Yet the boy swung, as he always did. He seemed to know just how to make best use of her arrows. She'd consciously thought about how best she could help him, even as she charged at the head of a warband, and she dared to hope that a mere few arrows to his rer would at least help.
More than help, they reversed the tide of battle for Beam entirely. He'd been sat in a ring of thirty men, forced to maintain the most perfect of balances, forced to operate at his highest capacity, merely to stay alive. He trimmed the waste as best he could – or at least, his body had. He'd rid his mind of thought, and merely operated on feeling.
With such a sense for the equilibrium, with such a sense for everything, really, just the slightest of shifts in his favour was enough. To Beam, those arrows from Nila weighed far more on the tide of battle than she thought they had. They inspired a fear in the enemy, an uncertainty. They'd been rigid and strong before, but now they were buckling.
Those men that had been going for his back, they knew to hesitate, and those men to his front, they could do very little to defend against his attacks, lest they leave themselves entirely open to the villager's charge.
Beam's Poison Water Style went to work then. It was finally given the leeway it needed to operate. With his mind absent as it was, he felt his finger on the pulse of battle better than he ever had before.
That which he'd been trying to learn from Dominus, that line of force that ran through every conflict, that efficiency of movement, that telling flow – he was finally able to make stronger contact with it. Every movement mattered, every detail ran into the next. No movement could be wasted.
A man turned to him as though in slow motion. He was one of the few Yarmdon that wielded spears – though, these were spears of a different sort, half the length of the ones that the Stormfront favoured, which were more suited to fighting as a group.
Greeves saw it too now, just what the eagle-eyed girl had spotted midcharge. That opportunity. That flash of brilliance. That spark of overwhelming heat, capable of turning the whole world into fodder that burned only for his sake. Greeves grinned. A heat overtook his body – a heat of elation.
This was what he had stepped onto the field for. This is what he had dared to believe in. As cynical as Greeves was, his belief in his intuition bordered on superstition. He followed wherever it pointed, like a dog followed its nose.
Where one man saw a steaming pile of manure, Greeves paused, and sighted gold. Once he'd caught the scent of a good investment, like the hound that he was, he wouldn't let it go, not until he'd reaped all the rewards he could from it.
"CHAAAAAAAAARGE!" He roared, a battle fury taking over him, a noise from a different life, where the sword might have offered him more opportunities than the pen.
The villagers echoed his shout. They'd seen the wave of destruction that ran up the side of the Yarmdon wall, and they were emboldened by it.
The men at the front picked up their pace and lowered their shoulders. Finally, the wall felt breachable. It had lost that stone-like quality it had had before, and they were less hesitant to put their full might into defeating it, especially with that attack coming from the left to help them.
Beam killed another two men. He kicked the last body deeper into the wall, onto the sides of the Yarmdon that were still struggling to hold their shields strong and high.