My orders complete, I checked on the state of the battle.
The lizardman defensive ranks were about to collapse. It wouldn’t be long now. And if that’s how it was outside, the caverns where the chief was might be just as infested right now. I sent Soei in there by himself; would he be all right? I wasn’t too worried about Ranga, but what about Gobta? To say nothing of Benimaru and his crew…
Oh well. No point fretting about it now. I gave the orders, and they accepted them. If any agreed to do something they knew they couldn’t accomplish, it was their own damn fault.
When I was still new at my company, the boss would yell at me all the time about taking on more work than I could handle. If things got delayed as a result, it negatively affected everyone on the team, according to him. The same went for managers, too—if they were too unobservant to realize they were overtaxing their employees, they deserved what was coming to them.
It was key to do the work that was best suited to you. A boss’s job was to gauge his team’s abilities and distribute the work correctly.
I still didn’t have a full grasp on these guys’ capabilities. It was hard to figure out whether I was asking them for too much or not. I just hoped they knew themselves better than I did—and that I wasn’t dumber than I thought.
It was an irresponsible thing to think, but I had to believe in it for now. And since a boss’s task was to step in and help whenever things went awry, I had a duty to keep watch over them. If anyone ran into trouble down there, I didn’t want them to be alone.
✦ ✦ ✦
A single swing of the halberd broke the spear in the chief’s hands.
The fact the chief had survived this assault so far was worthy of praise in itself. He gave a proud sneer as he looked at the orc general.
“Pah-ha-ha-ha! I can fight all I want to without a weapon!”
All the bravado in the world didn’t convince anyone else in the room that he meant it. His armor was already shattered, cracks in his proud scale mail obvious for all to see. With nothing left to protect him, the chief was a hairbreadth away from death.
“Listen!” he shouted with as much authority as he could muster. “Come forward, my guard! Protect as many of the women and children as you can. I refuse to let you give up! Buy us as much time as possible and wait for help to arrive!”
“Ch-chief… These reinforcements cannot truly exist…”
“Don’t say that!” he replied, admonishing the vice general of his royal guard. “Believe in them! We can never abandon hope. Protect the pride of the lizardmen until the very end!”
The chief never wanted to show a moment of weakness. He was a symbol of the lizardman strength, their final hope. To the lizardmen with no place else to flee to, they had nothing to lean upon apart from his words.
“Plus,” he added to his team with a smile, “as long as I can beat this foe, we can open a new path for ourselves.”
He was right. If they could defeat the orc ringleader blocking the exit, they would have a literal path to survival. There was no despair among the lizardman warriors.
Even if their chief fell, they knew they would stand up and fight. This much they had learned over the years, seeing him stand for his people. They would fight to the last man, and as long as they evacuated as many of the innocents as they could, no greater victory could be obtained.
They had to find a connection to the future. But even that hope was crushed before the orc general.
“You old fool! All the ridiculous chatter in the world won’t save you now!”
A flash, and the halberd in the orc general’s hands sliced its way into, and then through, the chief’s chest.
“Argh!!”
He fell, coughing up blood on the way.
This is it…
The caverns echoed with the shouts of lizardmen.
The orc general stepped forward, aiming to land the final blow upon the chief, only to be stopped by a small team of fighters. He cut them down, resentful at this obstacle, and reached the chief’s body.
“You fought well, for a lizardman,” he rumbled. “Your courage proves to us that you will serve well as our flesh and blood. When you die, you will die basking in the honor of becoming part of us!”
He aimed the blade of his halberd upon the chief’s neck, lifted it up, and—
“I’d rather you didn’t do that. We have a promise with the chief.”
—was stopped by the voice of someone who appeared in front of him.
At that moment, the arrival of this man, Soei, completely changed the destiny of the lizardman race.