He stood up, planting his heavy boots firmly on the pristine marble floor of the Void Vault. He stretched his arms high over his head, twisting his torso until his muscles pulled taut. His spine popped satisfyingly, a cascading series of sharp cracks that echoed in the silent, white space, releasing the last lingering pockets of deep, knotted tension trapped between his vertebrae.
"Physiology restored to 98%," Lencar stated aloud, the sound of his own voice strangely flat in the infinite expanse of his pocket dimension.
He let out a slow, self-deprecating sigh right after he said it. The percentage, the clinical phrasing—it was a coping mechanism, he knew that. It was easier to treat his body like a machine with a dashboard than a living, breathing thing that had just been pushed to the absolute brink of metaphysical destruction. But right now, he felt his mind slipping effortlessly back into its analytical, objective mindset. The "Sovereign" persona was returning, taking the reins back from the exhausted him.
Yet, the mindset felt a little less rigid now, slightly more pliable. The edges of his arrogance had been tempered by the humbling realization of his own spiritual fragility. The anti-magic had been a harsh teacher. It had shown him that while he could bend the rules of this world, he could still be broken by them.
"Time to collect the prize," he murmured, shaking the lingering existential dread from his shoulders.
He walked over to one of the nearby supply shelves, his boots leaving faint, damp tracks on the white floor. He quickly stripped off his ruined, shredded, and soaked tunic. The fabric was heavy with freezing rainwater, sweat, and the pulverized crystal dust from Mars's armor. He tossed the ruined garment to the floor with a wet slap. Reaching into a neatly folded stack, he pulled on a fresh tunic from his supplies. It was a simple, practical garment made of dry, tightly woven warm wool. After the biting chill of the mountain storm and the corrosive burn of the anti-magic, the soft, dry fabric felt like an absolute, decadent luxury against his chilled skin.
He reached for the shelf again. He unbuckled the cracked, blood-stained wooden mask from his face. He stared at it for a moment—at the deep gouge where a crystal shard had nearly taken his eye, at the blood smeared across the mouth slit. He placed the ruined mask carefully on the shelf, a silent monument to surviving the Diamond General. Then, he picked up a brand new, identical one. He slid it over his face, securing the leather straps at the back of his head. The familiar, earthy scent of freshly carved pine filled his nostrils, grounding him instantly. The mask was his anchor. It was the face of the Heretic.
He was ready.
He tapped his silver ring and stepped backward, out of the vault and back into reality.
The storm greeted him with a deafening roar of thunder, as if the mountain itself was angry at his brief absence. The freezing rain immediately began to pelt his shoulders, plastering his new wool tunic to his chest within seconds. But this time, he was fortified against it. His mana pathways were clear and humming with Quintessence. The cold didn't sink into his bones; it just washed over his skin, a minor, easily ignored physical inconvenience.
He walked purposefully across the slick, black rock over to Mars. The Diamond General remained exactly where Lencar had dropped him, unconscious and sprawled on the wet obsidian, completely oblivious to the hurricane raging around him.
Lencar crouched down beside the fallen boy. He ignored Mars's scarred face and looked directly at the magical artifact lying half-submerged in a puddle next to the General's limp hand.
It was a strange, deeply unsettling book.
Lencar reached out and picked it up. As his bare fingers closed around the cover, he felt an immediate, jarring sensation travel up his arm, making his teeth ache. It felt heavy. Not just physically heavy, like holding a thick, dense brick of lead or iron, but spiritually heavy. It was as if the book itself was burdened with a terrible, agonizing weight, a concentrated mass of suffering trapped within its pages.
He held it up, inspecting the cover under the violent, strobing light of the lightning overhead.
The grimoire featured a distinct, grotesque design that offended his highly refined sense of mana. It wasn't a single book; it was quite literally two entirely different grimoires that had been violently, magically stitched together by a madman. The cover was a jarring, unnatural patchwork. The front half was largely composed of a pale, pearlescent white material, smooth to the touch and featuring intricate, precisely colored, diamond-shaped geometric patterns. This was the natural manifestation of Mars's Crystal Magic—ordered, rigid, and cold.
But running down the spine, and bleeding out like an infected wound into the back cover, was a jagged, scorched crimson leather. This material felt hot, rough, and angry to the touch. It was the Fire Magic.
Most horrifyingly, the cover proudly displayed two distinct Diamond Kingdom insignias. They didn't sit side-by-side; they overlapped, clashing in a messy, forced amalgamation that looked like a magical car crash.
"The Grimoire of the 'weapon', huh," Lencar whispered.
He traced a thumb over the thick, raised magical stitches that bound the two warring halves together. It wasn't thread; it was magical scar tissue. Through his fingertips, he could practically feel the chaotic, opposing mana signatures trapped within. He could feel the cold, structured, absolute order of the crystal trying to suppress the furious, wildly burning, chaotic fire. They were screaming at each other within the pages, a perpetual state of elemental agony.
