The walk from the Hage Village square to the Abarame farmhouse was approximately 1.4 kilometers. Under normal circumstances, at his optimized "Wind Step" pace, Lencar would have covered that distance in under four minutes. Tonight, it took him nearly forty.
The "Mage Mode" mana reservoir was not just empty; it was a vacuum. The final strike against Asta—the Mana-Enhanced Kinetic Strike—had been a surgical success in terms of outcome, but a catastrophic failure in terms of structural preservation. Lencar had siphoned the dregs of Yuno's atmospheric pressure and used his own arm as the barrel of a cannon.
The physics were undeniable. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.
Lencar's right radius was fractured in two places. His ulna had a hairline split running toward the elbow. Three of his ribs, on the side where Asta's sword-shockwave had clipped him earlier in the three-way bout, were sending jagged signals of agony to his brain with every breath. He was covered in a crust of dried dirt, Asta's sweat, and his own blood.
Data Point: Current Physical Integrity: 64%. Pain Threshold: Approaching saturation. Status: Critical maintenance required.
He crested the final hill, the silhouette of his home a dark, welcoming shape against the starlit sky. He paused for a moment, leaning his good shoulder against a fence post. He looked at his right arm, which hung limp and unnaturally still at his side. The internal "System" was screaming for a Toggle, but he had nothing left to toggle to. He was just Lencar now. Just a fifteen-year-old boy who had pushed a human frame past its biological limits.
He pushed the door open. It creaked—a familiar, domestic sound that felt jarringly peaceful compared to the ringing in his ears.
Inside, the living room was bathed in the warm, flickering orange of a dying hearth. Rion and Marta were sitting at the wooden table, a single candle between them. They hadn't eaten. They had been waiting.
The moment the door opened, they both stood up. Marta's hand went to her mouth, a small, strangled gasp escaping her. Rion took a step forward, his face paling so quickly it looked like the light had been sucked out of the room.
"Lencar..." Marta whispered.
Lencar stood in the doorway, a ghost of a boy. His face was smeared with dark crimson from a scalp wound, and his clothes were little more than rags held together by dried mud.
"I'm back," Lencar said. His voice was raspy, stripped of its usual analytical cadence.
"Oh, gods! Lencar!" Marta rushed to him, her hands trembling as she reached out, afraid that if she touched him, he might simply shatter. "You're... you're covered in blood! Rion, help him!"
Rion moved with a speed Lencar hadn't seen from the older man in years. He caught Lencar by the left shoulder, guiding him toward a chair. "What happened? Was it a monster? An accident?"
Lencar gritted his teeth as he sat, the shift in posture sending a white-hot spike through his broken ribs. "The qualification fight," he managed to say, his breath hitching. "It was... an extended engagement. I secured the pass. I'm a qualifier."
"The pass?" Rion stared at his son, his eyes moving from the broken, swollen arm to the blood-matted hair. "You did this... for a piece of paper?"
"It's not just paper, Father," Lencar said, trying to force his mind back into its cold, logical pathways. "It's the entry key to the system. It's Phase Five."
Marta was already moving, her motherly instincts overriding her shock. She began to stoke the fire, hanging a heavy pot of water over the flames. "Don't talk. Don't think about 'phases' or 'systems.' You need to clean these wounds before they fester. Rion, get the basin."
Lencar looked at them—his parents. To Kenji Tanaka, they were secondary characters in a simulation. But as he sat there, feeling the warmth of the room and the visceral terror in his mother's eyes, the "Data" began to feel uncomfortably real.
"I need to take a bath," Lencar said, pushing himself up with his one good arm. "The dirt is a contamination risk."
The bath was an exercise in endurance.
He sat in the wooden tub, the water turning a murky, bruised red as the grime of the arena washed away. Without the "Mage Mode" to dull his senses, the sensation of the hot water hitting his open cuts was excruciating. He looked down at his body. He was a map of trauma. The "Mana-Forging" had made his muscles dense, but the skin was still human.
He looked at his right arm, now resting on the edge of the tub. It was purple and swollen, a clear sign of internal hemorrhaging.
Analysis: Recovery time for bone density without magical intervention: 2 to 3 weeks. Deadline for Entrance Exam: 20 weeks. Buffer: Sufficient, but efficiency will be hampered by 15% during the healing process.
