For three long, agonizingly slow minutes, the sweeping expanse of the Thunder-Crag plateau was consumed by a silence so profound and heavy it felt more oppressive than the howling storm that had just passed. The only sounds remaining in the world were the distant, muffled rolls of retreating thunder, the soft, rhythmic patter of the freezing mist settling against the black volcanic rock, and the ragged, uneven sound of a broken boy trying to remember how to breathe.
Mars sat completely frozen on the rain-slicked obsidian. He was a terrifyingly lethal living weapon, a general who commanded armies and crushed elite Magic Knights, yet in this specific, fractured moment, he was nothing more than a lost child trapped completely in the purgatory of his own bleeding mind. His head was bowed, his broad shoulders hunched forward, and he was staring down at the single, solitary tear currently glistening on his leather-clad index finger. He looked at that tiny drop of saltwater as if it held the fundamental secrets of the universe, or perhaps the complex formula for a lethal, unknown poison. He didn't understand what it was. He didn't understand why the center of his chest felt like a collapsed star.
From his jagged, uncomfortable outcropping of rock a few yards away, Lencar Abarame watched him. He didn't move a single muscle. He didn't speak. He barely even allowed himself to breathe loudly, ensuring the slow, white plumes of his breath dissipated quietly into the morning air.
Lencar's own physical exhaustion was bone-deep and absolute. It was a heavy, leaden weight dragging at his limbs, turning his blood to sludge. His muscles screamed in protest from the sheer kinetic force he had exerted during the anti-magic beatdown, and his bruised, swollen knuckles throbbed painfully beneath his wet gloves. But despite the overwhelming biological urge to close his eyes and slip into unconsciousness, he forced himself to remain an entirely passive, silent observer.
He allowed the silence to stretch and thin until it was as taut as a drawn bowstring. He knew, with the pragmatic, terrifying certainty of a man who had just successfully rewired another human being's brain, that the newly unsealed emotions absolutely needed this crucial window of uninterrupted time. The microscopic, surgical crack he had etched into the purple sealing rune was acting exactly like a high-pressure valve, allowing decades of violently suppressed humanity, trauma, and love to slowly bleed back into the boy's conscious mind. If Lencar interrupted now—if he startled the boy, spoke a word, or triggered a defensive combat response too early—Mars's fragile psyche might violently reject the massive influx of new emotional data. The cognitive dissonance would spike, and his mind could completely shatter under the unbearable strain.
So, Lencar waited. He sat with his arms crossed tightly over his chest, the damp, freezing wool of his fresh tunic already clinging uncomfortably to his chilled skin, and he watched a child soldier experience the terrifying, completely alien concept of unadulterated grief for the very first time in his conscious memory.
It's pathetic, Lencar thought, a heavy, uncomfortable tightness settling deep into his own chest that had absolutely nothing to do with the thin mountain altitude or the biting cold. He doesn't even know how to cry. He has the physiological response, the tears are falling, but he doesn't possess the foundational contextual framework to understand why his chest feels like a hollowed-out cavern. He just knows that it hurts. Morris didn't just steal his childhood; he surgically removed the boy's basic vocabulary for human emotion.
Sitting there in the mist, Lencar's mind drifted back, recalling the distant, fading memories of his own past life in Tokyo. He remembered being Kenji Tanaka. He remembered the mundane, manageable sorrows of a completely normal existence—the sharp, embarrassing sting of a romantic breakup, the dull, hollow ache of losing a grandparent to old age, the bitter frustration of a failed project at work. Those were normal pains. They were human experiences, processed and categorized by a healthy brain.
What Mars was experiencing was fundamentally different. It was the sudden, unmitigated phantom pain of an amputated soul. He was mourning a ghost whose face he couldn't quite see, grieving a loss he wasn't allowed to understand.
But Lencar, operating with the cold, predictive logic of a timeline architect, also knew that this absolute, naked vulnerability could not, and would not, last.
The Diamond Kingdom's psychological conditioning was not a flimsy, surface-level hypnotic suggestion that could be washed away with a single tear. It was a brutal, deeply ingrained biological and spiritual survival mechanism. It was a hardened steel vault forged in the agonizing fires of magical experimentation, cemented by absolute terror, and baptized in the blood of fellow children. The human mind, especially one as battered, abused, and inherently resilient as Mars's, fundamentally abhors a vacuum. When faced with incomprehensible emotional pain, it seeks stability and structure at any cost.
Right before Lencar's eyes, a visible, chilling, and profoundly tragic shift occurred in Mars's posture.
The subtle, pathetic trembling in the boy's broad shoulders and armored hands abruptly ceased, as if a switch had been flipped. The profound, confusing, ocean-deep sorrow swirling in his wide pale eyes was violently, forcefully shoved downward. It was practically audible, a psychological slamming of a heavy iron portcullis shutting tightly inside his mind. The vulnerable, bewildered child who was mourning a ghost he couldn't even name vanished entirely in the space of a single, thumping heartbeat.
In his place, the cold, unfeeling, terrifyingly lethal Diamond General reasserted absolute, unquestioned control. The empathy died on the vine. The confusion evaporated like mist over a fire. What remained was the pure, distilled essence of a weapon of mass destruction.
It was a deeply tragic psychological transformation to witness firsthand, a horrifying testament to the sheer effectiveness of his abusive upbringing, but Lencar had to admit it was a highly functional survival tactic.
