A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

He felt that he had the pieces in front of him, that was the most frustrating part. He felt as if his battlefield strength still did not match where he ought to have been, given all that he'd discovered. As strong as he was, he still felt the burning dissatisfaction. That mismatch between his reality, and the sense for progress that he had built up.

"I'm driving myself mad," Oliver said, smiling self-deprecatingly as he spoke his thoughts aloud. Even Claudia and Ingolsol had both gone silent, so self-centred had Oliver's conversation become, that even their words could not reach him.

There was stone beneath his feet, and he pawed at it with the very tip of his sword, as if believing that somehow the blade would slide through, as easily as it would through leather, or a man's flesh. Of course, the resistance that he felt was immediate. There was a mismatch still. A belief of something that did not yet manifest itself properly in the reality around him.

"If that can not be called madness, then what can be? I am well and truly losing my mind," Oliver said.

"What do I do? Even as I train, I can hardly believe that simple sword swings will solve my problems anymore. My heart isn't in the slashes. I lie to myself with each swing that I take. If I don't believe that it will give me strength, then what reason does my body have to believe it?" Oliver said.

When he had grasped progress in the past, he'd done it with the utmost certainty of his mind. Now doubt was worming in. He'd built this grand mausoleum inside his mind – his image of progress, and how it worked. It had carried him through the past two years. It had even carried him past his victory with Talon. But it would carry him no further.

Those ideas of the past… They were hard to part with. Even if those ideas were not concrete enough that he could put them all into words, still the mere thought of moving on from them, and dismissing them as wrong. That was a terrifying thought.

The sword fell from Oliver's hand, and clattered against the floor. Dominus' sword. A sword that had struck down the strongest creature that Oliver had ever seen. A manifestation of Ingolsol himself. A sword that had even managed to leave a wound on the famed Pandora Goblin, when none else could.

Why could such a man have made it as far as Dominus did? He said again and again that he had no talent. He'd looked at Oliver, at times, and he'd sighed at the talent in him – but Oliver had never felt that talent until Dominus had helped him expose it. Now, he wondered, if in fact he'd begun to lean on it. He wondered if his idea of his own strength was the very thing that was holding him back.

"And now, as I think, I will say that I overthink," Oliver said, shaking his head. "I feel as if I should be stretching in multiple directions at once. Like… Like nothing is solid. Like no plan I could ever come up with would ever always be right. Then, what do I commit to? What is it that I need to do?

How can I lead my men if I'm so full of doubts myself?"

He clenched his teeth. It had started as mere simple sword practice, and some part of him had already seen through the fallacy for what it was.

"Self indulgence," Ingolsol taunted, his voice breaking free of the quiet at the worst possible time. "You told yourself you'd get something, and that was enough for you. Now you see the truth. Some part of you sees it, anyway…"

"Oliver, do not be reckless," Claudia cautioned. "Your emotions… They've grown alarmingly heightened."

Indeed, they'd arisen with a suddenness. Hope, and assurance had been replaced by a void of empty belief. As if the truth was peeled back. A golden curtain was cast aside, and nothing remained behind it but an empty maw, forcing a man to stare right down into the bowels of hell.

Oliver wondered if that sort of despair was truly what hell was. The sort of despair that should have pushed him when he'd been nothing but a slave. He'd teetered on it then. He'd been ever so close to giving up. Why had he hung on?

"You've done enough," Ingolsol said, his tone suddenly gentle. It almost sounded like Claudia was speaking. "Why not relax a while? Take the back seat? Of course, it was meant to be this way. This is who you are.

Without someone like Dominus, how far can you really go? You've ridden the coattails of the greatest swordsman in the Stormfront, and you've reached the Third Boundary for it. That is enough for the likes of you. You will go no further."

The sword sat on the stone, as if taunting Oliver. The slender curve of its blade, so elegantly done, so sharp and fierce some. The number of heads that such a blade had taken. It ought to have had a life of its own. It certainly had enough presence to. Looking at it, Oliver could see a reflection.

He knew it to be his own, and yet, all the same, he could have sworn that it was shaking its head at him, disappointed.

"I need to steady myself," Oliver said, running his hand back through his hair. He hardly knew what had come over him. In a fit of reaching, the worst of his doubts had risen to the surface. "Is that how much it means to me, those ideas of the past? My ideas of progress? That as soon as I even begin to think of their flaws, despair rises up in me?"

He drew in several deep breaths, recognizing the state of himself. He heard Ingolsol tut, and he heard Claudia give a sigh of relief. "That is the nature of progress, Oliver. Do not forget. That feeling you have of reaching in many directions at once, is that not progress all the same?

There will be times when an idea will carry you far, and there will be other times when you need to wrestle a new route forward."