Lencar didn't reply. He kept walking toward the distant alchemy station.
But as he turned away—
A faint, almost imperceptible shift passed through the heavy, dense air of the white room. It wasn't a sound. It was a feeling. Like something between them had finally, truly been acknowledged. Not just employer and forced employee, but an actual, functional partnership.
Garrick let out one last, long breath, letting the incredible tension of the day finally melt away into the stone.
"…Weird boss…" he mumbled to the empty room.
And this time—
The deep, healing sleep came incredibly quickly, pulling the smuggler down into a dark, safe, dreamless ocean.
____
Silence completely dominated the space.
This was a heavily controlled, absolute stillness. Deliberate. Contained. The kind of suffocating silence that existed only in perfectly sterile environments where every single external variable had been meticulously minimized or entirely erased.
Inside the vast, shadowless white expanse of the Void Vault, Garrick slept the deep, heavy sleep of the dead.
His breathing was slow, ragged, but stubbornly steady, echoing faintly against the marble floors. His surviving crew members lay scattered nearby on conjured cots and piles of soft plant magic, equally unconscious. Their battered bodies were desperately recovering from absolute physical exhaustion and total mana depletion, soaking in the incredibly dense, healing emerald Quintessence that permeated the room.
And at the absolute center of it all, sitting cross-legged at his makeshift wooden desk—
Lencar Abarame sat alone.
He had shed his ruined, shredded black cloak and the damp tunic, wrapping himself in a fresh, dry grey shirt he had pulled from his dimensional storage. His cracked wooden mask sat on the corner of the table. His bruised, tired eyes—Kenji Tanaka's eyes—were wide awake, burning with an intense, obsessive curiosity that completely overrode his physical exhaustion.
In front of him rested the prize.
A small, unassuming stack of three books. Old. Worn. Smelling heavily of deep earth, sea salt, and dangerous secrets.
The "harvest" that had almost sent Garrick into the jaws of death.
Lencar leaned forward, his elbows resting on the table, and gently picked up the top volume.
The cover was crafted from a strange, pale, cracked leather that felt disturbingly like cured skin. It was heavily stained by time, moisture, and probably a fair amount of blood. Faint, intricate rune etchings lined its fragile surface. They were primitive compared to the highly structured magic of the modern Clover Kingdom, but they were deeply, undeniably intentional.
"…Let's see what almost got that guy killed," Lencar whispered to the quiet room.
He carefully opened the heavy cover, wincing as the dry spine cracked in protest.
The yellowed, brittle pages inside were absolutely filled to the margins with complex, hand-drawn diagrams. Geometric patterns. Sharp, interlocking lines. Symbols layered painstakingly over other symbols, accompanied by frantic, messy notes written in a dead, angular language that Lencar couldn't even begin to read.
To an untrained eye, or even to a standard Magic Knight Captain—it was absolute, incomprehensible gibberish. The ramblings of a madman.
But to Lencar, a former data analyst who spent his previous life reading lines of complex code, and a mage who had just literally rewired a Diamond Kingdom General's brain—
It was structure. It was the raw, uncompiled source code of magic.
He flipped the first page with a delicate touch. Then the second. Then the third.
He stopped, his brow furrowing.
"…Incomplete," Lencar muttered, leaning closer to the parchment.
His eyes narrowed critically. The foundational rune system presented on these pages was heavily fragmented. They were clearly just small, isolated segments of a much larger, grander geometric design. They were broken pieces of a programming language that had long since been lost to the ravages of time and war.
But even fragmented code held immense value if you knew how to reverse-engineer it.
Lencar raised his right hand slightly, his palm facing the open book.
With a familiar, heavy hum, his thick, black Logoless Grimoire materialized out of thin air, hovering faithfully beside his shoulder. It flipped open to a completely blank, crisp white page, waiting for input.
"…Replication," Lencar commanded softly.
A faint, pale blue pulse of his Stage 3 Peak mana flowed outward from his fingertips, washing gently over the ancient book.
The geometric symbols on the brittle page seemed to react, shimmering slightly under his magical scan.
Then—they began transferring.
They didn't move physically. The ink didn't lift off the old page. Instead, they transferred as pure, structural data.
Lencar's grimoire actively absorbed the underlying magical pattern. Line by glowing line. Layer by complex layer. A brand-new, glowing blue formation rapidly appeared and etched itself onto the blank page of his own book, a perfect 1-to-1 copy of the ancient construct.
But almost immediately—
It proved to be highly unstable.
The glowing blue lines on his page flickered violently. They distorted, buzzing with angry magical static, threatening to collapse in on themselves.
"…As expected," Lencar sighed, rubbing his tired eyes.
The original diagram in the book was incomplete. It was missing vital load-bearing variables. So naturally, the pure replication inherited that exact same fatal flaw.
Lencar tapped the flickering page of his grimoire lightly with his index finger.
"It seems I need to Manually correct here. Time to debug."
He didn't need to be able to read the dead language in the margins. His mind began working on pure, intuitive logic. He wasn't interpreting the philosophical meaning of the spell—he was analyzing its mechanical relationships.
He looked at the angles. The intersection points. The flow paths. He visualized exactly how a current of raw mana would attempt to move through the geometric structure once it was cast.
"…This section right here is completely redundant," Lencar muttered to himself, his finger tracing a jagged line. "It's a dead end. It just causes mana pooling and friction."
He focused his intent, using his absolute control over his own grimoire to manually erase that specific line from the glowing diagram.
"…And this one conflicts with the primary intake valve. It's creating a bottleneck." He adjusted a curve, smoothing it out into a straight, efficient conduit.
"…This—"
He paused. His pale eyes sharpened slightly, zeroing in on a dense cluster of symbols near the center of the rune.
"…This doesn't belong here at all."
One specific, highly complex segment of the rune pattern stood out like a sore thumb. It wasn't just an incomplete line. It was fundamentally wrong. It had been forcefully, clumsily jammed into the structure, completely disrupting the natural harmony of the geometry. It was a foreign, malicious element.
Lencar meticulously adjusted it. Using his mana like a surgical scalpel, he carefully excised the corrupted segment from the diagram and reconnected the primary flow lines, bypassing the error entirely.
The moment he completed the edit, the rune shifted.
It violently snapped into perfect, geometric alignment. It stabilized completely.
The glowing blue page in his grimoire stopped its angry flickering. The lines smoothed out, thrumming with a calm, contained power. A faint, harmonious pulse of mana radiated from the page once, pushing the air away, and then settled into a steady, reliable glow.
"It is functional now," Lencar breathed, an incredibly satisfying rush of accomplishment washing over him. It was the exact same feeling he used to get when he finally found a missing semicolon in ten thousand lines of code.
He observed the stabilized construct quietly.
This wasn't an offensive spell. It wasn't going to shoot a fireball or summon a sword. Not directly.
It was a foundational, underlying construct. A core building block. It was something meant to be seamlessly integrated into much larger, far more devastating systems—like the Chimera Rune inside Mars's brain.
"Ancient runic logic is pretty fascinating," Lencar mused, his fingers hovering respectfully over his own page. "It's incredibly primitive… but brilliantly adaptable if you clean up the trash."
He carefully closed the first, pale leather book and set it aside.
He reached out and picked up the second volume.