The violent storm that had battered the Thunder-Crag Peaks for hours was finally, grudgingly, surrendering to the dawn. The heavy, bruised clouds overhead—swollen to bursting with the night's fury—were beginning to tear apart at their seams. Their dark bellies shredded under the shifting atmospheric pressure, allowing thin, fragile shafts of pale, watery morning light to strike the slick obsidian plateau. The howling, banshee wind that had threatened to throw them off the mountain just hours prior had died down to a sharp, biting breeze. It merely tugged at wet clothing now, rather than threatening to rip it away entirely, and the freezing, horizontal rain had thinned into a fine, persistent mist that clung to everything it touched, turning the black volcanic rock into a deadly, frictionless mirror.
Lencar Abarame stood absolutely still, a dark, solitary silhouette against the bleeding, bruised colors of the eastern horizon. His heavy wool tunic was soaked completely through, clinging uncomfortably to his skin, aggressively leeching the core body heat he so desperately needed to conserve. Every single muscle in his body ached with a deep, throbbing exhaustion that pulsed in perfect, agonizing time with his elevated heartbeat. His knuckles, hidden beneath wet, ruined leather gloves, were wrapped in bruised, swollen purple skin from the sheer, concussive physical force required to shatter diamond-hard magical constructs with his bare hands.
Yet, despite the overwhelming, siren-call urge to simply collapse onto the wet stone, curl into a ball, and sleep for a week, his gaze remained locked, unblinking, on the unconscious Diamond General lying at his feet.
He was waiting for the boy to wake.
He had kept a thin, practically microscopic thread of sensory magic wrapped around Mars for the past twenty minutes, monitoring him with the frantic, underlying anxiety of a surgeon waiting for a patient to emerge from a high-risk, experimental operation. Through that invisible tether of mana, Lencar felt the boy's pulse steadying, shifting from the thready, weak flutter of the near-dead into the steady, powerful, rhythmic thumping of a living, breathing warrior. He listened to his breathing deepen from shallow, desperate gasps into full, lung-expanding intakes of the thin, freezing mountain air. Mars's mind was stirring, slowly but surely pulling itself up from the crushing, suffocating depths of unconsciousness.
Any second now, Lencar thought. He crossed his arms tightly over his chest, attempting to ward off the biting morning chill, though he knew the cold he felt seeping into his bones wasn't entirely environmental. It was the chill of anticipating a catastrophic failure.
Beneath the cracked, splintered wood of his mask, Lencar stared intently at Mars's pale, scarred face. He was nervous. He wouldn't admit it out loud, not to the empty mountain, and certainly not to himself if he could help it, but a tight, heavy knot of genuine apprehension was twisting violently in his gut, making him nauseous.
He had used his unique Replica Magic dozens of times over the last few weeks to forge his own expansive arsenal. He had perfectly, flawlessly copied the spellbooks of the ruthless bandits he had hunted down in the venomous badlands. He knew the mechanics of creating a synthetic grimoire inside and out. He knew how to balance the ambient mana, how to bind the ethereal pages into physical reality, and how to replicate the structural integrity of the covers so they felt like aged leather and cured mineral.
But this? This was entirely unprecedented territory.
He had never used the spell to bestow a fundamentally foreign magical attribute onto a living, breathing host. True, Mars had wielded Fire Magic previously, but that was only made possible by Morris's horrific, soul-binding Chimera Rune—the very piece of dark, geometric magic Lencar had just violently stolen. He had taken the Fire Soul Gem, tearing it from the boy's spiritual core to secure it for himself. To fix the timeline, to ensure Mars remained the tragic, dual-elemental threat required for the future battles in the Witch's Forest, Lencar had provided the boy with a newly forged synthetic grimoire.
This new book acted as a magical bridge—an invisible, highly encrypted tether allowing Mars to draw on the Fire Magic safely harbored within Lencar's own vast soul space.
In theory, it was a flawless, elegant, even merciful workaround. It provided the Diamond General with the necessary, timeline-mandated firepower without the soul-tearing, agonizing friction of holding two violently opposing elemental gems in one fragile human body.
But theory and practice rarely survive contact with each other on the battlefield, Lencar mused, a frown pulling at his lips as he watched Mars's pale fingers twitch involuntarily against the wet stone. The human body isn't just a hollow, inert tube for mana to flow through. It isn't a simple copper wire or a lifeless conduit. It is a living, breathing ecosystem. It reacts. It adapts. Or, if pushed too far... it rejects.
Mars groaned.
It was a low, gravelly, pathetic sound that scraped against the quiet morning air, heavy with pain and deep, profound disorientation. It was the sound of a boy waking up from a nightmare only to find the waking world was just as broken and merciless.