He leaned his head back against the wood, closing his eyes. The steam filled his lungs, softening the sharp edges of his thoughts. For the first time in months, he wasn't calculating trajectories or siphoning mana. He was just feeling the weight of his own existence.
After the bath, he sat on the edge of his bed, wrapped in a clean, oversized tunic. Marta entered the room silently, carrying a tray of clean linen strips and a pungent-smelling herbal salve she had prepared. Rion followed her, standing in the doorway, his arms crossed, his face a mask of somber reflection.
Marta sat beside Lencar. She took his broken arm with a gentleness that made his throat tighten. She began to apply the salve, her fingers moving with a practiced, rhythmic grace.
"I remember when you were six," Marta said softly, not looking up from her work. "You came home with your knuckles bleeding because you had been punching the stone wall behind the barn. I asked you why, and you told me you were 'calibrating.' I didn't know what that meant. I still don't."
She began to wrap the bandages, the white cloth stark against his bruised skin.
"Lencar," she said, her voice trembling. "It doesn't matter. It truly doesn't matter if you never become a Magic Knight. It doesn't matter if you stay here and help your father with the harvest for the rest of your life."
Lencar opened his mouth to argue, to talk about the 15-year plan, but she pressed a hand to his chest.
"You don't need to try so hard," she whispered, a tear finally escaping and landing on the bandage. "You don't need to get hurt like this. No title in the world is worth seeing my son come home looking like a corpse. We don't care about the Royal Capital. We don't care about the Wizard King."
Rion stepped forward, his voice deep and steady, but underscored with a rare vulnerability. "She's right, son. We watched you for ten years. We saw you push yourself until you fainted in the fields. We stayed quiet because we thought it was just your way. But today... seeing you covered in that much blood... it changed the math."
Rion walked over and placed a heavy hand on Lencar's shoulder. "We just want you to be safe and sound. We want you to live well. To have a life that isn't a constant battle. If becoming a knight means breaking your body every day, then we don't want it for you."
They finished the bandaging in silence. Marta tucked the last strip of linen into place, her touch lingering on his wrist. She stood up, leaning down to kiss his forehead—the skin there still hot with a slight fever.
"Sleep now," she said. "The world will still be there tomorrow. But for tonight, just be our son."
They left the room, closing the door softly. The click of the latch echoed in the silence.
Lencar lay back on the bed, staring up at the dark wooden beams of the ceiling.
He should have been calculating his recovery rate. He should have been planning how to siphon more mana once his arm was healed. He should have been analyzing Yuno's final reaction.
But the "System" was offline.
He was thinking about the conversation. Safe and sound. Safe and sound.
In his past life as Kenji Tanaka, he had been a man of spreadsheets and sterile apartments. His parents in Tokyo had been distant figures of expectation—his father a salaryman who valued prestige above all, his mother a woman who measured love in academic grades. They had never told him he didn't need to try so hard. They had never told him he was enough just as he was.
Then, a memory from his current life surfaced. He was seven years old, in the middle of a brutal winter in Hage. He had stayed out too late, trying to "Mana-Forge" his lungs against the freezing air. He had come home shivering, his lips blue.
Rion had wrapped him in his own heavy coat, and Marta had stayed up all night, feeding the fire and pressing warm stones to his feet. They hadn't lectured him on "efficiency." They had just been there.
Lencar felt a strange, tight sensation in his chest—a variable that didn't fit into any of his models. It wasn't logic. It wasn't strategy. It was a profound, aching warmth.
Touch. Deeply touched.
He realized that his 15-year plan had been built on a foundation of cold ambition, but these two "data points"—his parents—were the only ones who truly cared if the plan succeeded or failed, as long as he was alive at the end of it. Their concern was a powerful outlier, a force of nature that ignored social status and magical power.
Conclusion: I am not just a resource manager. I am a person with a debt that cannot be repaid with magic.
He closed his eyes, the pain in his ribs subsiding as the exhaustion finally took over. He wasn't thinking about the Royal Capital or the four-leaf clover. He was thinking about the smell of the herbal salve and the weight of his father's hand on his shoulder.
For the first time since his rebirth, Lencar Abarame wasn't planning for the future. He was simply existing in the present, protected by the love of two commoners who thought he was a hero, not because of his magic, but because he was theirs.
He fell into a deep, dreamless sleep, his broken bones beginning the slow, quiet work of knitting themselves back together, fueled by a meal and a warmth that no siphoned mana could ever provide.