He didn't hesitate. He didn't even check on Yuno's breathing. Lencar instantly raised his hand, channeling a massive surge of mana into his silver spatial ring.
He ripped a hole right back to the exact coordinates he had just left.
In the ruined dining hall, Charmy was halfway through her transformation. She was already a foot taller, her dark hair lengthening, her magical pressure crushing the debris around her into fine, white powder. The terrified royal chefs huddled behind their overturned carts were weeping openly, unable to even breathe under the crushing weight of her aura.
A dark purple vortex snapped open directly in the air behind her elongating form.
Lencar stepped through the portal with explosive, terrifying speed. He didn't bother with a dramatic entrance or a warning. He needed to shut her down before the dwarven heritage fully locked into her conscious mind and rewrote her immediate personality.
He channeled a highly concentrated burst of Wind Magic into his legs to cross the remaining three feet in a microsecond. He raised his right hand, flattening his palm into a rigid, weaponized blade. He augmented the physical strike with a precise, microscopic layer of kinetic force—enough to bypass the dense, swirling defensive aura protecting her neck, but carefully calculated to avoid breaking her spine.
Lencar brought the side of his hand down in a brutal, lightning-fast chop directly against the back of Charmy's neck.
The impact landed with a dull, heavy thud that echoed sharply over the roaring flames outside.
The physical trauma, combined with the sudden, violent disruption of her nervous system, instantly short-circuited the transformation sequence. The massive, consuming aura of Meal Magic sputtered and died like a snuffed candle in a hurricane.
Charmy's eyes rolled back in her head. She let out a soft, confused exhale, feeling herself rapidly losing consciousness. The physical elongation reversed in an instant, her body snapping back to its small, round, childlike proportions as the dwarven genetics retreated violently into dormancy.
She went completely limp, pitching forward toward the shattered marble.
Lencar caught her by the collar of her Black Bull robe before she could hit the ground. He let out a harsh, strained breath behind his mask, the adrenaline slowly receding from his veins. That had been entirely too close. A few seconds later, and he would have had to engage her in a full-scale magical brawl that would have undoubtedly leveled the entire city block.
He gently lowered the unconscious, lightly snoring girl back onto the massive, fluffy cotton cushion she had created earlier.
Lencar turned his head, his gaze sweeping over the ruined dining hall. The royal chefs were still hiding behind their carts, shivering in absolute terror. They hadn't fully processed what had just happened. To their mundane eyes, the terrifying masked man had vanished, the little girl had started turning into a towering demon of pure shadow, and then the masked man had reappeared from thin air to knock her out before vanishing the demon entirely.
He needed to wipe their perception of this event immediately. He could not afford witnesses describing the Forged Heretic engaging with a Black Bull member and stopping a demonic transformation.
Lencar raised his left hand, his fingers glowing with the iridescent, shifting light of Illusion Magic. He cast a wide, heavy blanket of sensory manipulation over the entire room, targeting the fragile, panicked minds of the cowering chefs.
He wove a false narrative directly into their immediate sight and their current perception. To the chefs, they had just woken up after Charmy beat Catherine... The masked man had never reappeared after fighting Charmy seemingly being frightened of her. Instead, their altered minds saw Charmy simply throwing a massive, exhausting tantrum over her lost food, crying and screaming until she completely tired herself out and fell asleep on her cotton bed. He masked his own physical presence entirely, bending the light and sound around him so that he was nothing more than empty space and falling dust. So seeing that their saviour had fallen asleep after crying for food, the head chef decided to go make food for her.
While the illusion wasn't perfect and if someone like Marx Francois were to examine them it would be easy to get exposed but that was all he could do for now. As for directly killing them Lencar couldn't bring himself to do it and Lencar believed that after today he didn't need to be so restrained and worry about being exposed given his current strength and the strength he will soon have. After thinking things through Lencar returned his attention to the unconscious girl.
Her grimoire had fallen to the floor when she passed out. It was a thick, slightly worn book, radiating the soft, familiar white mana of Cotton Magic.
Lencar crouched down beside the cotton cushion. He reached into his dark cloak and pulled out his own grimoire, the heavy brown leather binding feeling cold and familiar in his grasp.
He picked up Charmy's grimoire from the marble debris. He placed his own grimoire directly on top of hers, the two magical vessels pressing against each other.
This was the moment. He had already harvested Catherine's Ash Magic today. And now the opportunity to acquire the unique, hybrid magic of a dwarf was infront of him.
Lencar closed his eyes beneath the wooden mask. He pushed his mana into the connection, forcing his absolute will into the fabric of the books.
Replication Magic: Absolute Replication.
The reaction was immediate. Charmy's grimoire began to tremble violently beneath his own. It didn't resist with the toxic, screeching desperation that Catherine's book had shown. Instead, it felt like it was simply yielding, dissolving under the sheer weight of his authority. The physical pages and the thick leather cover broke apart into thousands of brilliant, glowing specks of pure white light.
The specks of light swirled upward like fireflies, pulled directly into the binding of Lencar's grimoire. They sank into the brown leather, absorbed completely, leaving absolutely nothing behind on the floor.
The physical world vanished.
Lencar felt the familiar, violent wrench at the base of his skull, and the chaotic noise of the burning capital was instantly replaced by the profound, absolute silence of the Soul Realm.
He opened his eyes. He was floating in the infinite, swirling expanse of silver mist. He looked down at his own form, seeing the translucent, pale blue, heavily scarred projection of his true physical body. The massive gravity of the numerous soul gems he had already collected hummed steadily within his chest, a constellation of stolen power that generated an aura of terrifying spiritual dominance.
He looked forward, searching the mist for his target.
Charmy's soul form was suspended in the void a few yards away.
Lencar drifted closer, his mind immediately picking apart the structure of her spirit. It was unlike anything he had seen before, fundamentally different from the human mages and the decaying witch he had harvested earlier.
Normal human souls were generally singular in their nature, radiating one specific elemental frequency. Even those rare individuals with dual affinities usually had those affinities blended into a single, cohesive spiritual core, like two rivers merging into one.
Charmy's soul was entirely different. It was a perfect, distinct binary system.
Her spiritual form looked exactly like her small, physical body, sleeping peacefully in the mist. But hovering within her translucent chest were two entirely separate, distinct soul gems, sharing the space but never touching.
Lencar stopped a few feet away, observing the gems with deep, fascination.