The enemy had unsettled his men with their singularity, their determination to do battle on their own terms, to solve the problem themselves, to close that distance themselves. And it had worked. It was working. But the second Jok adapted, and changed his own stance, he was met with a critical counter that approached premonition.
It felt like he was a cliff, fighting against the sea. Every scrap of material he gave away only weakened him more and more.
"Who the hell am I fighting now?" He found himself asking. The villagers hadn't moved yet. Not a single word had been spoken, but there was a united determination in their eyes. By a principle of understanding that went beyond what words could convey, they all realized their path to victory even more strongly than before.
It bound to their own wills, to slay Jok himself. For somehow, they'd all been naïve enough to believe themselves capable of that. And now each of them saw a better route, a surer strategy. To not cling to it would be to oppose the intelligence that even the most cursed of humans was endowed with.
It was to realize that one needed a large amount of water, only to ignore the bucket on the shore of the river, and continue scooping it with their hands.
Somehow – they'd all been convinced that it was indeed water that they needed. That it was indeed Jok that needed slaying. These cowardly people, of the same ilk that Jok had seen in every village. What gave them the strength to realize that in the first place... When had Jok lost?
That charge, wasn't it..? When they'd overcome his forty or so men in that charge... and all because of that boy. But then, he'd also failed to kill the boy earlier – that was why he'd been there in the first place. Even as he took his men to the Southern Wall, they'd been unable to kill him.
It was impossible to tell for Jok. He felt like he wanted to do the whole thing over. It seemed like Beam had seized an advantage so early on that neither of them had noticed. Had that really been the case, though? Regardless of whether it was or not, the end result was the same. Those freshly blooded villagers had slain their enemies with such ease that they believed they could take down a Commander.
That had been the seed that had been planted in their mind... But these eyes, as Jok had a feeling there were more than two hundred. He recalled the elderly man that had thrown himself in a suicide charge earlier, and the woman that followed him. It wasn't just the villagers of fighting age that had joined in, their whole army had increased in size.
"Lead."
"Take command."
"Wear the crown."
They all spoke at once, some arrogant, greedy, and power-hungry. Others desperate, and compassionate. All the different souls of all the different thousands of years that had led up to Beam, they cried out their decisions. Rarely had a body been so united.
It was not only those voices of his unconscious, either, it was his past as well.
The blessed child that he had been, in his village, surrounded by friends, as they ran through fields of grass, as Beam charged on ahead of the rest, leading them all to greater fun.
"It's only natural, right?" That smiling face seemed to say.
The him that had been in the depths of despair, as he awoke to the corpses of his family, and the wounding of his liver.
"Coward – take it," he said, with dark and angry eyes, filled with resentment.