A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 351: A Puppet of Power - Part 2

He lay face down in the snow, his eyes completely shut. When she turned him, she saw the blood streaming out of his ears and eyes, and running out of his nose. He was hot to the touch. Not just feverishly hot, but painfully hot.

"What happened?" Greeves shouted urgently, using the brief lull in combat to dash towards them. As far as he was concerned, Beam was the most important person on that battlefield. He'd seen him work miracle after miracle. He was in a situation where he didn't know what to think, as such, he clung to that which was most likely to free him, and he did so with the desperation of a younger man.

But despite his speed, the battle was already beginning to resume. The villagers were looking over to them too, with wide and fearful eyes. That fearlessness that they had exhibited up until a moment ago, it had suddenly vanished, like steam to a cold breeze. Many of their tools slipped from their hands, as weakness overran them, and the spell was broken.

Lombard could only spare the boy's body a look out of the corner of his eye, for now, two Konbreakers were closing in on him, and with only one arm, they were proving more difficult than they otherwise might be.

He found himself tutting, and muttering under his breath. "Damn it Dominus, where are you?"

He'd thought he understood his old battlefield friend, after seeing Beam himself. He'd thought he'd understood the desire to mentor something that special, to watch it grow, to allow it to be set loose on the world to do great things. He felt it firmly in his chest that he'd be willing to die for that cause.

With such a feeling, he'd also understood Dominus, and that which he'd surely seen in the boy, that which was beyond Lombard's own foresight.

And yet the boy's master was nowhere to be seen. Even straining his senses to the maximum, Lombard could pick up no hint of him. He could pick up no hint of anything past the confines of the dark dome that had sprung up around them. With each minute that passed, that dome hardened into something more glasslike, more physical, more impenetrable.

"Damn it," Lombard said again, feeling himself finally begin to lose his composure. Tolsey overheard him, and he understood the man's frustrations. With Beam down, they didn't have the strength to protect him. They didn't have the strength to protect anyone.

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"Shit! He's burning like crazy! Is this that fuckin' mage's doing?" Greeves spat, after trying to touch Beam's forehead, only to have his hand pull away, as though he'd just grasped a steaming hot kettle. Yet even as he spat that accusation, Francis was watching, his head tilted curiously, and his jaw open, as his hands twitched by his side.

He didn't look like a man that had done anything. In fact, he looked like a man deeply disturbed by what he'd just seen. Greeves couldn't draw any conclusions from that, though, for he'd seen just how mad the mage was from their earlier interactions, for all he knew it was simply another act.

"Impossible… There's so much!" Francis said. Only he could see the density of darkness that clung to Beam. Only he. Claudia's scent was almost completely wiped out by now, along with the boy's own.

It was of such a magnitude, that Francis found it impossible to believe the Dark God himself was not standing before him. It was the type of weight that he was sure could make a planet split in two, make the rivers dry up and the mountains crumble. But he had no true conception of what a God was.

He'd felt Ingolsol's presence before, and assumed it to be the full thing, the untainted thing. But no mortal could survive in the presence of a God. What he had seen had been a mere fraction. Francis quickly realized that, making what he saw in front of him all the more disturbing. Heat rose off Beam's body, as the last of the sleety and bloody snow began to evaporate around him.

A monster reached in to lunge for Beam, a terrible-looking Hobgoblin, his fangs twisted and gleeful. It was as though the creature remembered the grudge its kind owed to Beam, for there was such an intensity of emotion there, beyond mere bloodlust – it was true hatred.

It grabbed for Beam with a thick hand, as Nila watched in dismay, as Greeves stumbled to his feet with his sword, trying to swat it away.

But before the monster could get within touching distance, its arm exploded in a mess of blood, drenching Beam's two defenders.

They both looked in horror at the mage, thinking him to be a sick man, even sicker than they'd expected, that he'd torment them so, even at the cost of the lives of his own men. But Francis was frozen in place, he had no part in what had just happened.

"Impossible…" He said again, his eyes widening further. "Impossible! IMPOSSIBLE!"

He could see it. At the centre of that darkness, there was still a tiny will, struggling to survive, like a single blue flame, it held it all together, stopping the being that was Beam from merely disintegrating, soul and all, into a burst of energy.

He held the slightest sway over it. Francis could see that. Enough to swat away that Hobgoblin attack, as though through a will that eclipsed consciousness, without even seeing the creature before him, he hated the Hobgoblin with the same ferocity that the monster hated him.

A moment later, Beam's leg kicked behind him, as the Hobgoblin's green blood poured all over him for its missing arm. Then, following that, his fingers began to curl, grasping the red slushy dirt between them.

An eye opened a moment later. An eye stained purely by gold. These were no longer flecks. These were the eyes of a cat – golden all the way through. Golden enough for a banker to lust after them.

The Hobgoblin burst into black flames upon meeting his gaze, and then it began to turn around, and charge through the ranks, swatting at the monsters to either side of it, bursting them into black flame as well.