A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1157 Two Generals - Part 2
1157: Two Generals – Part 2
1157: Two Generals – Part 2
It ought to have been there that the superiority of the Verna army was made obvious.
After all, they’d gained one of their primary objectives, and the Stormfront had failed to defend it.
Yet that wasn’t quite the case.
There didn’t seem to be that level of overwhelming distance between them.
The Battle board still seemed as if both sides were equal.
Once more, Lord Blackwell made his presence known on the battlefield.
Half his army had spent the night in the left castle, with General Broadstone, and the other half had spent their night in the right castle.
Their supplies had already been shifted out before the central castle had fallen, safely housed within the walls of the castles that were still standing.
Lord Blackwell made it seem as if the loss of his castle hardly mattered to him at all – indeed, the way he so confidently maneuvered his men around the ruins, he even made it seem like a tactical opportunity, as if he was daring to tempt Khan in.
Whatever he might have been threatening, Khan didn’t seem likely to take the bait.
The Verna man had other goals in his mind.
With the shattering of the central castle, he’d begun the allocation of his own forces.
His rearrangements were simple – with him, all the way to the left-hand side of the battlefield, where General Broadstone fought, he dragged his army of fifty thousand men, and what remained of his siege weapons, and he had them busy setting up their new formations as the sun rose higher up into the sky.
The battlefield was beginning to grow complicated.
As General Blackwell hovered in the centre, Oliver was unsure quite what measures the man would take.
There seemed to be too many options.
Professor Volguard had warned him, when there seemed to be too many options, that was when a budding strategist was likely to make mistakes.
But General Blackwell was no budding strategist.
He was as mature in his ways as one was likely to get.
Though it wasn’t as if he could move recklessly against the likes of Khan.
He took his time, evaluating the movements of his enemy, even as the new siege weapons began to thunder into action, and draw fresh holes out the walls of the castle to the left.
One thing was for sure, if those men were allowed to attack like that untouched, with all seventy-thousand of them – including the twenty thousand Verna men originally positioned on the left – attacking at once, then the left castle that had managed to stay relatively fresh all things considered would not stay that way for very long.
As Blackwell debated, Karstly called to attention his men.
He’d made no note of yesterday’s attack in his speeches, and so as he raised his hand up in the air, and indicated that they should lend him their ears, that was as close as they’d come to any sort of debrief.
“The battlefield is evolving,” he said, gesturing to the land around them.
“No doubt, from the glazed look in all of your eyes, you’ve ceased attempting to predict what action we are likely to take next.
Good, I suppose.
That is a look that I want from you.
You will follow my orders, and you shall do so without question.
That includes what I am about to say next.”
He led his short speech with those words, and he put them on edge straight away, a threatening tone to his voice.
Karstly was a man that often made strange decisions, and that he needed to threaten them into obeying his next order before he even said it was a matter that made many of them nervous.
“Yesterday, our raid on the encampment, as orchestrated with General Blackwell, brought us boons that we had quite anticipated,” General Karstly said.
“That neither Lord Blackwell nor I anticipated that we would be able to push the attack quite as far as we did – both on the siege weapons, and on the encampment itself – is a something that we cannot take lightly.
If you would open those glazed eyes of yours, and look around you, I’m sure you will note that we are quite well outnumbered.
If their siege weapons are allowed to operate as they have been, we will not have a single castle left standing.
Nor can we engage them directly in open combat.
We must play it carefully, and use all the cards that we have… And if that includes room for developments that we had not anticipated, then we will allow it.”
Once more, there was a grave tone to his voice.
He fiddled with the white collar of his black uniform, as if he was uncomfortable proceeding any further himself.
It was a rare sort of body language to be seen from the ever confident Lord Karstly, who seemed to eternally be comfortable, no matter what was going on around him.
“Lord Blackwell and I have come to the conclusion that, in a field battle, with the two of us operating by different strategies, our good friend General Khan will struggle to counter the two of us at once.
I’m sure you’ve heard the adage ‘two heads are better than one’ – well that is about the only sword that we now stand to use,” Lord Karstly said.
“You might be thinking that the Verna too have their two heads, with that General Harme, but I do believe that we have already demonstrated his lacking capacity to keep up with either Lord Blackwell or myself.
That is not arrogance, it is simple fact.
Where there are weaknesses, we will ply them apart.”
The men shifted.
It seemed to be obvious now that General Karstly was meandering around a point.
He rarely explained such things to them.
He only spoke when he had to.
He seemed to be of the mind that as long as his men had enough capacity to follow his orders, then they needed not know the full scale of the strategies that the Stormfront were intent on unfolding – especially when they were liable to evolve with each second that passed.
Oliver narrowed his eyes.
He could sense the man stabbing at something, but he wasn’t sure yet what it was.
He only knew that it would likely be something outlandish, if this was the sort of almost apologetic performance that he was putting on in advance of it.
