Then the Patrick army had all the opportunity that they needed. Blackthorn’s rapier was not lax, as she dashed in after him, and thrust through three n of her own. Verdant used that strength of his, and thrust his horse straight into the enemy formation, trampling them, and bashing aside any others not thrown off their feet. His disruptions were sothing that his own n seized quickly upon.
Firyr was greedy, and Jorah was careful. As the rest of the Patrick n caused their destruction, with their Boundary Broken soldiers leading the charge, Jorah saw them carefully organized from the back. Maintaining a strange formation, if one were to observe it visually, but preserving their strength through it.
Just as the next set of arrows was about to rain down upon them all, Hod’s order saw them halted. "HOLD YOUR FIRE! YOU’LL HIT YOUR OWN KING!"
A swiftness of transition, once more walking that line of balance, as Oliver put a trust in all those things that he had no direct control over. If even one had been out of line, he would have led those very n that he valued more than any other straight to a tily and unfortunate death.
The rewards for the risk were imnse – and none saw that more clearly than Tiberius.
He had brought his cavalry to circling, freeing them up from the lee that was being fiercely fought in his formation, and he looked for the perfect bit of order that he might crush. There was sothing beginning to mount, where Prince Hendrick and Fitzer now took command. A due process, sothing stable and orderly, with a predetermined conclusion. One that, inevitably, would result in them piercing out of the back of Tiberius’ formation, and piercing his army in two. That pointed itself as a good target. The only thing holding the Emperor back from rushing in against it was Oliver Patrick himself.
Now, with a thousand n, Oliver put to the sword the right half of Tiberius’ army, further dividing them. They swirled, tearing apart a stable formation right from the centre of them. Every single ti, frustratingly, Oliver Patrick managed to see it done. He would pierce through, as if he was no larger than an insect, and find himself near to the heart of Tiberius’ n, and then his own army was there to profit off the gaps that he had created.
Tiberius gave them the order. He brought his n into a risky bit of positioning. He bid that they abandon their lines and their squares, and that they seek only the suffocation of Oliver Patrick and his thousand n. They had ten thousand n to work with, after all – why ought they not to crush him?
But Tiberius was not naïve enough, even with those odds, to think that those soldiers by their loneso could win. By and large now, those were High King n that remained. Oliver Patrick had led an inquisition on Tiberius’ own well-armoured soldiers, as if he hated them as much as Tiberius had co to hate Oliver Patrick. It was a frustrating thing, but it mattered not.
"Indeed, indeed..." Tiberius said, snarling. "I’ll admit, you’re sothing different, Oliver Patrick. Yes, perhaps you aren’t so bad a foe..."
He found he could not deal with Oliver in the way that he had dealt with the Stormfront Generals before him. There was not evident that strong symptom of Claudia in him. There were only the occasional flashes of it. Even in uniting his whole army under the banner of a new King, it was not a solidness of fire that Tiberius could attack, and he understood it not. His frustration beyond asure, but the instincts of Pandora seed to be battered away by sothing else within Oliver Patrick. Sothing that wasn’t just Claudia. A strangeness of presence that made Oliver seem to tear through everything that Tiberius put before him, as if Tiberius’ formations were wooden, and Oliver were a wildfire.
The trick then, Tiberius supposed, was to see him isolated. Even if he could not win with Pandora’s might alone, it mattered not, for there was far more to Tiberius simply than the Fragnt that possessed him. If Oliver Patrick was the strange quality that put to the torch the manner of battling that Tiberius knew best, then he had only needed to see him imprisoned, away from the rest.
"And you choose that prison of your own volition, you fool," Tiberius hissed, his hatred so thickly pouring out of him, that one might have collected it as a black liquid in a cup. The weakness was evident in front of him now. The orderliness of Fitzer and Hendrick’s valiance, and now of Hod’s and he leaned into their cause in the centre, and looked to see it firmly completed. They were the red sheet held within front of a bull’s face. There was nothing more obvious on the battlefield that the attacking of they.
If he could not see Oliver dealt with directly, Tiberius thought, then he would destroy his army, until none remained but him. And Oliver Patrick, being the fool that he was, even if indeed he was a troubleso creature on top of that, he invited the very corridor to his own demise. A fatal weakness, from his own youth. The very thing that Tiberius had heard all of Oliver’s opponents criticize – his fatal lack of true strategy.
Tiberius’ heavy cavalry were ready and waiting. Positioned perfectly, as if they had floated towards where they now stood, more like phantoms than n. Creatures of Pandora, every one of them. Every one of them oozing the sa hatred as Tiberius. They saw those inspired soldiers in front of them, and the Prince that now led them, heroic, and filled with a sense of justice, and they wanted nothing more than to tear him apart.
As one, two thousand cavalryn went lurching forward, the hooves of their horses casting snow and mud in the air.
Tiberius at the head of them. He sneered in his head. The Stormfronters were so fond of a General that led from the front. He wondered how fond they would be, when from the front, he saw them all cut down by his own hand.
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