A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Oliver raged against the natural direction of defeat, just as his men did. His own defeat – his dying heart. The last few petals of that sacred flower that was his soul. He burned as hotly as he could before the last of them were to fall and hit the ground, ridding him of the prospect of observing beauty for all eternity.

"Steady yourself," Hod warned him, noting the look in his eye. "This position favours us. Tiberius does not understand it well enough to break through."

"Do you understand it, Minister?" Oliver asked him, anger in his voice, though Hod was not that anger's intended target.

"The men find themselves cornered," Hod said. "They fight as if there's nothing to lose – like soldiers in a castle, knowing that the prospect of surrender is not an option. They'll fight to the deaths, and they will hold nothing back. Tiberius' cruelty, and the fear he evokes, you've used it against him."

"I have?" Oliver said. "The men fight of their own accord."

"Enough resistance to overcome even the fear of death," Hod said. "To replace it with rage, and indigence. That is not the natural state for most men. You've stirred it up in them, just as you stir it up in yourself."

"…" Oliver's rage abated just for a second. Somehow, a complementary thing in that moment was likely the worst thing that Hod could have said. A pointing to Oliver's worth. Some other direction, other than the total overwhelming rage at the world. That searching for a platform on which he could stand. Oliver's vision dizzied. The wound to his arm had its pain intensify anew. A torch of fire right up the length of the limb.

Then he saw Tiberius give a signal from a distance away. He'd dragged away his cavalry, and then those heavily armoured infantry… And now what was that flag that he was waving? What were the intentions behind it?

"...Interesting," Hod murmured, as the encirclement around them began to weaken, and then collapse entirely. Not because of anything that the men of their army had done, nor because of anything Oliver and Hod themselves had done. It was an all-out retreat. They broke their position, and rushed back to where Tiberius was, forming lines on the other side of the battlefield.

All of a sudden, that pressure was gone. There was no one for their men to fight. They had been forced into such a tight circular formation for such a length of time, that when it broke, the men hardly knew what to do with themselves. That tightness, at the very least, they knew to be suffocating, and they broke outwards, their formation weakening as they went.

There, Hod took over. It had been his goal from the start to see the encirclement broken through. Even if this was not how he had foreseen it would happen, he still saw those orders given, and those lines reformed, with all the quickness that he could muster.

Somehow, however, it was if they'd lost. Indeed, they'd broken free, they'd achieved that goal that Hod had given Oliver. Oliver himself had seen it happen, in rallying the men. Was that not cause for celebration? He had pulled himself out of the void of his own struggle, and his own catastrophic failure at the start of the battle, in losing so many of his men in an ill-fated charge, and he had recovered their position.

All ought to have been well, and worthy of celebration. They that had been ambushed, caught entirely off guard, and they'd made it through without being shattered, still with twenty thousand men, to match the roughly thirty thousand that Tiberius still had remaining. It wasn't a bad position in the least.

So why was it that hardly a single man smiled? Why was it that even the Minister of Logic, who had aimed for this very position from the start, received it with the grimmest look on his face? Why was it that Tiberius grinned broadly, as Oliver felt himself sinking, swaying in his saddle? How was it that, in giving away his position, Tiberius had enacted a more crushing victory than any other that he could have wrought?

He found it, as complicated as it was, and as different as it was to the likes of Blackwell and Asabel, and their styles of Command. He found that single fraction of meaning that Oliver's men had clung to. A tiny little thing, hidden in a storm, but it was enough to string along the fury of their resistance. That will for a glorious death. The assumption that they were to die anyway, that they were to be defeated where they stood. That it was dying well that was their only option.

Tiberius took that meaning, and with the nose of Pandora, he saw it crushed, by once more inviting chaos in, and weakening the men in front of him with both the tempting possibilities of victory, and of now a retreat. The hardness of the resistance that they were capable of when there was such a pressure now seemed far too mighty a thing compared to the deflated army that Tiberius now faced off against.

It was Oliver's weakest form of battle regardless. Tiberius knew enough of his adversary to know that his strategy was weaker than that of most Generals, even if now he held Minister Hod on his side.

"I think I understand you, Oliver Patrick," Tiberius said. "Creature of Claudia that you are, the key to defeat you, is as ever, in those tenants that you fools so preach. You've clung to one more than any other. Twisted little creature that you are. The struggle that she promises rewarded, and the suffering. You enjoy that, do you not? You fight best when you feel the cold press of a knife against your flesh. When you are already cut to pieces. You fight best when there is no creature to be had. Masochistic perversion. Indeed, it is no wonder that others before have struggled to deal with you – for who could imagine what a twisted little creature you are?"