Lencar focused his intent, narrowing his spectral eyes. He didn't just reach out; he exerted his will.
The sheer scale of Lencar's enormous soul power flared to life in the silver mist. Unlike Catherine's hollowed-out spirit, Lencar's soul was a massive, dense constellation of terrifying gravity. Within his own spectral chest, dozens of other soul gems—harvested from bounties, rogue mages, and the Diamond Kingdom's finest—shone like captive stars, lending their collective weight to his presence. The spiritual pressure he generated was absolute, crushing the silver mist away from him in a shockwave of raw dominance.
He locked his spiritual gravity onto the bruised magenta gem embedded in the witch.
Pull.
The soul gem of Catherine reacted instantly, violently resisting the extraction. The jagged gray edges of the crystal flared with a desperate, toxic light, attempting to dig deeper into the rotting tissue of her soul. It emitted a high-pitched, screeching psychic frequency that grated against the silence of the void, struggling like a cornered, rabid animal trying to avoid a predator's jaws.
But it just couldn't withstand the soul power formed by the so many soul gems housed within Lencar. The resistance was entirely futile.
Lencar clenched his outstretched spectral fist. The sheer gravitational force of his soul ripped the bruised magenta crystal free from Catherine's crumbling spirit.
The witch's soul spasmed violently, a silent scream echoing in the mist as the core of her magic was violently amputated. Without the gem holding the rotting structure together, the fissures across her spectral form widened, shedding massive chunks of gray ash into the void.
The magenta gem floated across the distance, pulled inexorably toward Lencar's outstretched hand. As it approached, Lencar didn't just absorb it passively. He engaged the true, monstrous mechanic of his unique existence.
Replication Magic: Absolute Replication.
This was the terrifying, god-like evolution of his power. It didn't just copy the superficial spells; it fundamentally, conceptually stole the deepest essence of the target's magic attribute itself. The spells acquired this way weren't photographs; they were the raw source code. They were incredibly flexible, scaling effortlessly with his own massive mana capacity, allowing him to endlessly tweak, improve, and even synthesize entirely new spells based on the stolen attribute's fundamental logic. It was this specific ability that had allowed him to casually craft a brand-new suit of highly articulated crystal armor for Mars just hours ago.
The bruised magenta gem touched the palm of Lencar's spectral hand and melted inward.
The integration was instantaneous. A cold, dry, suffocating rush of knowledge flooded Lencar's consciousness. He felt the mechanics of the Ash Magic taking root in his own soul—the intricate geometric formulas required to drain vitality, the wide-area dispersion techniques for the gray fog, the microscopic, parasitic binding curses. He didn't just learn Catherine's spells; he owned the very concept of her magic.
With the harvest complete, the silver mist around him began to dissolve. The absolute silence of the Soul Realm fractured, replaced by the rushing, chaotic noise of the physical world.
Lencar's soul snapped back into his physical body.
He opened his eyes beneath the synthetic face mask. He was still crouching in the dark, dust-choked corridor on the second floor of the ruined tower's annex. The air tasted heavily of pulverized brick and smoke.
He looked down at the unconscious body of Catherine. She was still lying in the exact same position, a withered, broken old woman buried in the rubble. But now, she was something far more pathetic. She wasn't just unconscious; she was magically hollow. If she ever woke up, she would find that the gray ash she had relied on for decades was completely, utterly gone.
Lencar stood up, his boots crunching softly against the broken glass on the floor. He looked at the gray, smoke-patterned grimoire lying in the dirt near her wrinkled hand.
He couldn't just leave her here without a grimoire. When the Magic Knights eventually swept the building and found her, a missing grimoire would raise far too many questions. They would start looking for a thief, a third party operating in the shadows, and that kind of investigation could eventually threaten his cover. He needed to maintain the illusion that this was a standard, albeit brutal, battlefield defeat.
Lencar reached into his worn brown cloak and pulled out his own grimoire. The thick leather book opened automatically, the heavy parchment pages fluttering rapidly until it landed on a completely blank sheet near the back.
He reached down with his right hand and gripped the edge of the blank page. With a sharp, precise tug, he tore the heavy parchment completely out of the binding.
He held the blank page up in the dim light of the corridor.
Replication Magic: Reverse Replication.
This was the synthesizer. The printer. It allowed him to tear a blank page from his own grimoire, aggressively infuse it with a specific magic attribute he had stored, and physically forge a brand-new, functioning grimoire or a magical tether in the physical world. The person with this grimoire cannot harm him with their spells as the spells would stop a few inches away from him if they attack him, and he can also control the spells used by the person with this grimoire because those spells are essentially being cast through him.
Lencar channeled a fraction of the newly acquired Ash Magic, stripping away the raw power and leaving only a weak, superficial trickle of gray mana. He pushed that specific frequency directly into the torn page in his hand.
The blank parchment glowed with a dull, sickly gray light. It began to fold and multiply in his palm, the single sheet violently duplicating itself until it formed a thick stack of pages. A cover manifested, binding the pages together—a dull, ashen gray leather cover etched with swirling, smoky patterns that perfectly matched the original.
Within three seconds, Lencar held an absolutely flawless, physical replica of Catherine's grimoire.
The trap was set perfectly. If Catherine somehow survived her injuries and got captured, the Magic Knights would try to use this new book, they would find all of her old power available to her, completely unaware that every single spell she cast would be routed directly through Lencar's soul. She was no longer a threat; she was a puppet on a severed string.
With the loose ends tied, Lencar stood up straight. The Illusion Magic he had cast to hide them from the outside world shimmered and faded away at his command, leaving only the mundane reality of the ruined corridor.
He turned his gaze upward, looking through the massive, jagged hole in the ceiling that led to the royal dining hall on the floor above.
Through his highly refined sensory perception, he could feel the distinct, massive mana signatures resting just above him. One was the sharp, exhausted, incredibly dense wind mana of the Golden Dawn prodigy. The other was the strange, overwhelmingly heavy, food-obsessed aura of the tiny Black Bull.
He couldn't leave Yuno here. The boy was part of his spoils too, but was utterly defenseless after overdrawing his mana to awaken the Wind Spirit. While the tiny girl with the cotton magic was currently acting as a cushion, this tower was exposed. The Eye of the Midnight Sun operatives were still active in the city. If a spatial mage like Valtos or a brute like Rades stumbled upon the unconscious prodigy while he was dealing with Charmy, they would execute him without a second thought, completely altering the timeline and destroying a crucial piece of the Clover Kingdom's future defense.