A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 40: Battle With The Goblins - Part 6

"Mm," Dominus murmured in consideration. "I suppose I can lend you this a while. Don't break it." He reached into the folds of his jacket and withdrew a short dagger. He tossed it to Beam, who managed to fumble a catch.

The boy ran his hand along the wooden handle, admiring the smooth sheath made of the same material, before drawing the blade from its sheath and gasping as the steel caught the light. "So cool…" he murmured.

"Careful of the edge. It's razor-sharp," Dominus warned him, moving Beam's fingers to correct how he was holding it. "Keep it firm in your hand, reverse grip, like this. It widens your options and makes it harder for an attacker to disarm you."

The knife felt strange to Beam as he held it as his master had told him, in the reversed grip. He tried a few strikes, slashing at the air, before trying a few thrusts.

"Ehhh… That's awful," Dominus said, his face twisted as though he'd just seen something truly disgusting. Beam blanched.

"Was it really that bad?" He asked cautiously, not realizing.

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"Yeah… I don't know how you managed it, but that was the worst knife-wielding I've ever seen. Here," Dominus said, moving Beam's arms and shifting his leg into a different stance. "Fight like you would unarmed, like I taught you. Only instead, this hand is now a claw."

It was a simple enough explanation, but something clicked as Beam listened to it, and he tried a few practice strikes again, shifting his weight and balance as he would when he was training unarmed. He threw punches in the same way that he would before and kicks too, and his body naturally, as if by instinct, twisted the knife to deal the maximum amount of damage to the air.

Dominus sighed with relief. "Thank the Gods," he said. "That's better."

Beam smiled and scratched his head, seeing that the relief was actually genuine. "It must have been really bad before, huh?"

"It was beyond bad. It was a straight-up sin," Dominus told him. "But if you continue fighting like that, as you would unarmed, merely treating that knife there as an upgrade to your fist, you'll do just fine. Now, shall we be off?"

Beam nodded seriously and began along the most easterly path available to them. Dominus' house was typically to the north, higher in the mountains, so with this route Beam expected that most of it would be unexplored for him.

"Ah, no," Dominus told him, seeing the boy settle into a fast walk. "If it is only a few hours by walk, then we should run it. Why waste valuable training opportunities? There's only so much time in a day, after all. Don't be so rigid in your thinking that you would overlook them."

"We're running all that way?" Beam asked, nervous. He'd never run that far before, not under Dominus' supervision.

"You are," Dominus nodded. "Off you go."

Beam frowned at that, about to ask what his master was going to do, but then he saw the look on his face and thought better of it, merely breaking into a fast jog down the mountain track, looking over his shoulder once or twice as he went.

Only when Beam was a distance away did Dominus finally break into something that could almost be called a run. However, it wasn't quite what it was. Whereas Beam had to move his legs rapidly to generate the same amount of speed, Dominus hopped forward from one leg and with that, there was such an explosion of energy and speed that he was in the air for several moments, travelling a good distance before he landed again.

Beam's eyes nearly fell out of his skull as he watched it, and, looking over his shoulder, he soon found that he had bounced off a tree, bruising himself again.

"Watch where you're going," Dominus told him, appearing behind him. "I'm not going to overtake you. It's up to you to find the perfect route there and track them down."

"Ah." Being told it so simply imbued Beam with a new seriousness as he fixed his gaze forward and concentrated on the path in front of him. Just as he had done in the ravine, through intuition, through what his body perceived as the slightest slopes of the nearby landscape, he was able to guess which path led forward and which path led north.

And, thus far, those guesses were proving to be correct. Even if they were not the absolute perfect route—one that Dominus himself had only mapped out after spending a considerable amount of time in the mountains—it was still an extremely effective one, and they were making good time forward, without having to encounter any significant obstacles.

"That's not an easy feat to do," Dominus mused to himself, as he considered the implications of Beam's pathfinding skill. He knew just how rare the skill could be, especially in a world where relatively few explored the true unknown.

With such thoughts in mind, Dominus kept pace, flitting along as he had. When his right leg touched the ground, he bounded forward with all the ease of his youth, with nary a thought. On that leg, he knew he could go so much faster if he willed it.

However, on his left leg, where the Pandora Goblin poison had spread the worst, it was significantly more difficult. Merely getting the muscles of the leg to contract was far harder than it ought to be. It was as if the limb didn't belong to him.