Ezio's POV/
The woman moved away from me thankfully.
I remained kneeling with my head bowed and my eyes fixed on the ground and listening.
The tall young man, was speaking again with that eager voice of his, and though I could not catch every word, I understood the intent well enough when he gestured toward me with a grin that stretched across his scarred face.
"Anyways! Mute or not mute, it's time to see if this guy is really as strong as his aura suggests. Before the transformation, I could have equally fight with him if I went all out and used my best martial arts. So let's see how it's now." The muscle man said.
I understood nothing.
But ohh well, it seems I know what he wants. The young man sure has a sick amount of fighting spirit, which made me chuckle inwardly.
After moving and settling into a peculiar stance, the young man said, "Come and attack me, go for the kill."
I lifted my head just enough to see his face that resembled something closer to childlike excitement, as if he had just been given a new toy and could not wait to see what it could do.
'Sighhh, he wants me to attack him.' I realized, and the thought was so absurd that I almost laughed. Here I was, a dead man in a body that was not my own, standing in a forest that looked too beautiful for some reason if not for the prisoners behind me, and the first thing this stranger wanted was to see if I could fight.
'Can't this old man just enjoy his retirement? I didn't particularly believe in heaven or hell, but a man can dream, right? Where are the angels serving me some good wine?' I thought. Not that I believed I would go to heaven even if it existed. There was too much blood on my hands.
Maybe this is karma.
'Very well. Let's teach this young man a lesson in respect so he wouldn't be going around ordering old men to attack him.' I thought, and I rose to my feet slowly, deliberately, feeling the strangeness of this new body with every movement.
This body was lighter than I remembered, faster, more responsive, and I felt like a man who had been carrying a mountain on his shoulders his entire life only to have it lifted away in an instant.
I was young and strong again, and yet I was also something else entirely, something more than a... human? I was sure something related to that Pig and Zebra monsters happened to me too.
'What have I become?' The question echoed in my mind, but I pushed it aside because there would be time for answers later and right now there was only the man in front of me and the test he wanted me to pass.
I took a step forward and then another, my eyes never leaving his, searching for an opening or a weakness or a flaw in his stance, but there was none.
'Ohh, it seems the young man's muscles isn't for show and knows a thing or two.' I thought. My instincts tell me to be careful.
He was relaxed, yes, but he was also ready in a way that spoke of years of training and battles survived, and I knew without needing to be told that this man was dangerous if not handled carefully.
'Would have been nice if I had my hidden blades with me, but my fists would do for n–hmmm?' Something stirred within me the moment I thought about hidden blades, an instinct that was not my own, a knowledge that had been planted in my blood by whatever process had brought me here, and though I did not understand it, I trusted it enough to listen.
And then I felt it.
*ksss.*
A warmth spread through my forearms like electricity running through my veins, and with a sound like tearing silk, two blades of pitch black metal extended from my wrists, longer and sleeker than any hidden blade I had ever worn, and they seemed to absorb the light around them as if they were made of shadow itself.
'Hidden blades? Out of my wrists? What the hell?' I thought with a mixture of wonder and unease.
I looked at Garou, and his grin had widened because he had seen the blades and he was pleased.
For now, push every nonsense that happens, accept it until I get more info and have time to think without distractions.
So I moved.
Then another weird thing happened.
The world slowed in my eyes, or perhaps I slowed, or perhaps everything else slowed, and the trees and leaves and dust in the air all hung suspended like insects trapped in amber while I could see every detail and every particle and every flutter of a bird's wing in the distance with a clarity that bordered on the divine.
'The drugs must have been lethal.' I thought as I took in this spectacle.
Like, what is this? What is happening to me? But there was no time for answers because my body was already moving faster than my thoughts could follow and yet my mind was keeping up as if time itself had bent to my will.
I looked at the muscle man, and he was still standing there with his stance on, his cocky grin still in place, but he was moving so slowly now, so impossibly slow, that his chest rose and fell at a glacial pace and his eyes blinked once every eternity.
He can't see me.
Then...
*Fuuuu.*
I crossed the distance between us in a single step like a ghost without making a single sound, and one moment I was standing ten paces away and the next I was directly in front of him with my hidden blade extended and aimed between his eyebrows.
*Swoosh!*
I knew that it would be quick and painless and that he would not even know what had hit him.
'Should I kill him?' I thought before shaking the thoughts away because this wasn't his style. He didn't know if Garou was a good or a bad person. And he didn't kill anyone for no solid reason.
