A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1180 A Passing Result - Part 3
1180: A Passing Result – Part 3
1180: A Passing Result – Part 3
Though those were the objectives that they had independently decided upon the day before, it wasn’t as if they were set in stone.
Already, Lord Blackwell was recommitting himself to the attack on the siege weapons, sending wave after wave of men against the Verna lines, in a rather traditional display of strategy.
He preferred to wear his enemy down, look for small advantages that he could build on.
In that sense, he and Khan weren’t so different.
Karstly had watched the assault for a time, not committing himself to any corner of the battlefield.
General Harme had his men positioned ready to stop what he assumed would be another attack on the encampment – and that attempt at prediction had been the very thing that made Karstly halt.
He hated being second guessed.
He hated being predicted, and even told what to do.
It wasn’t a particularly good quality for a military man, even if he was a General by now, so there were few that could tell him exactly what it was that he needed to do.
He was well aware that it was a childishness that had no place on the battlefield, but he could hardly stop himself from carrying his nature.
So it was, with a smile, that Karstly brought all five thousand of his men down the line of Verna soldiers, and towards where General Blackwell was doing battle, delighting in the mortified looks that the Stormfront officers were shooting him, as well as the puzzled expressions of the Verna officers, whose expectations he had quite swiftly bellied.
Even General Khan, from atop his tower, was made to turn.
There was a frown written out by his heavy eyebrows.
It made Karstly’s grin all the wider.
He brushed aside men, finding the light that he had no doubt was hidden beyond him.
His sword did the work of a gardener, thinning all that was unnecessary, and making way for the proper spectacle – the sunlight that was meant to shine through the leaves.
Their entrance was immediate enough to be overwhelming.
Blackwell made use of it, though he did so with a distinct look of displeasure on his face.
His nose was pointed to the air, as if trying to work out the scent of something, and he swung his sword with an animal recklessness, wide and heavy, more claws than steel.
The sudden coming together of their two flowing currents brought about a transfiguration that Khan struggled to halt.
Any worse General would have been overwhelmed the instant that it had happened.
General Harme was still posted towards the rear, trying to keep track of what had happened, and failing miserably to bring his men into line to deal with it.
Khan, however, was the boulder that slowed the tide.
Bit by bit, he eked out his presence, and he brought his men closer and closer together.
His roots ran deeper, and his branches extended.
With muttered order after muttered order, the will of Khan was spread throughout the ranks of thousands of his men.
Though the battlefield changes had been swift, he responded to them with the sort of slow deliberateness that ought to have been afforded to a tree rather than a man.
That was not to say it wasn’t effective, however.
Slow each movement might have been, and careful, but their effects in stemming the sudden pincer attack were still no less effective.
Within a few short minutes, the flood was over.
Karstly could puncture no deeper.
He was rewarded with a pair of siege units for his efforts, which he promptly destroyed after sending a group of hammer wielding men after them.
He still bore his smile, though he struggled to hide the thunder behind it.
He’d been quite certain his advantage would win him more, that the sudden swiftness of the attack would give him a cutting wound on Khan enough to influence the tide of battle indefinitely – but Khan had weathered the storm and now Karstly found himself standing thoroughly out of place.
The oddness of position was made even more evident given the environment that had been built up before his arrival.
The rhythm that Khan and Blackwell and the men under them had fallen into was not something so easily upset.
As soon as a foundation was grown, enough to breach what Karstly himself had tried to commit, they easily fell back into their old ways – and Karstly knew he had no part in it.
A great hairy hand was raised up into the air.
It didn’t seem like an order, not the way Blackwell did it.
Another man might have mistaken it for a salute.
But Karstly could see the look in his eyes.
It was the look of a bear who misliked the intruder than had wandered into his territory.
‘He would not have been complaining if I’d managed to thrust this poisoned knife a rank deeper,’ Karstly thought, half tempted to stay.
He held the man’s gaze for a second, as his men did what they could to sweep the soldiers around them, and to leave their mark in the heavy rock that had been laid there before they came.
Seeing that look, with such impertinence, Blackwell was half-convinced that he would stay.
He had to fight to keep the irritation off his face.
He knew himself to be a man that was easily provoked into anger by petty aggressions.
He knew it well enough that he was able to fight to keep a handle on it.
But then Karstly put his own hand up into the air, as if imitating General Blackwell’s earlier gesture, and he led his men back the way they came, though he didn’t do it with any deal of speed.
He was a snake slivering back into the long grass.
Even his retreat seemed like a warning.
With his exiting, it was a resuming of the Battle board that Blackwell and Khan had already established.
Slow from both sides, deliberate attacks.
They were more like great networks of plants, trying to govern entire ecosystems, than they were predators looking for the single killing blow.
Viewed from a distance, their fighting styles were similar.
They seemed a good match, as if the longer they fought, the more likely they were to tend towards a draw.
There were still thousands upon thousands of Verna men to deal with, however, and Blackwell only had five thousand of his own to spare.
If they were matched in strategy, then he was already losing.
Being matched would have meant the uprooting of his army before long.
The careful siege that he’d set up in front of Khan’s own siege weapons would have been stopped before it even began.
But somehow, bit by bit, he was worming his way ever closer.
Khan’s finger ran through his beard.
He’d tried to get a handle on who General Blackwell was throughout the course of their battles in the centre, but it was only these last two days, where they’d served as opponents on the same level field, that he’d truly begun to get a sense for him.
And even that sense was pitiful. freeweɓnovel.cøm
It was a few cupfuls of the water that filled the great lake that they called General Blackwell, and it was far from being sufficient.
