Lencar left the ruins, his mind a silent, high-speed supercomputer processing the aftermath of the day's "Chaos Events." Ahead of him, Yuno and Asta were already heading back to the church. Their voices, one a calm drone and the other a rhythmic shout, drifted back through the cooling air. Their rivalry had been rekindled, forged now into something sharp and tangible by the books they carried.
Lencar, however, took the long way home. He didn't want to be a participant in their narrative—not yet. He needed to process the data he had siphoned.
He was currently in "Mage Mode." Inside him was mana pool equivalent to Yuno. It was a resource 25 times his own previous mana pool.
Then, just to verify the system's stability, he toggled. He focused on the [ANTI-MAGIC] page at the very back of his mental grimoire.
Click.
The world went silent. The heavy cloak of mana vanished instantly, leaving him feeling impossibly light, yet utterly powerless. His grimoire was no longer a wellspring of potential; it was a dead, inert book. All that remained was his own Mana-Forged body: the dense muscle, the strong bones, and the disciplined mind of Kenji Tanaka.
Click.
He toggled it back. The return was a tsunami. The sudden surge of Yuno's mana flooded his system with such violence that Lencar's knees buckled. He leaned heavily against a gnarled tree, his heart hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs.
Analysis: Switching from an massive mana pool to a complete void is not a natural act. It is a violation of the body's equilibrium. Latency during transition is 2.2 seconds. Hazard level: Extreme.
He understood his path now. He had two, and only two, modes of operation:
Mage Mode: Wielding copied, inflexible spells backed by a prodigy's mana capacity.
Heretic Mode: Wielding Anti-Magic backed by nothing but his own physical, non-magical body.
He finally reached his family's farmhouse as the first stars began to pierce the twilight. He took a deep breath, calming his racing thoughts, and focused on his grimoire's cover. The blank leather shimmered, a faint glow settling into the image of a simple, unassuming, and perfectly average three-leaf clover.
He tucked the "lie" under his arm and went inside.
"Lencar! You're back!" his mother, Marta, cried. She rushed from the hearth, her own meager mana fluttering nervously around her like a trapped bird. "The ceremony... how did it go? Did you... did you get one?"
Her eyes were so full of hope it made Lencar's analytical mask falter for a fraction of a second. He gave her the small, calm smile he had perfected over the last fifteen years.
"I did," he said, holding up the book.
His father, Rion, came over, his eyes widening. "A three-leaf clover... Lencar, that's wonderful! Just like us!"
They gathered around him, their hands calloused and warm as they touched the cover. Their relief was palpable. They didn't dream of him becoming a Captain or a legend; they simply didn't want him to be an outcast. They didn't want him to be like Asta, the magicless boy they still pitied, even after Lencar's years of regular bread donations to the church.
"We'll have a special stew tonight to celebrate," his mother said, her eyes tearing up with joy.
Lencar sat with them, eating the warm, simple food. He listened to them talk about the upcoming harvest and the village gossip. He felt a sharp pang of guilt—this was the biggest lie he had ever told, but it was a necessary one. If they knew what his grimoire really was—a blank, parasitic, heretical thing that could steal the very essence of others—they would be terrified.
He was protecting them. And in doing so, he was completely, utterly alone.
After dinner, the farmhouse was silent, the kind of heavy, rustic silence that only exists in the Forsaken Realm after the sun has long since vanished. In the small, dim room upstairs, Lencar Abarame sat at a scarred wooden desk. The only light came from a single tallow candle, its flame dancing in the draft, casting long, flickering shadows against the walls.
On the desk lay the book. To anyone else, it was a plain, brown leather diary—perhaps a failed three-leaf clover, if they saw the disguise he had woven over it. But to Lencar, it was a high-density storage drive. It was a blank canvas that had, in a single day, been populated with a series of high-level data entries.
He didn't open it immediately. Instead, he closed his eyes, leaning back into the creaking chair. As Kenji Tanaka, he had spent years staring at monitors, translating human behavior and market trends into cold, hard numbers. He had lived in a world of logic gates, regression analysis, and predictive modeling. Now, he was applying that same relentless methodology to a system that the people of this world treated with mystical awe.
Magic was not mystical to Lencar. It was a resource. It was a variable. And like any variable, it could be optimized.
