The storm raging across the Thunder-Crag Peaks didn't care about victory, nor did it possess the capacity to mourn defeat. It simply roared on, a chaotic force of nature entirely indifferent to the fact that a twelve-foot crystal titan had just been systematically dismantled by human hands. The rain was freezing, slashing down in sheets that felt less like water and more like liquid ice. It pelted against Lencar's exposed skin, mixing with the heavy layer of sweat, pulverized crystal dust, and dried grime that coated his battered body.
Lencar stood over the unconscious, entirely broken form of Mars. His chest was heaving, drawing in greedy, ragged breaths of the thin, ozone-rich mountain air. The terrifying, borderline-manic adrenaline that had sustained him through the brutal close-quarters combat was finally draining away, bleeding out of his system and leaving behind a hollow, aching exhaustion that settled deep into the very marrow of his bones.
He brought a heavy, leaden hand up to his face, his fingers trembling slightly—a physical manifestation of his crashing nervous system—as he touched the splintered wood of his mask. His head was pounding. It wasn't a normal headache, the kind born of dehydration or stress. This was a rhythmic, blinding throb centered directly behind his eyes, pulsing in time with his racing heartbeat. It felt as though his brain, swollen with unnatural energies, was actively trying to resize itself inside the cage of his skull.
"Damn," Lencar hissed, his breath hissing sharply through his teeth as he winced. A sudden, sharp spike of pain shot down his neck, radiating out across his shoulders like a web of hot needles.
It felt like a metaphysical hangover, a brutal consequence of playing god with his own biology. By intentionally inverting his mana flow and forcing his forged body to become a living, breathing vacuum for the anti-magic, he had essentially told his own natural, biological mana to shut up, sit down, and cease existing. It was a violation of his body's natural state.
Now that the anti-magic skin was gone, his natural, highly refined Stage 3 mana was violently rushing back into his empty meridians, desperately trying to reclaim its lost territory. But the pathways weren't clean. They were coated in the dark, corrosive residue of the void. The collision of his natural life force with the lingering anti-magic was agonizing. It was like mixing oil and water in a pressurized, sealed container and shaking it violently. The friction was burning him from the inside out.
He forced himself to look down at Mars. The Diamond General was out cold, lying motionless in a shallow puddle of freezing rainwater, his chest rising and falling with shallow, erratic breaths. Without his towering crystal armor, he looked terrifyingly small. He looked like exactly what he was: a traumatized teenager drafted into a war he didn't understand. He wasn't going anywhere.
"I need to recover first," Lencar thought to himself, his internal voice lacking its usual crisp, analytical edge. Right now, he just sounded tired. "If I try to pull off high-level attribute magic in this state, my pathways will rupture."
He tapped the heavy silver ring on his left index finger.
"[Spatial Magic]: [Void Vault] - Entry."
The electrified air warped around him, bending and folding inward like a crushed piece of paper. A rift of pure, absolute blackness tore open in the storm, and Lencar stepped through the threshold without hesitation.
The roaring, deafening wind and the biting, freezing rain vanished instantly, cut off the moment the spatial rift snapped shut behind him. The chaotic symphony of the mountain was replaced by the absolute, serene, ringing silence of his pocket dimension.
The space within the Void Vault was vast and seemingly boundless, bathed in a soft, shadowless white light. It was a sanctuary of his own making, filled with towering wooden shelves holding the spoils of his second life. There were racks of stolen weapons, crates of rare potions, stacks of purloined grimoires, and neat, organized rows of survival supplies he had hoarded over the years.
But Lencar didn't so much as glance at the treasures. He walked slowly, his boots leaving faint, wet footprints on the pristine floor, straight to the absolute center of the vault.
There, a simple, elegant pedestal of polished white marble stood. Resting atop it, glowing with a soft, bioluminescent inner light, was a jagged green crystal the size of a large melon—the Breath of Yggdrasil.
It pulsed with a slow, rhythmic light, like a sleeping heart. It emitted a localized atmosphere of mana so profoundly pure, so incredibly dense and rich with life force, that just standing near it felt like taking a deep breath in an ancient, untouched forest immediately after a heavy spring rain.
"Okay," Lencar whispered to himself, the sound of his own voice strangely loud in the absolute silence of the vault. "Recovery time."
He dropped to his knees before the pedestal. He didn't bother stripping off his ruined, soaked tunic. He just reached out, placing both of his trembling, bruised hands flat against the smooth, warm surface of the green crystal.
