The Archmage’s Swordsmanship Is Too Strong - Chapter 95

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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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95
Chapter 95. Deleted Time
***
The transparent wings unfurled behind Airi’s back trembled violently.
In response to that vibration, silver Mana particles cascaded down like a waterfall, layering around the artifact suspended in the void.
The ominous mechanical grinding of golden gears meshing filled the quiet interior.
The red eye embedded at its core writhed grotesquely like a living creature, then began swaying wildly from side to side.
“Begin.”
The moment the words left my lips, resonance crossed its threshold.
A shriek like metal being crushed erupted from the artifact, and it shot toward my waist, defying gravity.
Just before it touched my collar, the solid golden sphere lost its physical form.
Its shape crumpled like candle wax thrown into a boiling cauldron, or like high-polymer compounds melting in scorching heat.
The liquefied artifact branched into tens of thousands of delicate crimson filaments, spreading across the void like a spider’s web.
It was neither decoration nor mechanical apparatus.
It was a grotesque form that seemed to be a cross-section of intricate human capillaries or a precisely engineered Mana neural network.
Slash—!
The crimson neural network tore through the skin of my abdomen and burrowed inside without warning.
“Ugh—!”
My teeth clamped down so hard they nearly shattered. My jaw muscles swelled abnormally, and a stifled animal’s groan leaked between my lips.
This is different. It follows a completely different trajectory from any Integration process I’ve endured before.
Before regression, I crawled across blood-soaked battlefields, etching countless SSR Grade artifacts into my flesh.
The sensation of the General’s Red Cranial Armor scraping my shoulder blade, the agony of the Ancient Dragon’s Heart burning through my veins—neither came close to this.
Physical pain from torn flesh and scraped bone I can endure. But this foreign sensation rushing through me was a vicious erosion that invaded the very realm of the soul.
The intruding crimson residues wedged between my organs and blood vessels, writhing as though alive and breathing.
Squelch. Squelch-squelch.
The wet sound of membrane twisting inside my body echoed vividly against my ears.
Pure Mana erupting from the Core in my abdomen resisted explosively, attempting to reject the invader.
But the crimson neural network, like a starving parasite, gnawed at the juncture points of my Mana and forced the assimilation process forward.
With every breath I drew, my lungs felt as though they were burning in crimson flames, and that sensation swept across my entire body.
The knuckles of both hands gripping the armrest of the chair turned white, the blood vessels nearly bursting, and my fingernails tore through the thick leather of the seat, digging deep into the flesh beneath.
“Airi—”
Cold sweat dripped down along my jawline, pooling on the floor. I glared into the void with bloodshot eyes.
[Current Integration progress: 49 percent.]
A silver butterfly circled around me, projecting the merciless figure into the air.
Halfway. Still only halfway.
Enduring this agony that twisted and wrung my organs wasn’t the problem in itself. The real problem was the extreme strain of my neural pathways burning like they were coursing with high-voltage current.
My consciousness kept flickering. Each moment the boundary between reality and hallucination blurred, control of my Core wavered.
If I lost my grip on consciousness here, the rampaging Mana would backflow and blow out my heart and brain in one stroke.
Squelch. Squeeze.
The crimson aura of the artifact, having conquered my abdomen and chest, now crawled up along the carotid artery in my neck.
The movement of blood vessels writhing like snakes beneath the skin was vivid enough to see. It crept past my right forearm and expanded its territory toward my face.
“Haa—haa—”
I brushed back my wet hair, breathing heavily. My fingertips were trembling.
“Airi, what if I—”
[Impossible.]
Before I could finish, a cold mechanical voice struck my eardrums.
[Forcibly transferring consciousness to the Altar of the Successor during artifact Integration is extremely dangerous.]
[At the moment the body loses control and the soul separates, there is a 99.8 percent probability of Mana backflow occurring.]
[The result would be complete rupture of the optic nerve and brain stem.]
An answer that saw through my intent. I swallowed saliva mixed with blood and licked my lips.
“I was just asking. Only joking.”
I said that, but my facial muscles convulsed beyond my control.
