A short while before Faye ever set foot in the cave, Magna had already begun his transformation, choosing what he judged to be the best option.
[Option 2 selected. Utilizing gathered energy to gain the core traits and instincts of a cold-blooded assassin. Prepare for sudden physical pain.]
"Physical pain again?" He hadn’t seen that coming, having rather assumed this change would be more mental than physical this time round.
Still, warning noted, he braced himself all the same.
The countdown ticked slowly down.
By the time it hit zero, he understood just how wrong he’d been.
The option wasn’t simply handing him the mindset and memories of an assassin. It was reshaping his entire body into that of a seasoned killer, one built through years of ruthless conditioning.
The agony struck all at once, and he went down again.
It tore through his whole body, worse than the pain of aging 3 years had been, or so he assumed, since he hadn’t actually been conscious for most of that one. Whatever the case, right now, it hurt like hell.
He could feel muscles he’d never even known existed, contracting, stretching, tearing apart, and stitching themselves back together.
Unbearable as the pain was, something else made it worse still. No matter how bad it got, he simply couldn’t black out.
His brain wouldn’t shut down, too busy, it turned out, undergoing a transformation of its own.
Knowledge and experience poured into his memory from nowhere at all. False memories played out, showing him a body forged over a long life spent as an assassin.
Memories of people dying in his hands, experiencing every kind of injury, and near-death moments, all of it carved itself into his mind.
After a while, the flood of memory stopped feeling foreign, until it felt, quite genuinely, as though he’d lived through every scrap of it himself.
In a way, he supposed, he had, all of it lived out through the games he’d played in his old life.
Gaia, apparently, was using his own memories to shape him into a proper assassin.
The only thing she’d gone through and added, adjusted, real pain, real hardship, to every experience before folding it back into his mind.
After writhing on the ground in agony a while longer, his body started responding to the pain less and less, growing used to it.
Eventually, his tolerance peaked out entirely, and all he could do was lie flat on his back in the chamber and wait it out.
The mental shift finished first, somewhere around ten minutes in, followed a few minutes later by the physical one.
Muscles that had been faint, barely defined, now stood out sharply across his whole body.
His eyes had changed too, not in colour, his pupils stayed the same dark brown, but in the way they looked at things.
Even his height had grown, ten centimeters or more.
Where he’d already looked like a child past four, this transformation left him looking something closer to six, maybe seven.
He slowly got up, testing the changes for himself, then muttered under his breath, "Holy shit. This tech is awesome."
For all he’d just become, a genuine assassin, memories and all, he was still the same nerdy gamer underneath it.
He hadn’t so much as blinked, growing from baby to child. But watching himself become a proper class in a matter of minutes, well, that left him rather in awe.
Now, at last, it was time to leave the cave without fear and find out exactly what sort of world he’d landed in.
But there was still one thing left to do first.
He turned toward the mother goblin’s body and made his way over slowly.
Kneeling beside her, he looked at her charred, ruined face.
"You were a good mother, you know? Best I’ve ever had," he said quietly.
He hoisted her onto his back, rose to his feet, and walked out of the chamber.
He wanted her a proper grave. Not one in this foul, stinking cave.
He hadn’t forgotten the strange red metal either, taking it with him, it looked worth something, along with a broken, half melted short sword, the best weapon he’d managed to scavenge off the goblins.
Making his way through the long, dark corridors, he relied on his senses to guide him.
His eyes couldn’t see past a meter or so, but his ears wewe working fine, tracking the faintest sound, and his skin picked up the subtle breeze drifting in from the cave’s exit.
Just as he was about to reach the main chamber, the one where the goblins used to gather, he froze on the spot.
His ears had caught something. Footsteps, soft ones. Not like the goblins.
He set the mother goblin’s body down slowly and drew the half-melted sword from his belt, barely a blade anymore in shape, though one edge still held its sharpness.
Lowering himself to make his small frame even smaller, he crept toward the sound on his fingertips, silent as any proper assassin.
He reached the large chamber soon enough.
Sunlight poured in through the cracks in the ceiling, lighting up dozens of charred goblin bodies scattered across the floor.
Near the far entrance, though, stood a faint shape.
’What’s that?’
To his eyes, it was little more than a blurry silhouette, human in shape.
Had this been the old Magna, his first instinct would have been to slip back the way he’d come, as quietly as he could, and hide.
But now, driven by the cold instincts of an assassin, his body was already moving before he’d even had time to think it through.
Using the shadows to his advantage, his footsteps utterly silent, he closed the gap behind the blurry figure.
He pressed the sharp edge of his ruined blade against where he judged its neck to be.
Feeling the figure freeze and start trembling at once under the pressure, a flicker of satisfaction ran through him.
Whatever this was, it clearly understood fear well enough.
Leaning in close to test whether it could speak, he pushed his altered vocal cords into something unfamiliar and let it whisper right into her ear.
"Who are you?"
Faye felt a sudden jolt of surprise, her whole world thrown into turmoil.
The icy edge of the blade pressed so hard against her throat that she could feel warm blood trickling down her cold skin.
Yet worse than the steel itself was the voice whispering beside her ear, breath grazing her neck along with it.
It stirred up something in her she’d never once felt before.
Fear.
It sounded like nothing she’d ever heard, all at once the voice of a man, a woman, and something monstrous, and yet entirely without the one thing it needed to have... Emotion.
’I’m going to be killed.’
Her legs trembled, close to giving out beneath her. The spell wrapping her in transparent ice shattered, having served no purpose anyway.
Her deep blue eyes shook, warm tears spilling freely, and then she began to cry loudly.
In an instant, her whole noble bearing as a Winterborne Witch fell away, leaving nothing behind but the terrified reality of an 8 year old child.