"I have to intervene," Lencar murmured, his voice a low, determined rumble over the hissing steam rising from Mars's skin. "I can't just crack it like a window. It's too fragile. If I hit it with blunt force, it shatters completely. I have to rewire the damn thing while it's running."
It required a level of intricate, microscopic magical precision he had never, ever attempted in his life. He had to use his mana like a master neurosurgeon's scalpel, operating on the delicate, firing folds of a living brain, all while simultaneously managing the massive, exhausting output of Quintessence required to keep the patient physically alive. One slipped thought, one slightly heavy-handed push of his mana, and he would scramble the boy's frontal lobe permanently.
Lencar drew a deep, shuddering breath, filling his lungs with the freezing mountain air, trying to slow his own racing heart. He aggressively compartmentalized his own exhaustion, shoving the burning ache in his muscles, the stinging of his burned hands, and the throbbing in his skull into a locked box in the back of his mind.
He didn't have years of formal education in runesmithing. He hadn't studied under the grandmasters of the Diamond Kingdom or the ancient witches of the forest. His knowledge was a patchwork quilt of desperate survival and obsession. He remembered sitting on the dusty, cold floor of the Hage Grimoire Tower, poring over ancient, crumbling texts by the light of a flickering candle when he was just a child. He remembered deciphering the crude, blood-stained journals he had looted from the corpses of rogue mages and the leaders of the Mud Dogs and the Red Hoods during his lonely months in the badlands.
It was theoretical, messy, self-taught knowledge.
But what Lencar lacked in formal, academic training, he made up for with sheer, overwhelming spiritual intuition. His soul had just violently expanded to the absolute Peak of Stage 3. His connection to the fundamental flow of mana was incredibly acute, sharper than ever before. He didn't just see the magic; he could feel the intent behind the geometry. He could feel what the purple lines were trying to do, like reading the source code of a malicious program.
He narrowed his sensory probe, condensing his vast Stage 3 mana into a microscopic, impossibly fine needle-point edge.
He carefully, agonizingly navigated past the firing neurons, dodging the electrical storms of Mars's brain, approaching the sickly purple light of the failing sealing matrix.
He didn't strike the center of the rune. That would be immediate suicide for the boy. He scanned the fraying outer edges, his mind racing to translate the geometric shapes into functional concepts.
There, Lencar thought, his physical body going completely rigid with absolute concentration. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead, stinging his eye beneath the mask.
He found a specific cluster of purple nodes situated precisely over the neural pathways governing episodic memory recall. This was the specific sector of the rune responsible for blacking out Mars's past.
Lencar brought his microscopic mana-scalpel to bear. He didn't want to destroy the suppression entirely—the boy still desperately needed the emotional dampening to survive the immediate physical trauma and retain his sanity—but he absolutely needed to release the specific bottleneck causing the lethal rejection of the fire magic.
He had to selectively unseal the horror.
Lencar applied pressure. Not brute force, but a gentle, highly technical manipulation of the mana frequencies. He pushed his own highly refined, stable blue-white mana against the fraying, glitching purple threads.
The Diamond Kingdom magic instantly resisted. It flared brightly, treating Lencar's probe like a hostile virus, attempting to repel the intrusion with a burst of static feedback that made Lencar's own teeth ache in his skull.
"Don't fight me, you piece of garbage," Lencar gritted out, holding his breath, his hands trembling on Mars's shoulders.
He held firm, increasing the pressure micro-millimeter by agonizing micro-millimeter. He began to manually untangle the purple threads. He isolated the specific neural cluster corresponding to Mars's time in the Diamond Kingdom's secret experimental facility—the horrific memories of the sterile white walls, the brutal, unrelenting training, the desperate fights for survival against other children, and, at the very center of it all, the face of a girl named Fana.
It was horrific, emotionally draining work. As Lencar uncoupled the magical threads, flashes of the suppressed memories bled into his own sensory probe. He felt the cold, hard stone of the laboratory floor. He felt the absolute, paralyzing terror of a child forced to hold a weapon for the first time. He felt the sickening, wet tear of crystal piercing flesh. He felt the overwhelming, suffocating grief of loss.
Lencar's physical hands trembled violently on Mars's shoulders, his own heart aching with the sudden, borrowed sorrow, but he forced himself to maintain the surgical precision. He couldn't look away.
He carefully, meticulously severed the connections binding the memory of the experimental facility and Fana to the main suppression engine. He modified the frayed ends of the rune, weaving his own stable, blue-white mana into the gaps to act as a patch, preventing the rest of the emotional seal from unraveling. He created a highly specific, engineered bypass valve.
He was allowing the memory of the trauma, and the memory of the girl, to slowly seep back into Mars's conscious mind, completely uncoupling them from the physical combustion trigger, while heavily reinforcing the general stability of the boy's emotional dampening so he didn't instantly go insane from the influx.
He felt the resistance of the purple rune peak. The entire magical construct shuddered violently. Lencar held his breath, terrified he had pushed too far and broken it.
Snap.
It wasn't a physical sound, but a profound, deep spiritual vibration that echoed down the tether and settled deeply into the grey matter of the brain.
The modification took hold.
The perfect, oppressive, endless loop of the lobotomy spell was permanently altered. A steady, manageable trickle of previously suppressed electrical signals—memories of the facility, feelings of profound loss, and vital echoes of Fana's warmth—slipped through the newly created bypass, successfully avoiding the main suppression matrix.
