor on all fours and rushing madly toward me.
The sound of air splitting pierced my ears.
Screeeeeech—!!
I didn’t dodge.
I brought the heavy pommel of the Black Iron Sword down with full force at the creature’s face as it flew toward me.
A sickening sensation shot through my wrist as the skull caved in—feedback that traveled all the way to my brain.
“Grrk!”
The beast’s body twisted grotesquely in mid-air before crashing back to the ground.
‘3325.’
I counted the number coldly in my mind.
How many times I’d slammed this creature to the floor in this mental space.
Magic would have been faster and more efficient—binding it, burning it, purifying it—but I’d deliberately chosen the crude brutality of swinging the Black Iron Sword instead.
This heavy, primal violence that crushed organs.
The raw feedback of bone striking bone, flesh bursting open—it somehow helped untangle the knot of confusion tightening in my head.
“Grrrrr…….”
The pulped Berserk Entity trembled as it tried to push itself up again.
The black aura pouring from its entire body was visibly thinning.
Stubborn.
Even after receiving blows that shattered bone and ruptured organs over three thousand times, the creature’s teeth remained bared at me without end.
This was the raw and terrible essence of Berserk—that unique Madness.
It completely cut off the fatal warning signals and pain the brain sent out.
A horrifying switch for slaughter that forced the body to grind itself to dust toward only one purpose: killing the enemy before your eyes.
That was the reason for the nineteen-year-old Hong Tae-hwa’s insane mobility and abnormal durability that he’d shown in the Colosseum outside.
Why a Rogue class with such thin endurance could throw himself around like a Berserk Warrior and unleash suicidal attacks.
It wasn’t willpower. It was the final sparks sputtering from burned-out circuitry.
‘There’s no way this would manifest naturally.’
I swung the blade of the Black Iron Sword mercilessly at the creature’s knee joint as it staggered toward me.
Crack—!
With a grotesque snapping sound as the joint bent backward, it collapsed again.
Artificially implanting a ritual of Madness into a child’s soul, raising that beast over more than a decade as a human weapon.
And that group—which had maintained brainwashing for eight years by embedding a self-destruct switch in a first-generation Archmage’s brain.
Only one force in all my memory was capable of such sinister, thorough, and inhumane dark magic.
“The Gate Cult.”
The moment I spoke their name aloud, the Black Iron Sword’s heavy horizontal slash sent the Berserk Entity flying across the space.
Before the Hunter Lee Do-hyeon’s breath was cut off, the assassin who had infiltrated the hospital room spoke a command.
‘Shine with light for the god.’
With just those words, Lee Do-hyeon began chanting a blind prayer—”Give glory to the Gate’s god”—and directly ruptured his own cerebral blood vessels.
The assassin’s command was the will of the sect, and it was an absolute command of the soul that could not be defied.
When I destroyed Jang Yu-cheong, a Red Blood Alliance lapdog, at Club Arabian, the distribution hub for Boosters. And when I slaughtered the foot soldiers of the Red Blood Alliance at the Abandoned Factory.
Among those hundreds of creatures, I found not a single trace of this disgusting parasitic mark or sign of brainwashing.
Then there was a condition.
The intersection of targets the Gate Cult specifically chose to leash with this vicious Mana choke: first-generation Archmage Lee Do-hyeon and the mutant Explosive Genius Hong Tae-hwa.
‘Overwhelming Core potential, or an uncontrollable variable.’
From the sect’s perspective, ordinary assassins and low-level dealers were merely disposable tools—pay them, use them, discard them.
But Lee Do-hyeon’s knowledge that could twist the logic of the world itself, or Hong Tae-hwa’s catastrophic unique trait called Explosion—such calamitous talents could never be controlled by money or hollow loyalty alone.
So they put a leash on their souls. Ready to blow his detonator the moment he showed his teeth to his master.
In the end, I reached the unmistakable conclusion: the Red Blood Alliance itself—Asia’s greatest crime cartel—was nothing but a puppet and funding source for the Gate Cult, that massive fanatical organization.
They’d been corrupting humanity’s strongest players from behind, using the Red Blood Alliance as a shield.
“Grrr, rung…….”
As my thoughts continued, the Berserk Entity crawling on the ground’s snarls noticeably weakened.
After more than three thousand times of one-sided destruction and violation, even the apparently infinite turbid aura of Madness was slowly reaching its limit, beginning to reveal what lay beneath.
The black fog covering the creature was tearing apart, and the pale naked body inside was beginning to show through.
“About time for you too.”
In this space, time is meaningless. An eternity within the Altar is but an instant in reality.
I slowly gripped the Black Iron Sword again and took a step toward the black beast writhing on the ground.
I hadn’t set my purpose on simply beating it. This was simultaneously the most practical training to solve the task Charles had given me.
‘Single Strike Division.’
I carved through the beast’s trajectory and swung the Black Iron Sword.
The first slash passed through its illusory form, and in that fractional gap, the second Breaker—weighted with all my mass—drove precisely into its ribcage.
The vibration of splintering vertebrae traveled up my wrist, sharp and electric.
‘And once more from here.’
The moment the recoil from the second strike was about to travel up through bone, I wrenched every muscle fiber to its limit and forcibly snapped my wrist downward, breaking the momentum.
An attempt to ignore inertia itself, to twist the blade’s already-committed path and forge a third trajectory through sheer force.
But.
Clang—!
“…….”
The friction grated discordantly.
The instant I tried to force the third trajectory into place, my body’s balance crumbled infinitesimally, and the blade tip glanced off the beast’s hide and rebounded away.
Air shrieked and scattered.
