A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 354: A Puppet of Power - Part 5

That might have been a solvable problem, for there were three more creatures of the same type – yet those too were lost, those too were fighting under Beam's will. Every ailment afflicted on the Main Body of Francis' duplicate army, it was transmitted to the rest. A spell of that strength required a significant weakness.

For those doing the fighting, those with the strength to resist the mania, it was a terrifying thing. All those below the strength of the Second Boundary were swept up in an aura of battle lust that blocked out any other thought. It was only a handful of them that managed to keep an eye firmly on the reality of the situation.

Nila saw that Beam still hadn't budged. Even as the armies descended into chaos around them, she drew her dagger to defend him, standing her ground like a bear defending her child.

Despite the chaos, Lombard was able to calmly call out a question. "Is he breathing?" He asked, his back to her, as he moved in closer, towards where Beam had collapsed, in order to assist with the defence.

Now that the monsters had turned, they were allowed to take such liberties – but the battlefield was still fraught with danger, as giant monsters caused all manner of destruction, with or without the intention to.

With Lombard there, Nila was finally able to check. She held her ear to his mouth, and she felt it, slow and weak breaths, but breaths that still burned like they'd been breathed by a dragon. Even with the heat, those breaths grew weaker by the second.

"Damn it to hell, what has that mage done?" Greeves cursed, coming in close. By his eyes, the only rational thing was to blame the mage. He was there, after all, stock still as a statue, everso calm despite the chaos. It looked entirely like something of his doing.

Tolsey found himself eyeing the mage as well, as he fell in next to Lombard to assist with the defence. He said nothing, and merely kept the monsters away from them, infected by the same battle aura that had afflicted the villagers. His heart was hardened. He felt like a shield-bearer in the midst of battle. He had but one purpose, and that was to defend.

That purpose filled his life with more meaning than it had ever held before.

As the rest of their little party – with Judas and a few straggling soldiers joining them later, forming a circle around Beam's unconscious body – took in the situation, and blamed it on the mage, only Lombard found himself squinting, seeing past that.

'There's more to this,' he knew. He couldn't feel quite what it was, but he almost could. It was right there, on the edge of his periphery, like an itch he couldn't scratch. Beam had more to him than first met the eye, he understood that now. There was something else in him that accounted for his unnatural strength, even by the standards of the Second Boundary.

There was something else… Or maybe it was more than one thing.

Whatever it was, it was exactly the sort of thing that would have attracted Dominus, a man who had been quite calm in drawing his sword against a King, against an entire country, with no allies to support him in his rage.

From the start, Lombard had realized this was no ordinary battle, not to be fought with ordinary means. When mere villagers had triumphed where his own soldiers had failed – there were greater forces moving, unpredictable things. They sat in a crucible that might have rewrote history, and at the centre of it all, there was a boy who had called forth an impossible power, seemingly without reason.

Experience tales at M V L

And then he had collapsed, seemingly without reason.

It was not reason Lombard operated on, regardless. As a man who had spent his life on the battlefield, he knew it was not a carefully planned strategy that won in the end. It was something that exceeded it. It incorporated it, but it exceeded it all the same.

"Keep him alive," he told Nila firmly.

She hardly heard him. She was desperately trying to think of ways to help the lifeless body in front of her. 'Snow?' She wondered. 'To cool down his dreadful heat?'

"Kill the mage – that's what we need to do," Greeves said testily. "He's the source of all this. I wager that if we finish him, what he's done to the boy will pass as well. He's called up chaos, for whatever reason. Maybe his magic needs his slaughter of us to be more entertaining – whatever it is, we shouldn't trust that it will last.

We can't just stand here – we need to move, before he does something else, and we're right back where we were before."

For entirely different reasons, Lombard was of the same opinion. With Dominus still yet to arrive, Lombard knew that he could not rely on him. He knew not what was happening outside of the dark dome that they'd been trapped in. Every piece of logic that he knew was being continuously upturned. For all he knew, something might have happened to Dominus as well.

They knew they had to move, but so did Francis.

With cold eyes, he clapped his hands together. Rarely did he need to speak the names of his magic. Rarely was there a need to. But now there was a cause. He'd built a sacrificial altar to his God, and now the flames were growing out of control. He moved to calm them.

"Farlymangar," he muttered to himself, as he pressed his palms together. In three other locations, his clones did the same.

A pillar of earth blasted out underneath him, raising him into the sky by ten feet in an instant. And it was just in time too. There had been a stray Horned-Goblin looking for his head. Its spear point bounced off the pillar of dirt as it missed him.

Higher he rose, and higher, until he was thirty feet above all the action, on a thick and trusty tower of earth.