The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 92

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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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92
Artificial and Echo
***
“So Gates… could be made by humans.”
The weighty hypothesis that slipped from Kim Dae-han’s lips scattered across the ashen sky of the empty Colosseum. His tone was less a question than a grim certainty.
Instead of answering, I ran my thumb across the surface of the canned beer I held in my hand. Minute beads of moisture clung to the cold metal.
Water droplets melted by the warmth of my palm trickled down my wrist and dampened my sleeve, but I paid no attention. I lifted my gaze and swept it across the outer wall of the massive arena.
Dae-han’s conjecture aligned perfectly with the provisional conclusion I had already drawn. Rather, it could not help but align.
The sense of wrongness this space emanated could not by any means be explained by natural mana discharge.
“I believe so as well.”
My voice fell dry and heavy, sinking into the dirt floor of the arena.
Kim Dae-han was, before anything else, one of the Hunter Association’s most skilled Barrier Magic practitioners—and an investigator for the Ability Management Team.
A man who had spent his hunting career facing thousands upon thousands of Gate entrances, sealing the twisted gaps of other dimensions with his own hands.
The dissonance his sensitive mana-sense had felt when he touched the walls of this Hatching-type Gate and cast his barrier magic would have been far more instinctive and immediate than the logical data I had reasoned out.
The artificial pattern of the barrier he had shown me when he visited my hospital room after the Donggureung Gate conquest.
Back then, it was merely one possibility among many. But here, standing at the heart of this massively engineered arena, things were different.
“This is no naturally occurring rupture. There’s no mana shockwave, no irregular turbulence born from a dimension tearing itself apart.”
Kim Dae-han gave the canned beer in his hand a light shake. The sloshing liquid’s vibration struck the can’s metal walls, the sound ringing through the quiet space.
“It’s far too clean. From the mana confluence points of this vast space to the ashen clouds at the ceiling—everything is as if it were stamped from a giant factory press without a single deviation. Even the channels through which mana flows are engineered with the precision of a circuit board. This is not evolution or mutation. This is design.”
He was right. The entire space before me was like one enormous artificial cube.
Natural Gates, where monsters’ ecosystems flourish, ought to possess a “chaotic vitality”—and yet this place was stripped entirely of it.
In its place lay only suffocating order and repetitive patterns.
“I’m certain. The Hatching-type Gate is no accident.”
If that were true, then only one question of paramount importance remained: who had carried out this impossible construction?
“Is there… someone capable of such a thing?”
I brought the can to my lips and asked. Lukewarm beer slid down my throat, but the thirst would not pass.
Kim Dae-han did not answer. Instead, he flicked a broken stone fragment that lay at his feet across the arena floor with the toe of his shoe.
The dry scrape of stone dragging through parched earth echoed hollowly through the empty arena.
“No one.”
He pushed his glasses up with one finger, laughing bitterly. Behind the lenses, his eyes mingled exhaustion with shock.
“To ignore the laws of space and cut out a new dimension—that transcends magic and ability alike. It’s the realm of divinity itself. At least, within the scope of everything we’ve known so far.”
A hand arrogant enough to invoke godhood and mold dimension itself.
The scattered clues all pointed to one name: the Gate Cult.
Their proclamations of “a new world’s arrival” had not been mere fanatic delusion—this colossal artificial construction was their proof.
I crushed the can, crumpling it in my grip. The twisted aluminum rang sharp against my eardrums.
***
I stepped through the rippling dimensional gateway and into the cold night air of reality.
A brief vertigo seized me, as if my senses had been inverted.
As I emerged from the stagnant mana pressure inside the Gate, the sharp metallic stench of blood and dust that had assailed my nostrils gave way to winter’s biting wind and the smell of exhaust filling my lungs.
The scene was chaos.
Around the cordoned-off Gate entrance, dozens of police vehicles and Guardians Guild transport trucks tore through the night’s darkness with their flashing emergency lights.
The remnants of the Hong Blood Alliance, dragged from the arena like dried fish by elite Guardians Guild Hunters, were being transferred in orderly fashion to the awaiting vehicles of a specialized unit devoted to Awakened One custody.
