Lencar stepped out of the pristine, emerald-tinted safety of his Void Vault, and the physical world immediately tried to slap him across the face.
The Thunder-Crag Peaks was still a miserable, unforgiving place. The absolute worst of the storm had passed, sure, but the altitude still boasted a howling, biting wind that threatened to freeze the moisture right out of his eyeballs. He stood on the slick obsidian plateau, his boots crunching lightly against the frost that was beginning to form on the puddles.
He pulled his black cloak tighter around his shoulders, shivering despite the residual warmth of the monster meat he had just digested.
"Alright, Tanaka," Lencar muttered to himself, using his old name to ground his thoughts. "Time to figure out how to stop acting like a rabid dog every time the anti-magic turns on."
He paced back and forth across the black rock, his mind churning as he tried to recall the exact details of the anime and manga from his past life. He needed to learn Ki. It was the only viable solution to retaining his sanity and analytical edge while wielding the corrosive, hateful energy of the void.
But how the hell did someone actually learn it? It wasn't a spell you could copy with the Logoless Grimoire. It didn't have an incantation or a geometric rune. It was a physical, biological discipline.
Lencar closed his eyes and tried to picture Captain Yami Sukehiro, the perpetually smoking, fiercely intimidating leader of the Black Bulls. Yami was the one who had introduced the concept of Ki to the Clover Kingdom, bringing it over from his mysterious homeland across the sea.
How did Yami describe it? Lencar thought, rubbing his temples.
Right. He called it a "sixth sense." Lencar remembered the panels clearly now. Yami had explained that Ki was essentially the continuous flow of physical energy and raw vitality that is passively emitted by absolutely all living things. It wasn't mana. Mana was drawn from nature and resided in the body. Ki was the heat of a muscle flexing, the subtle shift in air pressure when a body moved, the micro-expressions of the eyes, the rhythm of a beating heart. Yami had said that Ki was the universal blanket term for all the different, subtle types of life energy the human body releases into its environment.
He paced back and forth across the black rock, his mind churning as he tried to recall the exact details of the anime and manga from his past life. He needed to learn Ki. It was the only viable solution to retaining his sanity and analytical edge while wielding the corrosive, hateful energy of the void.
By tuning into that specific frequency, a person could perceive movements, track trajectories, and even read a person's lethal intent before they actually launched their attack—even if the attacker was completely invisible or moving faster than the human eye could track.
"Okay, so it's basically biological data reading," Lencar translated into his own terms. "It's picking up on the microscopic telemetry that people shed without realizing it."
But knowing the theory and putting it into practice were two entirely different beasts. Sitting cross-legged and meditating until he achieved enlightenment sounded great in martial arts movies, but Lencar knew it wouldn't work for him. He was too analytical, too tightly wound. His brain would just get bored.
He thought about Asta. How had that loud, magic-less meathead managed to awaken the ability?
The invasion of the Royal Capital, Lencar realized, snapping his fingers.
Asta hadn't learned Ki by sitting under a waterfall. He had awakened it while he was getting absolutely thrashed by Valtos, the spatial mage of the Eye of the Midnight Sun. Valtos had been opening portals all around Asta, launching highly lethal projectiles from blind spots at blinding speeds. Asta had been bleeding, battered, and completely unable to track the attacks with his eyes or ears.
Yami had essentially thrown Asta to the wolves. He had told the kid to "surpass his limits," ordered him to stop relying on his unreliable physical eyes and ears, and told him to just feel it. And Asta, pushed to the absolute brink of death, had closed his eyes, concentrated through the pain, and successfully sensed the Ki of the incoming attacks, parrying strikes that were supposed to be impossible to block.
"Necessity is the mother of invention," Lencar murmured, opening his eyes and looking out over the desolate mountain peaks. "He didn't learn it because he wanted to. He learned it because if he didn't, he was going to die. The human brain only rewires itself that drastically when it's placed under extreme, inescapable pressure."
Lencar stopped pacing. A grim, somewhat crazy smile spread beneath his wooden mask.