In that instant, the crimson Mana mass hovering around my jaw and cheeks twisted grotesquely in direction. It rushed forward as though it had fixed upon a single target.
“Kugh—aaaaaah!!”
With a scream, my upper body slammed onto the desk.
It was my left eye.
Tens of thousands of crimson neural filaments burrowed all the way to the deepest root of my optic nerve. Pain like my entire eyeball was being finely chewed and ground pierced my brain.
My retina blazed as though exposed to ultra-high temperature flames, and my vision flickered crimson.
In the darkness, the heavy sound of gears meshing and locking into place echoed.
[Integration of the Viewer’s Eye has been completed.]
[Artifact activated.]
***
“This makes no sense at all.”
I pressed an ice pack from the pantry freezer firmly against my left eye socket.
As the ice melted and cold water streamed down my cheek, the searing pain that made me want to pluck out my own eyeball refused to subside.
The face reflected in the mirror was ghastly. Blood vessels stood out; my complexion had gone deathly pale.
Outwardly, my iris showed no discoloration and no scars remained, but when I swept my consciousness through my body with a mage’s precision, the reality was different.
The entire Mana Circuit running through my left optic nerve and into the brainstem was grotesquely swollen. The overloaded pathways flickered with tiny sparks and radiated heat.
For a mage, the eye is an ‘input device’ that reads the world’s wavelengths and truths. The mouth is an ‘output device’ that weaves incantations to project force.
In this condition, with the input device shattered, attempting even the smallest spell would mean my left eye would quite literally burst open like a watermelon.
And yet, staring at my reflection in the glass, I drew my lips up in a crooked smile.
“Getting off easy, I’d say.”
I reached out and opened my status window.
[Current Deletion window: 0.1 seconds]
[Cooldown remaining: 24 hours]
A blue system notification cut across my vision, which was streaked with crimson afterimages.
As I pulled away the ice pack, the throbbing returned, but it was irrelevant. This level of pain was too trivial to even call a price.
If anything, I felt like a thief who’d stolen treasure from God’s own vault and made off with it.
Time.
It is an absolute domain that even those who have transcended to the 9th Circle and beyond dare not touch.
The universe is built upon the steel-hard law of Irreversibility. The arrow of time flows in only one direction.
Spilled water seeps into the ground. Burned wood becomes ash. Entropy only increases; it never returns to where it was.
At the end of my previous life, when I destroyed the World Item—the Regression Runestone—and returned ten years into the past, I believed I was erasing that hellish future and rewriting history.
But that was a grave delusion.
I had not returned to the past.
Through a tear in causality spawned by the collision between the Sword Saint Kang Tae-yoon’s sublime sacrifice and the Runestone’s power, I had slipped through that narrow gap into a parallel world where the variable ‘Kang Tae-yoon’ had been eliminated.
The original world I’d inhabited—that dimension where my comrades burned without even a scream beneath the breath of the Calamity Dragon Zephyros and the earth became ash—must have met its perfect annihilation somewhere else in the multiverse.
Even the Regression Runestone could not achieve true ‘reversal’ against the flow of time. It merely switched me to a different rail.
Time itself was hallowed ground that human Mana could never touch.
Of course, it’s possible to deceive time using the laws of relativity through magic.
Like when I layer Haste five times over and twist space within a thirty-centimeter radius.
A technique that pushes my body’s acceleration to its limit, making the external world’s frame seem frozen.
But that is me becoming ‘faster’, not the world becoming ‘slower’. No matter how hard you struggle, you cannot reverse the current of a flowing river.
Before the regression, when I spent days and nights tearing through the academy’s forbidden archives searching for the seed of time magic, I’d reached the same conclusion: impossible.
Yet this nauseating artifact that had nested in my left eye was flatly denying every law and formula.
[Current Deletion window: 0.1 seconds]
Not freezing. Not rewinding.
‘Deletion.’
A grotesque editing process—snipping out 0.1 seconds from the middle of a videotape and gluing the severed ends back together with industrial adhesive.
