A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

The flesh had once again returned to its bones, though he seemed considerably hairier than he had before. His chest too was broader… And indeed, that bull-head that he wore no longer seemed to be a mere accessory. The beast of man pulled himself to his feet. It was as strange as seeing a statue coming to life. He looked towards them with the red eyes of the bull.

Only when those eyes blinked did the fusion become perfectly clear.

Horns on his head, hooves on his feet and legs as fury as those of a bull. The man had merged for all to see it. He was no longer human. Nor even truly monster, but something in between the two of them. One thing was for certain, he was strong.

It was hard to say where the black battle-axe that sat in his meaty palms had come from, but given that they'd seen stranger things already, no one was inclined to question it.

At least, in part, there'd been some answers. They knew at least what the people there had aimed to do with that fire. Had it been any larger, even twice the size, Oliver was unsure whether he would have been able to deal with it.

But this... This he felt a certain amount of confidence towards. The monstrous beast that rightly sent the army of soldiers cowering, Oliver stepped towards.

"Ser Patrick!" Cormrant shouted. "It would not be unwise to retreat, if you could find it in you."

Oliver smiled. "Vice-Commander, we've overcome too much today to baulk at the very final obstacle. Witness it. I was raised on beasts like these."

He wasn't lying. His whole career as a swordsman was founded on fighting monstrosities, far before he'd begun to fight men. He wasn't sure which world was more dangerous, though he was quite sure which one he preferred. There was something terribly simple about slaying monsters, for there was no murky lines there. Monsters hated humans with a maddening passion. One could get no truer enemy than that.

This monster was no different.

"A Minotaur," Ingolsol complained.

"Pandora is still the same as ever," Claudia agreed.

For Oliver, that name bore no meaning. He was not privy to the ancient legends of times past. The history that the Stormfront continent had forgotten, he too had no knowledge of. It didn't matter to him the struggles the heroes of aeons past had overcome – not then. This was simply the final swing of the blade in an overwise long and tiring day. And tiring it truly was.

Sometimes Oliver forgot what it was like to feel tiredness like a normal man.

The Minotaur bellowed at him from atop the steps. A cry that was halfway between a human's angry shouting, and the braying of a cow. A terrible thing. Monstrous. But there was still something human about the way he pointed a finger, begging a challenge. It seemed that, at least to a degree, the man had retained a fraction of his mind.

Enough to taunt Oliver with.

Oliver rose to the provocation. He took a deep breath in, and went barrelling towards the steps.

The Minotaur did not make him wait. It leapt from the top of the platform, clearing the ring of steps entirely, before landing with a heavy clatter, his axe raised, just in front of Oliver.

Forget cleaving a man in two, that strike would have been strong enough to shatter a boulder. Fragments of old tile and rock went flying as the axe missed its intended target and the hooves pounded an irritated rhythm into the stone.

Oliver hardly reacted. He was used to displays of power. It was no different from that Boulder Crab, not really. In many ways, the Boulder Crab was the more terrifying beast. Its strength, at least, almost certainly exceeded that of the Minotaur.

He worked up the speed that he'd employed on those twenty men earlier, though he found that he had a considerably harder time going that fast now that the exhaustion was beginning to set in.

He drew a ring around the Minotaur, doing a full circuit of it, before feinting forward, only to come back the other way. An angry battleaxe swung where he'd just been, as the Minotaur snorted its irritation heavily enough through its nostrils to have its breath mist in the cold air. Stay tuned to My Virtual Library Empire

Dominating the battlefield, as with every endeavour, it seemed to be the same. Gaining ground, a step or two, looking for the opening on his opponent, forcing him to move.

The too hastily thrown battleaxe strike created such an opening. Oliver knew he was the faster man, unlike with the Boulder Crab, and he dashed in to draw a lick of blood down the Minotaur's back.

His sword landed as he intended, though the skin was tougher than he'd expected. That was not to say that the wound was insignificant. He felt a glimmer of relief at that. From the Minotaur's aura, he'd expected a certain level of strength from it and he was pleased to see that he was not mistaken.

Then the wound began to heal.

Oliver saw it out of the corner of his eye, just as he dodged the next blow of the axe, ducking down as he'd been practising all day, he instinctively lashed out to draw a cut across the creature's calf.

It howled in pain. He was wounding it, that was certainly true, but so too was the fact that it was healing. Slow though the regeneration was, it was happening. By the time the minotaur was preparing its next strike, the wound on its back was almost healed.

A troubling thing to see, though Oliver did not feel the sort of fear towards it that he likely should have. So, it made the minor wounds that he was inflicting ineffectual? That hardly seemed to matter. It made the fight more difficult, true, but it didn't change what he had to do. He merely needed to inflict a fatal strike that it couldn't shrug off and tear it to pieces from there.@@novelbin@@