"It's not power, Mars," Lencar said calmly.
"It's the absolute absence of it," Lencar explained, his demonic voice mocking the Diamond mage's panic. "It's the one thing your kingdom's twisted, mana-obsessed experiments couldn't prepare you for. You built a fortress to withstand magic. You forgot how to fight a man."
Mars roared in a wild, incoherent mix of fury and primal terror. The cold, calculating apathy that defined his combat style was entirely gone, shattered along with his armor. He abandoned all pretense of defense or tactical positioning.
The jagged crystals on his back flared desperately, glowing with a blinding, unstable pink light that hissed against the rain.
He unleashed a point-blank, omnidirectional barrage—hundreds of razor-sharp crystal lances shooting outward simultaneously, turning his body into a giant fragmentation grenade. It was a desperate, suicidal attack designed to impale everything in a twenty-foot radius, a move meant to create distance at any cost.
Lencar didn't even blink behind his mask. He didn't raise his arms to guard his face. He didn't brace for impact.
He simply walked forward, right through the storm of spikes.
As the lethal, high-velocity magical projectiles struck his black-red skin, they didn't pierce his flesh; they didn't even slow his momentum. They dissolved instantly upon contact, turning into wisps of black smoke as their magical mass was erased by the anti-magic residue.
He was a man taking a leisurely stroll through a light, passing breeze, completely and utterly immune to the Diamond General's ultimate desperation attack.
He stepped smoothly into the Titan's guard, ignoring the frantic, sweeping motions of Mars's remaining arm.
Lencar jumped, leaping high enough to grab the jutting edge of the Titan's massive, barrel-shaped chest plate with his left hand. As his fingers closed around the armor, the anti-magic actively ate away at the slick, impenetrable crystal, dissolving it just enough to give his grip a perfect, indented handhold. He hauled his dense, heavy body up with one arm, his face coming perfectly level with the blank, smooth crystal visor of the armor.
Inside the magical construct, suspended in the center of the mana, Mars could clearly see the cracked wooden mask mere inches from his face. He could see the absolute, terrifying calm in the single visible eye glaring at him through the splintered wood.
It wasn't the look of a rival mage analyzing a spell. It was the look of a butcher assessing a cut of meat. It was the look of an executioner.
"Your armor is a crutch," Lencar said, his demonic voice vibrating against the crystal, sending a chill straight into Mars's bones. "And I'm kicking it away."
Lencar pulled his right arm back. His mana-forged back muscles bunched beneath his wet tunic, thick, heavy, and coiled tight like industrial springs. He channeled every ounce of his physically trained strength—every push-up in the freezing snow, every boulder lifted in the high-gravity zones of the mountains—into his fist.
The black and blood-red anti-magic aura flared wildly around his knuckles, condensing into a dense, swirling sphere of negation, anticipating the impact.
He punched Mars squarely in the dead center of the chest plate—the exact, mathematically calculated spot where the core of the regeneration magic and the mana stones were housed.
BOOM.
The impact was catastrophic.
The anti-magic instantly erased the structural integrity of the complex spell matrix holding the armor together. With the magic gone, Lencar's fist acted like a heavy, kinetic bunker-busting shell driving into a pane of glass.
The entire chest plate of the Nemean Armor detonated inward. The sheer physical shockwave blew out the back of the armor, sending a massive cone of pulverized crystal blasting into the storm behind Mars, carving a trench into the rain and shattering the rock behind him.
The massive Titan construct shuddered violently, throwing its head back in a silent scream. The glowing pink light that animated it faded instantly, like a dying ember dropped in a puddle.
The immense magic holding the giant form together completely unraveled. The heavy crystals turned back into raw, uncontrolled mana and dissipated harmlessly into the freezing rain, washing away in the storm.
The towering armor fell away in heavy chunks, dissolving as it dropped, revealing the real Mars suspended inside.
The Diamond Kingdom boy hung in the air for a fraction of a second, his pale, scarred face exposed to the freezing storm. His eyes were wide with shock, the pupil blown wide. His mouth was open in a silent scream, the physical trauma of the shattered armor knocking the air completely out of his lungs.
Lencar didn't let him fall to the hard rock.
He reached out with lightning speed and grabbed Mars roughly by the collar of his Diamond Kingdom tunic with his left hand. He held the General suspended in mid-air, his feet dangling inches from the obsidian, holding him with effortless, brutal physical strength.
Mars gagged, his hands flying up to weakly grab at Lencar's thick wrist. His fingers scrabbled uselessly against the anti-magic skin.
The Diamond General—the terror of the Kiten Dungeon, the living weapon who had effortlessly crushed the Golden Dawn's elite—was completely and utterly broken. His mana was scattered, his ultimate, invincible spell destroyed by bare, anti-magic coated fists.
"You..." Mars choked out, his chest heaving as he struggled for oxygen. A thin line of bright red blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, immediately washing away in the rain. "You're a monster..."
Mars said the word not as an insult, but as a terrified realization. His eyes locked onto the glowing red slits of Lencar's mask, and the swirling, corrosive red-black mana covering the man holding him.
"Yes," Lencar replied softly.
He willed the anti-magic to recede. It was draining him too quickly anyway; the biological toll of maintaining the inversion was immense. The thick, viscous black-red aura rapidly faded away, shrinking back into his pores, revealing his wet, shivering, entirely human form beneath the freezing rain.
His chest heaved as normal air rushed back into his lungs, his normal mana circulation restarting with a painful jolt.
"I'm indeed a monster, Mars," Lencar admitted. His natural, youthful voice returned, devoid of the demonic distortion, making the words somehow even more chilling. "But I'm the monster that's going to change this continent. You're just a footnote."
Lencar pulled his right fist back one last time. Without the anti-magic, it was just a fist of flesh and bone. But flesh and bone forged in gravity and Quintessence were more than enough.
He delivered a crisp, precise, devastatingly heavy physical cross directly to Mars's exposed jaw.
The crack of bone echoed sharply over the thunder. Mars's eyes rolled back into his head instantly, the physical trauma shutting his brain down before he even registered the pain. His body went entirely limp, dangling from Lencar's grip like a broken puppet with its strings cut.
Lencar opened his hand, dropping him.
The Diamond General hit the wet obsidian plateau with a soft, pathetic splash, lying motionless in a puddle of rainwater. He was out cold, his breathing shallow but steady.
Lencar stood alone in the howling storm, looking down at his handiwork.
The adrenaline was finally leaving his system, replaced immediately by a deep, bone-weary exhaustion that made his knees tremble. His knuckles were severely bruised, the skin split and bleeding from the impact against the crystal. His breathing was ragged and heavy, his lungs burning with every inhale.
The anti-magic skin had taken a massive, terrifying toll on his physical stamina. It had burned his own cellular energy to maintain the unnatural vacuum, leaving him feeling hollowed out, nauseous, and violently ill.
But as he looked down at the unconscious, defeated weapon of the Diamond Kingdom, Lencar smiled behind his cracked, blood-stained wooden mask.
He didn't need the Demon-Dweller sword to win. He didn't need destiny, or fate, or a five-leaf grimoire chosen by a devil.
He had taken a microscopic trace of an anomaly—a mere residue of anti-magic—and forged his own body into the ultimate weapon to wield it. He had proved that his hypothesis was correct. The human body, properly conditioned, could become a vessel for the impossible.
The Heretic was ready for the war.