A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1134 The Next Patrol - Part 5

1134: The Next Patrol – Part 5

1134: The Next Patrol – Part 5

“…Thank the Gods we have the Lonely Mountain Force at least,” Blackwell muttered.

With how dangerously the battle had already started off, without Karstly’s men, and his achievement in securing the Lonely Mountain, he could hardly see a path to victory anymore.

Nevertheless, he knew well enough how long he had to survive before he could take advantage of those men, and so despite how alarming the situation had become, and how impossible it seemed to defend, he began to move his pieces on the Battle board of his mind, and he shouted his orders to match them, managing to stall the enemy for just long enough that they were able to survive the first hour of battle.

And then the second.

And then the third.

Until, impossibly, they got through the first day.

It was not until the second that Karstly’s men could be sighted off in the distance.

It was midday when they arrived, thoroughly exhausted from pushing themselves to such a degree.

Karstly knew the danger of a forced march like that as well as any, but it was a decision that he’d needed to make given the fact that he’d lost his momentum already.

The Karstly force of two thousand men arrived to a battle that was already within its heat.

As far away as they were, they could hear every shot of the catapult sounding with a great boom, and every barrage of ballista hit with enough force that the men swore they could feel it in their chests despite the distance.

They saw how ragged the castles that they were meant to be defending were already beginning to look.

The stones were webbed like cobwebs.

This was war.

That unbelievable pressure in the air from so many tens of thousands of people – that was what war was.

That was what the older men at the Academy had spoken of, when they counselled their students, warning them that they did not know what true war was like.

That their ideals of chivalry, and heroism did not count for much out there.

That it was a different world entirely.

Indeed, the Karstly men had faced similar pressures when they’d met Khan’s men in the mountain passageway.

There had been a good deal of men there.

Enough to create a pressure.

But compared to this, it seemed like the slightest drop in the pond.

For one, there were so many more men here, and yet there was so much more to it than that.

It was the unbelievable aura of violence that permeated.

One could look at that battlefield in a number of ways.

They might have seen the soldiers of the Verna endlessly reloading their catapults and their ballistas, and they might have seen the endlessly charging men and though what a pity it was to see so many lives snuffed out so quickly.

Especially when the storm of Stormfront arrows came, and wiped away so many hundreds of lives at once.

That was certainly one way to see it.

Endless little plays as part of the larger battles.

Thousands of tragedies being acted upon all at once.

Hundreds of little pressures and problems delivered and solved by all the lesser leaders within the two warring armies.

Or they might have seen what Oliver saw and what many of the other Stormfront men saw as well.

Their minds were not conditioned to handle thousands of pieces of information at once.

That information needed to be reduced as part of a greater ideal.

And there could be no means of reduction more powerful than that of Blackwell against Khan.

Those soldiers, each of them moved with the will of Blackwell, and so they could see their efforts of defence as the efforts of Blackwell, and suddenly the information was containable, and understandable.

Even more so when they did the same with Khan.

It was the way they were forced to perceive it, if they wanted any chance of drinking in all that lay before their eyes.

Still, it was a mightily terrifying way to see it.

For those two men, on that battlefield, even though the arriving troops could not see them, they stood as tall as giants.

Their presences were massive.

They orchestrated this grand play, and with their little movements of the Battle board, they committed many thousands of lives into the abyss.

This was what they’d travelled here too rapidly to get involved in.

They’d hardly noticed the march.

They’d set off in the morning of the previous day, and they’d endured the relentless pushing.

Some had even wished for the chance to take a break, as the inevitable feeling of pain built up, when one’s endurance runs out.

Now they were given that chance to stop, and all the thoughts of the difficulty of the march were washed away.

They were made to seem insignificant.

In the years that followed, not a single one of them would remember, for the horror of the battlefield that came after, that so easily overwrote it.

And here they were, right where they needed to be, with hardly a lick of time to spare.

Another General might have started moving in an instant when he saw just how fractured their defence had become, but it was a testament to the iron in Karstly’s heart that he was able to remain calm despite all that he saw.

He gave his men the chance to rest that they longed for, and in the meantime, he let them drink in the battlefield and form their own opinions about it, whilst he did much of the same.

“Oh indeed, there are a lot of you,” he murmured to himself, studying the Verna army.

They had expected such numbers from the Verna – though of course not quite that many.

And still, it was one thing to deal in the numbers themselves on a piece of parchment in one’s mind, and it was quite another to see them in the flesh.

Not only for the reasons that so unsettled the regular infantry, with their inability to drink the information in, but for reasons of strategy as well.