A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1605 - 1605: The Witch - Part 4

The chaotic state of the battlefield, with an all out melee between all those ten thousand infantrymen, and the remaining two thousand enemy archers standing on standby, to pick them off whenever they were lucky enough to disengage – it was bad enough. They had not heard a word from Volguard in a while, their only source of counter strategy, and Oliver had a strong inclination that the old Professor likely lay dead. Against the charge that had swamped them all, the teacher, with his lack of physicality, left him without a chance of fighting back.

There was no hope, and to add to that hopelessness, the dragon came to crush the one card that they had in their favour – the presence of a General, and the presence of men of the Fourth Boundary.

Oliver couldn't make out their features well enough, he didn't have the energy to strain his eyes to see that far, but by his vision, the two gentlemen came shrouded in golden light. He knew they were Generals in an instant. A grey stallion, and a dark chestnut mare, two entirely different creatures, with two entirely different riders, so opposite in their style. A twirling mustache and ornate armour, and then on the other men a hard expression, and a suit of armour more battered than even that of a low-nobles.

They carried their standards of their houses, and that of the Prince that they served. Oliver wished he could have made them out too. He had to smile. Such was fate, he supposed. When a problem was grand enough that it might crush a man, let him crush it entirely, he thought. There was no chance of matching this one. Any amount of false hope that he had built up, and any amount of progress that he might have thought to be had was instantly wiped away.

"SOLDIERS OF THE ROYAL HOUSE OF EMERSON!" Came a barking shout, from a man far sterner than Oliver could ever hope himself to be. "LEND YOUR PRINCE YOUR WEAPONS!"

"PUT AN END TO THE REBEL OLIVER PATRICK, IN THE NAME OF PRINCE HENDRICK, AND IN THE NAME OF THE HIGH KING OF THE STORMFRONT!" The mustached General to his left added, two separate swirling auras of Command. They came, and they invigorated all the soldiers at once.

In the midst of the chaos that had been falling on them, and that directionless hopelessness that they'd begun to be afflicted with, the shouts of their Generals joining the field of battle along with them came as a splash of cold water. They were rejuvenated in an instant.

All at once, it was complete, the mighty dragon had its head, and it had its wings. If someone had told Oliver that he had merely been fighting one arm of the beast up until that point, he would have believed it. The transformation that the appearance of the Generals brought was incomparable. They were the beating heart and the thinking head of the entire army, and with their arrival, by the flames of their leadership, the army was burned back into proper shape.

The Colonels that had attempted to fill in for them rose all the mightier. Their swords fell heavier, their own barking shouts were louder, bringing more obedience. The Captains under them were surer of themselves, more inclined to pursue recklessness, believing more strongly in the orders from above. And all those soldiers down the chain were the same. Their need to think had evaporated, they steamed with all the certainly of thoughtless men, and they were far more dangerous for it.

"I see them, Minister," Oliver said with the smallest degree of sadness, as he watched the last of the hope that they had been offered fade away. He sealed away his heart, and the wanting in him, and sighed in exhaustion, preparing himself for a harsh last few moments of battling, before their inevitable defeat.

"I meant not them, General Patrick," the Minister said, raising his arm to point with a glaive in the same direction that he had pointed before. Oliver had merely stared ahead in response, supposing that there was only one thing that the Minister could have seen fit to be mentioning. But now he turned to the side, his eyes not needed anywhere else, for no matter where they looked, they would not have found the seeds of the grand plan that Oliver and his men so desperately needed.

There, finally, Oliver found a reaction that he could not control, no matter how defeated he claimed to be, or how calm he supposed he'd made his heart. "Gods be damned, Verdant…" He said, his eyes widening with surprise, then relief, then a brief second of joy, before he clamped it closed, hoping that the dragon wouldn't see. "Gods be damned…"

There was his reliable second in command, looking as if he had confronted all the guards of the underworld himself. He looked wrecked. One eye was closed, and he had nasty cut down his cheek, and all the hair that he'd grown back was now matted with slick blood against the side of his head. His cape was torn, and his surcoat along with it, and there wasn't a patch of his normally shining silver armour that was unsullied by either mud or blood, or bits of viscera. He was the worst a man could ever look, and made all the more terrifying for the triumphant smile that he wore on his face.

"SEE, MY LORD! SEE!" He exclaimed proudly, certainly the proudest Oliver had ever seen him, for an achievement of his own. Verdant seemed to celebrate Oliver's own achievements far more than he had ever had something he'd done himself here. But the battlefield had seen him reduced, as it had seen all of them reduced. So crushed were they that they could not revert to anything but entirely what they were.

And he had every right to be proud, for the men that he had collected. A mere hundred, or so another man might comment, but this was a hundred drowning sailors collected on a storming sea. It was just him, either, there was Blackthorn by his side, and there seemed another hundred men battling through a short distance behind him under the leadership of Jorah.