"I need a crucible," he decided. "If I want to force my brain to unlock a sixth sense, I need to completely overwhelm the other five while putting my life in actual danger. I need to build a training environment."
He didn't waste any more time. He walked to the absolute center of the widest, flattest section of the obsidian plateau.
First things first: he needed to clear the canvas. The howling winds and the occasional rumbling thunder of the peaks were too chaotic, too random. He couldn't control them.
Lencar pulled out his thick, black grimoire. "[Wind Magic]: Eye of the Hurricane."
He released a massive, sustained burst of highly pressurized wind magic, forming a colossal, invisible, spiraling dome around himself. It pushed the natural weather completely away, isolating a massive circular area of the plateau. The biting wind of the Thunder-Crag Peaks slammed against his magical barrier and diverted around it, leaving the air inside perfectly still and silent.
Next came the foundation.
"[Earth Magic]: Subterranean Vault."
Lencar slammed both of his hands onto the wet black rock. His Stage 3 Peak mana surged into the mountain itself. The ground trembled violently, a localized earthquake that shook the loose stones off the nearby cliffs. Slowly, heavily, a massive, incredibly thick dome of smooth, hardened earth and compressed stone rose up from the plateau, completely enclosing him within a pitch-black, spherical structure easily a hundred meters wide.
But a hundred meters wasn't nearly enough space for what he had planned. If he was going to simulate high-velocity, long-range sniper attacks like Valtos's spatial magic, he needed distance. He needed room to maneuver, dodge, and be surprised.
This was going to hurt.
Lencar took a deep breath, mentally bracing himself. He focused entirely on the concept of space. He wasn't just opening a door to his Void Vault this time; he was actively bending and stretching the physical reality of the earth dome he had just created. It was the magical equivalent of blowing a massive bubble inside a glass jar without breaking the jar.
"[Spatial Magic]: Dimensional Expansion."
The drain on his mana was instantaneous and horrific.
Lencar dropped to one knee, groaning loudly as the spell forcefully ripped the energy straight from his core. Sweat immediately beaded on his forehead, soaking the inside of his mask. Expanding physical dimensions required a profound, terrifying amount of raw power. He had to manually overwrite the laws of physics over a massive area.
He watched in awe and agony as the interior walls of his earth dome began to rapidly stretch and recede into the distance. The ceiling shot upward, swallowed by the darkness. The floor expanded outward.
He kept pushing, gritting his teeth until he tasted copper, forcing his newly expanded meridians to their absolute maximum output.
More, he commanded himself, his vision blurring. Needs to be bigger.
When he finally cut the spell, gasping for air and clutching his chest, the interior of the dome had been fundamentally transformed. From the outside, it still looked like a standard hundred-meter earth shell sitting on a mountain. But inside?
Lencar stood in the center of an impossibly massive, hollow sphere. The interior space now exceeded three kilometers in length, width, and height. It was a cavernous, terrifyingly empty arena, completely divorced from the reality of the outside world.
"Holy... crap," Lencar panted, his chest heaving. He checked his internal reserves.
That single, sustained spatial manipulation had instantly burned through roughly fifty percent of his Stage 3 Peak mana capacity. It was an absolutely absurd expenditure. If he had tried that before absorbing Mars's soul gems, it would have literally killed him, draining his life force to make up for the mana deficit.
His legs felt like lead, and his head was swimming. He couldn't build the rest of the trap in this state.
"Time out," Lencar wheezed.
He tapped his silver ring and practically fell through a localized spatial tear, dropping unceremoniously onto the soft, velvet-leaf mattress inside his Void Vault. He lay there for a solid ten minutes, doing absolutely nothing but breathing in the rich, emerald-green Quintessence pouring off the Breath of Yggdrasil, letting the hyper-refined natural mana rapidly replenish his dangerously depleted core.
When his heart stopped hammering and his mana pool felt pleasantly heavy again, he stood up, cracked his neck, and stepped back through the portal into the massive, empty darkness of his training dome.
"Alright," Lencar said, his voice echoing endlessly in the three-kilometer void. "Phase one complete. Now, let's build the weapons."