An imperfect strike, the blade never finding its edge.
Splash—!
Yet even that incomplete impact tore the beast’s body far more brutally than before, flinging it to the far edge of the altar.
Black ichor from its spirit body pooled thick across the floor.
“Not working out.”
I brushed my wrist lightly and muttered low.
The sense of a Two-Strike Succession within a single motion had become natural by now.
But trying to artificially split that interval once more and link a ‘third strike’ yielded no viable physical angle whatsoever.
It wasn’t a question of muscle fatigue or mana depletion.
The human body’s inertia and mechanical structure itself stubbornly rejected this third, forced intrusion.
Every time I tried to suppress the muscle’s recoil, my forearm screamed as though it might tear.
‘Is it even possible?’
Just as doubt was beginning to bloom, a memory of ash-grey light from before the return flickered past my retina like lightning.
Zephyros, the calamity that was mankind’s despair.
Toward those terrible scales, Kang Tae-yoon charged alone and unleashed thousands of silver slashes.
Those were not cuts struck one by one. Within a single leap, a single breath, space itself was fractured a thousand times over—the trajectory of a god.
He had done it. He had achieved it.
Then this is not an impossible theory. I simply haven’t pushed myself hard enough to touch that truth.
I gripped the blade again and was about to step toward the beast writhing on the floor when—
“……Ungh, mister.”
A small, unfamiliar voice, breaking the silence, rang through the quiet altar.
I stopped dead. Gooseflesh prickled down my spine, firing through my brain.
“Where… where is this?”
I turned slowly.
In a corner of the altar, the moment the black beast’s blind killing intent had dulled, a small Hong Tae-hwa—eight years old, his face buried and trembling in the corner—lifted his head and stared toward me.
An innocent face still streaked with tears.
In those eyes, there was no hostility, no anger directed at me.
Only the sharp terror peculiar to a lost child, and the bewilderment of not understanding what was happening at all.
‘He doesn’t remember.’
I slowly lowered the hand holding the Black Iron Sword.
This fragment of an eight-year-old soul was entirely unaware that I was the one who had ruthlessly crushed him in reality and forcibly dragged him here.
All the violence and twisted malice that the nineteen-year-old Hong Tae-hwa had committed was clear proof that this black beast was merely a defense mechanism born of self-consuming erosion—an artificially imposed, corrupted shell.
The child hiccupped and rubbed his eyes roughly with small hands. That innocent gesture only deepened the cruelty of the moment.
“This is… a dream.”
I answered briefly, my voice low, stripped of all emotion.
“A dream?”
“Yeah. You’re having a bad dream right now.”
“And you, mister? Are you dreaming too?”
“I… live here.”
At my answer, the child’s round eyes trembled as though faintly reassured.
The fact that he had encountered someone in this endless darkness was a greater comfort to him than any wariness of a stranger.
“Oh… thank goodness.”
The child sniffled, his reddened nose twitching, and cautiously extended a small, trembling hand toward my pant leg.
“Then, how can I wake up from here?”
“…….”
“Grandfather is… Grandfather is still waiting outside. He can’t see, so I need to get back soon, but that dark wolf keeps blocking the way, and I’m so scared.”
The child’s voice finally collapsed into sobs and scattered to the floor.
I clamped down on the Black Iron Sword with crushing force, my right hand trembling with the intensity of my grip.
My knuckles blanched white, then purpled as veins stood out ready to burst. The calluses on my palm scraped against the hilt with a sound like grinding stone.
I understand now.
How he fell into this vicious quagmire. Why in the previous world he had to walk the path of ruin, called by such a merciless name as the Raging Demon.
‘Successor, I believe you can change him.’
Airi’s words—barbed yet somehow humane—circled back through my mind.
A thin, fragile hope: if environment had made the monster, then breaking that environment and excising the parasite from his soul might sever this tragedy at its root.
The objective facts, the evidence laid bare through the child’s state—all of it vouched for his innocence.
But.
My lips remained sealed, stubborn and immobile.
No—my body was rejecting it on a visceral level.
A acrid stench clawed at my nostrils.
It was phantom pain. Yet that smell, burned deep into the abyss of my memory, was unnaturally vivid—it pierced my lungs and dug in.
Inside a Gate from the past.
My vanguard soldiers, caught in his uncontrolled detonation—their eyes bursting from their sockets, their brains boiling as they shrieked in agony.
The reek of charred flesh, protein burning black, and those horrific screams tearing from their throats.
The stench of that hellish day still wrung my throat and strangled my breath in this very moment.
Even if this child’s soul were innocent, the carnage I witnessed with my own eyes, the devastation my skin endured—none of that could be erased.
There were victims. Real victims. And the perpetrator hiding behind the name ‘Parasite’—my reason could not, would not accept it.
“Uncle…?”
The child called out carefully, anxiously, noticing my frozen expression, my silence.
I lowered my gaze.
Over the frightened, blood-streaked face before me, the contorted visages of my comrades—burning, dying in agony—overlapped like afterimages.
My stomach twisted. Nausea clawed upward—a sickening, unbearable cognitive dissonance.
I clenched my teeth, locking my jaw. I forced the ghostly images of the past back into darkness by sheer will.
This was not the time for sentiment.
“…You.”
I forced my rigid lips apart. My words came clear and measured.
“You can go home.”
“…Really? I can actually go?”
A faint glimmer kindled in the child’s dull eyes.
My gaze fixed on the black beast convulsing across from me, blood streaming from its wounds.
“Yes.”
I angled the blade of the Black Iron Sword and added:
“Because I’m going to kill that monster here. Completely.”

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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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