And something inside his heart forced down that thought about killing this man. As if even thinking about it is taboo, which was weird.
But even before I made that thought...
*Grab.*
I felt a hand close around my wrist.
And then the world snapped back into normal speed.
I was standing in front of the young man with my blade a hair's breadth from his head, but it had not struck and it could not strike because the beautiful woman was there with her delicate fingers wrapped around my wrist like iron bands and her blue-gray eyes calm.
'Is this woman an Isu being?' I thought. Even though my expression didn't change, but my mind was working faster than lightning to understand just what the hell is the deal with this woman that gave me chills nonstop.
The clearing was silent, and I looked at the young man and saw that his eyes were wide and his grin had frozen on his face.
He had not seen me move or seen me coming and he had been a dead man without even knowing it if not for the woman stopping my hand.
And then, slowly, his grin returned wider than before.
"HAHAHAHA!"
He threw his head back and laughed.
'What a weird guy.' I thought. And somehow, this reaction of his reminded me of a dear friend.
Yusf Tazim.
The leader of the Ottoman Brotherhood of Assassins in Constantinople.
He was also light hearted and cheerful man that would often laugh in the face of danger.
Yusuf's boisterous, spirited, and playful was a direct contrast to my personality at the time I was in Constantinople. Always calling me by Ezio Auditore de la-la-la to annoy me.
This young man has a little bit of that energy, but sharper.
'Sighhh, good days.'
I watched the young man who had almost died and yet he was laughing as if I had just given him the greatest gift in the world.
"Did you see that?!" he shouted, looking at the beautiful woman with eyes that sparkled with excitement. "He almost got me! I didn't even see him move!"
The woman has long since she released my wrist. Her expression was still calm, with a small smile on her face as she examined me with much more interest, which was not good news.
"He is a genuine Kage powerhouse. In a fight with a leader of a hidden village, he can fight them equally. Though, he needs to familiarise himself with how ninjas fight at first. A single moment of distraction is all it takes to die, especially at high level battle between S-ranks." The beautiful woman went on.
"This shit is it! This is exactly what I wanted! With this fucker here, I could take over the land of fire in a short time!" The young man was practically bouncing with excitement now.
It seems I am seen as a weapon for him. A tool, a blade to be wielded, and yet there is something in his eyes beyond excitement, something like... respect? I do not know what to make of that either.
Why would this stranger hold respect for me? Maybe because I am strong and he liked strong people?
I retracted my blades and stepped back with my expression carefully neutral, and though I did not trust him or anyone here, I had learned something valuable.
These guys are not my enemies... for now.
And this body is powerful, far more powerful than my old one, and I am faster and stronger than I have ever been. It also seems like, I have some weird abilities.
'I need to learn more,' I thought.
.
The excitement died down after a few minutes, and the young man seemed to remember that there were other matters to attend to because he turned to the woman with his expression shifting from playful to serious.
"I've tested the blood enough. Let's move on to the main event."
Katsuyu nodded. "I have prepared the vials as you requested."
She gestured, and a small table appeared from nowhere. 'Isu tool? Magic? Or what? How could she materialise a table just like that?' I thought as my mind raced again while looking at that phenomenon.
On the table were hundreds of empty glass vials.
Then I watched as the young man approached the table and extended his hand, and with a small incision on his finger that wasn't there before a second earlier, he began to fill the vials one by one in his blood.
His blood darker than normal and almost black in the shadows, swirling and pulsing within the glass as if it had a life of its own.
'Why do I feel attracted to that blood. As if it's a part of me?' I thought in confusion.
After he had filled the last vial, the young man turned to the woman with a nod. "Inject every prisoner who hasn't taken the blood yet."
The woman nodded and began to gather the vials.
I looked out at the clearing where hundreds of prisoners were still chained to their posts with pale faces and wide eyes, some throwing curses around, or crying.
'Was this body one of them before I came here?' I thought solemnly.
This is wrong.
This was exactly what the Templars would do. Experimenting on people without their consent, turning them into weapons, stripping them of their humanity.
Is the young man and woman really the bad guys here? What have these rough looking men done to receive these their wrath?
I watched as the woman make clones of herself, which was another total nonsense thing I have seen until now.
My list of "What the hells?" Is growing by the second.
She moved among the prisoners and injected the blood into their necks and arms and hearts, and the screams began immediately, some prisoners going limp while others convulsed and thrashed against their chains, and their skin bubbled and warped as the transformation took hold.
And then, one by one, they began to change.
