Unbound Magic Swordsman - Chapter 30

WeTried Translations

Translator/Editor: Mordor

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◈ Unbound Magic Swordsman ◈

Chapter 30: Overwhelming Defeat

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The ogre’s remaining arm blocked out the sky.

The beast’s final struggle, raising its massive log club.

A devastating downward blow meant to crush the earth.

But Lucian did not retreat.

Instead, he lifted his chin to face it head-on, coldly staring down the impending lethal blow.

Combat instinct, pre-reading, carved into his body through dozens of battles.

From the subtle contraction in the beast’s shoulder muscles just before the attack erupted to the club’s trajectory and angle of descent, everything lodged in his mind with horrifying clarity, as though he were looking into frozen time.

The instant the club fell like lightning.

Lucian explosively condensed mana into a single point on the sole of his left foot.

Flash Step.

This was not a straightforward retreat. It was an irregular leap that tore through space along a forward diagonal.

Booom!

The club grazed Lucian’s ear and smashed into the muddy ground.

The earth screamed and split apart, but the meaningless violence had struck only an empty afterimage.

Riding Flash Step’s bizarre trajectory, Lucian slipped into the ogre’s right blind spot.

With one knee destroyed and its upper body collapsing, the four-meter monster’s thick neck was now perfectly level with Lucian’s shoulders.

Lucian poured the mana from his dantian into the right hand gripping the Silvermoon Grass longsword.

This was not a partial concentration limited to the sword tip.

He coated the entire blade in mana of uniform, heavy density, then layered savage heat over it.

Fire Blade.

At the same time, he drew mana into his empty left hand.

A fist-sized crimson flame flared up.

The simultaneous use of sword and magic.

Thk!

The silver longsword in his right hand pierced the side of the ogre’s neck.

Its living armor was hard as rock, but the side of its neck was soft tissue, its defenses as weak as a joint’s.

The Silvermoon Grass blade, its mana conductivity pushed to the limit, spewed heat and melted through the beast’s thick hide.

The blade reached its thick carotid artery.

At the same time, Lucian’s left hand shot toward the ogre’s face.

Fwoosh!

A fierce, meter-long flame precisely swallowed the ogre’s eyes and nose.

A merciless incineration that lasted five seconds.

“Graaaargh!”

The ogre screamed in the agony of being burned by hellfire, robbed of its sight.

Blinded, the beast wildly flailed its remaining arm through the air, but it could not touch a single hair on Lucian’s head.

Lucian did not pull the sword from its neck.

Instead, he gripped the hilt and twisted it mercilessly.

Riiip!

The heated blade shredded the beast’s thick carotid artery beyond recognition.

Dark-red blood sprayed upward like a fountain.

Without mercy, Lucian savagely pulled the sword sideways.

More than half of the ogre’s thick neck was sliced through.

This monster had none of a troll’s grotesque regenerative power.

Thud.

The enormous body, its life completely spent, finally collapsed to the ground.

A heavy tremor echoed through the entire forest.

The moment the apex predator that had raged as though it would crush everything was reduced to a cold lump of meat.

In the blood-reeking forest, Lucian stepped back, breathing harshly.

Then.

A tidal wave of experience poured in, tearing through the blood vessels across his body.

Its overwhelming mass was beyond comparison with the experience he had gained when he stopped the troll’s heart.

Its aura, its vitality, was relatively faint, but it contained an absurdly dense physical essence that more than made up for it.

The ogre was a physical monster that stood at the top of the ecosystem through pure strength and mass, not magical mystery.

The price of overcoming and devouring that ultimate force was imprinted directly into Lucian’s muscle fibers and neural network.

Like gaining poison resistance after slaughtering venomous snakes, killing the pinnacle of physical strength had honed his body’s durability, reflexes, and destructive strength another layer.

Skin as hard as stone, monstrous strength that could break a towering tree, and the vitality to rage even with fatal wounds.

The beast’s lingering essence was tempering Lucian’s body into a weapon of slaughter.

He had grown stronger.

He had not yet reached the threshold of the fourth leap that would stop his heart, but he had taken the surest and heaviest step toward that enormous wall.

More than anything, the greatest spoils left by this desperate battle were the incomplete theories that had circled in his mind. Through blood-splattered combat, they had been proven as weapons of death.

