After promptly treating the king’s wounds, Limhi’s soldiers deliver him for a face-to-face meeting. This king-to-king exchange represents, not a military conflict, but a political one. Even though the Lamanite king, by being defeated, has admittedly lost his divine mandate, Limhi honors the protocol of such an exchange.
Yet if capturing the king is a Mesoamerican tradition, then why does Limhi’s army immediately ask permission to kill him? Although an answer is necessarily speculative, perhaps such a threat is a formal aspect of the presentation. The Lamanite king is ritually presented as a forfeited life, so that the conquering king is clearly recognized as having power of life and death over him.
A second, and simpler, possibility is that the army, still aroused to blood lust, simply wanted to kill the man responsible for the deaths of their comrades in arms. In that case, however, taking the care to staunch his wounds would seem both unnecessary and unlikely.
Redaction: Mormon shifts his narration here from description to quotation (although his description of the battle may have also been quoted from a text). He must have been reading an official text of this exchange.