The Diamond General's eyes fluttered. His pale eyelids parted slowly, fighting against the crust of dried rain and sweat, to reveal eyes clouded with absolute, unadulterated confusion. Mars blinked rapidly against the grey, washing light of the dawn, his brow furrowing deeply as the physical pain of his shattered crystal armor and Lencar's brutal, relentless beating finally registered in his waking nervous system. Every nerve ending was screaming at him.
He let out a sharp hiss of pain, trying to sit up. His movements were incredibly sluggish, his muscles uncoordinated and trembling from severe magical exhaustion. His right hand weakly searched the wet rock beside him, an ingrained, desperate reflex seeking the comforting, familiar weight of his weapon. Instead of the hilt of a sword or the familiar mineral texture of his old grimoire, his fingertips brushed against the rough, artificially stitched leather of the synthetic grimoire Lencar had carefully placed there.
The very moment Mars made physical contact with the book, the magical tether activated.
Lencar felt it instantly. It wasn't a subtle shift; it was a sudden, sharp, violent tug deep within his own soul space. It was a distinct, demanding, greedy pull originating from the quarantined Red Soul Gem he had locked away in his internal repository. The tether was acting like a siphon, drawing the raw, unrefined thermal energy across the invisible bridge connecting the two mages.
Down on the ground, the synthetic grimoire flared to life. Its thick pages glowed violently, projecting a chaotic, swirling, localized storm of pale, structured pink light and angry, blistering, uncontrollable crimson fire.
Mars gasped, his eyes flying wide open in absolute shock.
But it wasn't a gasp of realization. It wasn't the sound of a warrior feeling the triumphant return of his stolen power. It was a gasp of pure, suffocating, unimaginable agony.
Suddenly, Mars's entire body went rigidly, terrifyingly taut. His muscles locked up so tightly they looked like they were carved from marble, the tendons in his neck straining violently against his skin. His spine arched backward so viciously that only his heavy boots and the back of his skull touched the slick obsidian plateau. His jaw unhinged, his mouth opening wide in a silent, horrifying scream; his vocal cords were completely, instantly paralyzed by the sudden, overwhelming magical and electrical shock surging through his unprepared nervous system.
"What?" Lencar whispered, his arms dropping to his sides, his rigid posture breaking. He took a cautious, instinctive step forward, his boots splashing in a shallow puddle. "No. That shouldn't be happening. The tether is insulated. I programmed the bypass perfectly..."
Then, the heat hit.
A wave of blistering, suffocating thermal energy rolled off Mars's arched body in a physical, concussive shockwave. It was a wall of pure, unmitigated heat. It was so incredibly intense it instantly vaporized the puddles of freezing rainwater in a ten-foot radius around him, instantly turning the liquid into thick, hissing, blinding clouds of white steam that smelled faintly of scorched minerals and burning ozone.
CRACK.
The sound was sharp, loud, and utterly terrifying. It didn't sound like magic. It sounded exactly like a thick log of dry, seasoned wood splitting wide open in the absolute heart of a roaring bonfire.
Lencar watched in absolute, paralyzing horror as Mars's pale skin began to literally fracture.
Glowing, molten-orange fissures, looking exactly like veins of liquid magma, spider-webbed rapidly across the boy's exposed forearms. The horrific cracks crawled up his neck like burning, parasitic vines and spread across his pale cheeks, the light from within so bright it briefly illuminated the underlying bone structure of his skull. It was as if a massive, uncontrollable, industrial furnace had been ignited deep beneath his flesh, and his fragile human body was desperately, hopelessly struggling to contain the expanding inferno.
Flames—real, tangible, roaring red flames that consumed the oxygen in the air—erupted directly from the glowing cracks in his skin, licking greedily at the freezing morning mist.
Mars finally found his voice. He screamed.
It was a sound that made the blood in Lencar's veins run ice-cold, freezing the powerful mage in place for a long, terrible microsecond. It wasn't the defiant, angry roar of a warrior falling in a glorious battle. It wasn't a sound of anger at all. It was the high-pitched, tearing, primal, mind-shattering shriek of a cornered animal being burned alive from the inside out.
Mars began to thrash wildly on the wet stone, his back slamming against the unyielding obsidian in a desperate attempt to put out a fire that was burning beneath his epidermis. His hands, wreathed in flame, clawed desperately at his own chest, his nails tearing right through his Diamond Kingdom uniform, ripping the fabric to shreds. He was trying to physically rip off the burning clothes and the scorching flesh beneath them, driven mad by the instinct to get to the heat source and tear it out.
"Damn it! Damn it all!" Lencar cursed, his voice cracking with genuine panic. He abandoned all pretense of the cold, detached, calculating Sovereign. The grand architect of the timeline vanished, replaced entirely by a terrified young man watching a teenager burn to death because of his own hubris.
He lunged forward, his heavy boots slipping slightly on the slick, wet rock, and threw himself to his knees beside the violently convulsing, burning boy.
He realized what was happening almost instantly. His mind, forged to process variables and data at superhuman speeds, supplied the horrific, undeniable answer.