Lencar closed his eyes, shutting out the violent, erratic strobe of the lightning and the towering, pink-glowing monstrosity that was the Diamond Kingdom's General.
He didn't reach into the Void Vault for the Demon-Dweller Sword. The heavy, rusted hilt was right there in his dimensional pocket, waiting to be drawn, eager to consume the magic of the Titan standing before him. He knew exactly how it felt in his hand—the unbalanced weight, the greedy, sucking sensation as it drank ambient mana. But Lencar hesitated, his gloved fingers hovering over the silver ring.
The sword was a tool, yes. It was a brilliant, overpowered conduit that belonged to someone else's destiny. It was a crutch. Over the last few weeks of brutal, agonizing experimentation in the toxic, unforgiving isolation of the Venom-Haze Badlands, Lencar had discovered something terrifying about his own forged body.
He had spent months saturating his cells with foreign mana, breaking his muscles down under the crushing, unnatural gravity of the mountain peaks, and rebuilding them with the pure life force of the Quintessence. He hadn't just made himself stronger; he had fundamentally altered his biology. He had turned his cellular structure into a hyper-adaptable sponge, capable of absorbing, surviving, and integrating energies that would kill a normal human.
He was a vessel.
And right now, standing in the freezing rain of the Thunder-Crag Peaks, with the wind howling like a choir of the damned, he chose to fill that vessel with a very different kind of energy.
He reached deep within himself. He bypassed the glowing, warm, sun-like core of his normal Stage 3 mana. He pushed past the familiar, comforting currents of wind and earth he had stolen and mastered. Down in the darkest, most compressed depths of his cellular structure, buried beneath layers of carefully cultivated magic, he found it.
It was a dense, suffocating residue. It felt like a microscopic grain of black sand, cold and infinitely heavy. It was the seed he had managed to replicate from Asta's aura during that fateful day in the Hage Grimoire Tower, when the five-leaf clover had first revealed itself to the world.
He didn't just hold that dark energy; he actively manipulated his own biology to accommodate it. Lencar inverted his own mana flow.
It was an agonizing process. It felt as though his veins, accustomed to the smooth, flowing warmth of natural mana, were suddenly pumping crushed glass and battery acid. His muscles spasmed involuntarily. He gritted his teeth behind the wooden mask, a low groan escaping his throat as he created a spiritual vacuum within his core. He was forcibly pulling the dormant anti-magic outward, dragging it from the depths of his cells, forcing it through his meridians, and pushing it to the surface of his skin.
The change was visually violent.
The ambient, blue-white aura of Lencar's highly refined mana instantly vanished, snuffed out like a candle in a hurricane.
In its place, a thick, viscous skin of black and blood-red energy erupted from his pores. It didn't glow; it seemed to actively consume the light around it, drinking the illumination from the lightning strikes and leaving a localized shadow in its wake. It was an aura of absolute negation. The torrential rain that was falling in sheets on the plateau didn't splash against his shoulders; the freezing droplets simply ceased to exist the moment they touched the black-red aura, erased from reality with a faint, unsettling hiss. Even the wind seemed to divert around him, a natural instinct warning the elements to avoid the void he had become.
Lencar opened his eyes.
Through the narrow slits of his cracked wooden mask, his gaze was no longer cold and calculating. It was heavy. It was a bottomless void, reflecting the terrifying, corrosive energy that now coated his flesh. He looked down at his hands. The Black Iron Gauntlets were completely enveloped in the dark energy, the silver runes of Dominante's design silenced and smothered.
Across the wet obsidian plateau, Mars staggered backward, his massive crystalline boots scraping loudly against the stone. A sudden, violent shudder wracked the twelve-foot Titan, the pink glow of the Nemean Armor flickering wildly.
For a highly trained sensory mage like Mars, what Lencar had just done was the psychological equivalent of going completely blind and deaf in the middle of a warzone. One second, Mars could feel the boy's vibrant, irritatingly dense mana signature burning like a beacon in the storm, a clear target to be crushed. The next second, there was simply a hole in the world.
To Mars's finely tuned magical senses, Lencar Abarame no longer existed. There was no life force. There was no magical intent gathering for a spell. There was no elemental affinity to counter.
There was only a terrifying, empty void that seemed to aggressively suck the ambient mana out of the air itself, creating a sudden drop in magical pressure that made Mars's ears pop and his stomach lurch. It was the sensation of falling backward into a bottomless pit.
"What... what is this?" Mars demanded, taking another involuntary step back, his massive crystal foot cracking the obsidian.
His voice lost its monotonous, emotionless drone for the very first time. The icy apathy that defined the Diamond Kingdom's ultimate weapon cracked, replaced by the sharp, undeniable pitch of genuine confusion and rising panic.
"An artifact?" Mars yelled over the storm, desperately trying to rationalize the impossible. "You think hiding your mana with a stealth tool will save you from me? I will crush the ground you stand on!"
Mars relied heavily on his ability to sense his opponent's magical intent to predict their movements, to know precisely when they were gathering mana for a strike or reinforcing a limb for defense. It was how he fought so efficiently, calculating the exact amount of force needed to overpower an enemy spell.
Now, he was fighting someone who couldn't be sensed, but only seen with physical eyes. It violated the fundamental laws of magic he had been taught. It violated everything the Diamond Kingdom's brutal academies had beaten into him.