He opened his eyes and looked at the book. The false three-leaf clover shimmered and faded, revealing the smooth, hungry surface of the blank grimoire.
"The current state of the system is unstable," he whispered to the shadows. "I have the hardware—the body I've spent ten years forging—and I finally have the software. But the drivers are clunky. The interface is slow. If I enter the Magic Knights Exam as I am now, I am a glass cannon with a five-second reboot time."
He pulled a stack of scrap parchment toward him and picked up a charcoal stick. He didn't write a diary entry. He began to draw a blueprint. This was the birth of the Six-Month Optimization Protocol.
Variable 1: The Biological Chassis (Heretic Mode)
Lencar looked at his hands. They were calloused, the knuckles thick from a decade of punching stone and rock. But until today, he had been working with a limited energy supply. His "Mana-Forging" had been restricted by his own native, meager mana pool.
Now, that restriction was gone. The reservoir he had siphoned earlier that day was immense. It was a sea of potential energy, a "Class-A" mana capacity that his body was currently struggling to contain. It felt like he had replaced a standard AA battery with a nuclear reactor, and his "cables"—his nerves and muscles—were humming with the excess voltage.
"Problem," he wrote on the parchment. "Current physical density is insufficient to handle sustained high-output Mana-Forging. The body is the vessel; if the pressure is too high, the vessel cracks."
The Plan: Progressive Overload 2.0.
For the next 180 days, Lencar would redefine the limits of the human frame. He wouldn't just do push-ups; he would do them while siphoning his newly acquired mana into his own muscle fibers to act as a counter-force.
He calculated the math in his head. If his baseline physical strength was a 10, and his current mana capacity was a 250, he needed to close that gap. He would spend the morning hours in Isometric Stasis. He would flood his legs and core with siphoned mana, commanding the magic to push down with the weight of a ton of lead, while his muscles fought to push up.
This wasn't just training; it was internal warfare. By using his own magic as the weight, he could ensure that his training was always perfectly scaled to his current power. As his mana capacity grew or stabilized, his "weights" would automatically get heavier.
The Goal: To achieve a physical density where he could move at superhuman speeds without needing to use magic for the actual movement. He wanted to be a "Zero-Mana Threat." This was essential because of his trump card: Anti-Magic. When he used the void, he had no magic to enhance his body. Therefore, his base physical stats had to be high enough to slaughter a mid-tier mage through pure kinetic force.
Variable 2: The Logic of the Inflexible (Mage Mode)
Lencar turned to the first page of his grimoire.
[Wind Creation Magic: Towering Tornado]
"The spell is static," he noted. "I cannot change the rotation, the diameter, or the trajectory once it is cast. It is a hard-coded script."
In the Clover Kingdom, mages spent years learning how to "feel" their magic, shaping it into different forms. A wind mage might turn a breeze into a blade or a shield. Lencar couldn't do that. He was a replicator. He had the "executable file," but he didn't have the "source code."
"If I cannot be versatile through shape-shifting, I will be versatile through Sequencing and Multi-Threading."
The Plan: Macro-Management.
He divided his magical training into "Logic Gates." He wouldn't just practice casting one spell. He would practice casting sequences.
* Sequence Alpha: [Magic-Sealing Chain] to immobilize, followed immediately by [Towering Tornado] for the finish.
* Sequence Beta: [Gentle Breeze] to create a dust cloud for concealment, followed by a physical strike from the blind spot.
He needed to learn how to split his "processing power." In his Tokyo life, he could manage four monitors at once, tracking different datasets. He would apply this to his grimoire. He would train to hold the [Magic-Sealing Chain] in his left hand—an active, siphoning thread—while his right hand prepared a [Fireball] or a [Wind Pulse].
He called this "One-Man Platoon Logic." Since his spells were inflexible, he would treat them like tools in a belt. You don't "shape" a hammer; you just know exactly when to swing it. He would build a mental library of every possible combination of his current spells, practicing the transitions until they were as fast as a keyboard shortcut.
Variable 3: The Latency Problem (The Toggle)
This was the most dangerous part of his "hardware" rewrite.
"The transition from Mage Mode to Heretic Mode is currently 2.2 seconds," Lencar wrote, circling the number with a heavy hand. "In 2.2 seconds, a Light Magic user can kill me seventeen times. A Fire Magic user can incinerate the oxygen in my lungs. A chain user can bind my heart."