Mars moved. There was absolutely no hesitation in his limbs now. He carefully, methodically placed the heavy, synthetic grimoire down on the flat, slick surface of the wet rock beside his hip. His movements were incredibly precise, calculated, lacking any wasted kinetic energy. He planted his leather-clad hands firmly on the freezing ground and pushed his heavy frame up, rising smoothly to his feet.
As he rose, Mars paused for a fraction of a second, his tactical mind instantly registering a discrepancy in his physical state. He looked down at his own body, turning his arms over, testing the weight, the balance, and the articulation of the sleek, pale pink crystal armor he now wore. It wasn't his bulky, overwhelming, magically exhaustive Nemean Armor. It was form-fitting, incredibly light, allowing for a full range of motion, and yet it hummed with an inner density that rivaled his strongest defensive constructs.
From the shadows of his hood, Lencar watched Mars's pale eyes narrow as he processed the new armor. The boy didn't seem to actively question where the armor came from, or how it had been forged without his conscious command or the use of his grimoire. The Diamond Kingdom trained their soldiers to prioritize immediate environmental threats over lingering mysteries. The armor worked. It kept the freezing mountain air away from his skin, and it protected his vital organs. His mind simply accepted the armor as a highly functional, absolute reality of the current moment, filed the mystery away for later analysis, and moved on.
Mars stood tall to his full, imposing height, his broad chest expanding as he took a deep, calculated breath. The biting morning wind whipped across the plateau, ruffling his short, pale hair. He began to systematically, clinically scan his surroundings, his tactical awareness coming fully, violently online.
His pale eyes swept methodically past the deep, charred scorch marks burned into the obsidian, glossed over the scattered, pulverized remnants of crystal spikes from a battle he only half-remembered through a haze of pain, and tracked smoothly across the misty, grey expanse of the mountain peak.
And then, his gaze locked onto the jagged outcropping of rock a mere dozen yards away.
He saw Lencar.
The silhouette was unmistakable, burned into his subconscious. The heavy, soaking wet black cloak billowing slightly in the mountain wind. The relaxed, almost arrogantly casual posture of a man sitting cross-legged on a stone. And, most damning, most terrifying of all, the cracked, splintered wooden mask obscuring the face, with its dark, empty eye slits staring back at him with predatory calm.
The sight of that masked phantom instantly, catastrophically triggered every single combat reflex hardwired into Mars's nervous system.
The hazy, disjointed memory of the humiliating, brutal, impossible beating he had received at the hands of this man surged to the absolute forefront of his mind. He remembered the terrifying, sickening sensation of his indestructible crystal magic being casually deleted from reality. He remembered the visceral, bone-deep crunch of his own knee shattering completely beneath a black-red coated fist. He remembered the feeling of absolute, paralyzing, humiliating helplessness.
Raw fear flared in his chest, a cold spike of genuine terror. But the Diamond Kingdom conditioning instantly intercepted that fear, transmuting the panic into a lethal, overwhelming, explosive aggression.
Mars didn't speak a single word. He didn't demand to know where he was or how he had survived. He didn't ask what had happened to his body, why his armor was different, or where the loud, incredibly annoying, magic-less Clover Kingdom boy with the giant rusted sword had gone. Dialogue was an inefficient expenditure of time and oxygen when faced with a superior threat.
He attacked.
"Crystal Creation Magic: Harpe!"
The incantation was a harsh, guttural bark that tore through the quiet morning air, carrying the full weight of a General's killing intent. Mars threw his right hand forward, his fingers splayed wide, his stance widening into a perfect, aggressive locus of power.
The ambient mana resting heavily over the Thunder-Crag Peaks literally screamed in protest as it was violently, aggressively condensed by the sheer, imposing willpower of a Stage 3 mage. The moisture in the freezing mist flashed instantly into solid, deadly matter.
It wasn't just one sword. Mars wasn't taking any chances with the phantom who had broken him. A dozen massive, razor-sharp broadswords of translucent, highly condensed pink crystal materialized simultaneously in the air, forming a deadly, hovering halo around his armored body. Each blade was easily seven feet long, thick as a man's torso at the base, tapering to an edge capable of splitting steel, and humming with a lethal, heavy kinetic energy that made the very air around them violently vibrate and visually distort.
With a sharp, brutal, full-body downward thrust of his extended arm, Mars launched the entire volley. He didn't aim for a warning shot to pin the man down. He aimed the massive barrage directly at the center of Lencar's chest, a concentrated, overlapping spread designed to completely obliterate the rock outcropping and pulverize the man sitting upon it into red mist.
The crystal blades cut through the mountain mist like a salvo of heavy artillery shells. They displaced the air so violently they created a localized sonic boom, a sharp CRACK that echoed off the surrounding peaks, whistling with a terrifying, high-pitched speed that promised instant, gruesome dismemberment.
On his rock, Lencar didn't flinch.
He didn't widen his stance to brace for impact. He didn't reach down for his Logoless grimoire. He didn't even bother to uncross his arms, which remained comfortably and warmly tucked into the folds of his wet black cloak. To an outside observer, he looked exactly like a man who had fallen deeply asleep sitting up, completely and utterly unaware of the twelve tons of magically hardened, razor-sharp shrapnel hurtling toward his face at hundreds of miles per hour.
He remained seated, his posture radiating an absolute, infuriating, almost insulting level of profound boredom. He was so incredibly tired, and this display of aggression was just so utterly predictable.
The massive crystal swords tore across the slick obsidian plateau in a fraction of a second, aiming to brutally impale him against the mountain backdrop.