A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The creature was battling between its fear of Beam and its fear of the Half-Titan. At the second urging of its commander, it finally set forth, albeit at an impressively slow pace, completely lacking the aggression of one that should be devoted to the attack.

Beam noted the way its eyes darted about. Its plan was written on its face. It wanted to get halfway between him and the Half-Titan, and then make a mad dash for the trees, in an attempt at securing its safety.

Seeing the Horned-Goblin coming towards him, Beam walked out to meet it, the thought of speed still thoroughly on his mind. He evaluated the goblin with the smallest part of his attention, whilst he spared the rest of eyeing the Half-Titan.

This was the deciding factor for him – if he could deal with the Half-Titan comfortably and quickly, then such encirclements now and in the future would not pose much of a threat. But the key was the speed.

He clenched his fist. The Horned-Goblin came rushing, and then it attempted to dart to the side at the last moment, so that it might avoid both beings that sought to claim their lives. With a degree of carelessness, Beam ended it. His sword arm snuck out like a snake, its reach misleading.

With a slight nick on the creature's throat, and a spurt of blood, it fell to the floor, frantically grasping with its hands to close the wound. But to Beam, it was already forgotten, his eyes were still pinned on the Half-Titan. He needed to connect the tools that he'd been developing in his arsenal for the longest time.

With fear, he sensed he could make this whole army buckle. But that command of fear wasn't a tool he could wield freely, not where people were.

With his monster's approach, he figured he could surprise the beast enough to land a fatal blow. But as he looked for weaknesses, places to strike, places to overwhelm, the targets seemed limited. He could sense the speed that the Half-Titan had within those Gorebeast legs of it, and he was already more than familiar with the crushing strength of a regular Konbreaker.

Normally, with that shell in front, the plan would have been to go around the back, and attack there. Beam was quite sure that he wouldn't manage to breach the shell armour, even with his strongest blow. With reckless assaults not as an option, he had to use the other tools he had in his kit.

Misdirection, and the hero's swing – bait him into throwing himself off balance, then hit him with a single overwhelming attack. What about the monster's approach, how could he fit it all together? He puzzled over it. He needed to unify those separate skills.

He'd felt the power of the monster as he clashed through the spear wall, but now he needed that monster to be supported by flow, to lead the enemy off balance, so that such strength and speed might prove effective.

The Half-Titan was eyeing him similarly. Beam could see a nervousness about his face now that they had come closer. Without realizing it, Beam's eyes had begun to sparkle with a purple. The golden flecks had been there nearly all morning, but now, as he sought a hero's desire, it was Claudia that made her presence known, and offered him the strength to reach higher heights.

Beam lunged in with a testing strike. He didn't seek to achieve anything with it, other than start the flow of a river, to commence battle.

As he'd expected, the Half-Titan easily pushed the strike aside with those monstrous arms that it had. But even from that single strike, Beam could sense that the battle had changed. He'd put less strength into the lunge than he normally would with his attacks, and that had changed the expression on the Half-Titan's face.

The nervousness that was there seemed to vanish. The muscles on its right arm tensed up. It was looking for a blow of its own.

Claws came streaming past Beam's face. He moved his head just enough to dodge them. Again, the battlefield had changed, the problems to be solved had shifted. A scaled arm was fully extended past his face, with a vulnerable elbow. The entire Titan was off balance.

But Beam's movements were not primed for a counterattack. Just as the Half-Titan was off balance, so was he. He'd reacted, rather than flowed, he realized. If he'd baited that arm in intentionally with misdirection, then his right foot would have been behind his left, and his sword would have been swinging down from overhead.

What was it? What was that little spark that made Dominus brush off every attack that Beam threw at him? What was that illusion that seemed like precognition, that seemed as though every move Beam could make was eternally being predicted?

It was that instinct for battle that he'd thought about before. The flow that the fight settled into. How merely the movements of his feet could build up into a grand wave that set the enemy off balance. But his understanding of it was merely a vague theoretical – he couldn't truly use it as a weapon, not yet. But he needed to.

The Konbreaker pulled its arm back and repositioned itself before Beam could bring his sword down at it.

"Not enough," Beam knew. He could charge forward now, he could use that strength of his, and he could eventually corner the enemy through sheer overwhelm, but it wasn't enough.

He settled into his rhythm of misdirection, as he did before. That flow of battle had something to do with controlling space, he'd realized before – his misdirection was connected in part to the true heart of the matter, the flow that governed everything. But it wasn't it entirely.

He jabbed his sword towards the Konbreaker torso. They weren't jabs meant to kill, or even wound, really, they were merely jabs that controlled the centre distance between them, that planted an idea of danger in the Half-Titan's head, that forced a perspective on it, that it needed to dodge that space.