SUPREME ARCH-MAGUS - Chapter 1040 - 1040: The Hunter!

A group of disciples surrounded Kent.

Their eyes… their eyes were not the eyes of rival disciples. They were the eyes of hired blades, sharpened by greed.

“Quite the welcome,” Kent murmured, his voice light, almost amused.

One of them stepped forward, a broad-shouldered youth with a tiger emblem across his chest. “Kent King,” he said, voice low but trembling with the thrill of the hunt. “You’ve made enemies in the wrong places. The house that backs me offered a year’s worth of mana cores for your head. Others here…” He gestured around, and the remaining disciples tightened their circle. “…were promised more than that. Some were offered weapons forged by divine hands.”

A wiry man with a scarred cheek smirked. “All you have to do is die here. Clean, simple. You don’t even get the honor of facing the beasts.”

The circle tightened further, boots crunching on the wet roots, hands gripping hilts.

Kent tilted his head. “So the gamblers are spending lives to make their bets safe.” His tone carried no fear, only a faint disappointment, like a teacher whose students had just failed a simple lesson.

They took his stillness as hesitation. That was their first mistake.

The second came when the scarred man lunged forward, blade flashing for Kent’s neck with a Sword dash spell.

Kent’s right hand moved.

The Heavenly Sword slid from its sheath like moonlight spilling across the world. Its silver-white edge seemed to drink in the faint light that filtered through the forest canopy. As the first strike came, Kent’s lips moved in a whisper — a mantra old enough to make the forest itself shiver.

“Heavenly slaughter of Sea God… Raising the Tidal Wave!”

The sword spun in his grip. Once. Twice. Then a full, sweeping arc traced a perfect circle around him.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then —

SHHHK!

The air itself split, a ring of pure, condensed mana erupting outward like a rippling tide. It passed through bodies as though they were paper. No scream had time to leave their throats before the world tilted — and heads, arms, and weapons fell in clean pieces to the forest floor.

Even the treasures and weapons got cut down.

Blood sprayed in an almost graceful arc, painting the damp roots red. The few who had been further back staggered, eyes wide in horror at the precision of the kill.

The tiger-emblem youth stumbled back two steps, raising his weapon in panic. “H-He’s—”

He never finished.

Kent’s sword barely shifted, but from its edge shot a thread of light — not flame, not lightning, but a compressed shard of heavenly will. It crossed the space between them in less than a breath. When it struck, the youth’s body seized, his eyes bulged… and then his chest burst open in a silent spray of crimson mist.

The survivors — what few there were — realized the truth too late.

They had not surrounded prey. They had walked willingly into the den of a predator they could never hope to understand.

“Run—!” someone screamed, but the word was shredded by the roar of Kent’s second spell.

But death followed them like a moving curse.

When the last body hit the ground, the forest was silent again.

Kent exhaled slowly, sheathing the Heavenly Sword in a smooth motion. He didn’t glance at the corpses.

He did glance upward, knowing that through the Aurora Glasses the spectators had seen every heartbeat of that slaughter. Somewhere up there, the gamblers who had paid for his death were now grinding their teeth, their profits bleeding away with each fallen pawn.

“They’ll send more,” he murmured to himself. “They always do.”

Without another word, Kent stepped over the nearest corpse and moved deeper into the forest. Within a few strides, the mist thickened, and his silhouette vanished entirely, swallowed by the living labyrinth of roots and shadows.

—

Meanwhile…

The Thousand Fangs Forest did not waste time. Even without rival disciples, death continued in every rustle and every faint glimmer between the trees.

The beasts here were unlike those on the outside. Many bore twisted mutations from centuries of consuming one another, their hides marked by strange runes and their eyes carrying an intelligence just short of human malice.

Somewhere in the near distance, a sharp, pained cry rang out — followed by the gurgle of flesh being torn. One unlucky disciple had already met his end. Through the Aurora Glasses, the crowd gasped as the image shifted, revealing a spider-like creature the size of a carriage dragging a limp human into a hole beneath the roots.

Elsewhere, a group of three disciples tried to corner a beast shaped like a wolf, but with scales instead of fur and a mouth that split open into four serrated sections. The fight was short and bloody, and only one of them stumbled away, clutching his arm where most of the flesh was gone.

Back near the portal’s edge, the weaker disciples lingered, pretending to prepare talismans, their eyes darting constantly toward the shadows. But hesitation was its own death sentence here. The beasts were not patient creatures.

–

Somewhere far above, in the highest pavilion, Elder Zong watched Kent’s figure fade into the mist with a slight narrowing of his eyes. Beside him, a well-dressed man from the gambling syndicate leaned forward, frustration burning in his gaze.

“That boy will be bad for business.” the man muttered,

Zong said nothing, but the faintest of smirks ghosted across his lips.

Inside the forest, Kent vanished deeper into the maze of danger, the sound of distant roars blending with the first heavy drops of rain that began to fall through the thick canopy. The hunt for beast cores had begun — and somewhere in that living nightmare, the hunter who had just butchered his hunters was already choosing his next prey.

–

Inside the private gambling rooms, the owners of several competing houses slammed their fists on jade tables, their smiles of earlier greed replaced by the sour expressions.

“Trash! Utter trash!” roared Master Fang, his rings clinking as he hurled a spirit cup against the wall. “We armed them with high-grade talismans, gave them life treasures, and even promised them women, lands, and gold… and they couldn’t even land a single scratch on that brat!”

Another, the sharp-faced Mist Crane Pavilion’s owner, leaned back in his chair, his eyes narrow slits of venom. “Five of them were Peak Earth mages! What happened in there?! Did they go in to fight, or did they go in to die?!”

From the side, an elderly man with a limp spat in disgust. “Hmph! The Syndicate’s aurora glasses showed nothing but a blur and then bodies falling like chopped bamboo. No flash of desperation, no fierce resistance… just one heavenly arc, and our investments became corpses!”

The room erupted into mutterings of rage and helplessness.

A heavy silence fell before Master Fang growled, “Forget it. If we can’t kill him openly, we’ll bleed him dry through odds. Make the public believe he’s just lucky, not skilled. Raise the bait, make the fools bite harder next round. The higher he flies, the sweeter the fall.”

From another corner, someone muttered darkly, “And if the odds go too far… the Syndicate itself might move towards him.”

–

Tomorrow Bonus-Chapter will be released.