A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Yet the boy swung, as he always did. He seemed to know just how to make best use of her arrows. She'd consciously thought about how best she could help him, even as she charged at the head of a warband, and she dared to hope that a mere few arrows to his rer would at least help.

More than help, they reversed the tide of battle for Beam entirely. He'd been sat in a ring of thirty men, forced to maintain the most perfect of balances, forced to operate at his highest capacity, merely to stay alive. He trimmed the waste as best he could – or at least, his body had. He'd rid his mind of thought, and merely operated on feeling.

With such a sense for the equilibrium, with such a sense for everything, really, just the slightest of shifts in his favour was enough. To Beam, those arrows from Nila weighed far more on the tide of battle than she thought they had. They inspired a fear in the enemy, an uncertainty. They'd been rigid and strong before, but now they were buckling.

Those men that had been going for his back, they knew to hesitate, and those men to his front, they could do very little to defend against his attacks, lest they leave themselves entirely open to the villager's charge.

Beam's Poison Water Style went to work then. It was finally given the leeway it needed to operate. With his mind absent as it was, he felt his finger on the pulse of battle better than he ever had before.

That which he'd been trying to learn from Dominus, that line of force that ran through every conflict, that efficiency of movement, that telling flow – he was finally able to make stronger contact with it. Every movement mattered, every detail ran into the next. No movement could be wasted.

A man turned to him as though in slow motion. He was one of the few Yarmdon that wielded spears – though, these were spears of a different sort, half the length of the ones that the Stormfront favoured, which were more suited to fighting as a group.

The man's weapon held no threat in close. He struggled to reposition himself, to take a step back and establish distance. His eyes widened, as his heart thumped against his ribcage, and he tried to follow the movements of Beam. He knew to fear the boy – he'd been in the encirclement against him just a moment ago.

'But he hadn't moved this fast then…' It was only the man's thoughts that could attempt to keep up with Beam's blade, for his arm couldn't. Beam severed it at the wrist, and then grabbed his shoulder, and spun him around, managing to slit the man's throat as he did so, not a single movement wasted.

Even as the man died, his spray of blood inconvenienced his comrades. By the slightest of fractions, it obscured Beam's movements. As he ran on to the next man, he finished him even more easily than the first. The body of the first hit the shoulder of the second. He kicked the second with it, and now two bodies were falling, spraying blood, even as Beam rushed on to the third.

The third man felt the weight of two corpses crushing in on him. Beam ducked, and cut him behind the knee. He didn't need to finish him off yet – the corpses collapsed on top of him. With no leg to resist the weight, the man collapsed under the weight of it.

Beam was on to the fourth before the fourth could even note what was happening. He'd heard a scream, and turned to look, but now he was met with chaos. A web of problems that went beyond merely a single sword coming his way. There was a spray of blood, and a mound of bodies, all of them inconveniencing, all of them demanding his attention as things to be solved.

Such was the moment that Beam had built up, the feeling he'd built up. To make use of everything around him, to the best that he could. Not to plan for something, for there were no thoughts in his mind to allow for that, he didn't have the energy, but merely to react in the moment, to feel for the flow of battle, and to nudge as many things in the direction of its flow as he could.

The fourth man was killed before he even managed to raise his sword arm. The fifth fell before he could even turn his head. What had begun as a struggle of an attack on a single man on the edge of the wall had now become a wave of slaughter. Beam moved like the seismic waves of an earthquake as it ran up the side of the building, his sword danced in a sea of blood, ridding the wall of its strength.

Nila's bow was no longer hardly needed. It was only really that first arrow that the boy had wanted. The second was a gift. And now he'd built up such a tide, the enemy had no hope of reversing it. Experience tales at m v|l e'm,p| y- r

Greeves saw it too now, just what the eagle-eyed girl had spotted midcharge. That opportunity. That flash of brilliance. That spark of overwhelming heat, capable of turning the whole world into fodder that burned only for his sake. Greeves grinned. A heat overtook his body – a heat of elation.

This was what he had stepped onto the field for. This is what he had dared to believe in. As cynical as Greeves was, his belief in his intuition bordered on superstition. He followed wherever it pointed, like a dog followed its nose.

Where one man saw a steaming pile of manure, Greeves paused, and sighted gold. Once he'd caught the scent of a good investment, like the hound that he was, he wouldn't let it go, not until he'd reaped all the rewards he could from it.

"CHAAAAAAAAARGE!" He roared, a battle fury taking over him, a noise from a different life, where the sword might have offered him more opportunities than the pen.

The villagers echoed his shout. They'd seen the wave of destruction that ran up the side of the Yarmdon wall, and they were emboldened by it.

The men at the front picked up their pace and lowered their shoulders. Finally, the wall felt breachable. It had lost that stone-like quality it had had before, and they were less hesitant to put their full might into defeating it, especially with that attack coming from the left to help them.

Beam killed another two men. He kicked the last body deeper into the wall, onto the sides of the Yarmdon that were still struggling to hold their shields strong and high.