"Fire Magic: Ignis Columna," Lencar chanted silently in his mind, drawing upon the devastating, hyper-concentrated flames he had learned from Leopold Vermillion's spell display in the capital and refined through his own massive capacity.
A roaring, blinding pillar of white-hot fire erupted from Lencar's palm.
It wasn't a sprawling wave of generic flames; it was a highly compressed, laser-focused column of sheer, incinerating heat that shot forward like a physical spear.
The pillar of fire slammed directly into the center of the giant charging cotton sheep.
The collision didn't result in an explosion of force. It resulted in absolute, instantaneous combustion. The moment the white-hot flames touched the hyper-condensed magical cotton, the entire massive construct simply ignited. The giant sheep didn't even have time to finish its charge; it was entirely consumed by the roaring inferno in a fraction of a second, turning from a terrifying kinetic weapon into a harmless, floating cloud of black soot and burning embers that rained down over the ruined dining hall.
Charmy gasped, her large eyes widening in shock. The heat rolling off the masked man's hand was staggering, forcing her to take a step back and shield her face from the sudden flash of light.
Her ultimate defensive strike had been vaporized effortlessly, without the man even breaking his slow, menacing stride.
Before Charmy could recover from the shock, before she could flip the pages of her grimoire to summon a secondary attack, Lencar shifted his tactical approach entirely.
He was out of time. The longer he stayed in this exposed tower, the higher the risk of another operative finding them. He needed the boy now.
Lencar dropped the fire magic and instantly channeled a completely different attribute into his legs.
"Wind Magic: Gale Step."
The heavy, slow, menacing approach vanished. Lencar's physical body blurred, propelled forward by a hyper-concentrated, localized sonic boom of wind magic at his heels. The sheer speed of the movement was entirely unnatural for a man of his size wearing a heavy cloak.
He crossed the remaining distance in less than the blink of an eye.
Charmy only saw a dark blur rush past her left shoulder. The wind generated by his movement whipped her dark hair wildly around her face and spun her entirely around.
By the time she realized what had happened, Lencar was already standing over the cotton cushion. He reached down, his large, gloved hand gripping the heavy fabric of Yuno's pristine Golden Dawn collar.
Without pausing for even a microsecond, Lencar channeled his mana into his silver ring one final time.
"Spatial Magic: Void Displacement."
A dark purple portal snapped open in the air directly beneath Yuno's unconscious body and Lencar's boots. The spatial gravity engaged instantly, violent and absolute.
To Charmy, standing just a few feet away, the sequence of events was entirely incomprehensible. One second, the terrifying masked man had blasted past her. The next second, a flash of purple light illuminated the ruined dining hall, accompanied by a sharp, vacuum-like popping sound.
She blinked, the smoke and soot settling around her.
She looked at the massive, fluffy cotton cushion she had created.
It was completely, absolutely empty.
The strange, masked man in the black cloak was gone. And worse, infinitely worse the tall, handsome, golden-eyed boy who had saved her pastries and slept in her lap was gone with him.
Charmy stood frozen in the center of the ruined room, her small hands balled into tight fists at her sides. The shock of the sudden disappearance quickly faded, replaced by a massive, bubbling, volcanic eruption of anger.
The dark, demonic aura returned to her small frame, completely overshadowing the heat of the fires outside. The shadows under her eyes grew so dark they looked like ink.
Someone had taken her food. She had fought them. But now, someone had taken something even more precious.
"You..." Charmy growled, her voice dropping into a terrifying, guttural snarl that made the remaining royal chefs scramble even further backward in sheer terror. She stomped her tiny foot hard enough to crack the marble tiles beneath her.
"GIVE ME BACK MY PRINCE OF MEALS!" Charmy screamed at the top of her lungs, her voice echoing violently through the shattered stone tower, shaking the very foundations of the building.
The scream shook the very foundations of the shattered stone tower.
Charmy Pappitson stood in the center of the ruined dining hall, her small hands balled into tight, trembling fists. The dark, demonic aura that had previously flared up to threaten Catherine the witch did not just return; it magnified, expanding into a suffocating, heavy pressure that cracked the remaining marble tiles beneath her boots.
Her Prince of Meals had been stolen. Right out from under her nose.
The pure rage of a Black Bull denied their prize boiled over. But this was not ordinary rage, and Charmy was not an ordinary human. Deep within her genetic code, a dormant, ancient lineage responded to the sheer spike of emotional and magical stress.
The air around her warped, bending light as the ambient pressure skyrocketed. The shadows under her eyes turned pitch black, bleeding into her expression until she looked less like a hungry girl and more like an awakened deity of gluttony.
And then, her physical body began to change.
The small, round, childlike proportions of her limbs began to stretch. She was growing taller. The fabric of her dark robe tightened as her shoulders broadened, her silhouette elongating into the form of a mature, dangerously powerful woman. The ambient mana in the room shifted from the soft, fluffy nature of cotton into something vastly denser, something that felt like a gaping, bottomless maw ready to consume the world.
A few miles away, Lencar had just stepped out of his spatial portal into a secure, abandoned cellar he had marked earlier in the day. He deposited the unconscious Yuno onto the dusty floor, fully intending to leave the boy there and return to his observation post to monitor the rest of the invasion.
But the moment his boots hit the ground, Lencar's hyper-refined sensory web screamed in warning.
He felt the massive, unnatural spike of mana erupting from the tower he had just left. He felt the conceptual shift from Cotton Magic to something entirely different—something ancient, hungry, and impossibly heavy.
Lencar's eyes widened beneath his featureless wooden mask. His pupils constricted into sharp pinpricks of genuine alarm.
He knew the lore of this world better than anyone. He knew exactly what was happening in that tower. Charmy was a dwarf-human hybrid. Her secondary magic attribute, Meal Magic, was awakening prematurely, triggered by extreme emotional distress and the perceived theft of her "Prince." If she fully transformed in the middle of the Royal Capital right now, in a state of blind rage, she would consume everything in her path. She would level the entire noble district looking for Yuno, and her monstrous, uncontrollable mana signature would draw every single remaining Magic Knight, and potentially the Eye of the Midnight Sun elites, directly to that location. Even that Patolli guy would be attracted to her.
It was a massive, timeline-breaking variable that he could not allow to happen.
"Shit. Damn it," Lencar cursed out loud, his distorted voice harsh and urgent in the quiet cellar.