He didn't draw mana from it aggressively. He didn't try to siphon it like a leech, the way he did with ambient mana during combat. He simply surrendered to it. He closed his eyes, slowed his ragged breathing, and opened his magical pores, allowing the Quintessence—that hyper-refined, impossibly high-grade natural life force—to wash over him.
It was absolute ecstasy.
The pure green energy flowed into his palms, traveling up his forearms in a wave of soothing, tingling warmth. It crested over his tense shoulders and flooded into his chest cavity, wrapping around his straining heart. It immediately chased away the deep, biting cold of the mountain storm that had settled into his bones. It sought out the micro-tears in his muscle fibers caused by his brutal physical exertion, sealing them, knitting the tissues back together with an influx of hyper-accelerated cellular regeneration.
But most importantly, the Quintessence flushed the toxic, buzzing "static" from his brain. The dark, corrosive anti-magic residue, which had felt like handfuls of abrasive grit thrown into the delicate, spinning gears of his body, was systematically washed away. The overwhelming, undeniable vitality of the Yggdrasil mana simply overrode the negation, purging his meridians until his natural blue-white mana flowed smoothly once more.
Lencar let out a long, shuddering sigh. The rigid, defensive tension melted out of his spine, and his broad shoulders drooped.
He opened his eyes and looked down at his hands, pulling them away from the crystal. They looked entirely normal. They were scarred, heavily calloused from sword training, and currently bruised across the knuckles, but they were just human hands.
Yet, for a brief, terrifying window of time during the fight on the plateau, they had been the hands of an absolute destroyer.
Lencar stared at his palms, a deep frown creasing his face behind the cracked wood of his mask. He remembered the feeling of driving his anti-magic coated fist through Mars's impenetrable crystal armor. He remembered the visceral, sickening crunch of shattering the Titan's knee.
But worse than the violence was the emotion that had accompanied it. He had enjoyed it. He had felt a dark, pulsing thrill of absolute supremacy while breaking Mars. He had looked at the abject terror in the Diamond General's eyes and felt a sadistic, hungry satisfaction that was entirely foreign to his normal, calculatedly pragmatic mindset.
"That might be the effect of the anti-magic itself," Lencar murmured to the empty vault, running a damp, bruised hand through his wet hair.
He realized now that anti-magic wasn't just a physical phenomenon that erased spells. It had a spiritual weight. It was born of deep, festering hatred and boundless despair. By pulling it into his own body, by forcing his biology to harbor it, he wasn't just using a weapon; he was letting a parasite hitch a ride on his consciousness.
"I have to be incredibly careful with this," Lencar warned himself, his voice tight with genuine apprehension. "It's corrosive to the soul as much as the body. If I rely on that power too much, if I let that void expand inside me, I might forget how to be myself. I might lose the Kenji Tanaka part of me entirely and become nothing but the Heretic."
His mind, ever desperate to analyze and categorize anomalies, immediately pivoted to the only other person in existence who utilized this power. He thought about Asta.
Why doesn't it corrupt Asta? Lencar pondered, staring blankly at the glowing green crystal. He wields those swords every day. He eventually coats his entire body in the stuff during his Devil Union.
"It might be because of Liebe," Lencar thought to himself, putting the puzzle pieces of his meta-knowledge together. "Asta forms a symbiotic contract with the devil of anti-magic. Liebe acts as a filter, a conscious buffer between the raw, hateful energy and Asta's human soul. Or... maybe it's precisely because of that magic-less body of his."
Lencar considered his own agonizing experience of inverting his mana. Asta doesn't have mana. He has an empty cup. When you pour anti-magic into an empty cup, it just sits there. But I have a cup overflowing with dense, Stage 3 mana. When I pull anti-magic inside, it's a constant, violent war of attrition. There is massive spiritual friction. Asta is the perfect, frictionless vessel for it. I am trying to shove a square peg into a round, highly pressurized hole.
The realization was sobering. He could use the anti-magic, yes, but only in short, desperate bursts. It was a trump card that damaged the deck every time it was played. He will have to focus on asta to understand the effects of anti magic better.
He sat there on the white floor for a full ten minutes, letting the soothing, rhythmic pulse of the Quintessence do its work. Slowly, his massive mana reserves topped off, glowing bright and clean within his core. The blinding headache faded away entirely, reducing to a dull, easily ignorable background buzz. His body felt light again, the heavy, unnatural density of his gravity-forged muscles humming with a restored, vibrant readiness.