Supreme Magus

No one answered or moved.

"I’ll take that as a yes." He replied. "Let’s start with you. Name?"

"Ask your mother!" A rough man with chestnut moustaches said. "Oh, wait, she doesn’t know it either. She just calls me dadd-"

A flick of Lith’s hand and the bandit’s neck turned 180° with a crunching sound without being touched. His body fell limp on his former colleagues, covering them in drool and piss.

"I love my mother." Lith said to his now terrified audience. "This guy got it easy. I’ll rip the balls off of the next man who mentions her. Then I’ll heal his wound and force him to eat his own nuts.

"After that, I’ll cut off his little friend and make him eat it too. I won’t kill him, though. I’ll have the authorities keep him alive and make an example out of him."

Lith paused, letting the picture sink in the bandits’ brains and stomping the corpse’s manhood into mush to underline the concept.

Merchants and soldiers shuddered while holding their privates for dear life, while the bandits’ eyes became pinpricks from terror.

"You, there. What’s your name?" Lith asked, and the man remained silent. "I asked you what your name is. Talk."

The man refused to obey, but that was as far as his defiance could go. He was too terrified of using the wrong insult to say anything.

"Lesson number two. Playing the silence game with me doesn’t work." Lith said with the mean, lecturing tone of a college professor. "No game works with me. And you know why? Because I cheat. Let me show you."

He grabbed the bandit’s head and forced his jaw open, releasing a stream of darkness magic from his eyes that seeped into the prisoner’s mouth, nose, and ears. The darkness element robbed the man of his vitality and made him wither to a speed visible to the naked eye.

"There. I took away ten years of your lifespan." The man now looked in his forties, with several grey streaks in his hair and many age lines on his face that hadn’t been there until a moment ago.

"Your name, or the next time it will be twenty years." Lith’s eyes flared up with darkness, making the bandit yelp.

"You can’t do this." He sobbed as he noticed liver spots that punctuated his hands. "This is Forbidden Magic. The Kingdom will kill you for this."

"Not at all." Lith replied with a soft smile. "Forbidden Magic is consuming your life to gain something. I didn’t get younger or stronger from this. I just shortened your lifespan. Consider it like an amputation, but instead of a finger, I took away the time you have left to live."

Lith had done nothing of the sort. Darkness magic weakened its victim and removed their moisture, causing an apparent but perfectly reversible aging process. One day of rest and plenty of liquids and the bandit would have become as good as new.

Yet he didn’t know that. He couldn’t even think clearly at the idea that an inhuman monster like that could exist, and he was staring at it in the face.

"Okay." Lith released another blast of darkness magic while the bandit was still shell-shocked.

"Ygar!" The man yelled, but it was too late. "My name is Ygar! Please, stop!"

"You didn’t answer me quickly enough, and you paid the price, Ygar." Lith conjured an ice spell so that the bandit could see the sixty-year-old man he had become. "Next question. Are you part of an organization?"

"Yes." He cried like a baby seeing how his luscious black hair had become grey and thin.

"What is it called? Don’t waste my time, or else..."

"Blood Axes. We are the Blood Axes!" Ygar wetted himself as the third blast of darkness magic encroached on him.

"What a ridiculous name." Lith snorted. "Yet as someone who once shaped swords out of beer, I don’t have much of a right to criticize a bunch of losers’ naming taste. Next question. Who is your informant?"

"My infowhat?" Ygar asked in honest confusion.

"The mole. Your accomplice inside the countess’ court that leaks information about the caravans’ routes to your gang." Lith clarified.

"I just joined the Blood Axes after running away from Lustria. I didn’t even know we had one of those!" The bandit sobbed, and Lith believed him.

"What about your boss? Who is he and where can I find him?"

"I don’t know his real name, only that he goes by the nickname of Mak of the Mad Ax." Ygar replied. "I don’t know where he is, though. I’ve never met the guy. I’m still a rookie. I was supposed to earn the gang’s trust by completing this job."

"Fine." Lith snorted in annoyance.

The heart rate, the eye movements, and the smell the bandit exuded all spoke of pure terror, not deception.

"Then who’s your handler?" Lith asked, correcting himself when Ygar’s dumbfounded look told him that the bandit didn’t know that word either. "The leader of this unit. The one who gives you grunts the orders."

Lith was certain that, at some point during the ambush, he had heard someone yelling commands, but he was in the middle of the fight and with his memory, all bandits looked the same.

"I..." Ygar swallowed hard. "I can’t tell you. The Blood Axes have a vast network. If word that I’m a snitch spreads in prison, they’ll kill me."

"Loyalty. I can respect that." Lith nodded. "But respect doesn’t mean I’ll go back on my word. I warned you about what would happen if you didn’t cooperate."

The darkness faded, and a blinding light replaced it as Lith conjured the first Decay rune, Vikara. Before Ygar could beg for mercy, the Cursed Element seeped inside of him and accelerated his metabolism several thousandfold.

He aged at a speed visible to the naked eye. His hair and nails grew longer while his limbs shrank into twigs. The other bandits stared in horror as the young man they called Ygar turned into a spindly old man with a beard almost as long as he was tall.

"..." Ygar opened his mouth to talk, but only a wheeze came out.

Light abandoned his eyes as life escaped his body.

Lith waved his hand, and a tendril of Spirit Magic brought him another bandit. At the same time, a gust of wind hit Ygar’s corpse, and it crumbled into a fine dust that was scattered across the Gadora Hills.

"You can talk, or you can end like him." Lith replied. "I still have many of you to interrogate, and I only need one of you to talk. Think carefully before making your decision."

The moment Lith removed the gag, the man spilled his guts in more than one way.

"My name is Arno. I’m a Flying Dagger, I mean, a Blood Ax. I left my old gang and joined these mooks a few weeks ago. I know shit about their leader." The young, pockmarked man said amid barfs.

"I only heard about him and joined his crew because the pay was good. I...We take orders from Kharam. That guy! He’s the one you’re looking for." Arno tilted his head towards the group of bound and gagged bandits.

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