A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 989 - Opposing Schools of Strategy - Part 2

989: Opposing Schools of Strategy – Part 2

989: Opposing Schools of Strategy – Part 2

The pace they’d built up was impressive, Karstly had to acknowledge, but with Khan’s continued insistence on a slow battle, the Patrick forces wouldn’t be allowed to make use of that explosiveness that they were demonstrating.

And now, as if to put more salt in the wound, a chase was beginning to build, led by the bloodthirsty Inka, filled with anger at his earlier showing.

He gathered up the remnants of his men to him, and followed the path that Oliver had cut through the Verna army to chase him down.

‘This is far from optimal…’ Karstly thought to himself, as he considered their surroundings.

His men were fighting for all they were worth.

The morale was high.

But this wasn’t the sort of battle that they were meant to be fighting.

Against the colossal weight of forty thousand men, it was meant to be a battle of speed.

He looked towards the enemy General, high up on that horse-drawn tower that he’d had built for himself, and he fell into thought.

Karstly was a strategist that liked to know the opponent. freēnovelkiss.com

Some strategists were filled with grand ideas, and they would use those to overwhelm opponents universally, but Karstly was a man that liked to use the right ideas for the right men.

The Verna General had employed roadblocks every step of the way.

Both literally, and figuratively.

The spaced ranks of men, designed to slow them, and then the way he responded to the spark that should have been created by the Patrick men.

‘This man… He likes his slowness,’ Karstly thought.

He could only just barely see the Verna man high on top of his tower, with his loose and colourful robes highlighting him under his gold-lined armour.

There was a tight beard to the man, and there was a tanned olive colour to his skin, so typical of Verna men.

But it was the slowness of his eyes that intrigued Karstly.

The eyes told him much.

The eyes made him feel the man’s Command.

It was like swimming in the depths of the sea, or trying to move through the sticky mud of a swamp.

“General!” Samuel shouted once more.

Even the attendant could feel their army beginning to slow, bit by gruesome bit.

There was still a mighty distance between them and the freedom offered by the unmanned passageway ahead of them, and that distance was ever-increasing, as General Khan spaced his men more and more.

Suffocating, that was truly the right word for it.

They needed something to shake off the bonds that bound them, and with the fire that had just been lit, Karstly thought that he knew just the ingredient.

“PATRICK!” He said again, as the Patrick men fought to get nearer to him, with the Inka forces hot on their heels.

“YOU HAVE A NEW TARGET!” He announced, before pointing at the top of the tall tower with the tip of his sword.

One didn’t need to speak the Stormfront tongue to understand his intentions.

Karstly made it so.

He held eye contact with that enemy General, and he made his declaration, knowing full well that the man couldn’t understand him.

“If I can’t attack your formation, then I will attack the source of your calm,” Karstly declared menacingly, laying the burden of such a task at the feet of a youth.

If the enemy was ice, then Oliver was fire.

His was a passion that even Karstly had been unable to contain for a second.

“Again?” Oliver said, frowning at the change in order.

He followed the direction of the pointed sword, and only when his eyes fell upon the man that sat up there did he realize the magnitude of his task.

There was an aura to him, as vast and uncompromising as the very lands that they travelled.

A man at least of the Fourth Boundary, unmistakably, but it was his Command that made him into the battlefield deity that he was.

He was enshrouded in it.

That exotic existence that the Verna men lived, he seemed to be at the very heart of it.

He was foreign strength personified, and it was his head that Oliver was to be offered.

“Verdant,” Oliver said, glancing over his shoulder, reminding himself of the persistence of the Inka men.

“We’re being used, it would seem.”

“You noticed?” Verdant said with a grimace.

“Karstly is a more unforgiving General than his appearance led us to believe.

Now that we have put ourselves out there, and demonstrated our strength, he seems intent on using us for everything that they had.”

First, it was distance that they had to cover, as they were ordered deeper into the Verna ranks as a secondary arrowhead.

Then, it was the wall that separated the two arrowheads that they were ordered to knock down.

Both the Patrick forces did without slowing, with the sort of overwhelming might that one would expect from Blackthorn troops – no, it was even greater than that.

Now, their reward was more blood, riskier ventures, a General’s head.

All to be achieved after their initial burst of energy had already been expended, and the men were beginning to gasp for breath.

“He does not give the order with the belief that we will secure it,” Verdant told Oliver, “he does it with the hopes of upsetting our foe.

That is all.

As much carnage and chaos as we can make, that is all.”

That too Oliver was well aware of, but his heart was beating anyway.

He drank in the magnitude of the moment.

Forty thousand men, and he was given permission from his General to go straight for the enemy General’s head.

If he closed his eyes, he swore he could have heard the sound of a beating heart.

Not only his own, though that was beating strongly enough that to thump against the side of his rib cage – no, he felt something greater than merely that.

Two aspects, holding up structures far beyond the weight of a single man.

General Khan stood like the centre of a city, binding so many men together for a single purpose.

There were those endless ranks of roadblocks that he’d set up to the right of his formation, with his men engaged in endless brutal conflict, and then there were the same men that he kept subdued to a quiet on the left of his formation, ordering them to discipline, to wait there turn, to merely stand and watch as battle was done, and space was made for their entrance.