Minute Mage: A Time-Traveling LitRPG

Chapter 180: Welcome to the Kingdom: Execution Phase

Asmo stood in front of two men in a damp, dark room. She stood calmly in the empty stone cellar, assessing the two of them as they stared back at her.

She turned to the smaller one. He was short, slouched, and had a messy mop of hair atop his head. “Thein Zannir. You have been offered a promotion to second-in-command to Keiki Umesai.”

He frowned and nodded slowly.

Asmo turned to the taller man, broad shoulders held high, back straight, and face in an eternally serious expression. “Weth Lorrn. You, too, have been offered this same promotion.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“As you can tell from the title, there is only one slot.”

“This some sorta interview?” Thein asked, his commoner accent shining through his words.

“Effectively.”

Weth looked around in the plain room, nothing inside except the three people. “What…are we to do, ma’am?”

“Well,” she looked at their armored bodies, layered cloth and leather covering them with probably a half-dozen hidden daggers and weapons concealed on their persons. They were assassins, after all, so it made sense that they’d be so well-equipped. “First, you will remove your garments. Clothes and weapons, please. Give them to me.”

“…All of my clothes?” Thein asked, raising an eyebrow. “That’s fuckin’ creepy, lady.”

“Address her with respect,” Weth said without looking over.

“With respe—-man, we don’t even know her fuckin’ name. How am I supposed to address her with respect? Lady didn’t even introduce herself yet.”

“And yet you still know who she represents. And who she’s allied with. Miss Umesai killed how many people before taking over? I do not think it would be wise to trifle with them.”

Thein scoffed. “What’s the bitch gonna do? Murder me?”

Asmo drew a dagger from the sheath on her side, pulled back, and drove it straight into Thein’s shoulder with the full weight of her body.

You have struck Level 11 Rogue for 48 damage using Dagger.

He yelled in pain, stumbling back and grabbing his now-bleeding shoulder, knife sticking straight out of it.

“That is what I will do,” Asmo said simply. “If you insist, I can leave the room while you take off your clothes. But I will enter again to collect them and introduce you to the interview process.”

“Understood,” Weth said with a curt nod, though Asmo could see his eyes flicking periodically to Thein as he continued to groan in pain.

Asmo turned to Thein, awaiting a response.

He looked up at her with a scowl, and yanked the dagger out of his shoulder, blood leaking from the wound that had only been partially protected by his middling Health. “…Yeah. Sure.”

He tossed the dagger to the ground.

“You can start by taking that and shoving it back into wherever it came from.”

Asmo turned and left the room.

When she re-entered the room, Asmo found a pile of clothes and gear by the door, and two naked men standing in the middle. Weth stood in the exact same pose as he’d stood in before, arms by his side and back straight. Thein stood with the same scowl on his face, blood from his shoulder wound dribbling down to a small puddle on the floor. The only noise in the room came from his arms crossed in front of his chest, his fingers tapping impatiently against his biceps.

“So?” He asked. “We comparing dick sizes, or something?”

Asmo looked between them for a moment. “Turn around and show me you have no concealed weapons on your person.”

They turned in a circle, arms raised, and she spotted nothing.

“Okay.” Asmo opened the door and kicked the pile of clothes through, then turned back to them. “As I said before, there is only one open position for this promotion. I expect you to have resolved this issue by the time I come back.”

Weth frowned. “Um, excuse me, ma’am, but how should we go about doing that? What…method are we to use to resolve this issue?”

Asmo looked at him. “You two are assassins, correct? Do your job.”

She turned and walked back through the door, shutting and locking it behind her. She would give them…five minutes before she returned to collect the victor.

Out of the two candidates, there was one obvious favored individual—Weth. He was higher-Level, taller, in better shape, and clearly more diligent as a soldier. While he wasn’t perfectly professional, he was at least better than the average lowlife assassin that worked for Keiki, so Asmo could understand why she had put him on her list of top five best-performing soldiers.

“Urgh!”

A shout of pain sounded from behind the door. Sounded like they’d finally understood what Asmo had asked them to do. Really, she didn’t need to wait the full five minutes before going in. Once one of them stopped making noise, that would most likely be the time the fight was over.

