Lencar's highly concentrated, needle-thin probe of sensory magic navigated the complex, wet, electrical labyrinth of Mars's cerebral cortex. It was a terrifyingly delicate operation, entirely different from anything he had ever attempted. He wasn't looking at spiritual abstractions floating in a grey, metaphysical void anymore; he was mapping the literal, biological firing of neurons inside a living, breathing human being's skull.
He was desperately searching for a physical anomaly. He expected to find a malignant tumor pressing against a vital gland, or perhaps a severe physical deformity caused by the sheer, blunt-force trauma of having magic stones brutally embedded directly into the boy's flesh. Or maybe he would find a ruptured biological meridian that was catastrophically failing to regulate the overwhelming, sudden thermal energy of the newly tethered fire magic.
Instead, as his awareness slipped past the outer layers of the brain and nestled deep within the delicate, vital center, he found something worse. Wrapped tightly like a suffocating, thorny briar patch around the hippocampus and the amygdala—the very epicenters of human memory and emotional processing—he found magic.
It was a Rune.
But unlike the massive, soul-crushing, brutally geometric clamp he had previously extracted from Mars's spiritual core by brute force, this specific rune was impossibly, horrifyingly delicate. It was incredibly small, a microscopic, intricate web of mana woven directly into the actual, physical grey matter of the boy's brain with terrifying, inhuman surgical precision. It glowed with a faint, sickly, bruised purple light in his sensory vision, pulsing in a parasitic, clinging rhythm that perfectly matched the frantic beating of Mars's failing heart.
It wasn't a spell meant to be cast outward at an enemy. It was a parasite made of pure, malicious mana, designed to eat its host from the inside out.
Lencar's eyes snapped open in the physical world, his breath quickening sharply in his throat. A sudden, cold wave of disbelief, profound surprise, and deep, visceral disgust washed over him as he realized exactly what he was looking at in Mars's brain.
"Morris, you sick bastard," Lencar whispered into the freezing rain, his voice shaking with a sudden, entirely human fury that pierced through his usual detached demeanor.
He had read the manga in his past life. He knew the lore. He knew the story of Mars, the brainwashed supersoldier, the tragic antagonist forced to fight for a dying, desperate nation. He knew the Diamond Kingdom systematically suppressed the emotions of their elite mages through horrific experiments to make them perfect, unfeeling killing machines.
But reading black ink on a white page while sitting comfortably in a Tokyo apartment, and physically, magically feeling the insidious, violating magic woven like rusted barbed wire into a terrified teenager's actual, physical brain were two entirely, unimaginably different things. The reality of it was sickening.
This wasn't just harsh military conditioning. This wasn't mere psychological abuse designed to create trauma-induced dissociation. It was a literal, magical lobotomy.
Lencar forced himself to calm down, taking a deep, shuddering breath of the cold mountain air. He couldn't afford to lose focus now. He maintained his iron, burning grip on the boy's shoulders, keeping the heavy, desperate, vital flow of emerald Quintessence pouring into Mars's chest to keep him from burning to a pile of ash.
He forced his breathing to steady, squeezed his eyes shut again beneath the mask, and focused his entire analytical mind on the sickly purple rune. He had to understand its precise function, its mechanical, programmed logic, to understand exactly why it was actively killing the boy right now.
He projected his senses closer, narrowing his focus to study the chaotic flow of natural electricity in the brain surrounding the magical construct.
Every single time a specific neural pathway attempted to fire—pathways that Lencar's limited but highly pragmatic medical knowledge suggested were directly tied to long-term episodic memory and strong emotional responses—the purple rune flared with a toxic, suppressive light.
It acted like a magical tripwire. It intercepted the natural electrical signal of a memory attempting to form or be recalled, violently absorbed the kinetic energy, scrambled the underlying data, and forcefully rerouted the thought into a dead end of cold, unfeeling apathy.
It was a complete, inescapable sealing matrix. It was actively, maliciously repressing Mars's basic humanity every second of every day. It locked away the warmth of his childhood. It locked away the bone-deep, screaming trauma of the death matches in the laboratory.
