A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Then the Patrick army had all the opportunity that they needed. Blackthorn's rapier was not lax, as she dashed in after him, and thrust through three men of her own. Verdant used that strength of his, and thrust his horse straight into the enemy formation, trampling them, and bashing aside any others not thrown off their feet. His disruptions were something that his own men seized quickly upon.

Firyr was greedy, and Jorah was careful. As the rest of the Patrick men caused their destruction, with their Boundary Broken soldiers leading the charge, Jorah saw them carefully organized from the back. Maintaining a strange formation, if one were to observe it visually, but preserving their strength through it.

Just as the next set of arrows was about to rain down upon them all, Hod's order saw them halted. "HOLD YOUR FIRE! YOU'LL HIT YOUR OWN KING!"

A swiftness of transition, once more walking that line of balance, as Oliver put a trust in all those things that he had no direct control over. If even one had been out of line, he would have led those very men that he valued more than any other straight to a timely and unfortunate death.

The rewards for the risk were immense – and none saw that more clearly than Tiberius.

He had brought his cavalry to circling, freeing them up from the melee that was being fiercely fought in his formation, and he looked for the perfect bit of order that he might crush. There was something beginning to mount, where Prince Hendrick and Fitzer now took command. A due process, something stable and orderly, with a predetermined conclusion. One that, inevitably, would result in them piercing out of the back of Tiberius' formation, and piercing his army in two. That pointed itself as a good target. The only thing holding the Emperor back from rushing in against it was Oliver Patrick himself.

Now, with a thousand men, Oliver put to the sword the right half of Tiberius' army, further dividing them. They swirled, tearing apart a stable formation right from the centre of them. Every single time, frustratingly, Oliver Patrick managed to see it done. He would pierce through, as if he was no larger than an insect, and find himself near to the heart of Tiberius' men, and then his own army was there to profit off the gaps that he had created.

Tiberius gave them the order. He brought his men into a risky bit of positioning. He bid that they abandon their lines and their squares, and that they seek only the suffocation of Oliver Patrick and his thousand men. They had ten thousand men to work with, after all – why ought they not to crush him?

But Tiberius was not naïve enough, even with those odds, to think that those soldiers by their lonesome could win. By and large now, those were High King men that remained. Oliver Patrick had led an inquisition on Tiberius' own well-armoured soldiers, as if he hated them as much as Tiberius had come to hate Oliver Patrick. It was a frustrating thing, but it mattered not.

"Indeed, indeed…" Tiberius said, snarling. "I'll admit, you're something different, Oliver Patrick. Yes, perhaps you aren't so bad a foe…"

He found he could not deal with Oliver in the way that he had dealt with the Stormfront Generals before him. There was not evident that strong symptom of Claudia in him. There were only the occasional flashes of it. Even in uniting his whole army under the banner of a new King, it was not a solidness of fire that Tiberius could attack, and he understood it not. His frustration beyond measure, but the instincts of Pandora seemed to be battered away by something else within Oliver Patrick. Something that wasn't just Claudia. A strangeness of presence that made Oliver seem to tear through everything that Tiberius put before him, as if Tiberius' formations were wooden, and Oliver were a wildfire.

The trick then, Tiberius supposed, was to see him isolated. Even if he could not win with Pandora's might alone, it mattered not, for there was far more to Tiberius simply than the Fragment that possessed him. If Oliver Patrick was the strange quality that put to the torch the manner of battling that Tiberius knew best, then he had only needed to see him imprisoned, away from the rest.

"And you choose that prison of your own volition, you fool," Tiberius hissed, his hatred so thickly pouring out of him, that one might have collected it as a black liquid in a cup. The weakness was evident in front of him now. The orderliness of Fitzer and Hendrick's valiance, and now of Hod's and he leaned into their cause in the centre, and looked to see it firmly completed. They were the red sheet held within front of a bull's face. There was nothing more obvious on the battlefield that the attacking of they.

If he could not see Oliver dealt with directly, Tiberius thought, then he would destroy his army, until none remained but him. And Oliver Patrick, being the fool that he was, even if indeed he was a troublesome creature on top of that, he invited the very corridor to his own demise. A fatal weakness, from his own youth. The very thing that Tiberius had heard all of Oliver's opponents criticize – his fatal lack of true strategy.

Tiberius' heavy cavalry were ready and waiting. Positioned perfectly, as if they had floated towards where they now stood, more like phantoms than men. Creatures of Pandora, every one of them. Every one of them oozing the same hatred as Tiberius. They saw those inspired soldiers in front of them, and the Prince that now led them, heroic, and filled with a sense of justice, and they wanted nothing more than to tear him apart.

As one, two thousand cavalrymen went lurching forward, the hooves of their horses casting snow and mud in the air.

Tiberius at the head of them. He sneered in his head. The Stormfronters were so fond of a General that led from the front. He wondered how fond they would be, when from the front, he saw them all cut down by his own hand.