A thud echoed from against the door—someone’s body must have been slammed into it—and then Asmo heard a wet impact from the stone floor, followed by more shouting. She’d taken their clothes and weapons, and both of those people were Melee-Types. So, basically, that just left the option of a plain fistfight. Something that was sure to drain both of them heavily, considering how much effort it would take for one of them to kill the other, even with the Level gap between them.

She wasn’t just killing a soldier for no reason, of course, it was simply a necessary sacrifice to get the survivor into the necessary physical condition for the next step of this process. That was, she needed the survivor to be damaged, beaten, and tired. Weth would kill Thein after some effort, and then she could ‘promote’ him.

It actually ended up taking the full five minutes before the sounds of combat stopped coming from behind the door. Once that was over, Asmo waited one more minute to ensure it was finished, and then entered.

The interior of the room was smeared with blood. Splatters from people getting slammed into walls, footprints from people sliding around in the murky red puddles, droplets flung around onto every surface of the stone box. And in the middle of the room was the person who’d contributed to about half of this blood. He was lying on the ground face down, dozens of wounds covering his entire body. Dead.

It was Weth.

Sitting in the corner in a pool of half blood, half sweat, was Thein. His heavy breaths echoed through the room as he stared at Asmo. Somehow, he’d won.

Asmo stared at him for a moment. “...I was curious when I received no contribution message from your dying.”

“Can’t…” he gasped for air. “Can’t kill me that easily.”

Asmo looked back at the corpse of Weth. “Are those bite marks?”

“You think I killed him with a knife wound in my shoulder by playin’ fair?” he said through continued gasps.

She stood in the room for a few more moments. The smell of body odor and sweat filled her nostrils. Then she turned around. “Well. You won. You get the promotion. We leave now.”

“Really?” He asked. “Thought you’d kill me after I beat your little game.”

“No,” she said. “Though I am curious as to how you defeated someone who was clearly your superior in every aspect, I will not kill you for no reason. At the very least, it would be a waste of resources to come this far only to give up halfway through. You will make a fine test subject.”

“That’s reassuring.” He sighed. “I don’t gotta walk long, do I? Can barely stand.”

She looked back at him with unamused eyes. “We leave now. Get up and come with me.”

After a short walk with the nude, bloody man, drawing curious eyes from the soldiers of the palace and baleful gazes from the cleaning staff, Asmo half-guided, half-dragged the exhausted Thein into an unlit room.

“Lie down here,” she pointed at the operating table and pushed him toward it.

Sluggishly, he climbed atop. “This is a shitty bed. If you’re expecting to fuck me here, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to get it up on this rock-solid piece of ass.”

She ignored him and walked over to the instrument table, ensuring she had all tools needed. There were the four prototypes Winic had made her—one for each arm and each leg—and, of course, the tools to put them there in the first place.

First, she grabbed the leather straps and walked over to him. “Stretch your arms and legs out.”

“Hey,” he said, seeming nervous from the strange room, “the hells are you doing?”

“Just put your arms and legs where I tell you to put them.”

“I don’t think I wanna do that. I thought this was some promotion thing. The hells is goin’ on?”

She forcibly grabbed his arms and yanked them to the place they needed to be, leveraging her superior Stats and the fact that he’d just drained all of his strength in a life-or-death fight to easily wrench his hands down to the table and strap them down, followed by his legs.

“Hey!” he shouted as she turned back around to grab more straps in an attempt to ensure he didn’t go anywhere. “What’re you doing! You said this was some experiment?! I though you meant, like, a fuckin’ social experiment! Like a ‘let’s see what happens if we make Thein kill some random dude’ kind of experiment! The hells is this?!”

After sufficiently strapping down his extremities and his torso, Asmo turned back around and grabbed the reason she’d needed to strap him down.

Walking toward Thein with the saw, serrated blade shining through the darkness, Asmo saw his eyes go wide in fear.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he said, “what the fuck? What the fuck are you doing?! Get the fuck away from me with that!”

She calmly placed the saw down on his arm, blade going right below the shoulder so it would cut the bicep in half. That was where Winic had told her she’d need to cut for the Enchanted instruments to work, so that was where she’d cut.

“Please, lady,” Thein begged, “I didn’t do nothin’ to you! I passed your fuckin’ test! What the hells?!”

“I do understand your pain,” Asmo responded. “Personally, I have had my own limbs amputated one hundred and twelve times. But the first time is always the worst, so I apologize for making you go through that. I will only do this to you once, however, so ideally you will find it in your mind to forgive me.”

