A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Ahoy!" Verdant called out, noticing him first, giving him the shout.

Oliver raised his hand in return and continued his dragging, soon closing the gap between them.

"This is far further than we agreed upon my Lord," Verdant said. "You need not make concessions on our behalf. The distance that we'd already planned was more than far enough to keep us in the right."

"I know," Oliver said, letting the body flop and grabbing a handful of snow to wash his hands off. "But I had a bit of a head start, and the Gocks are the most troublesome of the minor creatures, I think, so I ended up pulling them a bit further. How was the road here? And difficulties?"

"I slew a Gock," Blackthorn announced proudly.

"It was so dreadfully cute…" Pauline bemoaned behind her.

"She was remarkably quick in reacting to it," Verdant said. "It would seem to be a class of monster that the Lady does particularly well against."

"Well done," Oliver praised. "As long as no one's injured, I'll be going straight off again. See you later."

"As you wish, my Lord," Verdant said, "you've already taken more than enough time with us. Rest assured, we shall be fine. Karesh has already been speaking quite enthusiastically about how he'll deal with anything in our way."

"Wa- Don't tell him that!" Karesh shouted, as Oliver laughed and ran past them, back in the opposite direction.

It was towards the main thoroughfare through the forest that he had to head once more. Next on the list were his old enemies, the Gorebeasts. He expected the hunt of them to prove even easier than it had with the Konbreakers, given that they stayed in their packs, and they were devilish numbers of them, he reasoned that he wouldn't have to struggle to find their like.

He soon found his exit, after proceeding further down the road, and he shot off down another snaking path, just as deep in snow as the first, just as overridden with trees. Here, the Black Wolves proved to be a near-constant. Not as thick as the road to the Hobgoblins, but thick enough in their activity that it made him worry about how untouched any corpse that he left would likely to be.@@novelbin@@

Towards creating some sort of insurance on that end, he killed more Black Wolves than he had any intention to, slicing through a pack of five, his sword treating them as no more than the nuances that he thought they were.

The massive beasts gave a yelp of alarm when they realized that the battle hadn't been going their way, but even their wide paws and the grace that they moved through the snow didn't do much to save them from Oliver. He cut them down and tossed their bodies further into the trees, in the hopes of keeping any monsters that might be passing by away from the trail.

Off he went once more, in a brief period of quiet. It was an assault of goblins that interrupted him next. The two pack-loving monsters often dwelled closely together, and this section of the Grand Forest was no example. Their erratic screams and their incomprehensible madness was just as grating on his ears as it had been on the first day that he'd heard it.

He cut through them with a quickness that sought silence, and then tossed their bodies into the woods.

There wasn't a true change in terrain that marked their entrance into Gorebeast territory. They favoured the soft soil and thick trees just as Black Wolves did. In many ways, they seemed an evolved – or perhaps twisted – version of the Black Wolves, in their hound-like appearance and likes.

The real warning of the Gorebeast's presence was more the lack of Black Wolves and goblins than anything else. In this area, Oliver didn't bother to slow. He trusted that if there were any monsters nearby, they would find their way to him.

He darted aimlessly through the trees, without any real direction in mind, though he made sure to keep the position of the main path somewhere in the back of his mind, so that he wouldn't end up getting foolishly lost.

Soon enough, something must have caught his scent, for he heard a noise that sounded like a loud cough rise up into the air, and then a chorus of other coughs that joined it.

Within moments, he heard the rustling in the trees, and he slowed. They had him surrounded in an instant – a pack of five Gorebeasts.

"Now this is something of a problem, gentlemen," he said to them. "Given the look in your eyes, I'm going to have to kill the lot of you, aren't I? But then we agreed with the gamekeeper that I wouldn't kill more than two…"

Of course, the Gorebeasts made no attempts to understand his words. They circled him at a wild pace, using that single giant front leg that it had, with its dagger-like claws, to quickly change direction, as they dodged through the trees. Discover stories at My Virtual Library Empire

As he pondered what to do, the first came lunging in to snap at him, driven by the allure of his wide-open back.

Of course, Oliver's sword dealt with it in an instant. He stepped off to the side, selecting the blow as perfectly as he could, neatly drawing a line along the Gorebeast's throat, doing his very best to keep the rest of the body intact. The creature went crashing into the snow, digging a trench into it, as the snow attempted to slow the body down.

"See?" He said, waving his sword at the Gorebeasts. They eyed him nervously now, seeing the golden specks in his eyes. "I've got what I wanted. You can clear off now, if you so wish."

Nervous though they were, as soon as he presented his back to another one of them, its instincts drove it to what by now should have been plain to see as madness. It dove at his back, attempting to rake at him with the claws of its front leg.