A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

That would have been a mighty trick, and the exact sort of thing that the likes of Tiberius could have cultivated after all his years in prison, and then let loose for the first time on the battlefield. None would have seen it before, and at the very least, he was likely to inflict damage from it.

Somehow, that didn't seem to be right, however. The way those horses strode, as they impatiently pawed at the ground, waiting for the next orders to move after the bloodthirsty display that they'd been allowed, they could not fail to disguise the weight in which they bore.

"Was the trick then, in the visual?" Blackwell wondered. "Did the trick come before the charge?"

That too would have been in character for Tiberius. He seemed to have a sense for the normal expectations of men as they looked upon the battlefield. He seemed to have a knack for that, and then using that knowledge against his enemy, in appearing where they least seemed to expect it. Perhaps his distance from the hill had been the trick. Perhaps he played upon those very laws of strategy that Blackwell's instincts had come to dance with, and those were the threads of the spider's web that he'd covered him in.

Looking any longer wasn't going to get him his answers. The infantry had reformed themselves under Tiberius' leadership, and now they turned to those two remaining men, and they slapped the weapons from their hands.

They circled them, and they slashed, just light wounds, making sure that they would not die too quickly. They made those men cry out, and beg for mercy. Right in the middle of a battlefield, Tiberius took the time for his cruel display, and even in his disgust, Blackwell could not find it in himself to lie, and say that it was not effective. Those men that had managed to retreat within had found a shock to their morale already, and the sickening display of captured men being tortured did not do much to set them at ease.

Still, even in attempting to define that which Tiberius was, dangerously, Blackwell had to admit that he did not understand him. He still could not fathom why it was that he'd been caught. He had to trust that which his eyes had seen, and that which he knew to be physically possible, but no sense organ that he had could see through it. He needed an outsider's perspective, but busy as the rest of his army was, he could not have it.

All he could do was reform his remaining men, and pull back in his heart just a little bit further, as he reassured him, doubly, that the creature that he thought was a monster. Not merely in the gargantuan sense of a beast that was unslayable, but in his camouflage, in his ability to disguise that which he truly was – that might which truly lay beneath the surface. Skullic had been caught out by the same thing, and now it was Blackwell's turn. Only, Blackwell did not have the advantage of being offered a way of seeing through his foe. He was only allowed to wander eternally in the dark. Against this creature that seemed more the spawn of Pandora than any sort of human could be. Against a foe that almost made him wish that he was facing the Pandora Goblin. At least that was a foe that they knew they were hopelessly outmatched against.

The march had been long, and it had been far too hot. Through endless deserts of orange sand, he and his men had matched, attempting to trundle their supply train along with them in the process, and failing. Needing to be offered more than just safe passage by the Verna men that had allowed them into their territory for their task – they needed direct support.

Graciously, a General did offer, though he warned Arthur in the process. "I can give you camels, I can give you carts. I give you men to guide you through. But no more than this. They take you far, they give you safe passage, but they do not fight. Is a fool's quest."

"You have been most gracious to us," Arthur said, dipping his head. "I will remember your hospitality, General Sultar."

"Please," Sultar said, shaking his head with urgency. "Here, Kings do not bow their heads to us common men."

"I would not call you a common man, General. Your generosity, increasingly, becomes an uncommon thing," Arthur said. "Elsewhere, in other lands, on other battlefields, they would have called us enemies. But you have treated me as graciously as a friend. Will you shake my hand then, so I can offer my thanks properly?"

Arthur extended his hand, and the General received it with both of his. "Your High King, he misuses you. No man can defeat the Pandora Goblin. Is a death sentence, good King. I bid you, with no shame, turn back, and return to your lands. It brings no happiness to see a good man, and a good foe die such a useless death."

"I have ten thousand men with me, General," Arthur said. "Whatever beast it is we might face in the Pandora Goblin, we will at the very least give it a good fight."

"We know the beast better than any other. How many Emperors sent men to defeat it, you think? We have tried, again and again, for the legend of that chest it holds on its back. And how many you think return? Not a single man. For thousands of years. It stays, it wanders. Now, we leave it be. It can have the desert."

"It does not try to leave it?"

"If it did, we would all die," General Sultar said. "Small mercy, against that beast. Is a trick. A great promise impossible to grasp. What would you wish, for that chest on its back?"

"Oh, those are the spoils of the High King, I couldn't possibly…"

"If you could? Immortality? A sword undefeatable?" General Sultar asked. "Our Emperors have fought and longed for these things."