Lencar lowered his hand, resting it back on his knee. He settled back into his uncomfortable, jagged perch on the rock, pulling the edges of his damp black cloak tighter around his shivering shoulders.
He went back to waiting.
The silence of the Thunder-Crag Peaks was absolute, profound, and heavy. It was broken only by the occasional, very distant, muffled rumble of thunder from the retreating storm miles away, and the steady, rhythmic, comforting sound of Mars's breathing.
As the minutes dragged on, Lencar found his highly active thoughts drifting inevitably to the incredibly mundane. The adrenaline had completely left his system, leaving room for the trivialities of his daily life to creep back in.
It took another dozen, agonizingly slow minutes for the physiological changes to manifest.
Finally, the steady, rhythmic sound of Mars's breathing hitched abruptly. The deep, restorative, healing slumber of profound magical and physical exhaustion was finally breaking. The human body, no matter how deeply conditioned, could only sleep for so long after enduring that much systemic trauma before the primal survival instincts violently kicked in, demanding the brain wake up to assess the threat level of the immediate environment.
Mars's eyes snapped open.
He didn't slowly, groggily blink himself awake like a normal person rising from a deep, peaceful sleep. There was no yawning, no leisurely stretching of stiff limbs. His pale eyes shot wide open with the terrifying, immediate, hair-trigger hyper-vigilance of a child soldier who had been brutally, systematically trained since infancy to expect a lethal ambush at any given second of the day.
He inhaled a massive, ragged, gasping breath of the freezing mountain air, his chest heaving violently and pushing against the smooth, articulated confines of the newly forged crystal armor.
For a few, agonizingly tense seconds, the boy simply lay there flat on his back, staring straight up at the breaking, grey clouds passing rapidly above him. He was completely, utterly paralyzed by a profound, terrifying wave of complete disorientation. The mental gears in his mind were grinding loudly, desperately trying to catch onto a recognizable reality, trying to piece together a narrative of how he got here.
He didn't know where he was. The last thing his conscious mind reliably, clearly remembered was the being teleported to some place a strange masked figure who then beat him bare handed. He remembered the crushing, humiliating, world-ending impact of that man's fists covered in black red mana shattering his ultimate Nemean Armor, the feeling of absolute defeat.
And then... nothing but darkness.
That darkness was followed only by fragmented, terrifying, hallucinatory flashes. He remembered an excruciating, burning agony that felt like his very blood was boiling in his veins, like his skin was melting off his bones. And he remembered the strange, overwhelming sensation of being drowned in a vast, suffocating sea of blinding, healing green light.
He didn't know how he had survived the dungeon. He didn't know how he had ended up lying on a freezing mountain peak miles away from the battle.
His hands began to twitch at his sides. Driven by pure, ingrained, biological panic, his gloved fingers began frantically, rapidly patting the wet obsidian rock beside his hips, desperately searching for his anchor, his weapon, his lifeline. He needed his magic.
His fingertips brushed against a heavy, rectangular object lying in a puddle. It was the rough, unnaturally stitched leather of the synthetic grimoire Lencar had meticulously placed exactly three inches from his right hand.
Mars didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. He grabbed it with a vice-like, desperate grip, pulling the heavy tome tightly to his armored chest as he sat up with a violent, sudden jolt. His eyes darted wildly, frantically around the desolate, mist-shrouded plateau, searching for an enemy, a threat, a target.
He paused, his breathing ragged and loud in the quiet air. There was no immediate, rushing threat. The plateau was completely empty, save for the dark, cloaked figure sitting perfectly silently on a rock outcropping just a few yards away.
Slowly, carefully, Mars looked down at the book clutched tightly in his armored hands.
His brow furrowed in deep, profound, headache-inducing confusion. The grimoire felt right in his hands—the weight, the texture, the hum of mana—but it looked incredibly, jarringly wrong.
He stared at the cover. He saw the two distinct Diamond Kingdom insignias overlapping in a messy, forced amalgamation. He traced the thick, raised magical stitches running down the spine, feeling the unnatural binding. And then, his wide, pale eyes locked onto the jagged, scorched crimson leather that represented the secondary attribute on the back half of the book.
The Fire Magic.
Lencar watched from his rocky perch, remaining entirely silent, barely even breathing lest the sound draw the boy's attention too soon. He didn't move a single, solitary muscle. He watched the boy with the intense, clinical, utterly fascinated scrutiny of a master scientist observing a highly volatile, completely unprecedented chemical reaction.
As Mars stared intensely, almost hypnotically, at the crimson symbol of the fire magic, the delicate, microscopic, surgical crack Lencar had so painstakingly carved into the purple sealing rune deep within the boy's brain finally did its intended, dangerous work.
