A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 992 - Opposing Schools of Strategy - Part 5

992: Opposing Schools of Strategy – Part 5

992: Opposing Schools of Strategy – Part 5

The men around them began to transform.

The encirclement that they’d endured suddenly grew tighter.

They were lucky to have changed their formation when they had.

Oliver doubted that they’d ever manage to steal any movement from it again.

The men had solidified themselves as solidly as cement.

With the General’s authority, Inka augmented his own Command, and he gave the men a target – Oliver Patrick, he said, though he knew not his name.

‘The man that cut me.

The man that seeks to best me – drag him from his horse, and let his blood stain these dusty paths.’

“FORWARD, FIRYR!” Oliver said.

He spoke to the man, but his words were for the whole of the army.

They could have endured in the wedge formation that they were sitting in, but they struck out again, with the fierce pride that the Patrick troops had built.

Even surrounded by forty thousand men, they would not simply wait for their fate to come to them, they would reach out with bloody hands and take it.

Inka’s horse lowered its head.

It threw all its weight into its stride, knowing that it would have to break through a wall of men.

It fully intended it.

It was a war horse, with its own sort of pride.

It had been trained for this very reason.

The horse collided with the advancing Patrick men.

Both sides had gathered up quite the speed, and their collision was enough to send men flying backwards.

Unfortunately for Inka, the sudden charge of the Patrick men had taken him off course from Oliver. ƒreewebɳovel.com

He plunged in, two soldiers down, feeling a mighty force sweep past him, right into the heart of his men.

“BLOOD, FIRYR!

MORE THAN THAT!” Oliver shouted.

His own blade was a blur.

He put more strength into each attack than he ordinarily would.

He swung down with the weight of his body, timing it with each step of Walter.

He hit men with enough force to lift them off their feet.

His objective wasn’t just to kill, it was to send shivers that would be felt through the entirety of the enemy formation.

He felt his men stirred in a frenzy behind him, and he delighted in it.

They shouted his name, with each man that they killed.

“OLIVER!

PATRICK!” They shouted, whichever part felt more suited to their tongue.

Verdant had turned the name itself into some sort of magic spell, the sort of thing the men could utter when they demanded more might for themselves.

The trouble was, such a thing worked both ways.

Fear kept Ingolsol sated, as did dominance, but to hear a man’s name chanted with hope, as a man reached his hand for higher heights – that was Claudia’s domain, and it was Claudia’s power that began to fill Oliver, as his men continued to call for him.

“WHERE IS HE?” Inka shouted, whirling in his saddle, looking this way and that, even as he struck down man after man.

There was no satisfaction in such small kills.

Not least because these men only spilt blood.

Inka was accustomed to making his men crumple like paper, but these men felt like he was beating his sword against bare rock.

His strikes made his arm jar from the impact, running all the way up to his shoulder, quickly making the limb numb.

Such a sensation did nothing to improve the already weakened state of his body.

“Firyr,” Oliver said.

He’d lost track of the man.

His eyes had completely lost shades of the grey and green that marked him as who he was.

They were a battle between gold and purple, as both Ingolsol and Claudia’s powers continued to swell.

He could hardly see more than a few feet in front of him, yet he could have sworn he’d never been able to take in so much in all his life.

“Captain,” Firyr replied.

The two had separated.

They were lost in the violence of combat.

The formation didn’t stick.

Both of them chased arbitrary colours of helmets as they pursued men worth killing.

Yet still when Oliver spoke, Firyr responded.

Not to a sound, but to an order.

Vaguely, out of the corner of his eye, Firyr could feel something stirring.

His hands quivered on his spear.

“Silence,” he told them, as he felt the familiar fear beginning to swell.

Firyr knew no fear.

He denied it.

He lived his life in it, so it could not be real.

The years that he’d spent enduring the lash of the slave, his masters had grown frustrated with him.

They’d claimed him to be untrainable, unfit to serve.

But the truth was, Firyr was not unbreakable.

He was the opposite.

His heart was broken beyond repair, and it was with the most strenuous effort of will that he kept his mind together.

Fear.

Fear.

Fear.

It was always there, but now that fear was tinged with blood, in a world of red.

He’d drawn comfort from that.

Here was a place where he ought to feel fear, here was a place where he was healthy.

“Captain,” Firyr said again, speaking Stormfront words, as if they were prayers.

He’d forgotten the last time he’d spoken his mother tongue.

He dared not think of such times.

“Captain… There’s red.

There’s red, it’s floating…”

Dancing above a man’s head, there was red.

That man must have been the biggest of all men.

He stood ten feet tall to Firyr, and now the fear came again.

His heart thumped stronger, his legs shivered, and madness entered in.

“Firyr,” Oliver said, searching for the man, but not seeing him.

He felt his sword bite through chainmail, and up under the ear of a helmet.

Straight through, it went, and a purple plume drifted to the ground with it.

He saw the shock on the man’s face, and the horror.

He drank it in.

That was Ingolsol’s promise.

Claudia’s came from elsewhere.

His men were scattered, but so too were the enemy.

He could feel his men’s emotions swirling, as they sang his name.

“Oliver,” Claudia said to him.

Her voice was motherly, soft and comforting, but there was expectation in it.

If that voice was heard at the wrong time, there was enough expectation in it to crush a man.