In the physical world, the reaction was instantaneous and miraculous.
The violent, horrific cycle of spontaneous combustion abruptly, completely ceased. The glowing, molten-orange fissures that marred Mars's pale skin immediately faded, the roaring red flames dying out instantly as if a heavy iron valve had been firmly shut off.
The body had finally stopped fighting the magic. The modified mental seal had allowed just enough emotional recognition of Fana's presence, just enough context for the trauma, to soothe the physical rejection. The brain acknowledged the fire, and the flesh finally accepted it.
The Quintessence, no longer fighting a losing, desperate war of attrition against the runaway thermal energy, rapidly healed the remaining burns. The charred tissue sloughed away, leaving behind smooth, completely unblemished, pale skin.
Mars's body went completely slack against the wet obsidian rock. The rigid, terrifying tension melted from his muscles. His breathing, previously erratic, frantic, and wet, settled into a deep, peaceful, rhythmic slumber.
A few feet away, the synthetic grimoire lying on the stone ceased its violent, chaotic flashing. The alarming mix of colors settled into a steady, calm, harmonious pulse of structured pink and warm red light.
Lencar let out a massive, shuddering breath that seemed to empty his entire soul. He slowly, carefully pulled his burning, ruined gloves away from Mars's chest, finally cutting off the heavy flow of Quintessence.
He slumped backward, his legs giving out completely. He landed hard on his rear on the freezing wet stone, utterly and entirely drained. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, trembling so badly he couldn't even make a fist. His vision swam with dark spots of pure exhaustion, and the pounding headache had returned with a vengeance.
He had done it.
He had played surgeon to a shattered soul and a broken mind, performing microscopic magic with blunt tools, and the patient had miraculously survived.
Mars would wake up soon. He would still be the cold, highly efficient Diamond General, governed heavily by his remaining conditioning. But the seal was permanently compromised.
The modified rune would allow the memories of the experimental facility to begin to bleed through from now on. It would happen slowly, gradually, surfacing in nightmares and moments of high adrenaline stress, exactly like the trauma he had just experienced. By the time the boy eventually reached the Witch's Forest months from now, the crack Lencar had manufactured would be wide enough for Asta and Fana to shatter it completely, saving them all.
The timeline was secure. The pieces were back on the board.
Lencar looked up, tilting his head back to let the freezing mist hit his face. The sun had finally, fully crested the jagged horizon, casting a pale, cold, but undeniably beautiful golden light over the Thunder-Crag Peaks. The brutal storm was completely broken, leaving behind a profound, ringing silence.
He looked down at Mars one last time. The boy looked incredibly peaceful in sleep, the deep furrows of pain finally smoothed away from his forehead.
Lencar felt a strange, fleeting, but profound sense of kinship with the Diamond mage. They were both monsters, in a way. Both of them had been forged by necessity, their bodies and minds twisted and broken down to harbor magics they were never meant to hold. They were both carrying burdens far too heavy for their actual age, playing roles in a war that was much larger than themselves.
"Wake up soon, General," Lencar whispered softly, the morning breeze carrying his hoarse words away over the cliff edge. "Your kingdom still needs its weapon. And eventually... so will mine."
Lencar slowly, painfully climbed to his feet. Every joint popped and protested loudly. His muscles screamed in agony, demanding rest. He wanted nothing more than to open a portal to his bed in Nairn and sleep for days.
He raised his hand, his thumb hovering over the silver ring on his finger, ready to cast the spatial shift.
But he paused.
Lencar lowered his hand, his eyes narrowing slightly beneath the wooden mask. He looked down at the unconscious General, and then out over the horizon toward the borders of the Diamond Kingdom.
He was exhausted, yes. His mana reserves, while massive, were significantly depleted. But an idea was taking root in his highly analytical mind.
Mars was a General. A high-ranking military asset. If he simply woke up here, alone, with a new grimoire and fragmented memories, he would eventually find his way back to his army. The timeline would continue.
But Lencar Abarame was an opportunist. He didn't just want the timeline to survive; he wanted to control the board.
He had just forged an invisible tether to Mars's synthetic grimoire. He had literally rewired the boy's brain. He possessed an unprecedented level of access to a key player in the coming war.
If I leave now, Lencar thought, rubbing his bruised jaw, I will miss a crucial window. When he wakes up, he'll be disoriented and vulnerable. I can't control him directly—He didn't want to do that—but I might be able to plant a suggestion. A failsafe.
He knew Lucius Zogratis, the true mastermind pulling the strings of the world from the shadows of the Spade Kingdom, possessed unimaginable foresight through his Time Magic. Asta's entire existence in this world was a desperate gambit to outmaneuver that foresight by remaining completely unpredictable. And Lencar existence was something accidental or maybe something more.
Having a sleeper agent—even an unwitting one—embedded in the Diamond Kingdom's high command could prove invaluable.
Lencar sighed, his breath pluming in the cold air.
He walked over to a relatively dry outcropping of obsidian a few yards away from Mars. He sat down heavily, leaning his back against the cold stone, and closed his eyes.
He decided to wait for Mars to wake up. He needed to see how the boy reacted to the modified memories, and he needed to see if he could subtly manipulate the General before he sent him back to his masters.
The Heretic wasn't done playing the game just yet.