A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

With their attack brought to a screeching halt, Beam did not allow his own momentum to stop.

The soldiers roared their delight. "YOU'RE A WAR GOD, BOY! FINISH THEM!" They bellowed.

Tolsey spared a glance towards his Captain, wondering what his reaction might have been to that initial charge. The Vice-Captain still couldn't help but feel uneasy. Being a fellow member of the Second Boundary, he found himself looking for Beam's limits, and guessing that they weren't far away.

He had an inclining that the boy was merely good at attack – that his combat game must have been suffering somewhere else.

But there was the lightest of smiles on Lombard's lips. A rare sight indeed, enough to cause Tolsey to pause. Being in his forties as he was, Lombard was most set in his ways. Tolsey heard that he had a wife and a daughter – but he had not even seen the man smile as he read their letters. He would respond as though it was a business matter, and pen his reply before dinner.

Yet here he was, on the edge of a battlefield, with that smile daring to creep onto his lips. Tolsey had seen it in Lombard's tent too. Just what was the Captain seeing that he was not? Was Tolsey truly that short-sighted? He turned his eyes back towards the fight, hoping to find what he was missing.

With that Horned Goblin wounded, and the archers reloading, Beam pressed an attack of his own. The Gorebeast had already bounced away a distance, looking to create space before it began his next charge. The other two Horned Goblins were not so lucky. They lacked the speed of their fellow monster.

Ignoring the unarmed goblin as it clutched at its shoulder, Beam dove in on the other two. They had turned to run, but now they made a split-second decision to turn around and face them, even as the fear crept into their eyes. If Beam did not have an army of soldiers watching, the battle would have been over the moment he slew the Gorebeast in such a dominant fashion.

But then, he supposed, he wouldn't have been able to slay it so dominantly if not for Claudia's excitement rising to the fore – it was she that lent him the strength to land such a blow. She delighted in the making of a hero.

The goblins turned to him, their spears threatening to keep him at a distance, but they weren't enough. A most casual use of his misdirection training – feigning left, before feigning right, before once more going left. Movements done at such rapid speed that it left the goblins at the deepest depths of the hole of confusion.

The spear points strayed just slightly, unable to track him, and Beam's sword crept out.

A goblin head went flying, as its companion squealed in terror beside it, having been coated with Beam's blood. It turned to run, showing its back, but Beam's sword crept across it, barrelling its way through its spine and ribs and cutting open lungs, leaving it spluttering in a fatal mess by the time it hit the ground.

More cheers erupted from the men, as it became clear who the victor of this battle would be.

"BOY! WATCH THE LAST GOBLIN!" Tolsey shouted in alarm. He'd been more attuned than the rest in looking for weakness in Beam's game, and in truth, he was shocked to see the boy turn the momentum so easily. Seeing him survive the first attack and kill a Gorebeast in exchange, he'd almost expected it, to a degree.

Yet now the boy seemed to be the complete package. His speed and strength were such that he could fight multiple enemies at once. Tolsey wasn't sure how that made him feel. As a man in his thirties, it certainly didn't make him feel good. But then he realized his reaction was likely the wrong one –for this boy was on his side.

It was gratitude he should be showing, like his Captain, rather than jealousy.

And so Tolsey found himself calling out, as though the boy was already a comrade, covering for a weakness that he might not have seen. He half expected the boy to already have noticed it – but he didn't want to leave it to chance all the same.

That last goblin was reaching out towards the corpse of the split in half Gorebeast, with a large and bloody liver sat within its hands, preparing to take the first bite.

The soldiers had learned one thing, throughout their many battles with the monsters. When a monster reached for meat in the midst of battle, that was a fear response. They did not do so unless they did not believe they could defeat an enemy with their current strength.

Whether that was by some unspoken agreement, or whether they simply didn't think to do it until their lives were just about to be taken from them, it was hard to say. But that was the pattern they had noted. The monsters would either run headfirst towards the pile, ignoring everything, or they would stand and fight. Once they had decided to fight, they typically fought until the end.

Yet here this Horned Goblin was, reaching for Gorebeast flesh, plunging it towards his mouth. It was such an irregularity amongst the soldiers, that quite a few of them had never seen a monster evolve before.

The final Gorebeast seemed to take notes from the Horned Goblin, as it too began to look for flesh to eat. Whereas the goblin had gone for Gorebeast flesh, the Gorebeast ran towards the goblin corpses.

From experience, Beam knew just how fast these Gorebeasts tended to eat, and just how troublesome they were once they were evolved. He prioritised its slaying, as more arrows whistled out from the trees.

The arrows were little more than minor irritations now that the encirclement had been broken, and now that the enemy had gone from attacking him, to hunting meat themselves.