I looked at deadpan at this spectacle.
Then little by little, the transformations came to an end.
About two hundred and fifty in total, emerged from their transformations with humanoid forms and were still recognizable as men. They wore robes of various colors that seemed to have been generated from their own transformed flesh.
'More assasins. Just like me.' I thought in solemn shock.
I am not religious but God this is such a blasphemy to life itself and anything moral.
The name of my list of "What the hells?" Just changed to "What the fuck?!"
Are these transformed men still themselves? Do they remember who they were? Or are they just empty shells waiting to be filled with commands?
How did I come here? Did this body I have now previously belong to someone else and after the transformation, I replaced him?
I remember my dear disciple Shao Jun I trained after my retirement talking about Buddhism since she was from a land far east on earth. And how there is such a concept in Buddhism called reincarnation people believed in.
Man dies, man returns to the cycle, and then be reborn.
Is this it? Is this reincarnation?
I looked at the failed rest subjects in shock as they have turned to grotesque monsters with too many limbs and heads in the wrong places and eyes that glowed with mindless rage, and they stood apart from the others with their forms twisted and wrong and their intelligence clearly diminished, which told me where that Pig and Zebra-man came from now.
They were failed test subjects.
'I think I am in a much bigger shit I have found myself in.' I thought as I tried my best to stay calm.
The young man looked at them all, the successful and the failed, and nodded with satisfaction.
"Good," he said.
He just transformed hundreds of people into monsters, and he just says... good?
What kind of man is he? What kind of monster?
And what does that make me?
I needed to understand him and I needed to find a way to make my own choices.
But something tells me... deep inside my heart, it tells me that I can't betray this man.
It was a taboo my blood warned me about.
'Just great. My second life starts with being a slave.' I thought as my mind raced.
Who would want to be a slave?
I just hope I am not forced to do something I don't want to.
But... I am Ezio Auditore da Firenze, and I will not lose myself to some crazy bastard no matter what.
Information, information. Damn!
Seeing the 250 assasins kneeling without moving, I too, kneeled.
Just be low-key for now.
"Take care of them," the young man said, gesturing toward the kneeling assassins and the restrained monsters with a casual wave of his hand.
"Test them and see what's up. Also, teach them basic common sense, how to speak, how to act, and all of that if they were clueless. They should pick it up quickly enough with their enhanced physiques and whatever instincts they retained. And see if Ezio can talk. Something tells me he can. So deal with his confusion and tend to him."
The woman nodded.
The young man stretched his massive arms over his head and yawned as if he had just finished a long day of work rather than transforming hundreds of people into monsters. "Good, I'm heading back, I feel so sleepy and lethargic after using too much blood. I have other things to deal with after a meal and some good sleep."
The woman nodded and then, without another word, the young man disappeared in a puff of smoke.
'He disappeared? How?' I thought, but at this point this was less surprising.
Then, I found myself alone with the woman and two hundred and fifty newly created assassins and a horde of grotesque monsters that were still thrashing against their chains.
I thought about the young man with a mixture of confusion and curiosity because I still did not know what to make of him.
He had brought me back from death, given me a new body and new abilities, and yet I did not know his intentions or his goals or whether he was a friend or an enemy or something in between. He was powerful beyond anything I had ever seen in my previous life, and that alone made him dangerous, but danger was not the same as malice and I had learned long ago not to judge a man before I understood him.
But, turning many people into monsters still made me incredibly uncomfortable and made me instinctively give some negative points to the young man and this woman.
Only reason I haven't outright judged them as villains was because I knew what kind of men those prisoners were. Just some lowlifes.
.
The woman moved her clones among the failed ones first, her hands glowing with some kind of energy I did not recognize, and with practiced efficiency she bound them in ropes that seemed to pulse with power, restraining their movements until they could do nothing but snarl and snap at the air, then go silent after receiving a glare from the woman.
When she was finished, she turned to the assassins and spoke in that same calm voice.
"Wait here. I will return shortly." She said, and with her clones, all of them disappeared.
Leaving me alone with the kneeling assassins and the silence of the forest.
I remained still for a long moment with my eyes fixed on the ground, but my mind was racing because this was the first time since I had woken in this strange place that I had been left without supervision, and I needed to think.
'These assassins...' I thought, glancing subtly at the rows of kneeling figures behind me.
They were transformed like me.
They surely have new bodies and new abilities. But do they have memories? Or do they have souls?
I had seen no sign of independent intelligence from any of them since their transformation. They had knelt in unison, silent and obedient, but that could mean anything.
