For two full weeks, Lencar was a prisoner in his own body. His arms were useless, his body was a map of deep, agonizing bruises, and his world was confined to his small, dark room.
His parents tended to him, their faces a constant, worried mask. But beneath their worry, Lencar sensed his mother's fear and his father's quiet disappointment. He had lost. He had failed to leave. He was, for now, the broken boy who had to be fed soup by his mother, just as Rion had feared.
This, Lencar's analytical mind decided, was unacceptable.
He couldn't train his body. So, he trained his mind.
He spent sixteen hours a day in a state of deep, focused meditation. His "mental training" was twofold.
First, he re-analyzed. He replayed the fight with Asta, frame by frame, from his mind's-eye perspective. He saw his over-reliance on the chain. He saw his hubris in trying to tank the sword. He saw the exact, 0.2-second-long opening where Asta's fist began to move, an opening his analysis had dismissed as non-threatening. He burned that moment, that failure, into his memory. It was no longer a humiliation; it was DataPoint_Failure_001.
Second, he visualized. He sat cross-legged on his cot and, in his mind, he moved. He practiced his new, hybrid combat style. He visualized toggling to Heretic Mode to dodge a magic-based attack, then clicking back to Mage Mode to counter with a physical blow reinforced by Yuno's mana. He practiced not over-relying on his chains. He ran thousands of virtual simulations, a data-driven ghost sparring with imaginary foes.
His recovery, fueled by his "Mana-Forged" technique, was astoundingly fast. His mother's folk magic could only do so much, but his own, self-healing body did the rest. The deep bone-fractures knit back together, stronger than before.
On the fifteenth day, he unwrapped the splints. His arms were scarred and stiff, but they were whole.
He stood up. His parents were out on the farm.
"Phase Two," he whispered.
He stood in the middle of his room, took a deep breath, and opened his grimoire.
"Mage Mode. Active."
FWOOM.
The world imploded. The sheer, unrestrained pressure of Yuno's mana, which he had only ever called upon in the heat of battle, was now being invited into a calm environment. It was deafening.
It was like trying to meditate inside a running jet engine.
His head screamed. A migraine, instant and colossal, slammed into his skull. The air felt too thick. The sounds of the wind outside, the creak of the floorboards—they were a thousand, stabbing needles.
He staggered, his hand on the wall, his breath coming in short, pained gasps.
This... this is the 'Firehose' up close.
He had planned to hold this state 24/7. He lasted less than thirty seconds before he had to click it off, collapsing onto his cot, his body drenched in a cold sweat.
Analysis: This is not a mana pool. It's a high-pressure, rupturing damn. My body is not a regulator. It's just a pipe. And it's going to burst.
He realized his plan was flawed. He couldn't just will his body to contain it. He had to teach it to. He had to build the regulator from scratch.
He went outside, his legs shaking.
He found his father's grimoire on the kitchen table, open to its first and simplest page. [Tiny Fireball]. A spell to light a candle.
Lencar stood in the middle of the empty, fallow field behind their hovel. He took a breath.
"Mage Mode. Active."
The pressure-headache returned, but he gritted his teeth, bracing against it. He held out his hand, his arm trembling not from weakness, but from strain.
He focused on the page in his mind. He tried to draw just one thimble-full of mana from the ocean roaring in his ears.
"[Tiny Fireball]."
The resulting explosion blew him off his feet.
KRA-BOOM!
A column of fire, thick as an oak tree, erupted from his palm and shot twenty feet into the air. It left a six-foot, smoking, glassy crater in the dirt where he had been aiming.
His ears were ringing. His arm was numb.
"Well," he wheezed, sitting up in the dirt. "The data is... conclusive."
He was a man trying to fill a shot-glass with a tsunami.
He stared at the smoking crater. He looked at his own trembling hand. He felt the echo of the migraine.
This was not like his physical training. This wasn't about pushing through the burn. This was a problem of control. Of finesse. It was a problem for an analyst.
He had 3.5 months before he had to leave.
3.5 months to build a regulator, from scratch, inside his own body. 3.5 months to tame an ocean.
He sat down in the dirt, took a ragged breath, and activated Mage Mode again. The headache slammed into him.
He ignored it.
He had work to do.