A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 319: The Worth of a Man - Part 1

It was an attack that summoned all the strength the woman had, but it barely made the man budge. He felt it, like the sting of a wasp. He turned to her with a frown on his face. An emotion of mere irritation, as though he was correcting a dog that had stepped out of line.

A thick hand grabbed the woman around the neck, immobilizing her completely. She drove her dagger relentlessly into the forearm, but the man did not let go – not before he reached for the top of her head with his other hand, and broke her neck.

She fell to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut. The Yarmdon that killed her tried to reach around to his back for the wound. Jok twisted his lips in distaste. A sting though the attack had been, it had still managed to pierce the organ.

It took the man's body a few seconds to realize that. Blood filled his mouth as his lung flooded, and his knees went weak. He collapsed to the floor, shock written on his face, hardly able to believe that he'd been felled by a woman.

And then, more attacks began to ring out.

An arrow whizzed past Jok's face. It didn't have the same bite to it as the earlier two. He figured that it must have been from a different archer. His thought was soon proved, as two more arrows followed it. He swatted them away with his shield.

From the same gap between the houses that the earlier woman had come from, there charged two more men, similarly as enraged.

"THAT WAS A GOOD WOMAN, YOU DOGS!" Barked the first, a bearded man, with a small hatchet in his hand. To Jok, he seemed like a child playing at being a Yarmdon.

These two men were met with a full shield wall, locked into place. Even as they charged at full speed, they bounced off the wooden wall uselessly, injuring nothing more than their shoulders. With Jok's men on full alert, there was no chance of breaching their wall.

But then arrows were shot their way too.

His men had his eyes on the front, facing off against those two fools that tried to best their shield wall. The arrows came from the side. They did not even see what killed them.

They were not quite as freakish in their positioning as that earlier archer had put his – with both of them being targetted at the eye – but these two were still remarkably good shots, evidence of their hunting background. One caught a soldier in the neck, whilst another caught a man in the ear.

Only around half of Jok's men were wearing helmets. He suddenly found himself wishing that there'd been a few more.

With those arrows, and those two men slain, those foolish villagers burst through their first line of defence, right into the second. It did them no favours, though, for swords and axes soon came reaching for both of them. In the end, they were both cut down without landing a single hit.

Jok stared into the darkness once more. His heart told him that the quiet wouldn't resume, and he was quite right. A sudden movement caught his eye.

"On the roof!" He shouted.

It was that boy again. He must have sensed a spark of something in that location where those two men had died, for now he was on the low-single story roof of the nearest house, already midway through a jump, his sword drawn and his eyes focused.

A man was dead before he even hit the ground. His movements had been swift enough that the two-man hole that had been created earlier wasn't allowed to patch itself up. Beam kicked out against the nearest shield, sending the man stumbling backwards.

"Gods, he's strong…" Jok murmured. His blessing had not done much to augment his physical strength.

With the stumbling of that single man, a crack formed in the shield wall, one that Beam immediately took advantage of. He could spot the slightest shift in the positioning of their shields, the slightest angling out, so that it left the smallest scrap of torso exposed. His sword snuck in off that, and gutted a man, before he kicked that corpse too, trying to cause as much chaos as he possibly could.

Jok watched tensely. The boy was not far from him now, not far at all. If Jok chose to close the distance, he could have. He could have parted his men and charged straight at him… But there was no need. That slight spark of opportunity that four people had given their lives for, it wasn't worth much.

Beam managed to kill two more men, before his momentum died down completely. The Yarmdon shifted their positions, and surrounded him safely with their shields.

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It was an odd sort of battle that they'd been forced to engage in. It had all the tension of a battle of ten thousand men. Each movement was subtle, each commander, in his own way, was looking for weaknesses in the enemy, trying to feel them out.

For Jok, it was in a logical way, using the strategies that he'd grown accustomed to. He saw Beam dive in, aiming for the gap, as he'd sensed the boy would, and in retaliation, he gave orders to his men on the opposite side of their Shield Square, readying themselves.

His order came just in time for another party of four to dispatch from the shadows. This lot made use of the flames that Jok's man had set earlier. One man even crashed straight through them, holding his arms in front of his face as he gave out a mighty roar.

But the man was no warrior, Jok could see that. From the pair of cleavers that he had in his hand, Jok would have guessed he was a butcher. There were two women with him too, and another man wielding a pitchfork.

He saw their aggression falter, as his men's gazes fixed firmly upon them – they'd been spotted before they even managed to begin their assault. Their runs began to slow, as their instincts kicked in, and they realized that their attack had already failed.