It could mean they were mindless, or it could mean they were... terrified.
And maybe it could mean they were waiting, just as I was, for the right moment to act.
If they were like me, then it would be natural that they would show patience, go with the flow and gather information.
Assassins were trained for many situations, and no matter how weird this situation was, they could somehow handle themselves.
'And if they were waiting just like me...' I thought, then perhaps there are others like me among them, others who were pulled from their own worlds and their own lives and forced into this new existence against their will.
The thought was both terrifying and hopeful because if there were others like me, then I was not alone, and if I was not alone, then perhaps together we could find a way to make our own choices and make something out of this dangerous situation.
But how do I find out? I could not simply stand up and start asking questions because that dangerous woman could return at any moment and I did not want to draw attention to myself.
I needed to be subtle and careful.
I needed to test the waters before diving in.
And so, I went through the words that had been drilled into me since I was seventeen years old, the words that had defined my life and my purpose and my very existence.
The Creed of the Assassins. The words that had been spoken by Altaïr and passed down through the centuries to my father and then to me.
'If there are others like me, then they will surely recognise what I will say. Every Assasin did.' I thought.
I remained still for a long moment with my eyes fixed on the ground, but before I did anything else, I needed to be sure that woman was truly gone and not watching from some hidden place where I could not see her.
So I closed my eyes and reached for the Eagle Vision, that gift that had been with me since I was a young man, that ability to see the world beyond the physical and perceive the truth that lay beneath the surface.
*Huuuu.*
The world shifted around me, colors bleeding into gray and gold and blue, and I searched for her presence, that distinct glow that marked every living being as surely as a heartbeat marked the living from the dead, but there was nothing, only the faint shimmer of the forest and the dull pulse of the monsters and the kneeling assassins around me.
After making sure no one was around, I allowed myself a small breath of relief
I didn't waste time. Without moving my body or raising my head or doing anything that might draw attention, I opened my mouth and whispered into the silence wit a broken English.
"N..othing is tr..ue, ever..ything is per..mitted."
My voice was barely audible, a breath more than a sound, and I waited for a long moment, but there was no response, only the rustle of leaves and the distant sound of wind through the trees.
I tried again, this time in French, the language I had learned during my time being a scumbag and sleeping with french women in Florence.
"Rien n'est vrai, tout est permis."
No response.
I tried Spanish, losing hope little by little.
"Nada es verdad, todo está permitido."
Again, silence. Not a single sound.
Then I tried Arabic that I learnt a few words from my memories with Altaïr.
"Laa shay'a waqi'un mutlaq bal kullun mumkin."
'Damn!' I waited but still no answer.
Then I tried Latin, the language of scholars and priests and the old texts that Leonardo and I had studied together.
"Nihil verum est, omnia licita sunt."
I already lost hope, but I tried Turkish too anyways. The language I had learned during my time in Constantinople, the language of Yusuf and the Ottoman Assassins who had become my brothers.
"Hiçbir şey doğru değil, her şey mübah."
'Sighhh, seems I am truly alone in this strange new world.' I thought tiredly, while thinking about the unknown future that awaited me.
But at that moment...
I heard it.
A whisper finally broke the quiet much to my excitement!
"The Brotherhood."
The word was soft, almost lost in the wind, but I heard it clearly and my heart leaped in my chest because it was not the word itself that mattered but the meaning behind it, the recognition, and the understanding.
Someone else knew the Creed! Someone else had been an Assassin! Someone else was like me!
And then, from somewhere else in the crowd, another whisper.
"The Creed."
Two voices.
Two responses.
Two souls who had been pulled from their own worlds and their own lives and forced into this new existence, just like me!
I did not turn around though and I did not raise my head.
I did not do anything that might reveal my excitement or alert that woman if she returned.
But inside, I was smiling.
I was not alone!
There were others like me among these transformed assassins, others who remembered the Creed, others who understood what it meant to fight for freedom and justice and the right to choose one's own path.
And if there were two, then perhaps there were more. Perhaps there were dozens or there were hundreds. Perhaps every single one of these kneeling figures was a soul that had been pulled from another world and given a second chance at life.
The thought was overwhelming, but I forced myself to remain calm and patient.
There would be time for answers later.
For now, I had what I needed. Hope and Allies.
I had brothers and sisters with me here in the same predicament.
For now, just survive.
The End.
[If you like the development, then tell me who do you think the other two voices are. Or who should they be?]
[Pull some Power Stones.]