Irregular movement using terrain, the lethal power of Mana Edge at the sword tip, and the destructive force of simultaneous use with both hands.

Flash Step’s evolution was especially remarkable.

At first, his joints had screamed because he could not overcome the inertia of landing. But beneath the extreme pressure of the beast’s raining club strikes, his body had found the optimal trajectory on its own.

That forward-diagonal leap in the final exchange, evading the club while entering the enemy’s blind spot, was a sensation that could only be forged in the cold tension of real combat.

Lucian stood in the blood-soaked mud before the abandoned mine, steadying his ragged breath.

The overwhelming physical experience pouring from the ogre’s huge corpse swirled madly through his veins.

His muscle fibers were forcibly torn apart and rejoined, grotesquely increasing in density, while his bone density was being remade closer to that of steel.

A biological evolution wholly different from mana’s expansion, transcending the limits of his species.

Just as he clenched and opened his fist to gauge the strength now dwelling in his grip.

Thump.

The ground trembled faintly.

Lucian narrowed his eyes.

It was not postmortem rigidity or an aftershock from the four-meter monster that had just fallen.

Thump. Thump. Thump!

Heavy footsteps, closing the distance at regular intervals and yet with horrifying speed.

They came from the south, from the second ogre’s hiding place, where the information said there was a cave below the cliff.

‘Two kilometers away. Simultaneous activity unconfirmed.’

Ernst’s information could not have been wrong.

Ogres, with their strong territorial instincts, did not intrude on another’s territory.

But an exceptional variable had arisen.

The first ogre’s dying scream of pain, its roar that shook the earth, and the thick bloody stench filling the clearing before the abandoned mine.

Those explosive stimuli had gouged at the wildness of the second apex predator sleeping two kilometers away.

This was not a territorial dispute. It was a predator’s march, coming to claim the enormous lump of meat, the corpse, left behind by the fallen ruler of the forest.

But Lucian did not hide.

There was no reason to run.

The savage strength and durability he had torn from the first ogre boiled like lava in his veins.

The ideal training material for adapting to this expanded body’s performance was walking toward him on its own.

Tearing through the darkness of the forest, the second disaster revealed itself.

It was similar in height to the first, but its muscles were shaped differently.

Unlike the first, whose body had swollen like a mountain, this one was a compressed giant with muscles twisted grotesquely like ropes.

Its skin was also dark brownish-black, camouflage that made even its outline difficult to distinguish in the darkness.

Most threatening of all was the weapon in its hand.

It was no wooden club.

Held in its huge right hand was a long, heavy steel H-beam, the sort dwarves might once have used while mining the abandoned mine.

It had been left in the forest for decades and was red with rust, but its overwhelming mass and sharp edges made it a weapon that would tear apart anything it touched.

The dark brown ogre stopped the instant it entered the abandoned mine clearing.

Its bloodshot yellow eyes swept over the corpse of its kin, whose neck had been half severed, then the blood-soaked human standing beside it.

“Grrrrr...”

A low vibration boiled from the beast’s throat.

It was wary.

It instinctively felt threatened by the cold, predatory killing intent it sensed from the small insect that had cut down one of its own.

But that wariness was soon swallowed by an ogre’s characteristic savage hunger and arrogance.

“Graaaargh!”

The second ogre raised its steel beam high and roared. The air seemed to tear apart.

It kicked off the ground.

It was clearly faster than the first.

The acceleration released by its compressed muscles was so agile that it was hard to believe it came from a four-meter giant.

Only three steps.

In those three steps, the beast erased twenty paces and brought its several-hundred-kilogram steel beam down like lightning toward Lucian’s crown.

It was an attack Lucian of the past would have answered by deploying Flash Step and fleeing to its blind spot.

But this time was different.

He did not evade.

This was an opportunity to test his evolved strength and bone durability.

He planted both feet firmly into the ground and raised the Silvermoon Grass longsword at an angle.

He drew the mana in his dantian to its limit, explosively coating the entire blade, while circulating mana through his leg muscles and spine to harden his body like steel.

The utmost enhancement of his body.

Claaang!

The steel beam collided head-on with the mana-clad Silvermoon Grass blade.

With a rupturing sound that tore at his eardrums, the muddy ground beneath Lucian’s feet cracked like a spiderweb and sank.

