Lencar let the heavy, suffocating silence stretch for a long, agonizing moment.
He didn't rush. He didn't push. He just stood there on the slick, rain-washed obsidian of the Thunder-Crag Peaks, letting the howling morning wind whip his damp black cloak around his ankles. He watched as the horrifying, world-shattering weight of the truth finally, truly began to settle onto Mars's broad, trembling shoulders.
It was like watching a mountain slowly crumble from the inside out. Mars, the invincible Diamond General, the boy who had never once shown a flicker of hesitation or fear in the heat of battle, was currently kneeling on the wet stone, bound in rusted magical chains, completely and utterly broken.
The microscopic crack Lencar had surgically carved into the purple sealing rune inside the boy's brain was doing exactly what it was designed to do. It was leaking. It was bleeding out the suppressed nightmares. Lencar could almost visibly see the flashes of repressed memory assaulting the boy's conscious mind. He could see Mars's pale eyes darting rapidly back and forth beneath his eyelids, watching phantom horrors. He was seeing the cold, sterile, blood-stained stone walls of the Diamond Kingdom's underground laboratory. He was feeling the sickening, wet slide of his own crystal magic piercing through the warm, fragile bodies of the other children—his friends, his peers, his fellow test subjects.
Mars let out a low, ragged sound that was half-gasp, half-sob. It was the sound of a human soul recognizing its own mutilation.
"All of this," Lencar said, his voice cutting through the rushing wind, echoing over the quiet, desolate peaks with the absolute, uncompromising weight of a judge passing down a final sentence.
Mars flinched slightly at the sound of Lencar's voice, but he didn't look up. His gaze was fixed blindly on the black rock beneath his knees.
"The pain you are feeling right now," Lencar continued, taking a slow, deliberate step forward, his heavy boots splashing softly in a shallow puddle of rainwater. "The missing, fractured memories that feel like gaping holes in your own mind. The blood on your hands from the friends you were forced to slaughter in the dark, desperate fight for survival..."
Lencar paused, letting the wind howl for a second, framing his next words perfectly. He wasn't just a guy from Tokyo anymore; he was fully leaning into the role of the Sovereign, the mysterious, omnipotent figure he had created to survive this brutal fantasy world. He needed this performance to be flawless.
"...all of it is caused by the nobles and the white-coated scholars of your precious Kingdom. To them, you aren't a hero, Mars. You aren't a savior of the people, and you certainly aren't a person."
Lencar walked slowly around the kneeling, chained boy, his voice coming from all sides as he circled his captive. He poured every ounce of his own genuine disgust for the Diamond Kingdom's horrific practices into his tone. He didn't have to fake the anger; reading about Morris's experiments in a manga was one thing, but seeing the shattered, hyperventilating teenager in front of him made the fury entirely real.
"You are a tool," Lencar spat the word out like it was venom. "You are nothing more than a biological weapon, forged in a crucible of child abuse and dark magic. You are a sword for them to swing at the Clover Kingdom. And do you know what happens to tools, Mars? They are used until their edges dull, until they finally break under the pressure, and then they are casually, unceremoniously discarded into the mud. They stole your humanity, they stole your childhood, and they stole her... all just to secure their borders and line their own pockets."
Mars's breathing hitched violently at the implication of 'her'. The phantom warmth of Fana's smile burned in his mind, a beautiful, agonizing contrast to the freezing mountain air.
Slowly, shakily, Mars opened his pale eyes. The stoic, dead-eyed glare of the Diamond General was entirely gone. His eyes were bloodshot, wide, and swimming with a chaotic, turbulent ocean of raw, unfiltered emotion. He tilted his head back, looking up at the imposing, dark figure of Lencar standing over him, framed against the bruised, cloudy morning sky.
"Why..." Mars rasped, his voice cracking horribly. He had to swallow hard, his throat dry as sandpaper, before he could force the rest of the words out. "Why are you telling me this? Why do you care? You are an enemy of the Diamond Kingdom. You fought me in the dungeon. You shattered my armor. You..."
