A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Everyone that watched the scene seemed to be thinking the same. There was no hope to be had towards the front. The only hope, indeed, was backwards. But even then, would the outcome not be the same? General Phalem would merely switch his barricades once more, and again they would be forced to fight through them, amidst an arrow storm of archers.

"I had expected there to be more to General Karstly's machinations than this," Oliver said, watching the army charge forward towards the barricades with a frown. "Surely there isn't a trick to overcoming the barricades that I've overlooked?"

The way Karstly was moving, it held within it all the confidence of a man that thought himself to be cunning. It was the same way that Volguard and Skullic would move on the battleboard when they'd been setting a trap for the past ten moves, and now they were absolutely certain of their own victory.

Realizing that, Oliver's frown deepened. Indeed, that was exactly what it was. Karstly seemed to think that he had already won. "But how… what am I missing?"

He stared at those barricades hard enough to set them on fire, running as many ideas through his head as he could, but no matter what he came up with, none of them seemed to guarantee any sort of victory. Everything required a similar sort of sacrifice to the one that they had already offered up.

"I've missed something… surely," Oliver said. That could be the only explanation. Karstly couldn't have missed the fact that the barricades would be as numerous as they were, could he? It would have begged belief if he had. Though Volguard had said more than once, that the greatest strategists often held in their game the most stupefying of weaknesses.

There were times when they would commit blunders so horrific that even novices would never have made the same mistake.

Karstly was well aware that all those men were watching him, and all of them were trying to guess what his next move would be. He delighted in their attention, but more importantly, he delighted in their distress. An emotional man was an honest man, is what Karstly thought. When emotion shone in a man's eyes, finally, he presented himself as he truly was.

He was readable as if the sun had finally illuminated his soul in its entirety.

"Watch, all of you," Karstly said, breathing in that mountain air, listening to the shouts of the Verna men in front of him, and hearing the stomping of the feet of his own men behind him, taking the scene in entirely. This was his battlefield, as he'd imagined it. It was his stage.

For years he'd stewed away in the Pendragon lands without the opportunity to truly test the worth of his stratagems, and now, two days in a row, he'd been able to fight against the mightiest of opponents, and he'd been able to win.

"Though I do suppose, you weren't nearly as mighty as Khan," Karstly said, as he turned his horse off to the right of the mountain path, ever so suddenly, and ran it straight into the wall.

Even his retainers behind him were thrown for a loop. They were barely twenty metres from where the barricades began, and in a fit of madness, Karstly had thrown himself at what was practically a wall. He was going far too fast for a man with the intention of merely changing direction. He was running at the wall at nearly a gallop.

"W-what in the name of the Gods--!" Samuel shouted, fumbling with his reins to gallop after his Lord in an attempt to stop him. As much of a genius as Karstly was, there were times he engaged in recklessness that seemed likely to endanger him fatally, and it was in those times that he trusted his retainers to stop him. This, it seemed, was one such time.

Yet, where there should have been the sharpness of an impact, and a dull thud, or at least the neighing of a clever horse refusing to go any further, there was instead the landing of hooves on sandy rock, as they found traction. The horse pulled itself into a second bound, and within the span of half a second, it was halfway up that extraordinarily steep slope.

"Wha—t?"

"How in the name of the—"

"Impossible!"

All sorts of shouts rang out as they saw Karstly mount the impossibly steep slope, and he heard them all, allowing himself a single gleeful smile. It was the smile of a child having pulled a prank. Not normally the sort of smile Karstly would allow his subordinates to see. But it was all so fun!

Rarely was one given the opportunity to carry out an impossible idea on the battlefield, and rarer still did that idea succeed as planned.

Karstly delighted in it. This was exactly the sort of thing that he sought to find on the battlefield. This was the very reason that he continued living, even as the boredom of regular noble life inflicted him with a dullness that made him think he might prefer the void he assumed to be offered by death.

When he reached the top of the slope, there were no weapons to meet him. Archers stared at him with dumb surprise. Their bows had been ready to fire on the Stormfronters below – they hadn't expected the Stormfronters to rise up to meet them. They looked at him as if he was an apparition. Even as he stood there, none moved, seemingly doubting their eyes.

That was when Karstly's sword began to swing. He was a man of the Fourth Boundary, and situated as such, amongst the likes of mere archers, he was like the Goddess of War Varsharn herself. There was none who could stop him. Within the span of a handful of seconds, ten men lay dead, and then another set of clopping hooves ascended the slope, joining him.

"You took your time, Samuel," Karstly noted. "I thought you said that you trusted in your Lord?"

"My eyes did not, but it would seem that my horse did," Samuel replied. He too was a man of the Third Boundary, and his presence atop that slope was another knife in the gut that was the Verna formation. "From a distance, the barest patch of sandy stone, hidden amongst all this marble, and you spotted it? How?"