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Altair Necrosin wholeheartedly agreed with the Goddess' statement: he did stupidly let himself be assassinated by his own employers. Retirement via execution is standard practice; he had even been the one to off those agents a few times. Yet Altair thought his reputation as their best assassin, the best one in the world even, meant he was excluded and his skills were valuable enough to net him as close as a retirement can possibly be, namely churning out equally excellent child assassins for the organisation.
Thus, he carefully pinned a mental note in his mind to fully expect the Goddess to eliminate him once this new world is "saved" from the Hero. If the Goddess is privy to his thoughts and he has not been called out already, Altair safely assumed that the Goddess was subtly humouring him.
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Altair had never grown up with the common set of two parents consisting of one man and one woman or any other variation of nurturing guardians. He had studied the familial relationship to perform the expected behaviours when disguising himself as a brother, cousin, husband, father and eventually grandfather. Altair has also observed many family dynamics as part of his work. Some were filled with care and praise. Some were neglectful. Some were abusive.
Altair wasn't sure how to classify Lugh's familial relationship. A mother who taught every little wisdom of survival with each spoon she fed him while simultaneously coaching her baby to talk. A father who trained his toddler's hands to grip every object as weapons and legs to dash and attack. The contents of their lessons were reminiscent of his training under the organisation, yet he couldn't dismiss their parental love as a performance.
Lugh was mentally more than half a decade, but sometimes at night in his bed or at noon in the secluded corner of the garden, his eyes burned with memories of a young orphan who failed at discovering who he was born from.
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Altair had his fair share of excruciatingly long-term missions, but never one with a starting date after 16 years and a deadline of 18 years. Altair had outgrown the shock collar that ensures discipline of the highest order in his previous life, and though he no longer had a handler that would hover to organise every hour of his life to be the perfect tool, Lugh made sure to retrain those habits to his new and growing body.
One day, after a particularly hard training with his father, his body succumbed to the temptation of sleeping in and wasted the day. Rather than being punishment, he was faced with concern. And for the first time since he could remember, being sick and useless was allowed.
Altair tasted freedom in that safety, and no longer doubted Lugh's parents' love.
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With a pillar of fire roaring to the sky behind her, Lugh's magic teacher introduced herself. Three years senior to his seven, but apparently one of the best five magicians of the neighbouring kingdom, and Dia Vicorne made him feel that his mission to kill the Hero may not be such an impossible task. He was determined to learn as much as he can from his teacher.
And yet.
When he explored and broke and reshaped the boundaries of magic with Dia, he frequently forgot about the mission. His meticulous routine to train his body hours a day was in shambles, replaced with tangents of ideas popping up followed with magic word vomitting. His table manners escaped him whenever either one of them suddenly received inspiration for a new magic. Day by day his room looked like a paper bomb continuously exploded as they went over every spell a magician of Dia's caliber possessed.
His parents voiced their observation of how much fun he was having. Fun.
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Lugh's first encounter with a child of this world had been extremely memorable. The ten-year-old Dia summoned a fiery vortex that reached the atmosphere and contained it within a tight circle so it didn't even burn the nearby bushes, and his father's response was an impressed yet unsurprised polite clap. Lugh eliminated his doubts of the girl's magical hierarchy, hypothesised that children of this era mature more quickly, and figured this is another reason why his new parents were never freaked out when he gradually displayed uncanny knowledge and discipline for his physical age.
With that understanding, Lugh didn't really hold back in training Tarte. Short of manipulating Tarte to bond with another child of her age who she would later be ordered to kill as a test of loyalty, Lugh pretty much leafed through the rest of the organisation's training handbook. His personal maid adapted and thrived in combat, and his pride bled a little when he told Dia of the results of his teaching.
Dia laughed, made a little announcement that he had 'graduated', asked him to stop calling her "teacher", and proceeded to teach him of the new magic she came up with.
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Lugh wasn't sure when exactly he fell in love with Dia.
Tarte's "love" was an emotion he deliberately planted, and her poorly hidden crush on him would never amount to anything real due to their position or anything dangerous due to her kind nature. Maha's "love" was misplaced trauma in his opinion, lit too quickly out of desperation and best left to fizzle out. Lugh didn't feel inclined to end his existence if Dia somehow ejects him out of her life, not like his assistants to him.
He haven't thought of kissing Dia like his parents like to do, but the thought of living together with her had crossed his mind multiple times. Dia had actually voiced the same whenever they lamented over only seeing each other one day every month. For the life of him, he couldn't recall which one of them brought it up, but them getting engaged to solve the problem was brought up once as a joke. Her companionship was comforting, and their shared love of magic was enjoyable to the point of forgetting time; forgetting his divine mission.
When his father presented the option of dropping the Tuatha Dé legacy, Lugh didn't expect his first thought would be the resulting inability to have a future with Dia.
"I want to walk my own path and live my own life."
Marriage wasn't part of the plan. It's not even what he pictured whenever he vaguely imagined a future after killing the Hero. Then again, the plan never stood a chance since he met Dia anyway.