When The Magmite Became Human
a hololive fanfiction by The Overlord Bear
Summary: When it comes to loyalty, the Maglord’s minions have more opened eyes than they seem to have.
They first were test subjects in an experiment on a forgotten village. Having read texts on a cult that worshipped octopus-like creatures from the abyss between the worlds, mad alchemist Dezmond Magni sought to create creatures emulating their sway over weaker minds. Smart enough to have some caution about the consequences of carelessly meddling with such forces, he mixed into some octopi and that abyssal energy contained in some slime some arachnids and insects infused with a securely unnamed formula of his. He made them outright terrors, eyeless beings that made very stark their desire to devour the mind of flesh. And of course, as someone who also proudly called himself the Maglord, he gave those creatures his red-and-gold accented darker purple and called them Magmites.
That forgotten village lost its minds before it could even form yet another one of Dezmond’s cults. Not that it was a problem to him, not when he was tired of keeping up with so many fickle minds for such long whiles. The Magmites clung to their prey and steered their bodies at his command and some autonomy, and Dezmond considered them his greatest work for a good while.
And then that autonomy became sentience. Not like Dezmond didn’t expect that, but he also expected anything to happen with the power to devour and control minds. And even a crushed bug could be a nuisance. At the very least, they were satisfying to smoosh into the paste they once were when he had to put them down, and another part of why he considered the Magmites among his greatest creations was also how easy they were for him to make.
Still, the newly sentient Magmites irritated him with their screams and cries. Dezmond considered adjusting the next ones’ taste buds and make them easily addicted to brains, but even with the Magmites’ more disposable form, he wasn’t going to make another repeat of a failed Copium experiment he did on another forgotten village and risk making another tourist trap via legends of his madness.
Thus, he let the Magmites be, and his confidence in that was assured by the growth of their habit of offing themselves out of despairing guilt they barely understood along with their other feelings and emotions. Besides, it wasn’t like they were his only workforce, and he was used to doing things himself a lot.
And then he woke up one overslept day to walk into a ruckus over in his current lair’s underground lab.
An explorer had stumbled upon the village he took over. That made the livability of the Maglord’s current lair lower, which pissed the man off.
But something about the Magmites worsened the rage. They were giving some forced catering to the nosy explorer, but no, that was not what aggravated him. What did was how the Magmites now had beady little eyes and squishy little smiles, criss-crosses of thread over them marking what they once were. The explorer, chairbound with rope and gagged with cloth in multiple messy layers that showed the little monsters’ incompetence with all that finer manual labor, watched with both fascination and horror as the Magmites stacked and lined to pass ingredients, hold equipment, and do more human work.
But Dezmond, he only saw their inefficient work. That was all the Maglord could see with his cold, hard, little, and lonely heart held by his overefficient mind.
Thus, he took out a sledgehammer and smashed all the Magmites in the room. He didn’t care about his terrified captive. Those little things had grown even more irritating, and he had to get a hold of himself for the standard overclocking somehow.
“Sorry, buddy,” the shady alchemist told the chaired victim. “Just making sure that these creeps don’t catch me off-guard.”
The brightness in the victim’s eyes had Dezmond realizing that he seemed like came into the scene practically out of nowhere and like a hero delivering a miracle. The mad alchemist gave a wry smile at that.
“And now I’m gonna need to make sure that you don’t catch me off-guard,” he said next, snuffing out that light in his listener’s eyes. “Pardon the hammer, then, but – EEK!”
Suddenly, Dezmond’s face was blinded by a bunch of squishy yet tight suction, causing him to fall on his rear and grab for his face. Soon enough, he heard the explorer crying thanks to the Magmites while running away from the Maglord’s lair.
Once Dezmond got the Magmites out of his face, he killed every single one of them he could find until he tired himself out for the day.
And then the next day came with Magmites serving him breakfast in bed.
Dezmond wondered if he was having a nightmare.
A Magmite sucked a chunk of some egg into its seamed mouth, and then it pushed the plate to the Maglord.
Feeling like he had nothing to lose due to feeling like he was in rock bottom again, he humored his weirdly sentient creations and took a bite out of the breakfast they made for him.
Then he took another.
And another.
Again, another.
Dezmond finished the breakfast way faster than he ever expected of these mutated monsters of his.
“Whoever cooked this put in sugar instead of salt,” he called out, “But they managed to make it taste like a pretty good alternative to salt.”
And then the Magmites jumped onto him again, causing him to yelp, but this time, they weren’t trying to stop him. He even saw how they were trying to stretch out their stubby little limbs.
There, he realized that he found them cute. And that he was getting tired of working alone and overclocked with mindbroken servants.
(Not that it would stop him from wanting to smoosh them into paste, but now he would do it for a different reason.)
So when Elysian law enforcement came to the village for Dezmond thanks to a tip from that escaped explorer, he had already escaped with all his things and his servants…except for one.
That one Magmite? That one removed his own seams and disposed of every single one of the apprehension squad, the explorer included. He couldn’t catch up with his fellows and his master anymore after that fight, but still, he felt content as he died with his body recognizable unlike his splatter brethren.
Other Magmites came back for his body after some time, finding it almost crushed and never touched by rubble. They buried his body in the yard of the guild their master had just joined. They could not come up with a name for him, and their master was too busy to care yet again, so they settled on a title for his gravestone:
“The Most Human Magmite.”
They would later realize how ominous that sounded, and some of them would even get humanoid forms, but even so, that gravestone would never be changed for a very long while at least.
That Magmite’s death was what made them aware that they had become human, see.
And the Maglord could deny it all he wanted with claims of efficiency reductions and social customs, but the Magmites firmly believed that they couldn’t have learned that they became human if that death never made the usually horrible man himself cry.
Author’s Note: Just wanna show my appreciation for the one I consider Stars EN’s cutest mascot. And I’m more an Axelotl and a Koipanion. And speaking of being an Axelotl, I think Axel’s Tragic Mag obsession is rubbing off on me.
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