Opportunity
Sweat stung his eyes like a wasp. Another heft of his sword and another goblin felled. Around him the orderly chaos of battle in full tilt, a whirlpool of violence. The guards are managing to keep ranks while the goblins scattered and chaotic are being cut down. Their gore and viscera spraying at the ground.
The goblins shattered and bolted back the way they had come. Beau ordered a pursuit order. The bitter tang of iron upon his tongue. The guard chased the goblins into their, would be, reinforcements. The goblins running in opposite directions intercept each other. Several go sprawling to the ground at the impacts. Blood pounding in the pursuer’s ears echoing within their helmets, the sound of which pales in comparison to the screams of battle and steel as the guards make contact in their pursuit. The goblins already on the ground let out screams as they got impaled by steel, being given no quarter.
In the pandemonium, Beau ordered guards to split off to envelop the goblins cutting off their means of escape. The second wave of goblins seeing their comrades fallen make like the first wave but slide on the slick earth, trip over each other and the already fallen in the chaos or just because of the sudden attempted change in momentum. Regardless they are felled in short order as well. The remainder of the second goblin wave now finding themselves fully encircled with nowhere to go make last-ditch desperation charges only to find themselves impaled on swords.
With both goblin parties vanquished Beau and the guards returned to town under the early morning sun with minimal injuries among them to cheers from the townspeople. Beau capitalized on the high fervor with a rousing and inspirational speech to the town and caravan guards igniting their sense of duty with the passion of his words. At the speech’s conclusion, the crowd erupted into cheers of patriotism and pride. With the town and caravan guards growing increasingly close-knit with the guard's reputation renewed.
I enjoyed the short sentence structure you used to tell your vignette. It really helped heighten and exaggerate the action and tension. You did a good job describing the battle’s details and painted the scene of an intense battle. But while it’s a good battle, I learn not a thing about Beau. There really isn’t even a main character for your vignette; you’re mostly just describing a battle. Due to how short your vignette is, the reuse of certain words are extremely noticeable, especially that of “goblins”. The word’s repeated way too much; especially when there’s only 300-ish words. That’s roughly 3% of your whole story, and it’s in every other sentence. You could’ve made use of the words monsters, beasts, brutes, fiends, or savages to both paint Beau’s personality of their disdain of them & avoid reusing the word constantly. There’s a lot of really weird or genuinely incorrect grammar here too. Try reading the vignette aloud. A good few sentences feel off or just don’t flow well. Either it be due to a lack of commas, a weird combination of things being in both present and past tense at the same time, sentences not being clear, or the use of incorrect or weak vocabulary. For example, the use of shattered in “The goblins shattered and bolted back the way they had come” really destroys the sentence; what you’re trying to say is that they scattered but didn’t want to reuse the word, so you tried replacing it. In doing so, you’ve painted not the image of their ranks falling apart, but instead of them physically shattering like glass and breaking apart. Another example is “The guards are managing to keep ranks while the goblins scattered and chaotic are being cut down”. Perhaps you were trying to say that the goblins were scattered and chaotic? If so, you would’ve needed the sentence to be like so: “The guards are managing to keep ranks while the goblins, scattered and chaotic, are being cut down.” An example of things being present -> past tense would be so: “The guard chased the goblins into their, would be, reinforcements. The goblins running in opposite directions intercept each other.” The guards’ action is in past tense, but the immediate sentence afterward, the goblins are in present tense. In the future, be sure to pick a tense and stick with it; this flip-flopping can easily take the reader out of the story. This sentence also just completely took me out of the story due to both how complicated and how long it was “The second wave of goblins seeing their comrades fallen make like the first wave but slide on the slick earth, trip over each other and the already fallen in the chaos or just because of the sudden attempted change in momentum.” This kind of encapsulates most of my critiques above.