Asmo did need to work relatively quickly once she commenced her amputation. Blood loss would be significant from such a thing, after all, and the man was already heavily damaged. This was by far the part of the operation most likely to end in failure and a dead subject, and unpracticed hands were certainly not guaranteed to avoid error.

But with her calming breathing techniques to carry her through the sharp sounds of Thein’s agonized screaming, she carried through the operation smoothly. Each time she amputated a limb, she grabbed one of Winic’s devices and affixed it to the stump. This device then spread across the open, bleeding wound and covered it entirely in metal, stemming the immediate bleeding and setting itself up within Thein’s body, on standby for Asmo to activate when she was ready.

Once all four limbs had been amputated and all four devices were in place, she stood back and gazed upon her work. The bloody table held a barely-conscious Thein, who was now just a head and a torso with two stumps protruding from its shoulders and two stumps protruding from its pelvis. But soon he would be much, much more.

Asmo walked over and grabbed a potion of Health and a potion of Stamina, pouring them into her subject’s mouth. They’d boost his regeneration for the next ten minutes, which would hopefully pull him out of his current daze.

“Thein,” she said. “Wake up.”

“I…” his voice was hoarse from screaming. “I don’t…”

“Can you at least understand me?”

“Y…yeah.”

“Okay. I will speak, and you can listen.” She took a step back. “I have removed your limbs. You understand that, yes?”

He nodded wearily.

“Good. And you understand what that means for you? For your life? Without your limbs, you can effectively do nothing. You cannot walk on your own, you cannot work on your own, you cannot eat or drink on your own, you cannot live on your own. You are doomed to a life of nothingness, your only escape being suicide.”

Another nod, this one even wearier.

“I am willing to offer you one other escape. One which I imagine is much preferable to killing yourself. Which, of course, you would not be able to do anyway, given you have no legs to walk off a bridge with.”

His eyes opened a bit wider, looking at Asmo.

“Rather than telling you what I offer, allow me to show you.” Asmo reached into her pocket and grabbed a switch, then flicked it on.

Instantly, the four metal bands that were wrapped around his stumps lit up, brightening the entire room in a blue glow. Out from each of them grew a magical appendage, each sized to perfectly replace Thein’s missing limbs. Two arms and two legs.

He blinked and looked down at his new body, breathing heavily not out of fear anymore, but out of surprise. Asmo was sure the whiplash of losing one’s limbs and then instantly getting them back would be enough to put anyone in shock. Or, rather, she knew exactly that this would be the case, as she had lived through it, herself. In a slightly different context, of course, but she suspected she understood his feelings.

“Try moving them,” she said.

One of the arms shook, not quite moving in any sort of natural Human way, and not really traveling to any destination at all, rather bending strangely and contorting into itself. As a magical construct, it could pass through itself just fine, but other objects could not pass through it. Winic had tried to explain it to Asmo when he gave them to her, but his method of teaching seemed to forget Asmo barely had more than a cursory knowledge of Enchanting, and so his jargon-filled word vomit flew over her head. But seeing it in action was still quite interesting.

“What…” Thein stared on in wonder. “What is this? Why?”

“You will get more used to moving them in the future,” Asmo said. “I have heard they have quite the learning curve. But we will re-train you on how to walk and move naturally. As for why I have done this…”

She flipped the switch back off.

The room instantly went dark again as the limbs shut off, disappearing back into nothingness.

“If I, or anyone else I trust, ever, for any reason, suspects you of attempting to work against us, of being disobedient, insubordinate, lazy, ineffective, or otherwise costing more than you are worth, I will flip this switch off. And you will not have limbs until I decide to turn them back on.”

She flipped them back on. The blue light illuminated Thein’s face, revealing an expression of horror.

“If you work properly, you will have nothing to fear. In fact, these limbs are better than normal ones. I have effectively given you four extremely powerful, extremely expensive Enchanted items that you will have for the rest of your life. But I will take them away if I feel the need to. So do not make me feel the need to take them away. Unless you wish to take that other escape option I mentioned to avoid a life lived without limbs.”

“Y…” he shook his head. “You’re insane.”

“I prefer the term effective. Now come with me. I am hoping to turn you into the second person I have ever trusted. And I expect you to help me trust more people. Oh, and congratulations on your promotion.”