A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1597 - 1597: To Flow or to Fly - Part 4

So many men came at him with so many different intentions. Some would try and trick him, and make him follow their eyes towards something else, forcing upon him their flow, to a degree that he didn't like. In such instances, he'd feel a spark of childish anger. Just enough, for a single instant, to crush that which came before him.

It was a complicated thing. He was both full of emotion, and entirely bereft of it. It was both anti-flow, and flow of the most profound sort. Whatever it was, Oliver was fully aware that it was the only reason that he was able to keep standing. He knew that if he tried to grasp for it with his hand, and force understanding of it, he would lose his magic, and fall crashing down to the earth, where he ought to have been already.

There came a moment when, achievement almost pulled him from the sky.

Two colonels converged on Oliver at once. He recognized their rank by their presence, and even if he had not, he heard the soldiers shout to them, their title, and then their name, though Oliver quickly had the name fade from his mind.

His arms stiffened at the acknowledgement of the threat, as they ought to. And then the impulse came, to bite against that tension, and the gravity that he was trying to build up, and his want to solve the problem. He forced that continued state of lagging intention. With Gar and the Minister occupied by all the other men that were thundering down on them – as planned by the enemy that sought to overwhelm them – there was none to deal with both Colonels but he.

He caught the first blow on his sword, without putting strength into his defence, he let the blade drift along his own, until it caught on the hand guard and stopped. It was a dangerous little manevure, of the sort of that he'd normally avoid. He noticed then how many risks he had been taking in his fighting – so much more than he usually would. He walked a tightrope of danger that he otherwise would not.

The Colonel's eyes flashed with surprise, and then quickly with a realization, and he pushed onto Oliver's guard, twisting his blade, aiming to sever the fingers that supported his blade. But it was his own strength that sealed his demise. Oliver allowed him his pushing, but his brief flash of wilful anger prevented him from being pulled into the other man's flow for long.

He lashed out with his sword, and severed the man's throat, quicker, and more instinctively than he could ever have thought to overwhelm a Colonel before.

The other man came for him, and Oliver's old intentions would have been to build off the flow that he had just established – to use one problem to solve the other. But his anger came again, biting, as he felt the gravity and restriction of such a thing, the limits of following old patterns, and his anger turned against him. He burned the flow before it could limit him, and he drew back, his mind empty, as if nothing at all had happened, and he confronted the Colonel as if he were a freshman, all of his own.

A spear came rushing out at him, tucked from under the Colonel's arm, and then sent lashing forward with a twist of the hip and shoulder, at lighting speed, quick enough that even a Fourth Boundary warrior could have been proud of it. It made Oliver raise his eyebrow in surprise to see such a technique. It gave the illusion of a lacking range, only for the spear to go far beyond it. It might have caught many an opponent off guard, but Oliver ever so quickly took a risk of the most troubling sort once more, stepping into the path of the spear, allowing it to flash past his side.

Then, the man was defenceless. Oliver's sword came crashing down, and the man died with a smile on his face. The two of them acknowledged the beauty of the exchange. They had both surprised each other, and seen the glory in it.

The feeling of that exchange, and knowing his own strength, from times past, made Oliver dwell on that achievement for longer than he had any of the others. It distracted his mind, and made him consider. He felt the briefest spark of a hope. "This might be possible," he started to think, feeling a fire spread in his head, taking in all the men that they had slain, seeing how long their resistance had held. He started to take in the rest of the battlefield.

His sword started to fall more heavily on the men in front of him, and his eyes caught the slightest few golden flecks, as his will started to take over.

And just as quickly as he had thought such a thing, the dragon reminded Oliver of its size. As a spear point tore through chain mail, and nicked at his flesh. He turned in an instant, and made the wielder pay with a strike of his sword, but the lesson was learned, and once more, he was put in his lace, and reminded of the hopelessness. If he dared ask for anything, or celebrate anything, even for an instant, then even the spears of minor soldiers would reach him, just as they did then.

His was a tightrope that required the entirety of his attention. He could not be distracted for any length of time by any one thing. Whenever there came a flow that attempted to distract him for too long, the anger would rise, feeling that thing's gravity, and it would drag Oliver back away from it, seemingly by force.

What a pointless endeavour one had to acknowledge it all was, however. For all that they stood their ground, they only grew more exhausted. The Minister of Blades was growing more ragged by the second, and even Gar was breathing heavy. For as long as they'd stood their ground, they found no true achievements from it. No other men joined their cause. They were simply existing as stubborn stone, destined to be eroded, like all things were.