A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 976 - The Chance to Break Through - Part 1

976: The Chance to Break Through – Part 1

976: The Chance to Break Through – Part 1

Oliver listened in.

He hadn’t told his men of the Boundaries directly, but he hadn’t exactly avoided the topic around them either.

He wasn’t sure what the right approach to it was.

He preferred to watch himself from a distance, and to see who might be right on the edge of a Boundary Break and be in need of an extra push through.

He’d seen glimmers around certain men, like Firyr, and Kaya, but they hadn’t been nearly as strong as what he’d seen around Blackthorn and Nila before.

He knew if he reached out and grasped for them, as he had in the battle with Talon, he might have been able to have an effect, and push them through, but he was still rather squeamish about such things.

He didn’t want to do it if the situation wasn’t absolutely desperate, and even then, he didn’t know if it would work.

He preferred to let his men experience it naturally – he thought that would surely be the best position for them.

Hearing them talk about a vague idea of a Boundary Break without actually saying it by name made him think of such things.

It seemed even without knowing it by name, like the nobles did, even the peasantry had a small sense for an idea or place that they could aim for, where everything would change, and the boundaries around them would be shattered.

“If there’s any place that would grant them that opportunity, it’s here,” Oliver said to himself grimly, as he eyed the road ahead.

Chapter 13 – The Chance to Break Through

They would not be able to make camp that evening – that was the warning that was passed down from General Karstly in the late afternoon.

He predicted that they would be making contact with the Verna line soon enough, and with their own advance riders even sooner.

Oliver eyed their place on the map.

In this odd terrain, it seemed to be worthwhile doing as continually as he could.

There were all sorts of features that one wouldn’t expect, given the presence of that extended outcrop from what ought to have been the Black Mountain range.

The area up ahead was one such anomaly.

They’d been greeted by trees for a while, and had made good acquaintances with them, but now, more and more steadily, the mountains were asserting themselves.

The map foretold of a particularly odd arrangement up ahead.

A scattering of the first three rocky hills before the mountain range itself.

Those rocky hills were more like pillars than true hills.

A man wouldn’t have been able to scale them without a rope.

They were the sort of features where even the most determined of troops were made to go around them.

It was like a natural grate that the Verna army was forced to run into, splitting their army – temporarily – into three groups, as they made it past those three rocky pillars.

It was this that General Karstly had been eyeing from the start.

It was this too that General Blackwell had been eyeing, when he sought to increase his chances of his advance force breaking through.

The Colonels had known that battle was likely to be afoot as they neared it, even before Karstly came, and with them, Oliver had guessed the same.

He breathed words of cautious readiness to his men, and so when the command finally came from Karstly, they were not as shaken as the soldiers around them.

That was not to say that the troop’s hearts weren’t pounding.

Ingolsol’s eyes saw through them all.

He took in their fear, and he spoke of it with high spirits.

“The sweetest of scents,” he said, enjoying it to its fullest.

It was as though he was finally swimming in the sort of water that suited him.

Inside of Oliver, he could feel the Fragment growing all the stronger.

This was the first time he’d drank in the fear of so many men, and it was making him bold.

It made Oliver’s fingers quiver just to contain him.

With Ingolsol’s supping of the troops’ fear, Claudia clung to the troops’ hope, and it inflated her strength as well – though not to the same degree as her compatriot.

“They have belief,” she told Oliver.

“Your General has steadied them into the position where they ought to be.

Their hearts are firm enough to do what must be done.”

She said it to assure him, and she also said it to ask something of him.

Claudia had her own kind of pressure that she could exert, though hers came out of kindness.

She begged Oliver to do more on the behalf of others.

Even as she asked it, she knew the cruelty of her requests, and it was only for that reason that Oliver often found himself going along with her.

“I will do what I can, Claudia,” Oliver assured her, though in his heart of hearts, he did not know how far his reach could possibly extend.

These soldiers were all rightly terrified, but it was only the Patrick men that Oliver knew well enough to hold any sway over.

Besides, even if he did hold sway over the rest, he didn’t believe he had the sort of power that could change anything.

As they drew ever closer to the point of engagement, Oliver found himself glad that it was not he that shouldered this responsibility.

Already, the air was beginning to change.

It was terribly thin.

The men’s fear seemed to heighten the rapidity of their breath, or it could well have been that Oliver simply imagined it.

What he did not imagine, however, was the weight of that many men, when they stood in such danger.

That weight was too extreme for him yet.

He carefully distanced himself from it, and sought to control what was already in his possession – and that began with his two ever-excitable Fragments.

The soldier’s hillside path began to angle downwards.

To their right, cliffs were beginning to rise.

There would be no path through them.

Just like their enemy, the Stormfront men had to pass through the three grates in order to make their way forward.

Oliver looked up ahead, to hear the sound of returning horses, their hooves thumping up the path.

The scouts that Karstly had sent out earlier, he realized.

The whole of the line stopped as the General took their report, with a grim look on his face.