A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1459 - 1459: The Grand Strategist - Part 5

But those with the eyes to see had to grunt in their acknowledgement of it. It was, in fact, a move filled with the ultimate in intention and threat. It left Broadstone thinking for a good while. It pointed to the position that would follow, should Blackwell engage in an all out attack from the front, and that slight move to the right was exactly what Blackwell needed to make that position fall into his favour. It was just enough range and distance for him to keep Broadstone's rear cavalry in check, who would have otherwise been able to charge forward and make up for any blunders that might have occurred during the repeated exchanges.

General Broadstone responded by correcting the positioning of his cavalry in advance. Clearly it was a move that dissatisfied him. In strategy, the strategists seemed to all have a strange sort of pride that of not responding to an enemy's attack merely as a single defending move, but of going a step beyond it, and turning it into a counterattack. Broadstone was disappointed at his lack of success in finding such a move – he had to wait once more, and pray that Blackwell let his underbelly show in another regard.

It wasn't as if Blackwell was especially pleased to have seen Broadstone counter his strategy equally either, however, for that meant that he had to see further, and snatched at more future positions, in the hopes that Broadstone would lose his head in the grand foray of calculation, and allow something else to slip.

'But that is merely a single piece of strategy,' Blackwell told himself, with a hand on his sharp black beard, as he rooted around in his head for his next move. He knew that simply seeing further than the enemy was just a single approach to strategy. He had ever faced men that had seen further than him, and yet he'd secured victory against the large majority of them, for there were other things in strategy.

If one could not see a favourable position, it could be felt. He'd made his move, in trying to pull the wool over Broadstone's eyes, and a lesser Colonel might have tried another in that regard – but even in equal territory, moves were not made in isolation. The Battle board ever pulled, with a magnificent gravity. Everything bound together, inviting the unfolding of a grand wave. There were properties to the move that he had just made that would connect with other things, and when that connection was had, Blackwell knew victory would start to tilt in his direction.

He pushed forward his own cavalry piece, warning again in the same area that he had warned in before – threatening that he would delay Broadstone's own cavalry, once the attack had begun, and so put a spear through the heart of the defensive concoction that Broadstone had made.

Again, Broadstone countered, with a heavy frown on his face. No General liked to be led around. He was looking in the magnificent pool of strategy that dwelled in the depths of his mind, and he could find no magic in there yet with which he could counter Blackwell's manoeuvrings.

Blackwell himself was having a similar such problem. The moves were running out. He'd brought a considerable amount of tension towards one side of the board, threatening a single future position, and now he found himself hard pressed to find more moves that would contribute towards it, with a similar weight to what he had before. He was losing the initiative. He ignored the weaker moves that could have pointed in the same direction, knowing full well that Broadstone would no longer have to respond to them instantly – which was exactly what the defensive General had begun to hate.

Now Blackwell took a long time. He closed his eyes, and stroked his chin, filtering out all that unimportant from around him. He knew very well how closely the eyes of many important people studied him, but they had ceased to be creatures of significance now. He was dedicated entirely to that which he warred against.

His heat was beginning to stir with a considerable amount of fire. The cold hard logic of a calculating General had dragged him towards this point. A fact that he could have spoken about with pride as a youth, for it was ever the logical and academic that he had found the most difficult to match against anyone else – and now that logic could bring him on equal standing with a General. The killing blow, however, always belonged to someone else.

In his head, he heard the voice of his Fragment, murmuring, and careful. Claudia she was, but she was not as the people knew her.

"It may be time to use that fire, comrade," she told Blackwell, her voice more overwhelming in Command than his could ever be. He knew her to be clad in the silver armour of war – the same weapons that she had borne when she had led the other Gods, and saw Ingolsol imprisoned. She was a terrifying, overwhelming creature.

Blackwell gritted his teeth at her. He feared the Fragment, and she knew that. He did not know what the experience of the Second Boundary had been like for his peers, but he was quite certain that it had not been quite like his own. They had all returned with smiles, and jubilations, but Blackwell had felt himself defeated.

His heart had been crushed for a number of days. The roaring beast of the old House Black, that which had stood before its fracturing, had afflicted him even more strongly than his kinsfolk. His father had taken efforts to show that the extent of his rage had never seen the light of day, and Blackwell himself had taken similar such measures, knowing just how far it would embarrass his family if he were to let it loose. Yet, he could not deny what he was. It was his greatest power, and his greatest shame, and Claudia had crushed it entirely.

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