A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1146 Equal Scales - Part 1
1146: Equal Scales – Part 1
1146: Equal Scales – Part 1
So it was that the army of the left was spared from an even more humiliating and damaging loss.
Karstly had been watching, ready to take it, and he’d seen the General’s arm go up in the air, no doubt about to make a decision even worse than the last.
But something had happened, and he had to accept the fact that the dismantling of the army of the left would not go quite so quickly.
“…” General Khan breathed a sigh of relief as well, when he saw that his General had managed to hold himself back from his own order.
“General Harme… I apologize for setting you against such a troublesome fox.
You have done well to restrain yourself, all things considered.”
His own battle in the centre was forced to go on pause because of Karstly’s efforts.
His intervention was inevitable.
He had hoped that he might be able to make more progress in the bombardment of the central castle before then, but Karstly had brought that momentum to a snivelling crawl.
It was only the army of the right that was allowed to continue its battle uninterrupted.
“It would be unwise to see them as a detachment of a mere two thousand men,” Khan said to himself.
“Numerically, they are at least equivalent in an army of two thousand.
That young General Karstly… He has shown that he knows his martial training.
Troublesome.
With five thousand in the left castle, and five thousand on foot, General Harme’s advantage begins to look slimmer than first noted.”
He was well aware that there was a single gambit that the Stormfront men could pull as well.
It might have seemed as if the defenders were trapped in their castle, but given a decisive opportunity to finish off the army of their foes, they would most surely make an entrance.
The only thing stopping them from doing that, Khan supposed, was their coordination.
He did not know the history of Karstly in the Stormfront well enough, for there were few sources on the man, but at the very least he doubted that he had much sway over the Colonel that commanded the left.
It would be down to Lord Blackwell to make that final decision.
The same, of course, was true of Blackwell himself.
He had another five thousand men in the centre which he defended with, and there were another five thousand men in the castles to the right.
A mere army of twenty thousand men in total, and they caused such problems.
A less experienced General might have let that fact go to their head, and allowed shame to begin to cloud their judgement, but Khan was not such a man.
He was calm enough to recognize the enemy’s strength.
The Stormfront, after all, was a military nation.
They were famed for it.
They were built on it.
To expect to equal them in combat would be folly.
Even if Khan himself were a march for even the greatest of Stormfront Generals, it did not mean that their infantry were of equal quality.
“But there are domains in which we Verna triumph over you,” Khan said, his eyes falling to his siege weapons.
Those were tools of science that the Stormfront couldn’t hope to emulate with ease.
So too were their chariots, inventions that only the Verna had properly mastered.
With science, together with numbers, and Khan’s own competent command, he could still more than see his path to victory.
Indeed, he could see it quite strongly.
“You have made ripples in the water of this battlefield, young General Karstly,” Khan said.
“You are to be commended for it.
But it shall not last.
Muddy waters will soon find themselves clear again, if they are allowed to be still for a time, and the sediment can fall to the bottom.
I will freeze you in place.”
Khan gave his orders.
Ten thousand men began to move from the central army.
It was a concession that he would have rather not have made, but it was a choice between that, and complete inactivity.
Now Karstly’s men found themselves trapped on the far left side of the battlefield.
In order to make it back to the centre, they would have to go the long way around.
The detachment of ten thousand men seemed to be sent with that in mind, to make their way back all the longer.
Khastly shrugged.
He accepted the nature of the strategy, but it didn’t especially excite him.
He knew himself to have done enough on the left that it did not matter regardless.
He took his men up, and he pulled them away towards the rear, behind the Verna encampment, and there they stood, in between both the central battle and the left battle, exerting their pressure, waiting for another opportunity to present itself.
Chapter 10 – Equal Scales
“Mph,” Blackwell grunted, reviewing the state of the battlefield as evening fell.
It would have been pleasant to have the certain buttress of better endurance for his army to rest upon.
After all, it seemed as if the harrying of Karstly could be near instant.
He’d only brought two thousand men with him, after all, and Blackwell had been able to infer from that just how Karstly planned to keep his men well supplied and rested, so that they could exert a continual influence on the battlefield.
However, the greatest threat to that was the siege weapons.
Where men were unlikely to do much, those siege weapons did plenty.
It felt like a wonder to Blackwell that his castles had not collapsed before now.
It was only through the relentless work of the builders that they’d been able to last this long.
The men did what they could in terms of repair each evening, throwing together a quick setting cement, and putting together interior scaffolding with wood wherever it was necessary, but in time, it seemed inevitable that the castle they stood on would find itself collapsing to the ground.ƒreewebηoveℓ.com
