Darkness slowly receded.
It didn't happen all at once, like a curtain being pulled back to reveal the morning sun. It happened in fragmented, agonizingly slow layers. It was like swimming upward through an ocean of thick, suffocating tar, fighting for every single inch of awareness.
Sound returned first.
It started as a faint, distant, high-pitched ringing in his ears, a residual echo of the massive magical detonations that had nearly ended his life. Then, the ringing slowly gave way to a closer, more immediate sound.
Breathing.
Heavy. Uneven. Wet.
It took Garrick a long, disorienting moment to realize the pathetic, ragged breathing was his own.
Pain followed immediately after the sound. It wasn't a sharp, localized sting. It was a dull, overwhelming, spreading ache that throbbed and pulsed through absolutely every single inch of his battered body. It felt as though his bones had been pulverized and hastily glued back together.
"…gh…"
A pathetic, wet groan slipped past his cracked lips.
His leather-clad fingers twitched, scraping weakly against the ground beneath him. His dulled, exhausted senses slowly began to process the tactile feedback.
It was incredibly cold. And smooth.
It wasn't wood. It wasn't the familiar, splintered, salt-stained deck of the Gilded Eel. It was perfectly polished, flawless stone.
Garrick's pale, bloodshot eyes snapped open.
"—!"
He inhaled sharply, his lungs burning as they expanded. The air in this place was completely wrong. It was perfectly still. It was dry, yet incredibly thick. It lacked the biting, bitter smell of the sea, the rotting kelp, and the metallic tang of blood. Instead, the air tasted faintly of crushed mint and ancient parchment. It felt heavy, practically vibrating with a dense, foreign energy that made the hairs on his arms stand up.
For a long, terrifying moment, Garrick didn't move. He didn't even try to think. His traumatized mind desperately struggled to catch up to his physical reality.
Then—
The memory hit him like a physical blow to the jaw.
The Abyss Serpent. The freezing, apocalyptic sky. Kael Vortigen standing on the bow with that infuriating, bored smile. The massive, towering glaciers of demonic ice crashing down upon his ship. The absolute, suffocating despair of knowing he was going to die. And then... the jagged, unnatural crack in space tearing open the world just inches from his face.
"…I'm alive?"
His voice came out as a weak, hoarse rasp. It sounded disbelieving, as well as full of relief of having survived a disaster.
Garrick gritted his teeth and forced himself to push up onto his one good elbow.
White-hot pain screamed through his shattered ribs and his completely ruined left shoulder, forcing a hiss through his teeth. His vision swam with black spots, but he held his ground, refusing to pass out again.
"…Yeah… definitely alive…" he wheezed, blinking the sweat from his eyes. "Dead men don't hurt this damn much."
He glanced down at his own chest.
Bandages.
Thick, pristine white bandages were tightly wrapped around his torso, his shoulder, and his thigh. Through the fabric, he could feel a strange, soothing, incredibly potent magical energy seeping into his flesh. His wounds had been treated. It wasn't the flawless, instant work of a royal recovery mage, but it was highly efficient, practical field medicine backed by an absurdly dense healing environment.
That fact alone told him one very specific, undeniable thing.
"…Boss…" Garrick whispered.
A faint, echoing sound answered him from the bright, shadowless white space behind him.
Footsteps.
They were slow. Measured. Completely devoid of any rush or panic. They were the footsteps of a man who was entirely in control of his domain.
Garrick didn't turn his head immediately. He didn't have the neck strength, and frankly, he already knew exactly who was standing there.
"…Took you long enough," Garrick muttered to the empty air, trying to inject his usual lazy sarcasm into his voice, though it mostly just sounded pathetic.
Silence answered him for a few seconds. The footsteps stopped.
Then—
A voice. Calm. Even. Carrying a weight that seemed to press down on the very air itself.
"…You're awake much faster than I expected, Garrick."
Garrick let out a weak, bloody laugh that quickly devolved into a nasty cough.
"…Hard to kill, remember? You should know that better than anyone."
He finally managed to turn his head, wincing as his neck protested.
Standing a short distance away, looking entirely out of place in the pristine, brilliantly white room—
Was a figure he had only ever seen in terrifying, violent fragments before.
The masked man.
He stood perfectly still, his hands resting casually in the pockets of his black cloak. The cracked, splintered wooden mask stared down at him with those dark, empty eye-slits.
Lencar Abarame.
Even now, standing right in front of him, Garrick was deeply unnerved. There was no visible, roaring aura of mana surrounding the man. There was no overwhelming, suffocating pressure like Kael Vortigen had projected to intimidate them. There was nothing flashy at all. To a novice, this man might look completely ordinary.
