Valtos's mind was incredibly sharp. It was a mind built for the complex, mathematical calculations required to fold space and distance perfectly. It was a mind that naturally sought order, logic, and undeniable truth.
Licht had told him that the peasants were complicit. That their compliance was the foundation of the corrupt system. That they had to be destroyed to uproot the diseased tree.
It was a beautiful, terrifying metaphor.
But as Valtos's boots clicked against the stone floor, a memory flashed unbidden in the dark theater of his mind.
He saw the Red Hood leader standing in the smoldering ruins of Oakhaven. He saw the twelve cloaked figures, their mana perfectly synchronized, refusing to yield an inch of ground to a monster they easily could have ignored.
He remembered the Red Hood leader's cold, mechanical, yet deeply convicted voice cutting through the smoke.
"They saw twelve strangers, armed and cloaked, and they did not cower. An old woman invited us into her barn... The village baker brought us three loaves of fresh bread... They are not the rot of this kingdom; they are the victims of it."
Valtos stopped walking.
He stood completely still in the middle of a dark, empty corridor, the luminescent moss casting eerie, green shadows across his masked face.
Licht had said that everyone in the Clover Kingdom carried the original sin in their blood. That there were no innocents.
But the Red Hoods—a group of violent, radical criminals who hated the Clover Kingdom nobility just as fiercely as the Midnight Sun did—had looked at those same peasants and seen something entirely different. They had seen kindness. They had seen victims worthy of protection, even at the cost of fighting a fellow revolutionary.
Valtos frowned beneath his mask.
If the new world Licht promised was truly meant for the outcast, for the kind, and for those who had suffered under the heel of the strong... then why were they starting their glorious revolution by butchering the only people in the kingdom who would offer a warm meal to a group of cloaked strangers?
Why did the methods of the "divine savior" feel so much more chaotic, cruel, and cowardly than the methods of a radical, murderous cult?
Valtos tightly clenched his fists. He aggressively shook his head, physically trying to dislodge the thought.
"No," Valtos whispered fiercely to the empty corridor. "Master Licht's vision is absolute. Sacrifices are necessary. The old world must be destroyed. I am a faithful servant of the dawn."
He forced his legs to move, resuming his purposeful stride toward the spatial coordination chambers. He repeated Licht's promises in his mind like a mantra, desperately using the religious fervor to drown out the quiet, analytical voice of logic in his head.
He succeeded. By the time he reached his quarters, the unwavering devotion of Valtos of the Spatial Portal had returned. He was ready to follow his master into the fires of hell itself.
But deep within the dark, unmapped terrain of his subconscious, completely unknown to Patolli and vigorously denied by Valtos himself, a seed had been firmly planted.
It was a tiny, microscopic seed of doubt, born of an anomaly in a muddy village, watered by the cold, flawless logic of a mysterious master's shock troopers. It was buried deep, smothered beneath layers of fanatical loyalty and the desperate desire to belong.
But in the quiet moments of the dark, beneath the grand speeches and the golden lies, the seed had already begun to sprout.
The torrential downpour of the Thunder Crag peaks felt less like rain and more like a barrage of icy needles. The sky above was a violently churning canopy of black clouds, split every few seconds by blinding, jagged arcs of natural lightning that struck the jagged stone spires with deafening cracks. The ambient mana here was heavy, oppressive, and wild, pressing down on the environment with the suffocating weight of a physical ocean.
It was an environment designed to crush the weak. For Lencar Abarame, it was the perfect gymnasium.
High on a secluded plateau, oblivious to the freezing rain lashing against his bare torso, Lencar was pushing his physical vessel to the absolute brink of failure. He wasn't using Reinforcement Magic. He had completely suppressed his vast, terrifying reserves of mana, forcing his raw muscles, bones, and tendons to bear the full, agonizing brunt of his workout.
He had chained two massive, irregular boulders of solid granite to his waist using thick iron links. Combined, they weighed well over two thousand pounds. With his jaw clenched so tightly his teeth ached, Lencar lunged forward, dragging the boulders across the uneven, jagged stone of the plateau.
Thud. Scrape. Thud. Scrape.
Every muscle fiber in his back, legs, and shoulders screamed in protest. Sweat mixed with the freezing rain, running in rivulets down his heavily scarred chest. His breathing was ragged, harsh, and rhythmic, perfectly timed to maximize oxygen intake.
He had been doing this every single night for the past three weeks.
The motivation for this brutal, seemingly primitive self-torture was rooted in a theoretical concept he had developed: a technique he called "Overclocking the Soul." It involved carving a highly specialized, closed-loop rune directly onto his own mana core. The theory was that by preventing his mana from naturally venting out into the atmosphere, and instead forcing it to continuously circulate and compound within his own body, his speed, strength, and spell-casting velocity would skyrocket exponentially.
But there was a lethal catch.
Mana was volatile energy. Forcing Stage 3 Peak mana to endlessly loop within a human body without a release valve would generate a catastrophic amount of internal pressure and heat. If his physical vessel wasn't tough enough, the closed-loop rune wouldn't overclock him; it would turn him into a localized bomb. It would tear his muscles from his bones and rupture his organs in a matter of seconds.
So, before he dared to carve the rune, he had to forge a body capable of containing a contained magical explosion.
Lencar let out a guttural roar, pouring the last of his physical stamina into a final, explosive sprint, dragging the boulders ten yards before his legs finally gave out. He collapsed onto the wet stone, gasping for air, the freezing rain immediately chilling his overheated skin.
He lay there for a few minutes, listening to the thunder, feeling the agonizing, beautiful burn of exhausted muscles. Slowly, he reached for the silver ring on his finger and allowed a tiny, measured fraction of Quintessence from the Breath of Yggdrasil to flow into his veins. It didn't completely erase the fatigue—he needed his muscles to tear and rebuild naturally to gain true density—but it stabilized his heart rate and healed the micro-fractures in his bones.
He unchained himself, pulled on a dry tunic from his spatial dimension, and looked toward the eastern horizon. The sky was beginning to bruise with the pale, gray light of dawn.
His night of torment was over. It was time for his day job.
With a familiar pulse of his Spatial Magic, Lencar vanished from the howling peaks of the Thunder Crag, seamlessly bridging the gap between the savage wilderness and the quiet, domestic warmth of Nairn.
He materialized in the dark alley behind the "Rusty Spoon" tavern just as the sun broke over the rooftops. He smoothed his tunic, ran a hand through his damp hair, and pushed open the heavy back door of the kitchen.
The transition was jarring, but Lencar loved it. The violent, bloody reality of his nocturnal life was perfectly balanced by the mundane, rhythmic sanctuary of the tavern.
"You're late by two minutes, Lencar!" Gorn, the massive, burly tavern owner, bellowed from across the kitchen. The man was already covered in a light dusting of flour, vigorously kneading a massive mound of bread dough. "If you think your fancy knife skills give you the right to slack off, you've got another thing coming!"