A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

And then Tavar's eyes drifted, to a man standing still, away from the front lines. A man with the sigil of a beast on his surcoat, half-torn by the sword strikes that he had received. A man who, barely an hour before, had taken the head of a King.

Patiently, did Oliver have to wait, feeling that great transformation amongst his men. The greatest effort of will was required not to get involved, and to allow it to continue to happen of its own accord. Already, the Boundary Breaking of one man in Verdant had Oliver's heart to racing, but then one after the other, it happened again amongst his men. Oliver had never heard of such an instance, and he found it difficult to rationalise. Even to rationalise would be to hold chains to it, and to limit the magic as it was happening.

He did know one thing for certain, however. The men had Tavar to thank, as much as anyone. A General of that magnitude, for the pressure that he was capable of exerting. He made a fantastic teacher, whether he intended to or not.

Similarly, atop the walls, Hod didn't seem willing to move either. Both General Patrick and Minister Hod had themselves withdrawn. They watched, and waited for that perfect moment – a moment in which they were required to move again, and in the meantime, they left the efforts to their men.

What had begun as one Boundary Break had transformed into four, and then five, and then six. Jorah, at the head of a thousand men, with that well-practised sword of his, fell into the Second Boundary at a charge, as if being freed of his armour, and allowing the greater version of himself that had always been there to peel back.

Karesh, who had pursued that Second Boundary for all that time since Firyr had broken through, now slipped past it himself as well, with a feeling of shock. He looked over the battlefield, to shout his explanation to his cousin Kaya, only to find – not to much surprise – that the other man was most certainly in the same place himself.

It was that impossible realm. That which, by their knowledge of the Boundaries, could never have been. The Boundaries were things beyond imagination. The conditions required to pass through one were beyond reasonable for a normal person. Especially in such quick succession. The only man who ought to have been capable of such things, at such youthful ages as Jorah, Kaya, Blackthorn, and Karesh, ought to have been General Patrick. The same was true for Firyr – the man ought not to have been able to break through again so quickly. It was strangeness of the highest sort, magic, if ever one was courageous enough to use that word properly.

It was Hod's Time of Tigers manifest. The very laws that they had come to understand as being concrete dissolved before them. The walls of their conditions apparently melted, or at least, transformed in ways that they could not have expected nor understood. For an entire group of soldiers to be raised up so quickly at once. It was the sort of miracle that one would be given a title of sainthood for.

And all those efforts of transformation were directed outwards, towards the walls of the encirclement. That which once had seemingly allowed the pressure to sit in Tavar's favour all of a sudden began to rebel against him. It was as if he was trying to contain some sort of fluid in a glass, and the pressure of it was only growing all the more unbearable, making the walls of that container creek.

Micro adjustments Tavar made continually to stop his army from falling all at once. He couldn't make grand shifts in formation any longer, lest he free up General Blackthorn and the Minister of Blades who had reunited with him. Or lest he open up a gap of weakness, for these new men, these new Tigers, to pierce through.

Like Verdant, Tavar found the other Colonel in Jorah that Oliver had named to be expressly troublesome. For a Colonel to be merely of the Second Boundary – and to have been still in the First Boundary before that – was a maverick decision in and of itself. Yet, immediately, Jorah proved himself. He didn't take a moment to adapt. He hardly seemed to draw in a breath. He led the charge by the front, to see the morale of his men raised, but once they fell into the melee, he seemed to become another creature entirely.

The sort of Command Colonel Jorah wielded was one without overwhelming energy, or might. It was an outlier to those other Patrick men, who seemed so ruled by passion. Jorah was conservative, and he was reliable, and it was that sort of reserved energy that his men plunged in with, and held solid with. Another man would have called that sort of Command weak, but Jorah quickly made use of it, in his careful rearranging of his soldiers. He turned what had been an average charge into a powerfully corrosive melee.

It wasn't that his soldiers were that much stronger than the rest, it was simply that they were positioned with such a precision that they seemed to melt through Tavar's ranks like an acid.

Ideally, it should have been Tavar's own Colonels and Captains who rearranged their troops to match Jorah and his efforts, but they couldn't keep up. He danced around them to such a degree, with such a straight face, that one would have thought that it was easy for him.

"...Now there's someone that we've overlooked," Tavar murmured. He knew the boy, he knew his face, and he knew him to be of the Serving Class. A man who had never been allowed the strategic training at the Academy that the nobles were selected for. Yet his gift was the real deal. At least in terms of organization on the battlefield, it was difficult to imagine a man more effective. It was the sort of gift that would be difficult to even present on the battleboard. It was the gift of a quiet man, who chose not the limelight for himself, but allowed it of others. His gift was the ability to place his men where they might indeed shine best.