Their wrists were bound with Electronic Handcuffs that glowed blue, suppressing their mana.
There was no resistance.
The Hong Blood Alliance’s arena dominance, which had once driven the streets into terror, had long since been completely crushed and shattered within the arena itself.
Not even anger remained in their eyes—only the primal fear and despair that comes from confronting overwhelming force.
The Gate Management Bureau’s mobile units and their black vans had already left the scene and were nowhere to be seen.
Cleaning up after Jung Chan-hyun’s assassination alone would be enough to bury Ryu Kang-jin’s desk under mountains of paperwork.
Now with the addition of Hong Tae-hwa’s custody as a key witness to the Mana Choker, the Bureau’s hounds would have no rest for some time.
As a result, I had acquired a rather substantial promissory note that I could call in from Ryu Kang-jin, a man of considerable weight.
“Do-jin! Kim Do-jin!!”
Just as I was about to move forward while tracking the transport vehicles’ movements, a familiar voice cut through the night air from a distance.
“Yeah?”
I stopped and turned my head.
Beyond the collapsed factory wall, a heavily built man covered in dust was charging toward me like a bear, carrying an enormous circular shield in each hand.
A man in worn training clothes with heavy Guardians Guild plate armor layered over top.
It was Lee Sung-chan.
My classmate from the Hunter exam who had silently weathered the Mirror Golem’s assault while wielding two shields.
I had never encountered him before the regression, yet in this twisted world, fate had tangled our threads in subtle ways.
I had expected him to receive love calls from major guilds given his exceptional qualities as a tank, but I hadn’t anticipated he would join the Guardians Guild, known for their conservative, defense-oriented tactics.
“Do-jin! Man, it’s been forever. I never thought I’d run into you here!”
Lee Sung-chan approached with ragged breathing, thrusting out his hand eagerly. Dried blood from villains still clung to his gloves in dark red streaks.
I pulled my hand from my trouser pocket and grasped his large palm, callused hard from wielding a shield.
The heat transmitted through my palm spoke of the intense battle he’d just endured.
“Good to see you well.”
“Do-jin, I can barely recognize you. I mean, we literally ran the test grounds together just a while back, and now your whole presence is completely different.”
Lee Sung-chan scanned my face and body alternately, managing only repeated exclamations of surprise before the words dried up.
“You’ve changed quite a bit yourself.”
I noted the formal insignia of the Guardians Guild draped across his shoulder, and the countless blade marks gouged across the face of his shield.
Savage traces of real combat born from head-on collisions with sharp weapons—they were like medals of honor, proof he’d stood as a shield for his comrades at the front lines of countless battles.
“No, no, I’m completely green, just starting out. Your news comes through the guild channels and the news every single day, Do-jin. You’re really something. This operation too.”
Lee Sung-chan’s voice began climbing higher and higher. It was a phenomenon that hunters fresh from blood-soaked battlefields invariably experienced.
Adrenaline boiled over inside him, beyond his control, and he desperately needed to confirm through conversation that he’d just survived.
“You were so fast I couldn’t even see you. They just dropped out of thin air, and… honestly, I couldn’t believe you were human.”
He continued talking in an excited voice, even making empty swings with his shield in the air.
“I’m truly honored to have fought alongside you in this operation. If you hadn’t cut a path through, our team would’ve been in real trouble.”
“Without the Guardians’ defensive line, the remnants would’ve scattered in all directions. We fought together.”
“Still the same, aren’t you?” He laughed heartily. “I just held the rear formation during this operation, provided support from behind. You did all the actual killing, didn’t you?”
Lee Sung-chan’s booming laughter suddenly, almost imperceptibly, faded. The thick knuckles of his hand gripping the shield clenched tightly.
I caught the faint tremor in his fingers through the gloves.
“Fighting awakened villain hunters head-to-head on this scale inside a Gate… honestly, this was my first time.”
His gaze turned toward the muddy water pooled at his feet. Streetlight wavered precariously across his shadowed face.
