A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 312: The Strings of Fate - Part 11

"Does he agree with that?" The man said. Like the rest of them, he wondered why Beam had yet to speak.

At Greeves' nudging, Beam finally looked upwards. He locked eyes with the man that was talking to him. The man felt himself shiver. It was as though suddenly there were eyes looking at him out of the darkness. They were terrifying eyes, complicated.

Beam took a deep breath, willing some oxygen to his brain. As he'd stood and waited, he slowly felt his body recovering. It was both a good and bad thing. Beam had been fighting for days on end as a result of the monster attacks. He'd managed to keep up that pace with consistent rest and sleep, and he figured he could have gone on for far longer.

But a whole day of activity as he had been subjected to, with the same shift fending off monsters – Half-Titan's at that – followed by the unsettling nature of the Elder's basement, straight into an exhaustive battle not unlike the one that he'd fought with the Hobgoblin… He felt like he'd lived several lifetimes in just a single day. Continue your adventure with m|v-l'e -NovelBin.net

He'd grown, he felt that. His body and his mind were desperately doing what every body and mind did when they were overwhelmed with new experience and information – they were desperately trying to integrate it, and find some semblance of order amongst it all, some umbrella of reasoning that they could call the 'known.'

Beam's body and mind were still struggling to catch up. From the stresses of earlier that day, with deaths that should have been avoided… and now what seemed to follow was the deaths of everyone. Tolsey had gone missing, he hadn't heard from Lombard, he hadn't seen Judas… Everyone had disappeared. And then the number of soldiers that had died – many of whom he knew… It was impossible to process.

It felt like a weight. He couldn't decide how he felt about it yet. He'd reached some form of answer as he battled – the struggle had forged his mental state into something harder, and he'd recalled that which he was. He was never a hero, he was never a being of greatness. It was always loss that met his efforts, yet he struggled anyway.

Conscious thought began to return, and that was what he thought of, as his muscles ached. Violent thoughts assailed him. 'What of Tolsey?' 'Judas trusted you to have his back, didn't he?'

He brushed them aside for now. He felt the wounds begin to gather in his heart, and he accepted it. Whenever there was pain, Beam had learned that he was in the right place. He was right where he should be.

And now there were accusatory eyes cast upon him. Not many, but enough. Earlier in the day, that might have dug more deeply than it did now. Now, he was able to meet them with a straight face. He didn't like it, the feeling was uncomfortable, but he remembered that he was used to being uncomfortable. He was used to feeling like an outcast.

Competence had never been his calling card, he'd never been lucky enough to teach it, no matter how much he tried.

With that, mistakes were inevitable. With mistakes being inevitable, he could accept them. Even the lives of two hundred and fifty people, if they were placing themselves in his hands, trusting him, then he would accept them.

Not because he believed himself to be a good leader, but because he could see that they had no other choice. Greeves had guided them, Nila had guided them, Loriel had guided them. All of them were pointing their fingers his way. These pillars of competence in their own right, each of them pointed to something greater.

It was impossible for him to unravel what they meant. Even more impossible to do it right in that moment, when his mind was overloaded, when it couldn't figure out just who they were anymore, so he didn't bother, he didn't think too deeply, he couldn't afford to. Instead, he allowed the mindset of the warrior to wash over him, the mindset of the struggler.

The same thing that had kept him alive on the field of battle.

"We fight," he said simply. They weren't inspiring words, but they were the words that were running through his mind. His logical mind had died, he couldn't take the reins of a leader properly, so he took it in his own way.

He merely voiced his own intentions aloud, how he would fight this battle if it was merely him – and if the others wished to follow, then that was on them, he decided.

'Half-arsed', Ingolsol taunted. Beam knew it was Ingolsol by now. With the sounds of battle gone from his ears, that voice came again and again. Without someone needing to explain it, he knew that there was something peculiar about that night that made it possible for Ingolsol to reach him so easily. For that voice to be heard, when usually there was just a feeling.

Whether it was the despair that hung in the air, or the weighty evil that eclipsed all of it, it was hard to tell, but Ingolsol could be heard, and he spoke freely. Sharp, short sentences, more tongue lashings than anything else. It seized upon Beam's own doubts, and magnified them.

'Don't speak – you'll kill them,' it said. 'They're going to die. Die, die die.'

It took the knot of anxiety he usually found in his stomach, and it twisted it until the pain made him want to scream.

And still, Beam was able to remain comfortable, despite that internal civil war, despite the aching might of his body, despite the overwhelming responsibility that saddled him, the impossible odds that he had overcome. The state of mind that he had trained for years supported him when more complicated things could not. Beam resolved to struggle.

"They're going to burn the houses," he noted. "Could attack through the windows… But would need to be cautious."