I became a legion lich

135 Human experiments

“Do you think they will kill us soon?” A man inside a prison cell asked, his eyes lifeless. He was one of the servants of merchants that Athos captured, currently in the keep’s prison. His body was thin and his cheeks sunk against his face, clearly suffering from malnutrition.

Athos had ordered the skeletons to keep the prisoners alive, but did not specify how well they were to be treated. The skeletons did not take care of any of the prisoners’ basic needs, only following the ambiguous orders they were given.

All of them were put in just four cells, despite having almost thirty of them. Each received only a single meal a day and never left the cell, being forced to shit or piss on the floor and live with the smell for the last few days.

The prison did not have a toilet, as it was only intended to be a temporary punishment for soldiers who got out of line. In a fortress where all customers were soldiers who had the authority to arrest him, no merchant dared to step out of line.

The prisoners were cold, hungry, dirty with their own waste, desperate for how long they would stay in this situation and what the undead would do to them in the end. Some of them had already started to show signs of infection and illness, such as fever and festering sores.

Some of them were injured when they were brought in and with no healing applied, the best they could do was cover the wounds with the dirty clothes they were wearing.

“BOO!” Athos suddenly appeared outside the cell, hitting the iron grating with a loud bang, almost causing the prisoners to have a heart attack. He had mixed his presence with his surroundings just to scare them away.

“Pfftt, hahaha! You should have seen your reactions, I would kill to see it again.” Athos said with a laugh, but none of the prisoners were in the mood to laugh. They huddled in the corner of the cell, their eyes wide as they stared at Athos in terror.

Athos soon got bored of their fearful expressions and stopped playing. “I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that I’ve finally finished everything I had to do and have time to do my experiments with you, so it’s likely that many of you will soon die and be released from your torment.”

.....

“The bad news is that you are about to turn lab rats into a very creative lich, so their deaths will be very painful and testing is likely to continue even after you die. Any volunteers?” Athos asked with a smile and only crying and sobbing could be heard.

One of the prisoners tried to bite his own tongue to commit suicide, but Athos shocked the man and made him pass out. “Great, we have the first volunteer. Since no one else has volunteered and I don’t have the patience to wait, I’ll choose randomly.”

Athos opened the cell door and entered. The cell was cramped, but enough for all the prisoners to fit together and everyone immediately tried to run towards Athos, trying to run him over to escape. A general shock was enough to knock out most of them, and a punch to the jaw did the rest of the work.

“Skeletons, carry them all for me. I lied just to scare you when I said I was going to pick a few, I’ll take them all at once.” Athos spoke and electrocuted the other cells, laughing at the expressions of fear and confusion on the prisoners’ faces.

The surrounding skeleton guards obeyed his orders, opening the cells and carrying all the prisoners before following close behind Athos. They walked to a building made of white stone in the outer area, where mages with an affinity for light would heal the wounded soldiers, if Emilia and Gaius hadn’t killed them all during the first invasion.

The building had only two floors, the first being a large hospital area divided by curtains, as there were only 5 mages capable of healing in the entire fortress. The skeletons threw the prisoners onto stretchers before handcuffing them with handcuffs that Athos had prepared in advance.

Athos walked up to his first victim-that is, his first guinea pig, a male who appeared to have a fever. Among all the tests Athos wanted to do, the one he was most curious about was what would happen if he turned a living person into an undead. He wanted to know if the process would just be incredibly painful, or if it would be any different from a normal corpse.

Athos touched the prisoner’s body with his hand, conjuring up the undead. The prisoner woke up startled by the darkness ravaging his body and began to scream, but Athos didn’t care. The darkness finally reached its core and ravaged it, before the spark of corrupted life force restores it to a black core.

The prisoner’s body withered into a black skeleton and Athos received the extra life force, but it was just an ordinary black skeleton.

“Well, I didn’t have high hopes for this one, it was just scientific curiosity. Let’s start the real experiments.” Athos spoke without feeling disappointed and went on to the next.

“Hey, what the fuck was that? What are you doing?” The man strapped to a nearby stretcher screamed, having woken up to the screams of pain from the first experiment. Others began to wake up from, still in pain from the blows they received.

“Save your screams for when the real pain starts.” Athos spoke and gagged the man, before moving on to the next experiment. He wanted to know if it would be possible to only partially turn a person into a skeleton. Athos got this idea from seeing Treevor and how his body was able to function despite being half-plant.

He only had half a brain and several organs half or completely missing, but his body functioned normally. Athos should be able to do the same, as his darkness perfectly replicated organs.

Athos grabbed the man and forced him to stand still, before using the vampiric touch to slowly drain the nutrients from the man’s left leg.

“URRRKKK!!” The man gasped, feeling the flesh of his leg atrophy in a matter of seconds. He tried to move his leg, but Athos gripped his knee and waist tightly, trapping the member.

Athos controlled the ability so that it didn’t drain beyond the leg, to prevent it from hitting a vital organ and killing his experiment by accident. The process was slow and the prisoner nearly passed out from the pain a few times, forcing Athos to deliver a shock to keep him awake.

The experiment was a failure. The prisoner resisted until the moment the leg was mummified, but blood began to spurt from his waist and Athos was forced to burn the wound to stop the bleeding and the prisoner died of shock.

‘Um...I think I need to change my methods. Without a light mage, any wound can be fatal. I’m going to put the hybrid experiments on hold until the army attacks and I manage to capture some priests alive. Now let’s go to the next one.” Athos thought as he transformed the corpse into a skeleton.

Athos continued testing whatever ideas came to his mind, most being deadly to the prisoners and some being put on hold for lack of a light mage. The screams echoed inside the hospital throughout the day as Athos put all his creativity into play.

General Astrus had some healing potions of varying degrees in his storage ring, but the ring imploded the moment Athos tried to access it when he was checking the battle loot.

“This will be the last experiment before we call it a day. I want to know how the others are doing and you need a few hours of rest and food to get through another day of work.” Athos spoke with the last 10 survivors. The prisoners raised as undead were around the room, some of them with one or two limbs trapped in strange places.

One of the experiments that Athos did was to find out if he could transplant limbs into random places on the body, finding that they could be reattached anywhere in the body without serious consequences. Skeletons had trouble balancing and getting used to limbs in strange locations, but it was just a lack of custom and limbs were just as sensitive as they were in lifetimes.

“Please just kill me soon.” One of the men pleaded hoarsely, his throat aching from screaming in fear and crying during the day. Athos followed no obvious order when choosing prisoners, moving between rooms at random and terrorizing all the prisoners.

Whenever a prisoner’s screams stopped, they knew he had died and that any one of them could be next, so they swallowed back tears and made as little sound as possible, fearing the slightest movement would draw Athos’ attention.

“Hmm? Don’t worry, I’ve done everything I wanted to with the living, at least for now. I need a light mage to continue since you humans are too fragile or at least healing potions to proceed with my experiments.” Athos spoke and saw a glimmer of hope shining in the man’s eyes.

“So you can go back to your cell until my next burst of creativity.” Athos continued to speak gently, turning hope into despair.

“NO! I beg you, let me die! KILL ME!” The man screamed at the top of his lungs, but the skeleton guards at the hospital still dragged him to prison along with all the other prisoners still alive. Athos had used the vision of death to separate the healthy from the sick and experimented primarily on the sickest.