"Yes. It's an artifact," Lencar replied.
His voice was entirely different now. The coating of anti-magic around his throat distorted the sound waves as they left his mouth. It made his voice sound layered, deep, and demonic. The sound didn't carry on the wind; it seemed to bypass the air entirely, whispering intimately close, as if the shadow itself were speaking directly into Mars's ear over the roar of the thunder.
He lied effortlessly, his mind operating with cold, sociopathic clarity despite the agonizing burn of the anti-magic on his skin. Keep the true nature of his mutated biology a secret. Let the Diamond Kingdom—if Mars survived to report back—think it was an item. Let them waste years searching for a magical artifact that didn't exist. It would throw off their tacticians and keep the target off his own back.
Lencar dropped his martial stance. He didn't raise his hands to weave a complex spell. He didn't summon a weapon from his grimoire. He simply let his arms hang at his sides and curled his bare, anti-magic coated hands into tight, rock-solid fists.
He had spent his entire second life building his physical body through agonizing, bone-breaking gravity training and relentless mana-forging. His muscles were denser than a normal human's, packed with hyper-efficient fibers. His skeleton had been repeatedly fractured and healed with Quintessence, reinforced to withstand supernatural trauma.
Now, he was going to use it.
He pushed off the wet rock.
The result was terrifying. Without his own massive mana pool unconsciously fighting against the atmospheric pressure of the world, and with the anti-magic skin actively erasing the air resistance directly in front of him, Lencar moved at a speed that defied basic biological limits.
He didn't just run; the sudden, explosive acceleration caused a sharp sonic crack that echoed off the mountainside. He vanished from his starting point, leaving a spiderweb crater in the solid obsidian where his boots had pushed off. He bypassed the intervening fifty feet in a microsecond, appearing directly in front of the Titan's towering, crystal-plated legs.
Mars reacted purely on survival instinct. His trained mind couldn't process the speed, so his body took over. He swung his massive, building-sized crystal sword down in a blind, desperate panic, a horizontal cleave aimed to crush the exact spot where the void had just materialized.
Lencar didn't dodge. He didn't activate the Strider's Plumes to blink away. He didn't even shift his weight backward.
He planted his feet firmly on the slick stone, looking up through his cracked mask at the descending blade of pink crystal. It was a weapon of condensed magical mass that had easily shattered Klaus Lunettes's ultimate steel defense just minutes ago. It carried the kinetic force of a falling building.
Lencar raised his left arm, angling it upward, preparing to block the monumental strike with his bare forearm.
SHATTER.
There was no deafening clang of metal meeting crystal. There was no explosive, blinding shockwave of clashing magical forces that usually accompanied high-level combat.
The moment the incredibly dense, magically reinforced crystal of the Harpe blade touched the thin, viscous layer of black-red aura coating Lencar's arm, the magic binding the crystal lattice together was simply... erased.
It was a deletion of reality. Without the immense mana reinforcing its molecular structure and giving it supernatural hardness, the giant weapon instantly reverted to brittle, mundane glass.
Lencar's mana-forged bones, inherently denser and stronger than industrial steel, took the physical weight of the crumbling glass easily. He didn't even buckle. The massive sword didn't cut him; it didn't even bruise him. It shattered into a million mundane, jagged pieces against his forearm, showering over Lencar's black cloak like a harmless, sparkling snowfall of pink dust.
Mars froze.
The Titan stood completely motionless in the rain, staring down at his broken, truncated weapon in absolute, uncomprehending horror. The fundamental laws of his reality—the laws that said mana dictates power, and denser mana always wins—had just been broken by a boy standing in the rain.
"My turn," Lencar whispered.
The demonic distortion of the anti-magic made the two words sound like a death sentence pronounced by the abyss itself.
Lencar planted his boots firmly on the slick obsidian, anchoring himself. He twisted his hips violently, engaging the kinetic chain from the ground up. He transferred the rotational energy through his heavy core, up his spine, and into his shoulders. He drove his right fist forward, executing a picture-perfect, textbook martial arts cross, burying his knuckles directly into the Titan's massive, crystal-plated knee joint.
The anti-magic skin acted like a highly corrosive acid to the spell construction. The moment his knuckles made contact, the aura instantly nullified the Nemean Armor's magical durability at the microscopic point of impact. The diamond-hard crystal offered absolutely no resistance to the magical nullification; it became as soft and brittle as chalk.
But Lencar's fist offered terrifying, unadulterated physical force.
CRUNCH.
Lencar's punch blew completely through the Titan's knee.
The impact shattered the joint entirely, the raw kinetic energy sending a shockwave of pulverized crystal and dust blasting out the back of the leg. The twelve-foot golem shrieked—a horrific, grating sound of grinding minerals and stressed, dying magic.
The Titan collapsed forward, its structural integrity fatally compromised, its right leg entirely obliterated at the hinge.
Mars fell heavily, his massive crystal hands slamming onto the plateau to catch himself, shaking the earth and sending deep cracks spider-webbing across the obsidian beneath him.
"Impossible!" Mars roared, his voice cracking with a pitch that belonged to a terrified teenager, not a General. "What is this power?! Magic cannot be destroyed like this! My crystal is absolute!"