"Morris, you absolute psychopath," Lencar muttered, a wave of genuine disgust washing over him. "You didn't just stitch their physical bodies together. You stitched their very souls into a single binding. You took two children and forced their life forces to share a single, cramped room just to see what kind of weapon would crawl out."
It was a horrific crime against the natural order of magic, a violation of the fundamental laws of existence that governed the world of Black Clover.
But Lencar Abarame was not a paladin. He was a thief, an opportunist, and a survivor. And for his current purposes, this abominable book was a goldmine of unprecedented, borderline-divine magical engineering.
He stood up, his boots splashing in the puddle. He unclipped his own grimoire from the leather harness at his hip. His book—the massive, infinitely expanding Logoless Grimoire—was a thick tome of pitch-black leather, devoid of any kingdom insignia or clover rating. It was hungry, a void waiting to be filled with the world's knowledge.
He held his black grimoire out flat in his left hand. With his right hand, he carefully placed Mars's stitched, chimera grimoire directly on top of it. The moment the two books touched, Lencar felt a strange resonance, a deep, thrumming vibration as his grimoire recognized the dense concentration of raw, unadulterated magical data resting upon it.
Lencar closed his eyes beneath his mask. He took a slow, deep breath, pulling the freezing mountain air deep into his lungs. He centered his vast, Stage 3 Peak mana pool, stilling the waters of his internal energy.
He wasn't just going to copy a fireball or a wind blade today. He wasn't just downloading a spell. He was going to copy a miracle of forbidden science. He was going to peer into the mechanics of a soul graft. It required absolute focus.
"[Replica Magic]: [Absolute Replication]."
The incantation was merely a trigger, a vocal key to unlock the door. The real work happened in the mind.
Lencar closed his eyes tight and pushed. He gathered his entire consciousness, sweeping up his thoughts, his senses, and his awareness, compressing it all into a single, incredibly dense, burning point within the center of his mind. And then, with a violent exertion of will, he forced it outward. He actively ejected himself from the confines of his physical biology.
He felt a sudden, intense wave of vertigo, so powerful it threatened to make him sick. It was a sensation exactly like tipping too far backward in a chair, that split-second of stomach-dropping panic as gravity claims you, stretched out into a slow-motion eternity.
And then, with a soundless snap, his consciousness cleanly detached from his physical synapses.
The transition was jarring. The sensation of the freezing rain pelting his shoulders vanished. The biting, howling wind ceased to exist. The sharp smell of ozone and wet rock disappeared. It all vanished in an absolute instant.
He felt infinitely lighter, entirely unburdened by the crushing gravity he had trained his body to endure. He felt colder, but it was not a physical cold that made one shiver; it was the pristine, absolute, terrifying chill of existing entirely outside the laws of thermodynamics. He had become a concept, a ghost. He felt infinitely more expansive, his awareness ballooning outward, unconfined by the skull, encompassing the entire plateau in a 360-degree sphere of pure perception.
He had stepped out of his body.
Lencar—or rather, the spectral, glowing soul form of Lencar Abarame—hovered two feet in the air over the physical scene. He possessed no solid form, no flesh, no bone. He was merely a silhouette, a shifting, undulating outline of pale, blue-white light that pulsed softly in rhythm with his own immense Stage 3 mana signature.
He looked down at his own hands. They were translucent, shimmering with spiritual energy. The torrential rain of the physical world passed completely through his spectral form without the slightest resistance, leaving no ripples.
He floated downward, looking at his own physical body.
It was an uncanny, deeply unsettling sight. His body was crouching over Mars, frozen in a state of deep, unbreakable concentration. Its eyes were closed beneath the wooden mask, its hands rigidly holding the two overlapping grimoires. His chest rose and fell with slow, autonomous breaths, but nobody was home. It looked like a discarded piece of clothing, a highly advanced biological machine temporarily put on standby. Lencar felt a profound sense of detachment from it, a weird disassociation from the identity of 'Kenji Tanaka' or 'Lencar Abarame'. In this space, he was just a mind.
But Lencar didn't have the luxury of lingering on the philosophical implications of his own existence. The spell was taxing, burning through his mana reserves even with the Quintessence sustaining his physical shell.
He shifted his spectral, featureless gaze away from himself, turning his attention to the unconscious Diamond General lying on the wet rock a few feet away.
From this ethereal vantage point, existing entirely in the metaphysical plane of the Soul Space, the universe looked completely different. He didn't see the boy's pale, scarred flesh. He didn't see the soaked Diamond Kingdom uniform, or the rain, or the residual traces of pink crystal dust scattered around him.
The physical world was stripped away, peeled back like a useless rind to reveal the fundamental, glowing architecture of existence beneath.
He saw the truth of Mars.
Most souls Lencar had observed in his brief experiments—usually birds or small forest animals—looked like neat, coherent spheres of soft, pulsing light. They were whole, simple, and complete.
But as Lencar peered into the spiritual core of the Diamond Kingdom's ultimate weapon, he didn't see a sphere.
He saw a massacre.