He needed to remain a ghost. He needed to find the optimal moment to strike, to harvest the chaos without becoming the center of it.
He pulled the heavy cloak tighter around his disguised frame and slipped back into the winding, smoke-filled streets. The capital was burning, the Captains were gone, and the true test of the Clover Kingdom's resolve had just begun. And Lencar Abarame intended to watch every single second of it.
___
The sky above the Royal Capital of Kikka had turned a sickening, unnatural shade of bruised purple. The festive banners that had hung so proudly from the stone balconies just an hour ago were now torn and burning, catching the embers that drifted upward from the chaotic streets below. The initial panic caused by the sudden appearance of the undead vanguard had been bad enough, but the true horror of the Eye of the Midnight Sun's invasion was only just beginning to unfold.
Lencar stood perfectly still within the deep, concealing himself in the shadows of a narrow alleyway connecting the main commercial district to the lower residential rings. He kept his back pressed against the cold brick wall, pulling the frayed edge of his simple brown cloak tighter around his disguised frame. The brass amulet resting against his chest maintained his slouched, unremarkable posture, while the synthetic mask and carefully applied illusion kept his true identity completely hidden. To anyone who might accidentally glance into the alley, he was just another terrified commoner trying to stay out of sight.
But Lencar was not terrified. He was calculating.
He watched the street ahead of him. The junior Magic Knights were scrambling, their shouts echoing off the masonry as they desperately tried to form defensive perimeters. The sudden, inexplicable disappearance of the Magic Knight Captains had severed the chain of command, leaving the squires and lower-ranked members to fend for themselves against an enemy that fought with suicidal fanaticism.
Then, the air changed.
The sharp smell of ozone and burning wood was suddenly overpowered by something dry, choking, and incredibly old. It smelled like the bottom of a neglected fireplace.
Lencar held his breath, narrowing his eyes as a strange, gray snow began to fall over the cobblestones. It drifted down from the sky in thick, heavy flakes, coating the ground, the buildings, and the fleeing citizens.
It wasn't snow. It was ash.
The moment the gray flakes touched the skin of a passing merchant, the man collapsed. He hit the cobblestones hard, his hands clawing at his own throat. Lencar watched, his analytical mind immediately breaking down the magical mechanics of the attack. The ash wasn't burning the man. It was doing something far more insidious. The merchant's healthy, ruddy complexion rapidly turned a sickly, pale gray. His skin sagged against his cheekbones, and the vibrant energy of his life force was visibly sucked out of him, traveling upward into the sky along invisible tethers of magic.
"A wide-area parasitic drain," Lencar murmured quietly to himself, stepping further back into the shadows to ensure not a single flake of the gray substance touched his cloak. He drew his own vast mana reserves deep into his core, locking them down tight. "It absorbs the ambient and internal mana of anyone it touches, transferring the stolen energy back to the caster. Highly efficient. Incredibly cruel."
High above the street, floating leisurely on a long, ornate wooden broom, was the architect of the gray snowfall.
Catherine sat sideways on her broom, her long, elegant dark purple dress billowing in the unnatural wind she generated. Her silver hair cascaded down her back, catching the ambient light of the fires below. From a distance, she looked like a picture of aristocratic grace, a dark queen surveying her domain.
But as Lencar observed her, he saw the deep, twisted ugliness radiating from her posture.
Catherine held her grimoire in one hand, the pages glowing with a dull, suffocating gray light. She inhaled deeply, her eyes slipping shut in sheer, narcotic pleasure as the stolen mana from the citizens below flooded into her body. Her skin, which had borne the faint, microscopic lines of age, smoothed out entirely, taking on a youthful, radiant glow fueled by the stolen vitality of hundreds of people.
She opened her eyes and looked down at the panic in the streets. Her gaze swept over the older men and the crying children with complete indifference. But when her eyes landed on a group of young women—girls in their late teens and early twenties, wearing their brightly colored festival dresses and holding onto each other in terror—her expression twisted into a mask of absolute, unhinged venom.
"Look at you all, running around like frightened little mice," Catherine purred, her voice magically amplified to echo through the district.
She raised a hand, pointing a single finger down at the group of young women. Her lips pulled back in a snarl, exposing her teeth. The vanity that consumed her soul boiled over into pure, hateful rage.
"Stop pretending to be cute, you damn sows!!" Catherine shrieked, her voice cracking with hysterical laughter.
She flicked her wrist. A dense, concentrated cloud of ash shot downward like a cannonball, slamming directly into the group of girls.
The young women screamed as the ash coated them. The parasitic magic went to work instantly. Their bright festival dresses turned dull and gray. Their smooth, youthful skin wrinkled and dried out, their hair losing its luster and turning brittle. They collapsed to the cobblestones, gasping for breath, looking as though they had aged forty years in a matter of seconds.
Catherine threw her head back and laughed, a shrill, grating sound that bounced off the stone walls. "Yes! That's right! Give it to me! Your youth, your beauty, your mana! It all belongs to me! It is completely wasted on pathetic little country girls like you!"
Lencar watched the display with cold detachment. He felt no urge to leap out and play the hero. Catherine was a Stage Four, perhaps a low Stage Three mage, specialized in attrition. She was dangerous to crowds, but in a one-on-one fight against an opponent who could bypass her ash, she would fold. He filed her magical signature and her psychological weaknesses—extreme vanity and deep insecurity regarding her age—into his mind.
Down the street, the chaos continued.
Catherine floated lower, hovering just a few feet above the cobblestones, actively hunting for denser pockets of mana to consume. She glided past burning carts and shattered market stalls, her eyes scanning the fleeing stragglers.
Near the ruins of a collapsed stone fountain, a young couple was trapped. The exit to the main plaza had been blocked by fallen masonry, and they had nowhere left to run. The young man, dressed in a simple tailor's tunic, was desperately trying to pull his partner over the rubble, but her ankle was pinned beneath a heavy chunk of stone.