A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1599 - 1599: To Flow or To Fly - Part 6

"Ought you not do something?" Hendrick asked.

"They can not change the battlefield by themselves. They've barely struck down a hundred men," Fitzer replied.

"That a mere three men could strike down a hundred seems a feat to me," Prince Hendrick said. "I do not like the sound of it. And the fact that they continued to prevail, as a thorn in our side. We are not making fullest use of our opportunity. We ought to be hammering them down."

"They're content merely to resist," Tussle said thoughtfully. "There is not even truly any point in engaging them. It's nearly a waste of men. Just surrounding them would be enough, and we can pepper them in arrows, and rid ourselves of the men that we've been wasting."

"The rest of the resistances need crushing for that," Fitzer replied.

"And look – they already have been," Tussle said, pointing to the hands that were disappearing beneath the tide of men, after so long spent in struggle, they now had no means to resist the sea, and they drowned in its dark depths.

"Ho—" Oliver began to say, only to bite the words back. The gravity was a thing of strength now. He'd held that position with his three comrades for a good while To merely hold, it was expected of him. It was an expectation that coalesced, as if he was a permanent feature of the landscape. He could feel the force of it holding him in place, and the great difficulty it placed on him, in executing any new sort of movement.

The restriction made him reckless. Merely holding wasn't enough. To follow the past path too strongly was to limit his freedom, and to give in to some other sort of flow. "On me," he said instead to the other two more Command in his voice than before, on par with the irritation that he felt.

They stuck close to him, as Oliver began to hack his way at the wall of men, one step forward after the other, plunging back towards the centre. With the many tens and hundreds of men that stood in his way, it did not seem likely that he would ever reach it. It was like a lumberjack expecting to cut down an entire forest in a day. But with the Minister of Blades and Gar at his side, that task became all the easier. Even they did not look up, and dream of reaching the centre, given the grandness of its distance, it was far too strong an impossibility.

The gravity dragged at Oliver there too. All those different forces. The sheer weight of the dragon was mighty now, after Oliver had exhausted all novelty available to him. It felt as if his own path, and his own fateful actions, were as solidly carved into his being as rocky stone walls. If he reached out his hands, he could have sworn that he might have touched them, and seen them holding him in place, preventing him from doing any more than he was.

Briefly, the thought came to him that he might be able to reach the few pockets of men that awaited him from the central army, but even more quickly, that thought was quashed. That was far too solid and predictable an idea, and he was not allowed the burden of such things. He whitened his mind, and lightened his soul, and drifted thoughtlessly. Lured not by emotion in the general sense, but merely by a want for freedom, the refusal to be bound, even by his own goals and his own thoughts.

He settled again, where the gravity was at its weakest. He found he could once more appreciate the combat, as if it were the most magical thing in the world. When a spear came for him, he slid along its length, stepping in close, with all the grace of a quiet butterfly, and he skewered the man through the belly. There came a rush from the action, a feeling of sudden perfection, filling the world with colour.

He could have danced there, for all eternity, in that single instant of freedom, where it seemed like he might try anything, and have all the results that the Gods would so benevolently offer him. He felt as if he could have gone faster, and slew more men. He so too felt that he could have gone slower, and expended less energy. He felt as if all would have been equally as significant, equally as perfect.

The sheer way his feet swept the icy snow beneath his feet, and found there, from all the feet that had tread before him, that lacking of purchase, there was profundity. When he felt his boots catch poorly, and his treads lead to a sudden slip, it was not resistance in his legs he offered to stabilize himself, but a swing of his sword, making use of the sudden erraticness, slicing at the legs of the man nearest him.

The man howled with surprise and pain, as all that was below the knee was taken from him. Gar seized the opportunity to spring on him, and coldly plunge his short sword through the man's neck. Then the young man was back with the Minister, protecting his side, in their little triangle formation, from all the hungry swords and spears that sought to bring them low.

"Steady," did Oliver say, neither rushing, nor standing still, he treated each fresh challenger as if he was the only man in the world that he would have left to face. He gave them his fullest attention, almost as if he was fleeing from the greater goal that ought to have sat at the back of his mind.

And when it did seem like the next sword blow was motivated more by gravity, and pattern, than it was that beautiful sense of freedom, he gave another.

"MEN OF THE PATRICK ARMY, FIND YOUR METAL!" He bellowed, his voice filling with a sense of Command that was almost erratic. There was naught that could build towards it, no sense of flow. Ordinarily, he would have gone step by step. But a leaf in the wind was more erratic. The currents of the air twisted and spiralled, they didn't just flow and meander along the grounds of the earth.