A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

That man had indeed crumbled, just as Jok thought. He didn't think there was a flaw in his movements. The strangeness lay in that boy – of course it did. There was something about him that eclipsed what Jok knew of Blessed Warriors, there was another dimension, something that produced inconsistencies in the results that Jok would expect.

He narrowed his eyes. There were two sides to Jok. He embodied duality more than most men. There was his reckless and impulsive side, and his cautious side. Both reigned supreme above everything else. He would build plans carefully, organize everything around him to the most careful degree, and then he would get a sudden urge to do something irrational.

Those irrational impulses of his often produced results. Gorm had commented on it once, in a rare moment of seriousness, as they drank at their cups. "So you have both…" he'd said. That was enough for Jok to realize that it was unusual. He liked the unusual, as a man of strategy. The unusual was what threw the enemy off.

Even if the unusual element was one of weakness, often it could be utilised in such a way that it would produce great strength.

And now Jok's impulses sang at him again. They demanded that he engage that boy, and that he crush him. The impulse hit him in an unusual way. It let him know that it was reckless. It did not overpower him. It was merely there as an enticing option.

Then there was another impulse with it – it was time to take control of the entire battlefield. He'd already made his first move. He'd all but broken the Southern wall, and he still had sixty men under his command. There was a choice – ignore the boy, allow him to be swept up, and attack the field from more angles, or attack him head-on, and try to find out what it was that kept him so wilful.

One approach seemed far more likely to succeed than the other, and it offered its own kind of temptations. Jok could not lie – the feeling of puppeteering the entire field of battle did set his heart ablaze. He gave the order.

"Move east," he said. Just like that, there was a change in the air. Lombard looked up, feeling it. Someone had just slammed a piece down on the Battle board, and now they were nearing total annihilation.

Gorm laughed, seeing his expression.

"SO THERE'S EMOTION IN YOU, AFTER ALL!" He shouted. "DAMN THAT BOY! BUT DAMN HIM PROPERLY – HE'S PUT YOU IN A RIGHT BIND!"

The pressure changed entirely as Jok shifted his sixty men further to the east, in a position where they could reinforce both the Eastern and Southern walls as needed.

Gorm's men had streamed down the length of the Eastern wall by now. At first, they'd attacked it further to the right, whilst Kursak had hit it closer to the left, but by now the force was concentrated down the length of it, forcing the Stormfront soldiers to thin their ranks even more, weakening them.

Here, those Stormfront men had already broken. Men made their way past Lombard, just as they'd made their way past Tolsey. There were nearly twenty of them behind enemy lines now. All they needed was a moment to reposition, to reorganize, and they'd hit the enemy from the back, and the battle would be over.

Jok admired it from his position. He'd kept their losses to a minimum. He couldn't quite attribute their victory entirely to himself, for he knew Gorm would have found a way through regardless, but at the very least, he had stopped that fire that they'd started from spreading. That fire that had begun with the slaying of Kursak.

He'd reversed the momentum entirely, and crushed the Southern front thoroughly.

The magnitude of that feat, to reorganize his men, and take control at the critical moment, Gorm recognized that. It was one of the few reasons why he hadn't shouted at the young commander for disobeying his orders. He too had known something needed to be done. The boy had merely done what was necessary to keep their warring healthy, whilst he engaged in the fray himself.

"Not long left, Southerner," Gorm told Lombard, as he rested his axe on his shoulder. "You held on longer than expected. Commendable."

Lombard was a mess by now. His body was riddled with wounds. His chest heaved up and down as his body fought to get the oxygen he needed. He was thoroughly battered, thoroughly filthy, and by all accounts, he looked like a man with one foot in the grave already. Yet still, much to Gorm's annoyance, despite his state, the man still remained his composure to an impossible degree.

It irritated Gorm beyond belief. That kind of calm expression, it was the look of a man that had something else up his sleeve. But Gorm knew there was nothing – Lombard simply didn't have the men to try anything else.

Gorm looked past him. He was in no hurry to finish him off just yet. He watched as the men stampeded into the heart of camp. He would have barked at them for their childishness, for not rushing around to immediately hit the enemy in the back, but he had to acknowledge it himself – this had been a hard-fought victory. They deserved their fun.

A torch was torn from its stand, as the first of many tents caught fire.

The smoke billowed, and drifted into the distance. It was a smoke that carried with it many emotions. Fear, regret, anxiety.

"Look girl, it has already fallen," an old man pointed out to Nila. She tried to speak to them, but none had come to support the cause with her. She turned her eyes towards where he was pointing. Even with the smoke rising so high, it stung her enough to bring tears.

"No…" She said. "There's no way Beam would lose…"

It was half a muttering, half a moan, there was no power in it. It didn't speak with the authority needed to convince a crowd of people. It didn't carry the power needed to move their hearts.