A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"My eyes look for what excites me. This very much excited me," Karstly said. "For all the effort it took to reach it, I knew that if we made our way here, our good friend atop the mountain would make his mistake. Like everyone else, he overlooked this little feature of the geography."

"As any sane man ought to. It's barely wide enough for a single horse. This shouldn't be a battle-changing discovery," Samuel said.

"Ah, but it is," Karstly replied. "When men of our calibre mount it, and it is as ill-defended as we find it."

From below, Karstly heard the shouts that he wished to hear. "MEN! WE'RE CLIMBING THE SLOPES!" Gordry shouted.

For horses, the ordinary slopes were far too steep. For men, however, they were just barely manageable – just not quickly. It would have been reckless to try and climb them without any men atop the slope to defend their efforts. And now they had just those very men.

More of General Karstly's retainers willed their horses up the grippy section of rock that Karstly had managed to spot from below, and with a speed that defied comprehension, they established their foothold.

"…No wonder," Oliver said, sighed. He felt even more exhausted seeing it. He'd stared at the barricades long and hard, looking for a way through, only for the answer to lie elsewhere. Even as he saw it now, he didn't think anything of it. He knew it would have been impossible for him to find. It looked exactly like the rest of the mountain after all.

How was he to know that it wasn't the same smooth marble as the rest? That it would be just barely grippy enough for a horse at a gallop to brave the ascent?

He didn't think there would be anyone in the world odd enough to spot it as General Karstly had… Then again, as soon as the condition for oddness was invoked, the image of Minister Hod sprung to his mind. He supposed that the Minister, of all people, might have been one of the few to guess General Khastly's intentions there and then.

That oddness seemed to have won him this battle. The route that he had chosen not only evaluated him higher in the mountain whilst avoiding troops, it also put him right in the centre of a few branching path ways that could bring him and his men all the way to the top. Suffice to say, this was never a part of the mountain that General Phalem would have allowed Karstly to reach by ordinary means.

There would have been too many men to overcome, and too many barricades.

The General and his retinue went to work, carving more holes in the ranks of the archers. There was nothing to be done for those men now. They started to make a scattered retreat in all directions, but that only increased the rate at which they were slaughtered, as their ranks opened up, and the men of high Boundaries were able to slash them down from behind.

With time, Colonel Gordry brought his own horse up, joining the fray. His men scrambled after him, doing what they could to find the best sections of the marble rock to climb, allowing themselves multiple pathways upwards. Slowly but surely, their numbers began to bolster, until there were hundreds staking their claim on the position.

"It would seem that he's immoveable now," Oliver said. In his eyes, this battle looked as good as done. As soon as the rest of the General Karstly's army gathered up after him, he'd be able to make an assault on the mountain top, and claim total victory for himself. Now it more than apparent why the General had seemed so relaxed. He'd been hiding checkmate in his pocket for the right moment.

"General! We're taking heavy casualties on the archer's platform," came a report that seemed especially useless, for General Phalem could see just how many men they were losing right in front of him. He waved his hand, dismissing the man before he turned on him with a raised fist. He gnashed his teeth.

"This can't be it," he murmured to himself. "This isn't how battles work. You can't just slide in one cunning move, and then have everything fall apart… It might look overwhelming, but there will be a weakness in it, somewhere…"

He scanned the battlefield, drinking in all the information that he could, processing it at a speed that went beyond his normal capacity. The Karstly forces were situated between two sets of barricades, with direct access to three sets of paths. Just looking at where they stood was infuriating enough.

Those same layers of barricades that had been set to keep the enemy out now served to keep Phalem's own reinforcements from attacking them. Even if they attack from both sides at once, they would lose hundreds of men trying to breach the barricades, and still, with the narrowness of the paths, the Stormfront men would likely be able to manage to send men towards the mountain top as well.

"In other words, where they stand currently is unbreachable," Phalem said. "It would be foolish to waste more men on them. Even fortifying all the paths leading to us will be a waste of time. With there being three paths, we'd only be able to defend each of them lightly, and they'd pierce through whatever defence was narrowest…"

The greatest enemy that Phalem found he had, in the situation he was in, was time itself. If Karstly men weren't arriving so quickly, he might have had more options. He might have even dared to put the barricades in position, where now he'd dismissed it as pointless.

He could feel the eyes of the General below looking up at him, a taunt written in the pupils. It made his fury grow all the more. As hopeless as it seemed – and it seemed even more hopeless the more he looked at it – he knew that he had to find something from somewhere to overturn the situation they were in. There had to be something.