A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1359 - 1359: The Problem - Part 3

The Professor didn't like it. He was drumming his lengthy fingers on the desk, trying to decide on his next course of action. Ought he continue with his attack? Another few favourable rolls of the dice, and he could likely take Oliver's General. But in ignoring the archer unit of Oliver, and the cavalry unit, he could quite well lose his General in the process.

He considered it, and then did something quite reckless for such a well thought out Professor – he sent his General all the way to the front, to battle alongside his infantry, placing it well out of the range of Oliver's rear troops, but instead, straight into the range of Oliver's archers.

Now Oliver had to frown. The playful smile that he'd had all the way through faded. Hadn't Volguard just made a mistake? He stared at the board. There was no other way of describing it, was there? If he stepped his units of archers forward, they could bombard the enemy General, and victory would be his.

Was… It actually possible? Oliver hadn't thought so, but it was danging right in front of him, ever so temptingly. To beat Volguard would be… An impossibility among impossibilities. He was having fun moments before, but this would be an achievement that far exceeded fun. It was a once in a lifetime opportunity, not to be wasted by mere jokes.

Oliver gritted his teeth, and dared to make the move. He rolled the archer's dice with sweat beginning to form on his brow.

"Damn it…" He cursed. Surrounded by troops, the probability of hitting the General had been low, but he'd been rewarded with a destroyed spear unit for his efforts. 'I still have around 3 turns of firing. It should be enough to secure the kill,' Oliver thought, beginning to run the calculations, using all the energy that he had saved earlier.

His old systems of evaluation that Volguard had drilled into him so carefully booted up. All those strategy books that he had been made to read, all the opinions that he had formed, and…

Just like that, it was over.

"A tempting truth, alas, not the reality," Volguard said, revealing his tactic. A long-placed cavalry unit that Oliver had seen smashed into the side of his archers. That alone would have been fine… If Oliver hadn't taken the bait and stepped those archer units one tile forward.

Now his General was revealed, and four of Volguard's archers were allowed to fire upon Oliver's unprotected General in the same turn.

Unlike Volguard's General that had been protected by the surrounding men, allowing it to endure some shots, Oliver's was now completely isolated. The chances of avoiding death were astronomically low. And as if to put that out, the dice roll of the very first unit was what killed Oliver's General.

"Gaghhhh," Oliver gave a pained cry, and put his hand to his forehead. It had felt so damnably close. Of course, he should have known it was a ruse. "Still the same old, isn't it?" Oliver complained.

He waited, expecting the usual comments from Volguard about how he might improve his game, but the Professor was silent. With his hand on his chin, and the frown on his brow, one would not have thought that the battle was over.

"What did you do this morning, Oliver Patrick?" Volguard said.

"…Sorry? Is this an integration for a crime? If there's been a murder, it wasn't me," Oliver joked.

"That," Volguard said, pointing a finger at him. "More jests come from you than I received at the Academy. You have always had a certain degree of wit, but you're in an unusually good mood."

"...This is a very odd line of questioning, Professor," Oliver said. "Ah, I see. You're complaining about how I played? True enough, I'll admit, I didn't take it as seriously as I should, and I apologize. But I thought, since we were going to be studying so much anyway, there was little point in starting at a sprint, was there? Besides, it was fun enough, wasn't it?

It even looked close there in the end – or at least, the strategy that you pulled made it seem close, but as usual, I was no match for you."

"No, you fell for a tactic," Volguard said, as quick to explain as he usually would be. "It was not strategy that bested you, just a trap. I have told you before, a strategist should not rely on a single trap. Not unless he can confidently set many of them. I was about to set only a single one, and you were too greedy to beat me to see the ruse of it."

"I suppose so," Oliver agreed.

"So I do wonder, what is it that you did differently this morning?" Volguard asked again. "As a student, you are undeniably worse… But I can not say that the game you played was a wrong one, given how it confounded me so."

Oliver thought about telling him exactly what he'd done that morning, in the form of conversing with Nila – but he knew, in his heart of hearts, that there was no way such a light performance could have had any effect at all on his strategy. After all, strategy, he knew, to be the culmination of knowledge. It was that which the Generals had built up over their lifetimes.

It could be affected this dramatically merely by a shift in emotion. Naturally, it could be made to be worse, if one's calculation ability was hindered – but the style of strategy that Oliver had manifested could not even be called that at all. It was just a joke, and that was the only reason Volguard had trouble dealing with it.

Because no one ever seriously played a joking manner of strategy, there was a contradiction inherent in just forecasting such a thought.

"Well, I would say, I avoided breakfast," Oliver said. "Or more like, I didn't have time to eat. You said to avoid breakfast, didn't you? Maybe that's the solution."

Volguard frowned. "That wasn't what I was asking. How did you spend your waking minutes?"

"Without any degree of seriousness. Avoiding work, for the most part," Oliver shrugged. "Is that a new ring, Professor? A skull is awfully morbid for a man like you."