The mental dam had been compromised. The perfect, airtight, suffocating seal of Morris's psychological lobotomy was fundamentally flawed.
Triggered directly by the visual stimulus of the fire magic symbol—a magic that was inextricably, biologically, and emotionally tied to the very soul of its original owner—a tiny, microscopic sliver of violently suppressed emotion managed to slip through the newly created bypass valve in his neural pathways.
It wasn't a full memory. It wasn't a clear picture of a face or a spoken conversation. It was a microscopic, agonizingly pure, concentrated echo of a forgotten warmth. It was the phantom, ghost-like sensation of a soft, small hand holding his own in the dark. It was the faint, distant sound of a gentle, kind voice echoing in a sterile, blood-soaked laboratory, promising him that everything was going to be alright.
It was the lingering, undeniable emotional resonance of a girl named Fana.
Mars's breath hitched violently again, catching painfully in his throat as if he had swallowed glass.
He didn't scream. He didn't convulse or thrash against the rock like he had when the magic had physically, biologically rejected him earlier.
He simply froze. He went as entirely, completely still as a statue carved from the very dense, pink crystal he commanded.
A profound, terrifying, heavy silence descended upon the Diamond General. The hyper-vigilant, paranoid, combat-ready tension instantly drained out of his broad shoulders, replaced immediately by a sudden, crushing, invisible weight that seemed to press him down into the stone.
Slowly, entirely without his conscious permission or understanding, a single, heavy tear welled up in the corner of his left eye. It gathered there, trembling against his pale, dirt-smudged lashes for a long moment, before finally spilling over the edge. It traced a slow, silent, glistening path down his scarred, pale cheek, cutting a clean line through the grime and ash of the night's battle, before dropping heavily onto the smooth, pink crystal of his chest plate with a microscopic, silent splash.
Mars slowly raised his right hand, his fingers loosening their desperate death grip on the spine of the grimoire. His hand was trembling violently—not with the biting cold of the mountain, and certainly not with fear of the cloaked man nearby, but with a fundamental, structural, foundation-shaking shock to his entire nervous system.
He reached up slowly and gently, hesitantly touched his own cheek. He felt the wet, salty trail left behind by the rogue tear.
He pulled his hand away and stared down at the moisture glistening on his leather fingertips.
His facial expression, previously locked in a permanent, impenetrable mask of aggressive, emotionless apathy, melted entirely into one of absolute, heartbreaking, childlike bewilderment. He looked at the tiny drop of water on his glove as if it were a highly toxic, completely alien substance that had just miraculously manifested out of thin air. He turned his hand over slowly, inspecting the moisture, entirely and utterly failing to comprehend what his own biological body was doing.
The perfect, emotionless, apathetic killing machine of the Diamond Kingdom—the boy who had slaughtered his peers without a second thought to survive, who had crushed entire squads of elite Clover Magic Knights without his heart rate ever elevating past a resting pace—was currently experiencing a profound, suffocating, ocean-deep sadness.
And he had absolutely, unequivocally no context for why it was happening to him.
Because the memory itself—the actual, visual image of Fana's smiling face, the horrific, bloody details of her supposed death at his own hands—was still heavily, securely suppressed by the vast majority of the purple rune Lencar had left intact. He only felt the raw, devastating emotion attached to the memory, divorced entirely from the event itself.
He felt a devastating, hollow, echoing sense of loss. He felt a gaping, bleeding hole in the very center of his chest that the thickest, hardest, most impenetrable crystal armor in the world couldn't possibly protect or fill. He felt an overwhelming, primal urge to mourn, to fall to his knees and scream at the grey sky until his vocal cords snapped and bled, but he was completely, helplessly at a loss as to what exactly he had lost.
He sat there on the freezing mountain peak, a feared god of war reduced in an instant to a confused, broken, grieving child, staring at his own tears and trying desperately to solve a puzzle with half the pieces permanently missing from the box.
From his outcropping of jagged rock, Lencar Abarame watched the silent, intensely private tragedy unfold. He felt a sharp, undeniable pang of genuine sympathy pierce through his carefully constructed, pragmatic detachment. He had done this. He had taken the scalpel to the boy's mind. He had broken the seal, knowing full well how much it would hurt the boy to feel again.
It was necessary for the timeline, necessary for the boy's eventual salvation and the survival of the world, but witnessing the raw, unadulterated, naked confusion of a victim realizing for the first time that they were fundamentally broken was a heavy, terrible burden to bear.
Cry it out, kid, Lencar thought softly, keeping his presence entirely concealed in the shadow of his hood, allowing Mars this one, private, solitary moment of impossible grief. Let it out. It means you're still human under all that programming. It means Morris didn't kill you completely.