[Option 1: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain the speed of a mini-lizardman.]
[Option 2: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain the digestive system of a mini-lizardman.]
[Option 3: Expend 100% of accumulated energy to gain the hardened skin of a mini-lizardman.]
Magna stared blankly at the options, honestly not sure why Gaia was mocking him with the name mini-lizardman, a name that, as far as he knew, only Faye had ever used.
"Are you actually sentient?" he asked, thoroughly shaken, having assumed all this time the AI was little more than a mindless system, hardly capable of anything so specific as this.
Naturally, no answer came from the glowing text. The answer, instead, came from Faye.
"Me? No, no, I’m not angry," she said, waving her hands frantically in front of her face.
She clearly hadn’t the faintest idea what "sentient" even meant, assuming he was asking whether she held some grudge over her eaten cookies.
Magna set the girl’s confusion aside for now and turned back to the options.
He struck the second one off without a second thought, since it wasn’t going to help him much right now.
The first and third, though, gave him real pause.
"Do you know how fast these things are? And how tough is their skin, exactly?" he asked her, hoping for something useful to go on.
Faye, being the sort who hated admitting she didn’t know a thing, thought it over a moment before answering.
"Well. On land they’re about as fast as a horse, I think. In water, fast as a fish."
Magna couldn’t quite picture that, not knowing whether horses or fish in this world bore any resemblance to the ones back home.
"As for their skin, Mom always said even a third trial Witch can barely scratch it," she added.
Magna sighed. ’And just how strong is a third trial Witch’s spell meant to be?’
That hadn’t answered much of anything useful.
Deciding to see for himself, he peeked slowly over the rock to study the two lizards again.
He focused first on the sleeping one, sizing it up.
Its skin, or rather its glowing red scales, looked solid enough to pass for metal plating.
He scanned it for scars, wounds, anything, but there wasn’t a single mark on it anywhere.
Not that this told him much about its actual toughness.
So he turned his attention to the second lizard, still watching the river, hunting.
He waited, and learned at least one thing about them in the process, these creatures were absurdly patient hunters.
Just as he was about to give up, the lizard staring blankly at the water and going nowhere, it suddenly moved.
So fast that Magna could barely track it, even with his enhanced eyes.
One moment it stood on the bank. The next, it was simply gone. Only the heavy splash echoing through the cavern proved it had moved at all.
’Faster than Green in her demon form,’ Magna thought, measuring it against the fastest thing he’d ever seen.
He still had no read on how tough their scales actually were, but the speed alone had won him over.
He pulled his head back behind the rock, glanced at Faye, and gave her fair warning. "I’m casting another spell."
Faye nodded, her wide eyes fixed on him.
Magna started chanting again, reaching for the first words that came to mind.
"Grand Author of Stats, Creator of All Classes, Absolute Bane of Every Cheater. Unshackle my flesh and grant me the speed of the FPS players."
The words weren’t entirely random, actually. He’d used titles rather like these back in the game, playing as the God of Games, names the AI populations of his own worlds had given him once.
The moment he finished chanting, he locked in his choice.
[Option 1 selected. Utilizing gathered energy to gain the speed of a mini-lizardman. Prepare for sudden physical pain...]
He shut his eyes and braced himself as the countdown ticked down to zero.
The instant the first wave of mutation hit, his eyes flew open in sheer terror.
"Gaagh..." He caught the scream in his throat at the very last second.
This was worse, far worse, than anything before. For a moment, he genuinely believed this mutation might kill him right there on the spot.
It felt as though his entire body were being torn apart and rebuilt from nothing, as though he were turning into some kind of lizard himself.
"Are you okay?" Faye panicked, her hands hovering nervously over him, wanting to help, not knowing how.
"Yeah. Fine. Don’t worry about it," Magna gritted out through clenched teeth, cursing Gaia, and every god in existence, somewhere in the back of his mind.
Every single one of these mutations was pure agony.
Sure, the power ups were remarkable enough, but did every last one of them have to hurt quite this much?
Hadn’t dying once already, then being dragged into some strange new world just to fight for his life, been punishment enough on its own?
Listening to the sickening, wet crunch of his own bones shifting, a rage began building in him, hot enough to slowly numb the pain.
Eventually, that anger burned so fierce he couldn’t even remember, anymore, who exactly he was angry at. Only the rage itself remained.
Faye watched him writhing on the ground, her face going pale.
His eyes had gone completely bloodshot, his jaw clenched so hard his teeth had started cracking, blood trickling down his chin.
At some point, the sight became too much even for her. Something in her mind simply clicked off, the innate defense of her Winterborne blood kicking in.
The fear drained from her face at once, replaced by something cold, something vacant.
She no longer looked like a frightened child. She looked, rather, like someone who’d seen a great deal too much, someone regarding the world with total detachment.
She reached out and rested a hand on Magna’s head as he writhed there, running her fingers gently through his hair.
She didn’t chant a single word, and yet with every touch, a thin layer of frost spread through his hair, easing the burning in his mind, bit by bit.
After a while, whether from her touch or simply because the worst of the mutation had passed, his body stopped jerking about, until at last he lay completely still.
"Did she pass out?" Faye murmured, looking down at his closed eyes with a quiet sigh.
Her ears twitched at a heavy scraping sound breaking the silence, coming closer fast along the cavern floor.
For all Magna’s efforts to stay quiet, his muffled groaning had tipped the lizards off in the end.
"I don’t know what you’re doing," she said, her voice flat, entirely without feeling, "but taking on this much pain just to survive. I’ll give you that much, sister. You’re tough."
She pressed her palm flat against the cold ground and began to chant.
"O Vein of the Living World, River that has flowed since before the First Dawn, Silent Mother of Rain and Sea. Freeze the current into a sanctuary."
She spoke the spell far faster than her usual, chatty pace.
The moment the last word left her lips, the ground beneath her hand turned to solid ice.
Frost surged outward, and massive slabs of ice shot straight up from the ground, curling over them to form a thick, translucent shelter.
"That should buy us some time." She watched the two giant lizards charging straight for them through the icy wall with a perfectly calm expression.