The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 90

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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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90
Chapter 90. Severance and Confirmation
***
“I’ll save you from here.”
The voice that cut through the darkness of the Altar sounded strange even to me.
The moment those words left my lips, my right hand—gripping the Black Iron’s hilt—tightened infinitesimally.
Calluses on my palm scraped against the rough leather wrapping, transmitting a dull sensation through my grip.
It was a strange feeling, as though my tongue had moved of its own volition, beyond the brain’s control.
Hong Tae-hwa—that monstrous killer from memory, the one who had burned dozens of comrades alive, the “Detonation Demon.”
I had just declared that I would save his prototype with my own hands.
My throat felt rough, as if I’d been chewing sand, but I had no intention of taking back the words once spoken.
This was not sentimental forgiveness.
It was far from shallow pity.
It was simply this: Hong Tae-hwa in this world had not yet committed his crimes—a physical fact.
And it was the most rational decision I could make to sever the leash of the true axis of evil gnawing at this creature’s soul from within—the Gate Sect.
Grrrrrraaaagh—!!
The black beast responded to my voice; the Berserker clawed at the floor.
Sharp talons dug into the Altar’s stone surface, releasing a bone-chilling screech of friction.
The malice radiating from its entire body pricked against my skin.
I slowly lifted the tip of the Black Iron that I’d been letting hang at an angle toward the ground.
I raised it vertically until the blade aligned perfectly with my line of sight, and the faint gleam along the edge flickered across my pupils and vanished.
I had crushed its bones and flesh over three thousand times already. I had hammered enough physical blows into it.
The sticky shell of Mana that clung to its body was already tattered, ravaged like a worn rag.
Black mist-like Mana tried to seal its wounds, but fundamental collapse had already begun.
The time for strikes was over.
Now it was time to cut cleanly through and sever this grinding chain of causality.
‘Wind.’
Without moving my lips, I spun the Mana Core deep within my dantian.
Over the Black Iron’s dull blade—with its terrible conductivity—a single-Circle wind incantation layered itself thin and taut.
An invisible, razor-sharp blade formed from compressed air wrapped around the blunt surface like a high-speed chainsaw.
A faint, high-pitched hum traveled up my wrist and into my brain.
Thwap—!
The black beast, crouched flat against the floor and biding its moment, exploded upward into empty space.
Powerful leg strength cracked the Altar’s floor into a spider-web pattern.
My gaze tracked its trajectory with cold precision.
The direction in which it launched was not toward me, standing with Black Iron raised.
It traced an arc toward the eight-year-old Hong Tae-hwa’s soul, huddled trembling in a corner of the Altar—deliberately evading my perfect range.
Instinctively dodging the massive threat before it, seeking either to take the most fragile and certain prey as hostage or to devour it outright.
“Mad dog, you’re disqualified.”
Berserker.
The beast, meant to lose all reason and focus solely on destroying the enemy before it, was calculating tactical advantage. It was mixing evasive maneuvers, selecting the easier target.
Perfect loss of control—this was clear proof it had surrendered to primal terror and begun rational calculation instead.
Thousands of bone-breaking impacts had left their mark on its flesh. The work had borne fruit: it was now nothing more than a half-broken beast that had lost the essence of what it meant to be a mad dog.
‘Leap.’
I detonated the thigh muscles that had been holding back my Aura, and overlaid the jumping technique in a single explosive moment.
With a thunderous boom, the air beneath my feet compressed and created recoil.
An overwhelming ascent defying gravity.
My body shot upward like an arrow through the void, cutting directly into the path of the beast’s trajectory toward the child.
In mid-air, the beast’s startled crimson gaze locked directly with mine.
What glinted in its eyes was no longer madness, but the primal terror of a living creature facing death.
Time stretched grotesquely.
A single instant fractured into frame-by-frame segments, embedding itself in my mind. Suspended in the void, I opened my dantian’s core to its limit.
The core’s rotation speed approached critical point, and a sharp overload surged through my entire body.
‘Five-fold Incantation.’
Behind me, cyan-green branches of Sephiroth extended brilliantly into empty space.
It was no mere illusion. It was the circulatory pathway of the incantation as my Mana redefined the laws of this space.
The 5-fold Incantation.
Just days ago, when I first attempted it in the Wilderness, it had wracked my insides and left me rolling in the dirt from its grotesque backlash and awkward timing.
But now it was different.
My core’s vessels expanded, drawing Mana with natural ease, and my neural pathways had completed perfect conditioning to withstand the body’s acceleration.