Lencar stopped his slow circling. He stood perfectly still, looking down at the broken boy through the dark, splintered eye-slits of his wooden mask.
Here it is, Lencar thought to himself, his heart beating a little faster with the sheer, intoxicating thrill of the psychological game he was playing. This is the crux of it all. If I mess up this dialogue choice, he stays an enemy. If I nail it... I get a General on my side.
"I fought you because you were in my way," Lencar corrected smoothly, his voice dropping into a low, calm, almost conversational register. He didn't sound arrogant or boastful. He stated it as a simple, unavoidable matter of geographical fact. "You were trying to kill the people I consider Friends. I didn't hold a personal grudge against you, Mars. You were just an obstacle on the board."
Lencar needed to build a bridge here. He needed to construct a twisted, highly specific sort of rapport with the boy. He absolutely needed Mars to see him not as a patriotic, loyal Clover Kingdom Magic Knight who was just rubbing salt in the wounds of a defeated enemy, but as something else entirely. He needed Mars to see him as a fellow outcast. A fellow monster.
"I am telling you this truth, Mars, because we are not so different, you and I," Lencar lied.
It was a massive, overarching fabrication, a completely made-up backstory designed solely to manipulate the boy's fragile, traumatized state of mind. But as Lencar spoke the words, he channeled his own genuine feelings of alienation—the loneliness of being reincarnated into a world he didn't belong in, the constant, paranoid fear of hiding his true nature, the disgust he felt for the arrogant royals of the Clover Kingdom. He used his real emotions to fuel the fake narrative, and the sheer, unadulterated conviction in his voice made the lie sound like absolute, undeniable gospel.
"I am not some loyal, blindly obedient lapdog of the Clover Kingdom," Lencar said, taking a step closer, his voice dropping to a harsh, bitter whisper that carried perfectly over the wind. "I don't serve that pathetic, weak-willed Magic Emperor, and I certainly don't bow to the bloated, inbred royalty in the Capital. I am ostracized by their arrogant nobility, just as you are victimized and experimented on by yours."
Lencar dramatically spread his arms wide, allowing the biting mountain wind to catch the heavy fabric of his soaking wet black cloak, making it billow out behind him like the wings of a dark, fallen angel. It was a classic, incredibly edgy, amateur web-novel protagonist pose, but Lencar knew it worked. In a world governed by flashy magic and dramatic titles, theatricality was a genuine weapon.
"Look at me, General," Lencar commanded, his voice echoing with a dark, heavy charisma. "Look at what I am forced to be. I have to hide my true face behind a splintered piece of wood. I have to skulk and hide in the shadows, operating outside the law, stealing spells just to survive. Do you know why?"
Mars just stared at him, completely captivated by the masked man's intense monologue, temporarily forgetting the heavy rusted chains binding his own limbs.
"Because my magic is too powerful," Lencar declared, letting a surge of his Stage 3 Peak mana flare out, visibly distorting the air around him. "It is too unnatural, too foreign, too absolutely terrifying for their fragile, traditional, pathetic little minds to accept. The Clover Kingdom loves their neat little categories. They love their grimoires with pretty little clovers on them. But they fear what they cannot understand. They fear what they cannot control."
Lencar stepped right up to the kneeling boy, towering over him.
"The nobles of my kingdom would see me dragged to the guillotine and executed in the public square just as quickly as your white-coated masters would drag you back to the laboratory and dissect you alive if they knew of your current, unsealed state," Lencar said, his voice a lethal, vibrating hum. "We are both monsters created by the greed of our respective nations, Mars. We are the dirt they sweep under the rug to keep their ivory towers clean."
It was an absolute masterclass in psychological manipulation. Lencar, using his knowledge from his past life as a data analyst who understood how to read human behavior, was expertly offering the traumatized, isolated, lonely boy a compelling, intoxicating narrative. He was offering Mars a worldview where they were both tragic victims of a corrupt, elitist system.