“It felt strange. Instead of slashing through monsters, breaking human bones and… fighting the life of someone who looks just like me. It was worse than I thought. It doesn’t sit right.”
Lee Sung-chan’s rough confession.
I understood the weight of the words he’d spoken.
Even if they were vicious criminals who’d claimed dozens or hundreds of lives, severing the breath of a human who spoke the same language as me and shared similar feelings—that was something else entirely.
That cold sensation left a stubborn residue in the mind, utterly different from mechanically destroying a monster’s core.
No matter how steeled a tank’s mentality, on the day they first shed human blood, they need an emergency outlet to process the collision between revulsion and adrenaline.
If that unpleasant sensation isn’t voiced to someone, the residue clings to the deepest chamber of the heart and festers.
“…It’s like that at first.”
I barely parted my lips.
Then I turned my head and raised my hand briefly toward Kim Dae-han, the team lead who was directing cleanup operations near the transport vehicles.
Kim Dae-han, whose eyes met mine, raised his eyebrows—a silent rebuke about chitchat in the middle of work. I paid it no mind.
I closed my extended fingers and formed a cross shape with both index fingers.
Kim Dae-han hesitated for a moment, then looked over Lee Sung-chan standing beside me, and silently nodded.
He pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, placed one between his lips, and leaned his back against the police cordon tape.
“Sung-chan.”
I adjusted the Black Iron slung across my back and turned my gaze back to Lee Sung-chan.
“Let’s walk.”
Following the perimeter cordon, Lee Sung-chan spent ten minutes pouring out a real flood of thoughts.
The terrible vibration that traveled up his wrist when he shattered a human’s bones with his shield.
It was a resistance entirely different from striking a monster’s hide—unpleasant and soft, he said.
He added that he’d seen his own reflection in the eyes of an assassin who was coughing blood and begging for mercy, and he’d looked like a monster to himself.
Even a shallow fear and doubt about whether he was doing the right thing, or if he’d simply become a butcher wielding a shield.
I matched his pace and simply listened in silence.
I didn’t offer shallow comfort like “those guys deserved to die” or “more people would’ve died if you weren’t there.”
I knew that offering some cheap moral justification would only poison the wound.
What he needed now wasn’t the right answer, but a vessel to contain this nauseating sensation that was churning inside him.
As I listened to Lee Sung-chan’s disjointed confession, my gaze remained fixed on the ashen smoke of the night sky.
A distant memory from the past flashed through my mind.
The day I first crossed the line of fire as an awakened one, the first battlefield where I drove a blade into the heart of villains instead of monsters.
I was no different from Lee Sung-chan in that moment.
Returning to the guild lodge without washing away the stench of blood, I couldn’t handle the boiling excitement and the revulsion I couldn’t put into words—I could only pour out endless speech to someone.
Back then, I had Kang Tae-yoon as a solid mentor standing before me.
He didn’t stop my grim accounts of slaughter or my disjointed confessions. He didn’t scold me for being noisy, didn’t offer performative sympathy.
He simply sat in silence, poking at the embers, and listened to my voice all the way through across the dancing flames.
That dry, weighty attention alone was enough—miraculously—to settle the anxiety that I’d crossed a line and the raging adrenaline into stillness.
I’m not imitating that past mentor of mine in front of Lee Sung-chan now.
I simply know that for a hunter killing for the first time, that unpleasant sensation is entirely natural, and that standing quietly provides just a small enough outlet for him to expel that stubborn revulsion and breathe.
When that outlet closes, a person either falls apart or becomes something truly devoid of feeling—a real monster.
That was all there was to it.
***
“……Ah. Really, I’ve been rambling on without any sense, haven’t I? I’m sorry, Do-jin. You must be exhausted, and here I am, dragging you into all this.”
Lee Sung-chan, who had been speaking at length, finally exhaled a deep, ragged breath that had been lodged in his chest, and smiled sheepishly.
The precarious tremor that had lingered in his eyes began to fade.
The bloodshot, overheated frequency that had radiated from him when he first lunged toward me had now settled into a far calmer, more solid tension.