The "Toggle" was a system reboot. When he switched to Anti-Magic, his body went from "High-Pressure Mana" to "Complete Void." The sudden drop in internal pressure caused a sensory shock—his vision blurred, his heart skipped a beat, and his muscles experienced a micro-seizure.
The Plan: The Buffer Zone.
He needed to treat the "Toggle" like a gear shift in a high-performance car. He couldn't just slam it from fifth gear to reverse.
He would spend the middle of every day—the time when the sun was highest and his focus was sharpest—practicing the Rapid Context Switch. He would set up a "Gauntlet" in the woods. He would trigger a trap—a falling log or a swung stone—and he would have to block it with a Wind spell. Then, a second later, a different trap would trigger that required him to "Toggle" to Anti-Magic to negate a magical trigger.
The goal wasn't just to make the switch faster; it was to train his brain to ignore the "shock" of the transition. He needed to build a mental "buffer" that would allow his consciousness to stay online while his mana system was crashing and rebooting.
The Quantitative Target: Reduce latency from 2.2 seconds to 0.1 seconds. He wanted the "Toggle" to be faster than a human blink. If he could achieve that, he could cast a spell, toggle to negate an enemy's counter-attack, and toggle back to finish them, all in the space of a single breath.
Variable 4: Data Harvesting (Expansion)
Lencar looked at the empty pages of his grimoire. There were hundreds of them.
"The siphoned capacity I have now is a foundation, but it is a single-source dataset," he mused. "I am limited by the attributes of a few peasants and two prodigies. To become the 'Wizard King'—or rather, the person who holds the position—I need a more diverse portfolio."
The Plan: Passive Acquisition.
For the next six months, he wouldn't just stay in Hage. Every two weeks, he would travel to the nearby villages. He would offer "help" to traveling merchants, priests, or low-ranking guards.
He didn't need to fight them. He just needed to touch their grimoires.
He would perfect the "accidental bump." He would become a ghost in the crowd, a helpful boy who was always there to catch a falling book or steady a stumbling traveler. Every contact was a "Download."
He prioritized specific attributes:
* Healing Magic: For sustain.
* Detection/Sensor Magic: To improve his "Radar."
* Spatial or Movement Magic: To solve his lack of maneuverability.
He wouldn't seek out high-power spells yet. He needed "Utility Scripts." Small, low-cost spells that he could run in the background while his heavy-hitters were on cooldown.
The Mathematical Goal: The Magic Knights Exam
Lencar leaned back, his charcoal-stained fingers tapping on the desk. He looked at the final section of his plan, titled: The Final Simulation.
"The Magic Knights Exam is a controlled environment," he wrote. "It is a series of tests designed to measure output, control, and combat efficacy. The nobles expect to see a 'show.' They expect to see grand displays of mana."
He smiled, a cold, predatory expression that Kenji Tanaka had once used before a hostile corporate takeover.
"I will not give them a show. I will give them an Optimization Error."
He calculated his expected stats for the day of the exam:
* Physical Strength: Top 0.01% of the non-noble population.
* Mana Capacity: Equivalent to a High-Rank Magic Knight or Royal.
* Versatility: Five or more distinct magical attributes.
* Toggle Latency: <0.2 seconds.
"The Captains will see a boy with a blank book and think I am an anomaly," he whispered. "But the data will say otherwise. I will not be the strongest because of talent. I will be the strongest because I have accounted for every possible failure point in the human and magical systems."
He looked at the small candle. It was guttering now, the wick drowning in a pool of wax.
"Phase One: Foundation. Phase Two: Acquisition. Phase Three: Optimization."
He picked up the grimoire and tucked it under his pillow. The "Blank Book" was no longer just an object; it was a weapon. It was a mirror that would eventually reflect the power of the entire kingdom back at itself.
He lay down, his eyes staring into the dark. In his mind, he could already see the spreadsheet of the future. The names of the Captains—Yami Sukehiro, William Vangeance, Nozel Silva—they were just data points. Variables to be studied, siphoned, and eventually, surpassed.
"The six-month countdown begins now," he thought as sleep finally pulled at him. "180 days. 4,320 hours. 259,200 minutes."
His breathing leveled out, his heart beating with a slow, mechanical rhythm. The Data Analyst was gone. The Mage was gone.
Lencar Abarame, the Replicator, was ready to begin his work.