A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 322: The Worth of a Man - Part 4

The man stepped aside regardless. Jok was a slim youth, but none of them doubted his strength. They'd seen him spar with Kursak and Gorm on more than one occasion.

He pressed through more ranks of men, heading to where the fight was thickest, that gap that had been plunged into his shields, two rows deep, where nearly twenty men had gathered.

He forced the last man out of the way, and he swung his steel, cleaving a woman in two.

There was a change in the air as he landed his attack. He felt it, they felt it. He grabbed the corpse of the woman that he'd just killed, and easily severed their head. He held it up to them, as blood ran down his fingers. His gaze was unflinching. He stared all of them down – even those eyes that he couldn't see, that still dwelled in the shadows, waiting for their opportunity.

With his bloodied fingers, he ran them down his cheek, drawing their Goddesses' mark. And then his blade went to work, faster than they'd ever seen. They'd been locked in fierce combat with the Yarmdon just seconds before, but now they were bared like pigs before the slaughter.

Every opportunity Jok had to demonstrate a superhuman feat, he took it. Rather than deflecting a blow that came his way, he cleaved straight through the wood of the shaft, killing the man in the same strike, and leaving his torso barely hanging on by a mere scrap of flesh.

The instant he saw the man beside him cower, his sword went to him as well. He killed one man after another, easily, readily. He hit one man with his boot, as he had seen Beam do earlier. He went quite a distance – these Stormfront men were lighter, after all.

Each of these villager men were weaker than what Jok was used to. They were weaker than normal soldiers, and far weaker than the Yarmdon elite. They merely needed to be reminded of that. In a few short moments, Jok butchered the entirety of that small group, and then he raised his sword, and gave orders to the rest of his men, further down the line.

"CRUSH THEM!" He barked. Stay connected with m-v l|e'-NovelBin.net

He gave them permission to break the ranks of the shield wall, if only slightly. The men used their own judgement on that. Those villagers there were in range, they went for, slaughtering them without mercy. As soon as the opportunity was eradicated, the villagers were revealed for what they were – untrained, undisciplined and thoroughly weak. Men and women alike were slaughtered with ease.

Arrows were fired all the while, picking off a handful of Jok's men, but he did not mind those losses.

Once the battlefield had quietened once more, he barked at the shadows, and those villagers still in the dark, doing his best to imitate Gorm's roar.

"IS THERE NO ONE ELSE? IS THIS ALL YOU HAVE? WHERE DID THAT EARLIER SPIRIT GO?"

Jok almost smiled. It was done. There were no more movements in the dark. Their earlier spirit had been thoroughly crushed.

'That was all there was to it.' He noted the conditions for his victory, and he added that to the databank of strategy that he already had. He could feel he'd grown stronger from the confrontation. His mind had been opened more broadly. In the future, he felt, there would be room for strategic development in domains that he had not even considered before.

But he was not the only one watching the battle. He was not the only one taking notes. He was not the only one with a feel for the flow, the whisperings of the Gods, that fateful pattern that drew everything together. Some even saw more deeply than he.

A sword came crashing down from overhead. Jok's sword arm only made it up there on instinct, but that point of contact, that ringing up his arm, that unfathomable strength, it shook him to his core.

Beam was above him, his eyes wide like a cat's, but there was a glossiness to them, a lack of focus, as though he wasn't looking at him, as though he was somewhere else entirely.

Jok felt his knees buckle, as he attempted to deal with the force of the blow. 'What manner of beast..?' That thought flashed through his head. The boy couldn't have more than his Second Blessing, Jok was sure of it – but then what was that weight to his strike? It felt as though he'd been hit by Kursak's battleaxe, after allowing him to fully charge the attack.

It was a monstrous strike, somehow delivered by a sword, and somehow delivered by a boy half his size.

The two of them hit the ground together, and chaos ensued.

Jok made his way to his feet as quickly as he could. His soldiers gathered with their shields around him. Beam disappeared amongst a mass of bodies, thoroughly crushed on all sides by all things Yarmdon.

He'd failed to kill Jok – but that didn't matter. They'd seen it. They'd all seen it.

Greeves felt his heart leap into his mouth as he observed from a distance away. He'd climbed on the roof of a house further down the road, and was flat on his belly, watching the battlefield, as he ordered his men beneath him.

He hadn't seen the boy move. His eyes had been fixed entirely on the enemy leader. He hadn't been as naïve as the rest of the villagers. He knew it would be a near impossible feat for a normal man like himself to take down an enemy commander. He knew there was a marked distance between them that couldn't be made up by mere surprise alone.

Even knowing that, he hadn't been able to help the tightness that gripped his chest as he saw how easily the villagers were slain. He'd felt the slow building of hopelessness. He found himself biting his lip, holding back a curse, only to see the enemy leader on the ground a moment later.

"Did he get him?" He almost shouted that. From nothing, there had been birthed such an outrageous attack – the difference in strength between Beam and that enemy commander was made obvious. Even an amateur could see from the way Jok's wrist bent back that he didn't have the power to deflect Beam.