A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1206 The Chains of the Wicked - Part 4
1206: The Chains of the Wicked – Part 4
1206: The Chains of the Wicked – Part 4
A gate buried in a mighty wall.
It looked like the walls to a city, with how long it stretched, so far off in either direction, and how tall it stood.
Even the longest of siege ladders would have struggled to reach the top of it.
In that wall, he saw two such mighty gates.
One of gold, one of silver.
He looked around behind him, and there he saw more gates, through three more walls.
In each wall, there was a pair of gates, one of silver, and one of gold.
In each of those three, the silver gates were open, and the gold ones were closed.
Only now, as he watched, did those golden gates begin to swing open to the slightest degree.
And then as he turned his head to look forward once more, he saw the golden gate embedded in the fourth wall swinging open as well, along with the silver beside it.
A rush of wind came beating out with it, running itself straight at Oliver, almost lifting him off his feet.
It ran into his mouth, and down into his lungs, almost suffocating him.
He coughed violently on it, staggering to keep his feet.
And then the wind passed, and with it, came a rush of vitality from Oliver.
Once more, he could see General Zilan, and he could see him properly this time.
The darkness at the edges of his vision seemed to be completely beaten away.
Every detail he could drink in – from the slight curve in Zilan’s nose where it had once been broken, to the redness of his alcoholic eyes, to the very pores in his skin.
Everything was visible, and everything dripped with a certain significance.
The weight of the crushing grip on his wrist caught his attention.
No longer was it so demanding.
He saw the strain with which Zilan summoned up the effort to see the wrist broken, and Oliver regarded it with a tilted head.
Then, with a flexing of his forearm, and the slightest tug of his shoulder, he freed himself.
It was easier than it ought to have been.
Far, far too easy.
Something was missing in Zilan – something that had been there before.
Somehow, he knew exactly what it was.
There had been a cloak of Command to him, that Oliver had only just barely been able to recognize, and in that single moment of inattention, that cloak had gone from Zilan.
Oliver’s sword came.
CLANG!
And Zilan’s sword met it.
Oliver had half-expected to sever his head there and then, but the cloak of Command returned.
Its tendrils covered Zilan like a red shroud, extending him.
There was such thickness to it that it might have been smoke.
It baffled Oliver how he could not see such power before.
“…Something’s different,” Zilan said, his voice small.
“You’ve broken through, haven’t you?”
There, Oliver looked down at the golden sparks of light dancing around both of his arms, and he had to acknowledge it to be true.
“I suppose you can’t see them, can you?”
They weren’t words that made sense to Zilan – and they angered him for it.
“You will die this day, boy.
Your resistance means nothing.
For all you have struggled, it will fall as dead weight.”
Faced with such an anger, Oliver’s own anger rose.
The hatred that he’d felt stirred to newer heights, and with it, came a different kind of rage.
The condescension in Zilan’s eyes.
Who was he to show such a face?
The feeling of being unestimated and disrespected, it was thrown in with everything else, when it ought to have had no place, and no grounding.
Its seed was an arrogance that should not exist, not faced with a General as mighty as Zilan.
For the first time in their battling, Oliver saw the weakness in Command.
He had assumed, for the longest time, that the Boundaries were immutable.
That the sheer density of the power concentrated in a single person could not have been defied by other means.
That a General could wield a Command to match all those individual efforts… It hadn’t truly sat right with him.
There always seemed to be something missing.
And the missing thing, Oliver thought he knew.
Like a cloud, Command could be dispersed.
The leader had to concentrate on it, and his men.
He had to continually have leadership in his mind, in order to hold all their weight with it.
That was why Generals knew instinctively to perform the majority of their duties from the back.
To fight and to lead at once – that required a mind like no other.
Oliver wondered if even Zilan knew how his Command had faded away for just a moment.
One thing was clear, however, even with Oliver having broken through to the Fourth Boundary, his sword did not outweigh Zilan’s yet.
The Command kept him nearly invincible.
It prevented any strikes from harming his flesh as Oliver currently was.
And so he struck from elsewhere.
A solution to a problem that he thought he was beginning to understand.
A means to create a momentary lapse in attention.
He seized upon that new grasp of Command, and used his rage to lend new Command to his voice.
“Be strong, my soldiers,” he demanded.
“Remove the enemy before you.”
He remembered the army of immortals he had been able to cultivate in the battle with Francis, when he’d been infected by such weighty Fragments of the Gods.
He knew he could not hope to ever emulate such a strength, but merely knowing to hold it as an ideal was enough.
The Command reached his men, still embroiled in their combat, tainted by their exhaustion, and it washed it all away in a gold and purple light.
Firyr who had been forced to stand in front of a second chariot charge, as blood dripped down his thigh, weakening his legs, found a sudden strength.
He bellowed his fury, and the ten men behind him echoed it.
Against five chariots themselves, Firyr found the crack.
He sprang with all the grace of a rabbit, off to the side, and he put his steel-shafted spear through the spokes of both the chariot wheels.
A singular act of precision, with immediate effect.
The wheels caught, and the sudden halt in momentum created devastating results.