A perfect space of thought where physical variables like air resistance from the external world or the syncopation of breathing did not exist.
And a perfect training opponent that I had killed thousands of times.
The technique had awakened into my very bones.
The sensory certainty that even after deploying this spell in reality, I could expand the radius of spatial interference that had been merely thirty centimeters seized my skin.
Within a fraction of a second, less than one, where my right wrist crossed through the void, I traced two separate trajectories.
The contraction and relaxation of muscle achieved perfect harmony as the blade drove forward.
Fast Slash, and then Strong Slash.
Black Iron cloaked in compressed Wind bit through the creature’s neck and ribcage in a crossing pattern, horizontal and vertical.
The sensation of the blade tearing flesh and severing bone transmitted vividly through my palm, up my elbow, down my spine, and into my brain. The resistance was negligible.
Its defensive mechanisms had already crumbled before the speed of my 5-fold Incantation could even keep pace.
“Hong Tae-hwa.”
I felt the blade carve through its heart as I spoke the name low.
“Go well.”
The final farewell was not for the eight-year-old boy crouched beneath my feet.
It was a perfect rite of parting—toward the phantom of that terrible raging beast who had burned my comrades to death in fire and finally torn apart beneath my hands.
Shriek—!
Two death cries that split the void in a cross pattern.
The black beast, without even uttering a final cry, tore into four pieces of flesh suspended in air with perfect precision.
The remnants of Mana that could not hold form turned to blackened ash before touching the ground and scattered into the darkness of the Altar.
What scattered across the floor was not blood.
Only the unpleasant hiss of corrupted Mana fragments evaporating filled the silence.
My feet descended soundlessly onto the deep blue floor of the Altar.
I bent my knees slightly to absorb the impact, then straightened, gently shook the blade clean of Black Iron, steadied my breathing, and surveyed the surrounding waves.
The parasite of the soul had been completely erased.
In the real world, only a few minutes would have passed at most.
The fact that Airi’s urgent warnings or alerts were not ringing in my mind meant that the external situation was clearly being maintained safely under Bae Hyeon-gyeom’s control.
“U… Uncle!”
A trembling voice sounded from behind.
When I turned, the eight-year-old boy crouched on the floor was struggling with all his might to stand, staggering.
Tear streaks ran long down his cheeks, and his small hands, pressed against the floor, trembled like aspen leaves.
“It’s over now.”
I drew back the Black Iron and answered briefly.
The boy put strength into his legs to stand but his knees buckled at once, and he sank back to the floor with a soft thud.
Every muscle in his body shook like poplar leaves.
It could have been the release of tension before the massive monster, or it could have been the sudden relaxation of the Spirit that came from the black curse chains that had tightly constricted his soul for decades since his birth suddenly evaporating in an instant.
“Th… Thank you! Thank you…!”
The boy abandoned all attempt to stand and threw himself down on his knees on the ground, bowing his waist repeatedly toward me.
“Really, truly thank you……”
A small crown of hair bobbing, as if about to strike the earth with his forehead.
Watching that sight, a corner of my chest chilled and went cold.
The image of a blind old man in the doorway of a dilapidated apartment, striking his forehead against cold concrete, weeping for me to save his grandson, overlapped before me.
That old man, the only blood relation of Hong Tae-hwa whom I had killed.
“That’s enough. Let’s go back.”
“Thank you so much for saving me, Uncle… I’ll never forget this as long as I live!”
“Stop.”
My voice, unaware, had hardened into something sharp and brittle as it escaped.
That pure oath that he would never forget stabbed at my eardrums with cutting clarity.
The boy’s clear eyes lying face-down on the floor tried to look up at me, but I turned my chin and avoided that gaze.
‘Admit it, Kim Do-jin.’
My mind had reached a perfect conclusion.
This frail scrap of life weeping beneath my feet is not the raging beast Hong Tae-hwa who turned my comrades to ash.
But still.
I was not yet ready to fully accept the people of this world into my own.
The burning smell of my comrades that lingered at the tip of my nose was far too vivid to cover the grudge of the past and gently stroke that creature’s hair.
I am merely a phantom and a stranger who fled from a world of the past where everything has been destroyed.
I cast my gaze into empty space and closed the door of consciousness.
“Airi. I’m leaving.”
The deep blue floor of the Altar shattered into pieces and scattered in an instant.
The space before my eyes broke apart like shattered glass, and the perfect void withdrew.