And most importantly, it locked away every single memory of a girl named Fana.
Suddenly, the horrific, endless cycle of burning and healing taking place beneath Lencar's hands made perfect, terrifying sense. The pieces of the puzzle slammed together in his mind with devastating clarity.
"The fire magic," Lencar realized, his eyes widening beneath the splintered wood of his mask. "It's not just a raw elemental attribute. It's Fana's magic. It carries the lingering, undeniable emotional imprint of her soul."
When Lencar had established the synthetic grimoire's tether, allowing Mars to subconsciously draw upon the Fire Magic to defend himself against the cold, Mars's body wasn't just pulling raw, mindless thermal energy across the void. It was pulling the fundamental concept of Fana's flame.
Mars's physical body and his deeply buried, battered subconscious mind recognized that specific, familiar magic. The boy's spirit was desperately trying to welcome it, trying to embrace the lingering, phantom warmth of the only person who had ever shown him an ounce of genuine kindness in the blood-soaked slaughterhouse of his youth.
But the purple sealing rune embedded in his amygdala recognized that sudden, massive emotional spike as a catastrophic threat to its core programming. It was violently, aggressively suppressing the very memories and emotions that were absolutely, biologically required for Mars's body to harmonize with the fire magic.
The brain was literally fighting the body. The mind was actively rejecting the magic, because acknowledging the warmth of the fire meant acknowledging the existence of Fana, and acknowledging Fana meant acknowledging the horrific, mind-breaking trauma the rune was expressly designed to hide.
The resulting, massive cognitive dissonance was manifesting as physical, spontaneous combustion. The biological hardware was literally tearing itself apart because the magical software was engaged in a brutal civil war.
Lencar stared down at the pale, scarred, sweat-drenched face of the boy beneath him. The horrific cycle of burning and healing was slowing down slightly as the overwhelming volume of Quintessence saturated Mars's cells, forcibly repairing the tissue faster than the fire could destroy it. But Mars was still trapped in a torturous, burning limbo. He couldn't sustain this indefinitely. The physiological shock would eventually cause a massive cardiac arrest, and he would die.
Lencar shifted his sensory probe deeper, intending to find a way to carefully dismantle the purple matrix without lobotomizing the boy himself.
But as his perception brushed against the outer edges of the rune, a cold spike of pure dread pierced Lencar's heart.
The rune wasn't just pulsing. It was sparking.
It was already collapsing.
The intricate, microscopic purple threads woven through the grey matter were fraying violently under the strain. Whole sections of the geometric lattice were glitching, flashing erratically before fading out entirely.
Lencar realized with a grim feeling that the brutal, concussive anti-magic beatdown he had administered earlier hadn't just broken Mars's physical crystal armor—the absolute negation had sent massive spiritual shockwaves rattling through his entire nervous system. Furthermore, the violent, forceful extraction of the massive soul clamp had fundamentally destabilized Mars's internal magical pressure.
The delicate mental seal was utterly failing under the compounded strain of the battle and the tether.
Lencar was faced with a terrible, immediate dilemma.
If he simply let go, if he stopped the flow of Quintessence and let the rune collapse completely on its own, the results would be apocalyptic for the boy. Lencar imagined the consequences with chilling clarity. Mars was already enduring incomprehensible, cellular-level physical agony. If the failing seal shattered completely right now, the psychological dam would break. A decade of brutally repressed, horrific trauma, the visceral, sensory memory of murdering his best friends in cold blood, and the overwhelming, soul-crushing grief of losing Fana would flood his conscious mind in a single, unmitigated millisecond.
Combined with the ongoing physical shock of spontaneous combustion, the mental overload would completely, irrevocably shatter his psyche. Mars wouldn't wake up as a warrior. He wouldn't wake up as a general. He would wake up as a catatonic, drooling, screaming shell of a human being. It would be instant brain death via psychological overload.
Lencar couldn't let it shatter. But he couldn't leave it to burn the boy alive either.