A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1699 - 1699: To Poke a Bear - Part 1

Oliver kept himself to the forest's very perimeter, ensuring that the plains were always close to his left. He supposed that to be enough of an escape route. Or at least, his instincts did. He glanced behind him, wondering if that cavalry would follow him so far, but he could see no further than five back of his own men.

"They're in the forest," the Minister of Blades told him, guessing the question that was written behind Oliver's searching look.

"Good," Oliver replied. "We'll take them for a little bit of a ride."

He continued forward, slowing his horse down ever so slightly once more, to allow them the same chance to catch up that he had allowed the scouts before him. He could sense the fear streaming from his men. It was a level of tension that soldiers didn't enjoy existing in – not when they couldn't understand the purpose behind the plan.

The forest terrain here was as rough and undulating as it was elsewhere. The path would go up, and then it would go straight back down again, forcing a shallow stream in their path, which Oliver leapt, and then ahead, a fallen log.

He might have cleared that log with the same sort of leap, but he pulled his reins instead, and brought them to a halt, looking around himself. Here, several paths merged. A path leading off to his left, towards the plains. Another towards his right, deeper into the forest, and another that might have allowed him to continue up ahead.

"Minister. Blackthorn," Oliver said. "Is there an enemy ahead?"

Oliver cast his own awareness forward, and he thought he could sense just the vague sense of something, though it wasn't large. It was deceptively subtle. It might have been as insignificant a creature as a rabbit.

The Minister of Blades strained his expression, trying to give a reply. "It is possible…" He said.

Blackthorn was surer. Her senses seemed a different sort to theirs. "There is," she said, and that was all she said.

"I would suppose that to be the influence of Tavar, then?" Oliver said. "That up there ahead there is likely to be a trap. He's certainly moved quickly. He must have had those men moving as soon as we entered the forest the first time…"

"That is Tavar," the Minister of Blades said. "The more you engage with him, the more his advantage will grow. His strategy will coil around you like a snake, until you are no longer capable of moving."

"We will withdraw," Oliver decided. "It is tempting to see whether we might be able to confront these men that he's set out for us. But there's likely Boundary Breakers. Else we would have been able to sense them more readily."

"Wise," the Minister of Blades agreed, following after Oliver as he trotted up the trail that led back towards the plains.

They could hear the men behind them muttering curses, as they tried to navigate the winding forest paths as quickly as they could, but by the time they reached the fallen tree, Oliver and his men were already crossing the plains rather rapidly, with no signs of turning back.

"We'll ride for a while, and then make camp," Oliver said. "It seems prudent to have a guard from now on. Tavar is going to seek to punish us for what we did."

The following day, Oliver brought his men up with very much the same intentions as the first. Tavar and his men had covered some ground by the time that they reached them. They'd crossed the plains for a while, and left the valley that harboured them before. The flat terrain offered little potential for Oliver and his men to hide themselves.

There was the occasional copse of trees, and Oliver would enter into them, as if just for the sake of being irritating, and then he would emerge a while later, lazily, knowing full well that he'd never manage to bother Tavar and his baggage train like that.

He took his men towards the centre of them, towards where the supplies were concentrated. He kept them within a mile of it. Enough to make the enemy nervous. If there was one advantage of the plains and the long-sight it offered, it was that. Oliver could make his enemy feel his presence without risking too much by coming particularly close.

There was no more he did than that. He simply kept by their side. Sometimes he would make his way slightly close, in an attempt to stir the beehive, as he had said he would before. But now the horns no longer blew at his presence. The men regarded him as nothing more than an annoying – and especially dangerous - pest.

At first, they might have supposed him to be the head of some threat that was larger than just the thirty men that he brought, but the plains pulled back that curtain, and revealed the small little scouting party for exactly what it was.

It was to the point that the men that Oliver brought with him, almost began to see their efforts as pointless. For the danger that they put themselves in, the reward seemed minimal. They had no effect on slowing the progressions of that advancing army. All they achieved, really, was being there.

"It's almost like we're marching with them, if anything…" One man commented.

"We probably ought to be. Those are good Stormfront men. Is odd that we're fighting them."

Oliver found himself in full agreement. Those were Stormfront men. Men that he would likely have fought alongside instead if things had been different. Tavar too, there was such a man. For the familiarity that he had for their sensibilities, even if only because he was familiar with the sort of training that had helped to build them, there seemed that distinct lack of opportunities.

It was so thoroughly barren of potential that the niggling little sense that the soldiers were getting of pointlessness began to wear on Oliver himself. Yet still he stayed. All the way through that day, and then through the next, when the plains only threatened to continue.