The violence of overwhelming mass.

But Lucian did not kneel.

In the past, the impact would have shattered the bones in both arms holding the sword and ruptured his organs.

But the breakthrough beyond the limits of physical force he had gained by devouring the first ogre endured that terrible impact.

His muscle fibers screamed but did not tear, and his spine shook but did not collapse.

‘I can block it.’

A cruel curve crossed Lucian’s lips.

As the beast faltered at having its steel beam blocked, Lucian twisted his wrist at a bizarre angle.

The Silvermoon Grass longsword slid along the steel beam’s surface, scattering sparks.

Screeech!

Using the recoil of the force pushing him back, Lucian sprang his upper body upward and compressed mana at the sword tip to its extreme.

Mana Edge.

A sharp silver arc slashed horizontally across the ogre’s huge chest.

Slash!

The dark brown, rock-hard hide tore open, and dark-red blood sprayed from the thick muscles beneath.

“Guh!”

The ogre let out a beastly cry and staggered far back.

A one-meter gash remained across its chest.

It was not fatal, but it was clear proof that its absolute living armor had been breached.

When facing the first one, Lucian had only barely managed to pierce its skin by targeting a blind spot. Now, his mana output and physical strength had synchronized enough to carve through it with a frontal slash alone.

The ogre’s eyes went mad with killing intent at the sight of its own blood.

It began unleashing a frenzied barrage with not only its right hand holding the steel beam, but also its empty left hand.

Steel tore through the air, and enormous fists crushed the ground.

A physical disaster raging like a storm.

But Lucian’s eyes were as calm as a frozen lake.

It was a beast pattern he had already faced once.

No, his combat instinct had become far sharper, seeing through every one of its trajectories.

The minute contraction of its shoulder muscles, the direction of its gaze, the shift of weight at its toes.

Everything broke apart frame by frame and lodged in Lucian’s mind.

Lucian drifted through the beast’s violence as though dancing.

When the steel beam swept in sideways, he detonated mana beneath his left foot and activated Flash Step.

There had been a delay on landing in the first battle, but not now.

Fwoosh!

Leaving only an afterimage, Lucian slipped into the beast’s right blind spot and immediately swung his sword upward, deeply cutting the hamstring behind its right thigh.

“Argh!”

Its stance collapsed, and the steel beam’s trajectory went wide.

Seizing that opening, Lucian gathered mana into his left hand.

This was not a simple release of flame.

With his mana control now at its limit, he sharply compressed the shape of the fire.

Flame Projection.

Boom!

A red flame shot straight forward and exploded directly in the ogre’s face.

One meter of range. Heat pushed to its limit.

Its eyes and the mucous membrane inside its nostrils burned white, filling the air with the disgusting stench of roasting flesh.

“Graaaargh!”

Blinded and overwhelmed by agony, the second ogre lost all sense of direction and began to thrash in place, swinging the steel beam like a windmill.

The final madness of a beast determined to grind up everything that approached.

But Lucian had no reason to rush against a beast that had lost its reason.

Maintaining a safe distance, he drew the Ironwood Composite Bow from his back.

The initiative in this hunt had already passed completely to Lucian.

All that remained was the finishing blow.

He nocked the remaining Wyvern bone-tipped arrow and transferred the sensation of Mana Edge that had wrapped his blade directly to the arrowhead.

The arrowhead gleamed fiercely with silver light.

He precisely aimed at the ogre’s neck, at the area around the Adam’s apple where its hide was thinnest, as it swung steel madly after losing its sight.

He steadied his breathing and airflow, controlling his entire body.

He released the bowstring.

Twang!

The mana-coated arrow flew into the center of the frenzy with a chilling whistle.

Passing through the narrow gaps in the swinging steel beam, the arrow struck the ogre’s thick Adam’s apple.

Crack!

The Wyvern bone-tipped arrow, carrying Mana Edge’s destructive force, tore through the beast’s tough neck skin and pierced its windpipe.

“Ghk, gurgle...!”

The ogre’s vocal cords were destroyed in the middle of its terrible scream, leaving only the sound of escaping air.

The huge arm gripping the steel beam stopped in midair.

That momentary pause.

Lucian was already rushing beneath the beast’s chin.