My consciousness hurtled back into the rough gravity and flesh that trembled with the smell of blood at terrifying speed.
***
“Nothing out of the ordinary.”
I opened my eyes.
Acrid dust clawed at my nostrils; the stench of monster blood and Awakened Hunters scattered across the floor filled my lungs in harsh waves.
The stillness of the Mental World I’d just inhabited gave way to the Incubation-type Gate’s characteristic heaviness—a thick, humid air that pressed against my skin.
As consciousness returned, I checked the watch on my wrist. Exactly five minutes and twelve seconds had elapsed in real time.
Behind me loomed the shadow of an enormous Wyvern Ragus.
And circling it, a bronzed man was shaking blood from his frame—having reduced the surrounding radius of several dozen meters to a wasteland.
During the time I’d spent inside the Altar, Bae Hyeon-gyeom had constructed a perfect defensive perimeter, not allowing so much as a rat to breach my radius.
Beneath his massive axe lay the tattered corpses of those presumed to be assassins sent by the Gate Sect.
“Entry! Move in!”
At that moment, a rough shout erupted from the Incubation-type Gate’s entrance, accompanied by the thunder of footsteps.
I turned my gaze toward the plaza’s entrance.
Dozens of heavily armed Hunters were pouring in, their Auras blazing.
Emblazoned on the pauldrons and chest plates of their armor was a familiar insignia—a goddess wielding massive swords in both hands.
One of Korea’s top three guilds. The Guardians.
An elite subjugation unit of the Guardians, operating under the command of Deputy Guild Master Choi Seon-a.
She, who had maintained a cooperative stance toward the Hunter Association and the Ability Management Division, had coordinated covertly with Team Leader Kim Dae-han to deploy forces.
“Root out anyone in hiding! Stay sharp. There could be enemies hoarding Mana among them!”
“Identify the wounded and apprehend any surviving enemies immediately!”
At the command of the towering Hunter leading the vanguard, the Guardians’ forces dispersed in perfect unison, beginning their sweep for stragglers.
The metallic footfalls of reinforced-suit operatives shattered the silence within the Gate.
But that wasn’t all. Behind the Guardians’ Hunters, a small contingent dressed in black tactical gear was also rapidly entering the Gate.
Elite personnel dispatched from the Gate Management Bureau Force Division. Unlike the Hunters, they moved without sound, seizing control of the space with precision.
The Force Division operatives didn’t scatter—instead, they converged directly around Bae Hyeon-gyeom, then began rapid debris retrieval and perimeter fortification in response to his hand signals.
The City Ability Management Team, the Guardians Guild, and the Management Bureau Force Division.
Three gears that should have been utterly incompatible were now meshing together perfectly.
It was a sight that would have been impossible in the previous world.
Unlike them—those who had each pursued their own interests and walked the path to Destruction—these people now moved toward a single, shared objective.
After roughly assessing the situation, I slowly turned my gaze downward to my feet.
…….
Hong Tae-hwa’s fingers, lying unconscious on the ground, twitched faintly.
Soon his eyelids began to flutter, and he drew a deep breath of the murky air before his eyes snapped open.
“Where… where is this…”
He tried to push himself up, his cracked lips moving weakly.
But the shock his soul had endured fed back into his body—he stifled a groan and sank back to the ground.
His unfocused pupils darted across the carnage around him and the Hunters now descending upon the plaza.
The bloodshot, frenzied gleam of madness that had possessed his eyes moments before was gone.
In their place: trembling, fragile eyes full of fear and confusion—the eyes of a nineteen-year-old high school student.
“What… what happened to me… why did I……”
Hong Tae-hwa stared at his own hands, trembling violently.
As the Berserker’s curse that had clung to his soul was torn away, the recent memories he’d forged while consumed by that beast were fragmenting into chaos.
His mind’s defense mechanisms were blocking the impact his brain couldn’t process.
I took a slow step toward Hong Tae-hwa sprawled on the ground.
My shadow fell thick across his face.
Salvation had ended.
Still, perfect confirmation was necessary.
I had learned in the end of my previous life, bone-deep, that a second mistake means death.
I lowered my voice to a pitch that would reach only Hong Tae-hwa’s ears, cutting through the surrounding noise of clashing weapons and hurried footsteps.
“For the divine.”
The moment my voice reached him, Hong Tae-hwa’s wavering pupils fixed on me.
“…Pardon?”
I spoke directly to his face with crystalline clarity.
“Radiate light.”

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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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