A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

It was that thought of balancing points that had led to Oliver finding logs of an appropriate size, and trimming them down with the hatchet dangling from his belt – he'd brought it with the intention of making a fire, hoping for wisdom in staring into the flames, but he had been distracted by something more unusual in the process.

Now three stakes had been driving into the bed of the stream, at various intervals, making a zig-zagging line across it.

He hopped to the first of them tentatively, almost curiously, without testing the security of the stake first. There was a risk in that which made his heart leap for a second. He grinned when he felt the stake give ever so slightly, but he managed to hold. With even more recklessness, he jumped to the second.

"These are far from being secure," he said to himself, but something about that made the task all the more fun. Then he was pouncing to the third. This one was the worst of the three. It swayed madly in the sandy stream bed that it had been driven into, but it managed to hold, just barely.

Oliver jumped again, feeling the way each motion of the stakes tested his balance, and feeling the way he was testing them in the process. His weight place a demand on the stake with each jump, and by hitting the balance exactly right, he found he could lessen that burden.

'This isn't a bad training method at all…' He thought to himself. His style of swordsmanship wasn't one that placed a great amount of burden on balance – he preferred to forge his way forward straightwardly in Overwhelm, these days, opting instead to entrust his chances of victory in his knowledge of the battlefield flow, rather than surprising his enemy in the switching of styles.

He supposed for someone like Blackthorn, though, it would have a remarkable carryover to her natural way of fighting.

He laughed at the absurdity of it. He'd tried, in the past, to keep his training simple, without thinking all too much on things that might work, he preferred to make progress in what he knew would work. It simplified his task then – it was only progress that he was at war with, rather than the mapping of new territory.

But there seemed an overlap between the two, and it was an overlap that was difficult to reconcile. In search of answers to a difficult problem, and ways around its wall, he instead encountered other walls, of varying heights, some even larger than the one that he sought to scale. It was a strange sort of game.

"I had thought that you might be here," came a voice, far too suddenly, and far too close for Oliver's liking. He swayed on one leg, barely keeping his balance on the stake that he was standing on.

"Nila," he noted with a smile.

"Quite so," she said, raising her eyebrow at you. "Are you competing with someone?"

"…Who might I be competing with? Did you notice another set of footprints?" Oliver asked – he did not have to ask how it was that she found him. If Nila wished to track someone, there were few that could evade her. Especially in wet soil like this.

"Oh, I had only thought, to look so stupid, you must have been trying to one up someone else," Nila said.

Oliver laughed at that. It felt like the first time in a long time that the two had been able to laugh together, just in each other's company. He did not see the fear in Nila's eyes, that was beginning to grow accustomed to as of late. Greeves had given him some advice – to simply endure, and allow Nila to come up with a way of solving the problem herself.

But Oliver wondered if he hadn't found another solution: to simply look as foolish as possible.

"Do you want to try?" He asked. "It's more difficult than it looks. I think you'd be good at it, though, you've always been nimble."

"Nimble..?" Nila said with a frown. "What a strange thing to say… You've been around the nobility too long, Oliver. You're starting to say things right at the height of strangeness – stuff only they could say."

He noted with a twitch of his eyebrow that she had called him by his first name. She didn't seem set on maintaining the cold façade that she had taken to lately.

"What I am," Nila said, "is quick." She hopped up on the first of the stakes, as casually as one was likely to. The surprise was written well on her face when it shifted beneath her, and she had to flail her arms dramatically to keep her balance.

Standing on one leg, she eventually managed to keep herself stable, and she looked at Oliver accusingly. "That's a lot harder than I'd thought it would be. Are you trying to get me to fall in?"

"The only one who can get you to fall in is you," Oliver said. "That being said, I wouldn't try any of the other stakes. They're even more wobbly than that."

"…But I suppose you've tried them, have you?" Nila said. It seemed to be taking the vast majority of her concentration merely to stay balanced on the first of the stakes, but still she was eyeing up the second, gauging the long jump between the two of them – even that was a hard feat to achieve, even when one ignored the balance.

"Naturally. How do you suppose I came to stand on this one?" Oliver said.

"I wish you weren't standing on it, and were more… falling from it," Nila said. She grinned mischievously, as an idea popped into her head, but she didn't seem intent on executing it quite yet. She was probably reluctant to give up her spot on the first stake without trying a jump on the second.

"You're probably going to go for a swim if you try that," Oliver warned.

She pouted at him. "You doubt me," Nila said. "I haven't tested the limits of this Second Boundary business that you forced me through yet. I'm sure this is a jump I can make…"

Even saying that, when she shifted her weight beneath her, in an attempt to find a stronger position, the stake moved violently, and a look of panic crossed her face. She looked like a wild animal with such expressions. They were pure, unrestrained emotions, honestly written.