L did not jest when he spoke of the pentagram. The moment the ax cut through the flesh and spine, cleanly separating Braj’s head from his body, waves of dark mana previously prepared ejected from underneath him. The blood from his head barely had a moment to drop before it was enveloped in thick waves of mana. It covered it like a spider's web, wrapping around as L weaved the shadows and darkness around it with his fingers.

A pool of warm blood began to spread underneath L’s feet, but none of it was important. The blood in the brain still resided in Braj’s head, keeping all the vital bits intact. He was working on a time bomb, however, and a few notice distract could quite possibly ruin everything. Mana was more than just a thing which made other things explode; mana was life, itself. The soul. The doer.

The brain. That is where everything resided, and that is where L would take the soul from. He was working under no prior knowledge, no intel or practice.

It was a gamble, that the soul resided in the brain.

Another gamble was that L did not discreetly know whether even taking the soul was possible, but if that bet worked, then having the victim be at his dying breaths must be the most reliable way. That was a gamble, too, but it was not unfounded. One common game mechanic in the most world was that there were some weapons that could trap the souls of their victim, but only when the weapon itself kills them. Another hint was that each time a player died, they would come back with reduced strength.

The only possible explanation was that the soul leaves the body during death, and that was only possible to whisk away the soul before then. For players, the soul comes back, albeit slightly weaker. For NPCs, it simply returns to wherever souls came from.

The final gamble, if the previous ones did indeed work, rested on whether L was even capable of doing the task himself. It was possible, yes, but can he do it?

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He did. Rather, he had no evidence that he did--but he just did. There was no logical reasoning to why L came to this conclusion. This ludicrously difficult and nonsensical idea, of why L stuck his left hand through the bottom of the head, through the coating of dark mana, flesh, blood, and bones, but he did. He jabbed his hand as far as it would take him, and opened it wide. He let his fingers feel the squishiness of the live brain, a sensation he had indeed felt before, and he held it in the palm of his hand. The dark mana then fell from L’s bones and enveloped the brain itself. It pushed back against the mellow skull and completely surrounded the brain with another thick coating of dark mana, this time more highly concentrated and from L’s own reserves--not the surroundings.

It then squeezed. All the mana began to condense, squishing the brain towards the central point. It was mellow, at first, but once it got to the size of a baseball it ceased to yield.

He almost failed, then, as the brain matter would have separated, causing the links to dissolve and for the soul to be damaged beyond sane use. But in a rare feat of coordination, all L’s minds maintained the assault--while they could not combine their focus together, each different mind took a portion of the sphere, and pushed at the same rate as the others, maintaining the sphere’s balance.

They were, after all, the same.

By default, L ceased to exist for the few moments it took for the three to be wholly individualized and for them to complete the task. Once he came to, surprisingly the same L without added or removed characteristics, he felt a pearl-sized stone resting within his closed palm. Body shaking, L wrenched his hand out, letting the hollow head fall and bounce off the ground.

His left hand, as well as the rest of his body, were covered in lukewarm blood. The pearl inside his palm, however, was a depthless black, unblemished by any tint of red. The thick shell was resilient, absorbing all light.

Greater Black Soul Gem

Notifications flooded L’s vision, threatening to topple him over, but with a feeble command of his mind, he whipped them away, and then gently sat down, ignoring the blood that was seeping into his clothes. The world was flipped upside down, in L’s eyes and ears. It all bore down on his skull, threatening to crush him in a similar manner. He felt his limbs constrained and his blood cold. His drummed on as if it wanted to escape this treacherous body. It was a deadly state of mana overdose, from drawing in mana from outside of his body, and thus having it poison his blood further, and mana depletion, from using all of his internal mana, and thus allowing the foreign mana to wreck more internal havoc

His lips, though pained and unresponsive, smirked still. They opened wide and chuckled before passing out.

This was the easy part. I can't wait for the hard one.