Not temporal reversal, not acceleration, but a miracle that excised causality itself.
My mind grasped the meaning of those words with crystalline clarity, yet the creeping wrongness that crawled down my spine would not fade.
My head churned with countless simulations of the ‘phenomena where only the result remains’—what would unfold in a world where 0.1 seconds simply ceased to exist.
[I’ve brought an eye patch, Successor.]
A silver butterfly fluttering before my vision pulled me from the abyss of thought. Airi had obtained a black leather patch from somewhere and held it in her mouth.
I had given no order. Yet she had diagnosed my condition, judged independently, and acted.
Airi’s information-processing algorithm was growing increasingly adept at mimicking the human capacity for variable response.
This was not mere performance improvement—it was an unmistakable sign that something akin to a ‘self’ was beginning to take root.
[If you wear it for about an hour, the optic nerve’s swelling should subside.]
It irritated me. An AI’s unscripted actions breaking free of my control were never pleasant for a mage to witness.
Yet I couldn’t deny that I urgently needed physical cooling to damp down the heat radiating from my swollen Mana Circuits.
“You’ve got no charm about you, do you.”
I snatched the eye patch and tossed out the words flatly.
[You’re beginning to understand Hunter Charles’s feelings, then.]
[He must have thought similar things quite often when looking at you.]
Airi’s mechanical-tinged response flew back without giving me room to mount a logical counterargument. It was a seasoned reply.
“I’m losing my mind. Now you’re developing sass.”
I clicked my tongue and wound the black patch snugly around my left eye.
The moment I secured it, a strange sensation crept across my cheek. It was not mere cloth. The inside of the patch had been coated with a thin layer of cold-aspected Mana.
It gently enfolded the raging heat of my optic nerve and soothed it.
“At least I should be able to sleep now.”
The cool touch of the blindfold eased the tension from my shoulders, and I murmured softly. Fatigue rolled in like waves.
[You have no intention of doing that, do you?]
Airi’s firm observation followed. I smiled silently.
“That’s right.”
I reached for the Black Iron Longsword I’d leaned against the desk. The weighty heft of the dark scabbard transmitted through my palm.
I slung it diagonally across my back and secured it firmly.
“The live test happens outside.”
[Are you planning to go to that mountain? According to the data, it’s an efficient training location.]
“No, that mountain won’t work. Slashing rocks or timber means nothing. I need to see firsthand how an enemy’s reaction changes when time is deleted—how that tempo breaks down. A heavy bag with no feedback is useless as a testing ground.”
I slipped on my black leather jacket. As I zipped it up fully, the tension wrapping my body sharpened into focus.
“The remnants of the Hong Blood Alliance—you said they’re on the outskirts of Paju.”
[Yes. Cross-verification based on the Gate Management Bureau officer Jung Chan-hyun’s USB database.]
[The probability that the camouflaged Gate near the Paju Abandoned Military Zone is their forward base stands at 96.4 percent.]
[But Successor, you’re not leaving right now, are you?]
“That’s right. Movement helps recovery along faster.”
[I object.]
Airi darted directly into my line of sight and threw up a cascade of red warning windows.
[Your current biorhythm and Core stability are at their worst.]
[Driving directly in this state is suicide.]
[Harming innocent civilians violates the conduct code of a government-registered Hunter.]
[Furthermore, there is currently no public transportation heading to Paju.]
An endless torrent of warning messages. My ears were burning. My sister Min-seo hadn’t harassed me like this, and neither had my ex-girlfriend.
“There’s no shortage.”
[Pardon?]
Airi’s fluttering ceased.
“There’s an excellent one out there—fast, perfect, and it doesn’t even need to wait for traffic signals.”
Airi fell silent for a moment, working through the logic of my statement.
Reading the bewilderment radiating from her at the utterly unexpected answer, I felt a peculiar sense of superiority wash over me.
No matter how much data accumulated, I still stood above this tin-can artificial intelligence.
“Summon it.”
In the deep night sky of G City, far beyond the horizon, I felt a massive surge of magical power coiling in the darkness.
“Wyvern Lagus.”

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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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