A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

But in consolation for the lack of touch, before, she'd been able to see the steady rise and fall of his chest. Now there was none of that. Her eyes were sharp, the eyes of a hunter. If there was the slightest sign of movement she would have caught it. Yet, no matter how much she stared, there was nothing there but a frightening stillness, as Beam lay in his own blood. Far too much blood.

Nila couldn't answer him.

"Gods… What the hell is that?"

Francis' earlier proclamation had started a storm of mana. It was powerful enough to influence the air. It felt like a cold breeze. The villagers had largely ignored it, for such minor things escaped their perception now, in the midst of a hellscape.

A spell was a spell all the same though, even if ignored. With the magic available at Francis' disposal, and the overwhelming amount of mana, he found that he could conjure his will without even chanting a spell's true name, despite its glaring lack of inefficiency.

He'd merely called, as though in prayer, for the children to listen to what he had to say. A dally of a few moments. His eyes had been cast to the sky, but as soon as he brought them to the ground again, from the top of his tower, he knew that the children had appeared.

There were fifty of them, collected throughout many long years of research, by his devoted followers, who each pursued magic with the same zeal as he, and were willing to do whatever it took to reach the same stage that he stood on. They were the products of much hard work, and many years of planning.

And in the centre of them all, there lay an objective that Beam had spent weeks on.

"Stephanie…" Nila murmured, her voice a whisper, finally able to draw her eyes away from Beam. At once, two terribly important things had been placed in peril in front of her.

Stephanie was there, amongst the others, a collar around her neck, and a chain hanging from it. It had the same crystals embedded in it that Nila had seen when they were searching the villager Elder's resistance. But the way they were made to stand here, it was entirely different.

They gripped the chains of each other's collars. There were two chains hanging off each collar, and in the line of children, each person next to them was gripping those harsh metal chains. It was a horrible sight. Stephanie was dressed in a thin and ragged dress, of the same grey that the other children were forced to wear. Their clothes were too thin for the cold weather, but none of them complained.

There were two boys either side of her, each of them was a head taller than Stephanie. They gripped her chains tightly, unwilling to let her go, their eyes just as lifeless as Stephanie's were. In a sudden bout of emotion, Nila found herself hating those two boys.

Anger boiled up inside of her. She clenched her bow with white knuckles. Irrationally, she hated those two boys just as much as she hated Francis. To see them pulling on the chains around her poor sweet little sister's neck. She was ready to murder them both for it.

"So that's the sister, is it?" Lombard said with a stony calm. He'd seen through Nila's reaction in an instant, and he'd understood what he was seeing. He glanced at Nila, and then at the crater where Beam's unmoving body lay, and he heaved a sigh.

Even for a man such as he, with the experiences that he'd had, it was too tumultuous a day to be taken lightly. His tightly bound arm still was trickling a small slither of blood. He'd lost a terrible amount of it. He was lucky to be able to hold his eyes open – he was lucky to even b alive, and yet still he found the energy to look at the battlefield with that calculating gaze of his.

He searched for solutions, and for answers. A way out of this mess.

The boy had pulled two miracles. One with the Yarmdon, and then one with Francis' army. Lombard hardly knew what had happened. He'd sense a darkness that he could not understand. It would be easy to blame it on Francis, but to do that would have been to go against his better instincts.

He sensed that Beam had tampered with forces that went beyond the mortal ken. He didn't understand what that meant, but he did not dispute their results. He'd achieved something impossible, wielded a power that no one understood, and with it changed the tide of battle.

The result? A corpse that was quickly growing colder.

It was a disappointing sight. There was much potential there. He'd sensed that as well as any. But the boy was merely that – a boy, in the end. There were domains that only experience could bridge. He'd seen potential result in more than one implosion of a promising youth, but never quite on this scale.

"Tolsey," he said.

"Captain?" Came the reply. The young commander was still clinging to life.

"At the very least, I feel we should protect the corpse," he stated. "I know not how we will manage it. Truthfully, I have never felt so lost in my entire military career. We've run out of opponents to cut down, and now, we're merely left with the unreachable. Still, there is my sentiment. If there's an opportunity to do so, at the very least, we will attempt to pull the corpse to safety."

Tolsey nodded his head firmly.

A soldier posed a question, covered in mud and blood. "And our strategy for victory, Captain?"

"Ah… We've lost something far more important than a measly battle. But if you see worth in living, then I suppose, we had merely need kill that mage."

A poorly timed declaration. Francis' hands were raised, as he played in a realm that none present could even see. On four towers, around the perimeter of his Domain, all his clones copied his movements, as the children stood lifelessly beneath him.

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