A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 367: A Greedy Man - Part 10

But as soon as he prepared his spear, they were all hit with the reality of the situation at once. These were Gods. Huge divine fragments.

"What has happened, dear boy?" Claudia asked, her tone kind. "You have released your hold on them, allowing them this more powerful form… But you did so because your soul felt you could handle it, did you not?"

"Foolish, damn it," Ingolsol cursed. They were all cursing for the same reason. Ingolsol the fragment bore a fragment of the will of Ingolsol the God. It moulded his personality, and made him what he was, just as the experiences of Beam had moulded him into the sentient being that he'd now become… But knowledge was something that they all fatally lacked.

The boy with his seemingly unshakeable will.

The fragment of a Goddess with her ever-kind and brave heart.

And then the shadow of darkness that underlined them all.

They operated on instinct. They did that which came naturally to them. The human tongue was as much a part of Ingolsol as his want for power was. His main body was built by humanity after all – just as Claudia's was. He was the embodiment of all the knowledge that they knew consciously, and all that they had come to know unconsciously. Such things were the tools of the Gods.

As fragments grew, they gained access to that which the Gods that they came from knew, just as a child might follow the same path of strength as his father.

Yet this..? A mortal body hosting a battleground for four fragments from two different Gods – with those fragments losing the will of their Gods. It was sheer energy.

That which they knew guided their earlier shock. The boy was meant to die immediately. Those divine fragments had entered the domain of his soul. The safe sanctity that he'd built, the temple that had kept his soul balanced, even as Ingolsol's Curse wore on him, and even after he'd passed through to the Second Boundary.

That was his zone of strength. A place where even the giant divine fragments could not move strongly. A zone of murkiness, something hard to map, a place in which Beam had full control.

But in order to purge those foreign entities from his soul, the instinct to do that came like the instinct to vomit. It demanded that he cast aside the safe sanctity that he'd built up. It told him to use his eyes, and to truly see – to allow things to be as they were, so that he could truly put a leash on them, rather than merely maintaining the status quo.

Ingolsol and Claudia had been fed on Beam's victories. Their own instincts, and their own smatterings of godly knowledge that came as they grew, they had been overturned by the impossibilities that Beam had managed to conduct again and again. Even the very fact that the boy existed at all was a miracle.

And so when he'd cast aside the curtain, when he'd voluntarily dismantled the walls of his own soul's defence, and when he had allowed the two fragments that he held command over to rise up in their most powerful, and their truest forms – both of them held belief in him without a thought. It was the same belief that came with breathing, or with drinking, a natural thing, completely unchallenged.

Again and again, he'd done it. Again and again, he'd run up against the wall of infinity, of reality, of possibility. He'd smashed his skull against it, rattling his brains, out of a desperate desire to merely contain. A will that was once like an overwhelming wave, or a mountain of immovable material. The desire to simply be.

That which was now slowly but surely starting to form a point, as the boy grasped for the future he desired.

There were swords in his visions now. The material of his will started to take the shape of a warrior. And then, just recently, another part of him had changed shape as well, forging out of it a banner of command, the mantle of a leader.

Even with that overwhelming will, that which he had relied on again and again, to smite through any circumstance, finally, the cracks begin to show.

"Gargh…" The giants moved again, and Beam fell onto both knees this time. Blood ran out of his eyes, and ears. Both in that domain, as well as in the world around him.

Ingolsol's claws curled into an arc, and he found himself reaching for Beam's heart before he even knew what he was doing. His predatory instincts kicked in. He felt a wall fall, and his body demanded that he move to take advantage of it.

"Ingolsol," there came a low and threatening voice, as vines bound up his arm, stopping it just before the points of his claws could reach Beam's chest. "Halt," she said.

"He's done," Ingolsol hissed. "For true, this time, there's no coming back from it. Look around you, woman. The game's up."

As Ingolsol said, the world around them seemed to be falling apart. The giant divine fragments continued their vegetative shuffle, mindlessly searching for something, but they knew not what.

Their footprints continued to leave impressions in the ground. Every little imprint was like a knife through Beam's heart. Pain ran across his face, like nothing he had ever experienced. That foundation that he had always relied on – even that eluded him now.

A fissure ran through the land of white, as the giant's shuffling finally cracked that white material, rather than merely deforming it.

Beam's face was as white as a ghost, and blood ran down his chin.

"Look at him," Ingolsol said, his voice a growl. "The going was good – but this is where it ends. I've seen him longer than you have, wench. I know his capabilities, I know his strength."

"How can you be with him so long and still not have a shred of the goodness that he has?" Claudia shouted back, hammering a wooden fist towards the spectral shroud of Ingolsol's face.