And yet—
Garrick, a veteran who survived on instinct, felt it.
He felt something far more unsettling than Kael's overwhelming force. He felt absolute stillness. He felt a terrifying, contained control. It was the presence of a monster that was so incredibly confident in its own supremacy that it simply didn't feel the need to flex or prove itself. It was a black hole pretending to be a shadow.
"…You saved us," Garrick said, his voice dropping the sarcasm. It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact.
Lencar didn't respond immediately. He just stared through the mask. Instead of bragging or demanding gratitude, he took a slow step slightly closer, looking down at the broken smuggler.
"…You were about to die," Lencar stated simply, his voice devoid of pity. "Your mana was completely exhausted. Your body was failing. You were a fraction of a second away from having a demonic ice spear lobotomize you."
Garrick snorted weakly, letting his head drop back onto the smooth stone floor.
"Yeah, thanks for the recap. I noticed that part."
Silence stretched briefly between them, thick and heavy.
Then, Garrick leaned back slightly, exhaling a long, shuddering breath as the adrenaline finally, truly began to leave his system, leaving only the trauma behind.
"That bastard…" Garrick whispered, his pale eyes darkening with a mixture of hatred and lingering terror. "The Spade mage. Kael. He wasn't normal. He was playing with me the entire time. Magic knight captain level mage, right? He had to be."
Lencar nodded once, the motion slow and deliberate.
"…Yes. He is a formidable mage. A high-ranking noble from the Spade Kingdom's military elite." Lencar's tone was incredibly candid, offering no false comfort. "You were completely outclassed from the moment his ship appeared on the horizon."
Garrick clicked his tongue, a bitter, self-deprecating sound.
"Figures."
He looked down at his own hands. They were heavily bandaged, but he could see his fingers still trembling slightly.
"Thank you boss… I couldn't do anything at the end," Garrick confessed, the admission tasting like ash in his mouth. "I threw everything I had at him, and he just laughed. If you hadn't ripped open that portal, my entire crew would be food for the fishes right now."
Lencar tilted his head slightly to the side, crossing his arms over his chest.
"…That's not entirely accurate."
Garrick blinked, his brow furrowing in confusion. He looked up at the masked man.
"…Huh? What do you mean? I was on my knees waiting for the execution."
Lencar's gaze remained steady, boring into Garrick's soul.
"You created a new spell, Garrick."
Garrick froze.
For a long, tense moment—he didn't respond. His breath caught in his throat. The memory of the boiling black sea, the massive, towering wave of toxic sludge that had eaten the demonic ice, flashed vividly through his mind.
He let out a slow, shaky breath.
"…Yeah."
His expression began to shift. The bitter frustration of his defeat slowly melted away, replaced by a profound, calculating thoughtfulness.
"…That part…" Garrick murmured, staring at his trembling hands. "…was weird. Really weird."
He ran a hand through his messy, sweat-soaked hair, wincing as it pulled at a cut on his scalp.
"…Do you know when was the last time I organically got a new spell from my grimoire?"
He let out a quiet, hollow laugh.
"…Four years ago."
Silence. The words hung heavily in the pristine white air of the Void Vault.
Garrick continued, his voice tight.
"…Four damn years. Back then, I was still building my base spells. Figuring out how to survive in the badlands. I was fighting for my life every day, and eventually, the grimoire just... stopped turning pages. I figured I'd hit my absolute limit. A commoner smuggler with a highly toxic attribute. There's a ceiling for guys like me, and I thought I had slammed my head right into it."
He flexed his fingers slowly, feeling the phantom flow of mana through his repairing meridians.
"Almost all mages, especially commoners, don't just… suddenly get high-tier, massive-scale new spells like that in their late twenties," Garrick said, his mind working through the pain. "…Not unless something fundamental changes inside them."
His eyes slowly lifted from his hands, meeting the dark, empty slits of Lencar's wooden mask.
"…And something definitely changed today."
Lencar didn't interrupt. He stood there, acting as a silent sounding board, letting the smuggler put the puzzle pieces together himself.
Garrick continued, his tone becoming far more serious, his lazy demeanor entirely gone.
"When I was about to die… when that giant ice spear was falling on me…" Garrick swallowed hard. "my mana didn't just move. It didn't just react to my panic."
He clenched his right fist tightly, ignoring the stinging of the bandages.
"It expanded. It felt like… like a dam bursting inside my chest."
"Like a heavy, invisible ceiling that had been sitting on my soul for four years simply disappeared."