Magna shut his eyes against the sudden burst of heat flaring up ahead.
It felt like someone had thrown open a furnace door right in front of him. Heat rolled over his skin, and for a second he was sure it would simply melt straight off.
Yet just as fast as the temperature had spiked, it dropped away again, leaving nothing behind but the overpowering stench of scorched flesh.
He tried desperately to open his eyes and see what had happened. The lingering heat kept them dry and stinging for a few painful seconds.
At last he managed to pry them open and looked ahead.
What he saw left him speechless.
Stretching toward the entrance and beyond, the stone walls of the cave had partly melted. On the ground lay the goblins, their bodies charred pitch black, faint trails of smoke still rising off them.
Taking in the sheer devastation of it, it seemed nothing short of a miracle that he hadn’t been touched by the flames at all.
Then his gaze landed on the only goblin still standing in the middle of it.
From behind, the mother goblin looked more or less intact, except her horns were gone entirely, meaning she’d reverted out of whatever that demonic form of hers had been.
As she slowly turned around, Magna saw the truth of it, and it was horrific.
Her front was scorched black, just like the corpses on the ground. Even her one remaining eye had melted away in its socket, leaving her completely blind.
And yet, blind as she was, she sensed him instinctively, turning her face straight toward the baby.
"Geen..." Magna strained to make his voice reach her.
Hearing him, her scorched lips curled up, just slightly, into something like a tender smile as she spoke.
"Eat good... gwow big... kay?"
A heartbeat later, whatever strength she had left finally gave out, and her body dropped to the ground.
Those were the last words she ever spoke in this world.
Magna sat there a long while, entirely losing track of how much time had gone by.
For the first time across both of his lives, his mind went completely blank.
No spiraling thoughts pushing him toward overthinking, as usual, no feelings left in him at all. He simply sat there, hollowed out, his eyes fixed on the mother goblin’s lifeless body.
He might have stayed lost in that numbness a good while longer, if a sudden growl from his stomach hadn’t finally pulled him back.
He was in no state to care about hunger, and yet his body, honest as ever, ignored how he actually felt.
The rich smell of roasted meat drifting through the cave certainly wasn’t helping matters either.
Then, her last words echoed back through his mind.
Eat good... grow big...
Looking at the charred bodies scattered across the floor, he wasn’t sure whether to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it, or simply give in to grief.
One thing, though, he was certain of.
He would survive, and he would grow, if for no other reason than the mother goblin who’d given her life for his.
Magna crawled past her body without looking, not ready to face her that closely, and made his way toward the nearest fallen goblin.
Fortunately, enough time had clearly passed since the spell went off.
The stone ground and walls around him weren’t too hot to touch anymore, the cave’s natural ventilation having cooled things down well enough by then.
He stared at the corpse in front of him. Its skin had gone entirely black.
He had no idea if it was even edible, or whether his still-developing stomach could handle it, but the smell drifting off it was, rather surprisingly, mouthwatering.
Or maybe he was simply starved enough that anything would’ve smelled good to him.
Either way, the odd look of the meat didn’t bother him in the least. This wasn’t the first strange-looking meal he’d faced, not after all the bizarre dishes he’d eaten in VR games over the years.
Visually, at least, he was well past the point of being grossed out.
’How am I even meant to eat this?’ he wondered, glancing around for something sharp, a blade of some kind.
His baby teeth had started coming in, but they were nowhere near strong enough to tear through cooked flesh. He’d need a tool, something to slice it into manageable pieces.
Unfortunately, everything in the cave looked either burned to nothing or melted away entirely.
Until his eyes landed on something over in the far corner, right where the spellbooks used to sit.
There had been three of them originally, green, red, and blue.
The green and blue ones had been reduced to nothing but ash now. And yet, somehow, the red one sat right there among the ruins, without a single mark on it.
Curious, Magna crawled over for a closer look.
Given that everything around it, even the stone floor underneath, had partly melted, the book’s pristine state seemed almost impossible. It made him wonder whether it wasn’t just holding spells, but actively protecting itself with magic of its own.
Curiosity won out over hunger, for the moment. He reached out and flipped open the cover.
What he found wasn’t just writing, the way you’d expect from a book. The inner pages had been hollowed out to form a small compartment, and inside sat a bright, diamond-shaped piece of metal, glowing faintly red.
His curiosity only sharpened. He reached out to pick it up, then flinched and yanked his hand back at a sudden, sharp pain.
’It’s so sharp.’ Tiny cuts had already opened across his little fingers, blood starting to well up.
He’d barely even brushed it, and that alone had been enough to slice him open.
Lucky for him, he wasn’t quite strong enough to grip it hard enough to cut clean through his fingers, or he might have said goodbye to a few of them right then and there.
’I can use this to cut the meat,’ he realized at once, though he’d need a safer way to hold it first.
He scanned the cave once more, his eyes landing on the bed of leaves.
He crawled back, gathered up a handful, and packed them into a thick pad. Then he returned to the sharp red object.
Carefully wrapping the leaves around it, he tried picking it up again, making sure the edges wouldn’t cut straight through his makeshift handle.
As he lifted it, the first thing he noticed was how impossibly light it was. He could barely feel any weight to it at all, beyond the leaves themselves.
The second thing was the heat. It was warm, nearly hot to the touch, and he couldn’t tell whether the thing was giving off heat on its own, or simply holding onto whatever warmth the fire spell had left behind.
Either way, he had more pressing things to worry about than where the object had come from.
Holding it carefully, he made his way back to the cooked goblin and set about trying to tear off a piece, just to see how it tasted.