A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1204 The Chains of the Wicked - Part 2
1204: The Chains of the Wicked – Part 2
1204: The Chains of the Wicked – Part 2
With a boot, Zilan tried something else.
Another blow from elsewhere.
He attempted to kick Oliver free from his stirrups, and off his horse.
It was a juvenile attack, but given the weight of Zilan and his strength, it stung.
Straight into the leg, the blow went.
Zilan grinned.
Then the second strike came, and Oliver’s leg moved with it.
He snaked his smaller leg around Zilan’s knee, and clamped it in place, squeezing down.
It was a dangerous thing to do, with the two horses playing tug of war between them.
The slightest wrench, and he was likely to pull the limb out of the socket.
‘Damn it…’ Zilan cursed, frowning his confusion.
With every new tactic he tried against Oliver, the boy seemed to solve it more quickly than the last.
He was dragging the two of them ever closer to what seemed to be a draw – and a draw was exactly what he was after.
AWOOOOOOOOoooooo
The war horn sounded, and the tide of battle shifted, announcing the arrival of General Rainheart onto the battlefield.
The man put his sword up into the air in a salute to his men.
The sun caught it, and bathed it in a shining yellow light.
“””AWOOOO!””” The men called their salute to the General, echoing the sound of the war horn.
The explosion of morale and Command was acute enough to be felt several battlefields over.
Both Karstly and Lord Blackwell were forced to shift to look at it.
Even Khan, as busy as he was, had to spare it a glance.
For Zilan it carried even more weight.
He had to look up his own position, and acknowledge its ridiculousness.
An enemy Captain that he’d bloodied to the point that the boy looked like no more than a walking corpse, and here he was, tangled up with him, quite literally.
It was an infuriating waste of time.
What ought to have been as simple as kicking in a rotting door had turned out to be a battle with a particularly willy serpent.
Zilan was forced to give a command that he would have rather have saved.
“CHARIOTS!” He shouted.
“RID US OF OUR FOES!”
The impatience that he felt lent his Command strength.
His men were certain to carry out his will.
They’d been waiting, eyeing the remaining Patrick men, looking for their opportunity, and now they’d been given the order that they so desperately needed.
The chariots went rushing, and with them, a handful of Violet Commandants rushed in the direction of Oliver and Zilan, knowing full well that they had to hurry the battle between the two of them on.
There Oliver was presented with a problem that his body knew not how to solve.
It cautioned him to take a step back, but that was so contrary to the wills of his heart that he remained locked in place.
He’d vowed not to take a single step back any longer, even if it was strategically more sensible to.
It was a whisper of stubbornness that kept him standing.
As soon as that stubbornness was let go of, he knew that he’d fall into unconsciousness.
He could not even ask himself the question of ‘what do I do?’
Unlike Zilan, he didn’t have the extra mind required to make such thoughts.
Everything he had was embroiled in keeping the General in front of him in check.
And he’d managed that.
To the point that he felt he could almost manage it forever.
With the anger, there had started to come a rush of exhilaration, and he’d seen the flames that he was conjuring begin to burn the target of their wrath.
He didn’t want to throw the fire out whilst the flames were still reaching.
He wanted to burn all the more.
There was a skill that Oliver had been learning to rely on, when his body had previously been entangled.
In the place of his right hand, for a time, his body had been made to reach for something else.
It wasn’t nearly enough time spent in training for it to truly transform a man into something beyond what he currently was, but with the desperateness of potential, when Oliver’s stubbornness searched for any drop of extra that he might have been able to use, it found that piece, as of yet truly unassimilated with the rest of him, and it gave it a voice.
“Verdant,” Oliver said, not thinking the words, hardly knowing it was even him who had spoken until they’d crawled out of his mouth.
“Blackthorn.”
His voice was hoarse, and the sound of their names barely seemed to contain any hint of recognition as to who they might be referring to.
What they did contain, however, was Command.
Command to the most monstrous of degrees.
When those five Violet Commandants came, two warriors arose from the dead to meet them.
Blackthorn’s sword pierced a man through the chest, and Verdant’s spear caught a man so cleanly in the face that he almost tore the man’s head clean off, along with that Violet plumed helmet that he’d had strapped under his chin.
“What?” Even Zilan was on the backfoot.
At the very least, he’d thought those two warriors would not fight in the battle again.
It was even more likely that they would have bled out.
But here they were, like ghouls possessed by some kind of demonic spirit, swinging their swords, as if their very lives held not an ounce of value.
Half of the face of the beautiful Lasha Blackthorn was stained by a red blood, and on one side, her luxurious long black hair had come free of its braid, and been sheared clean off, leaving the hair that had once travelled all the way down to her waist instead stopping short at mere shoulder height.
Her appearances did nothing to detract from the worth of her blade, however.
They were two soldiers of the Second Boundary, her and Verdant, and they ought to have been easily outmatched by five Violet Commandants together – but they tore through them like paper.
Two had been taken out easily, and now three they pushed back, hounding, and hounding, a thirst in of the likes that Zilan hadn’t ever seen.