“Not at all.”
I checked my wristwatch and came to a halt. The promised ten minutes were nearly up.
“The Guardians Guild’s shield was flawless today. Because they held the line, I was able to swing my sword without worrying about what was happening behind me. You’ve done your part, Sung-chan. Go back and get some proper rest.”
“Thank you! Really……it puts my mind at ease. Next time, next time I hope we meet again! Do-jin!”
Lee Sung-chan adjusted his shield and bowed deeply, bending at the waist in a perfect ninety-degree angle.
With a far lighter expression on his face, he bounded away like a bear toward where the Guardians Guild’s return vehicles were lined up.
In his receding figure, I no longer sensed the trembling from before.
I watched his silhouette disappear completely into the darkness, then turned my steps toward the Ability Management Team’s SUV on the opposite side.
The massive hatching-type Gate catastrophe that had plunged D City into terror had, for now, come to an end. But I knew this was not the conclusion.
An artificially created Gate, and the traces of the Hong Blood Alliance and the cult that had lurked within it. We had only just reached the prelude to an enormous storm.
In the emergency command tent, I changed out of clothes caked with blood and dust, then settled into the passenger seat of Kim Dae-han’s SUV.
As my body sank into the leather seat, the dull fatigue that had been building in my muscles came crashing over me like a wave.
The stale scent of aged leather emanating from the seat mingled with the sharp reek of Kim Dae-han’s cigarettes, assaulting my nostrils.
“You seem to have more connections than I’d have thought. I was curious how you’d managed to win over the tactical division, but to be so close with the Guardians Guild as well——”
Kim Dae-han opened the driver’s door and climbed in, tossing out the remark casually.
He’d apparently been observing with interest my prolonged private conversation with the Guardians Guild’s vanguard hunter.
In his eyes lay a curiosity, as though he were trying to confirm once more the depths beneath the surface of who I was.
“More than you have, certainly.”
At my reply, Kim Dae-han pressed his head against the steering wheel and let out a low chuckle. The laughter echoed through the cramped interior of the car.
“I’ll concede that point. I have a habit of making enemies on all sides. An investigator’s fate is to have more adversaries than friends, isn’t it?”
Kim Dae-han, about to press the engine start button, withdrew his hand and pulled his smartphone from his pocket instead.
He unlocked the display and turned the holographic screen toward me.
The artificial light pouring from the screen bleached the darkened interior of the car with a pale glow.
“Exactly as you said……it’s blown up properly. Now even the brass upstairs will be forced to move their heavy backsides. If they pretended not to notice at this scale, they’d be accomplices themselves.”
A cascade of news alerts from a portal site flooded into my field of view from the passenger seat.
His method of seeding events and then observing their ripple effects—a flawless embodiment of my tactical advice, executed with Kim Dae-han’s characteristic precision and speed.
-[Breaking] Hatching-type Gate Completely Subdued. Who Was the True Hero Behind the Prevention of Mass Casualties?
-[Exclusive] Hong Blood Alliance’s Korean Branch Core Forces Arrested in Mass Sweep
The headlines were consuming the real-time search rankings, blinking frantically like a fever.
The rotten bureaucrats at the Gate Management Bureau and the Hunter Association who had tried to bury or minimize the incident could no longer contain or suppress the truth once public opinion exploded across the entire nation like this.
The assassination of Jung Chan-hyun, the arrest of the Hong Blood Alliance, and even questions about the existence of the Gate Cult—all suspicions had been forcibly dragged into the glare of public scrutiny.
Truth was no longer a secret hidden in darkness, but an ugly wound exposed beneath the sun.
People would feel fear, but that fear would become a blade turned against those in power, condemning their negligence. It was, in every sense, a perfect flashpoint.
I withdrew my gaze from the screen and buried myself deep into the backrest. The lights of the cordoned-off perimeter visible through the window grew progressively distant.
“Let’s go.”
With my brief command, the SUV’s engine snarled to life with a bestial, low growl.
The vehicle glided smoothly past the barrier and flowed into the bloodstream of the darkened city.

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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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