A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1709 - 1709: The Emperor - Part 3

He had them wait there for nearly an hour, the adrenaline beating through their veins as a cold fire – a poor cure for the cold that raged them. The men shivered from a mixture of the ice and the anticipation. Still, Karstly held them there, waiting for something, some sort of signal.

Samuel's ears twitched, as he heard something beyond the trees. He supposed a man's shout, but it could just well have been a bird, or a branch falling down in the quiet of the forest, down into the pillow of snow that would most certainly have waited under it.

But another shout joined the first, this one stronger. He was a military man, of great experience – it didn't take him long to recognize the timbre of that voice. It was a voice dealing in command, giving an order of some sort.

He straightened in his saddle, only now able to paint the picture of where he stood, and what it was that awaited them beyond those trees. There was the enemy army, pulling itself into its battle formations, attacking with the very coming of dawn.

He had not realized that they had been able to come so close, but he supposed that was the one thing that they had to thank the Skreen and all its wildness for. There was hardly a better place in all the Stormfront for concealing large armies of men.

Karstly pushed his horse forward, down into the trees, onto that downward facing slope. Samuel gave the order to the rest of the men with his sword, before following after his General.

Quietly they went, creeping like phantoms. Nervousness. Anticipation. The thrill of a predator stalking its prey. They were quiet, and they were terrifying. They could see shapes beyond the trees. The rear of the enemy, ever so close. Impossibly close. Ten thousand men, along with men of high command, right in the rear, mounted on horseback. Samuel thought he recognized General Satorius amongst them.

Karstly didn't rush. Whatever Karstly's nerves were made out of, it certainly was not the stuff of normal men. He was barely two hundred metres away when he drew his sword, and he still had that horse of his moving at a trot.

If Samuel didn't know any better, he would have thought that Karstly was simply enjoying the moment. 'Damn it, that's exactly what he's doing…' Samuel realized, drawing his sword along with him. 'What a troublesome Lord I've chosen to follow!"

"MEN OF MINE!" Karstly bellowed, all of a sudden. "SHOW THEM HELL!"

There it rippled. There it was. Karstly's genius, in a single line, in a single moment of timing, he bestirred them all. Samuel who knew him best – and those Pendragon men that he had borrowed to bolster his numbers, and then his own Karstly men along with them. He had them walking along a terrifying tightrope over the abyss for days, and he had made them suffer right until the very end for it. But now, with a single cry, he gave them footing, and he gave them wings. He made them more than men, and they terrified their enemy for it.

Karstly's cry tore through the enemy as a blow of fear in the same way it had been a wave of confidence for his own men. General Satorius turned around on his horse, quicker than the rest, issuing orders in alarm in that high voice of his. But the cry of the charging Karstly men, echoing that of his Lord, drowned him out.

General Satorius had his bodyguard hastily surround him. Those other officers on horseback drew in a protective circle, their training and their instincts all kicking in, despite the sudden nature of the surprise. They bellowed more commands, trying to draw back the infantry to their General as well, but by the time Samuel exited the trees, he could see how far away the majority of the infantry – and in particular the bowmen – were, in firing up at the walls of the imposing Skreen castle.

Samuel matched Karstly, staying just a few strides behind. He knew his Lord was no slacker when it came to single combat. The young General tore through the first line of men, his sword swift, and certain. Every blow came with the flourish of an artist's brush, flicking the blood of hise enemies onto the grand canvas of his battlefield.

It was a single line of infantry Karstly had to tear through – and he did that with all the ease of a wolf tearing through a flock of sheep. He was moving on to General Satorius's bodyguard in a second. Men of the third and fourth Boundaries. Terrifying creatures. Karstly plunged right into the heart of them, and Samuel struggled to match him.

It was a single Fourth Boundary man in particular that Karstly eyed, signalling him out from the rest. He pointed his sword straight at him, and gave a cry of challenge. "FACE ME, WENCH!" He said, as if he had grown up in the muds of some peasant village. The man bellowed at the taunt, and pushed his horse out in front of the General to meet the challenge.

Karstly raised his sword for a mighty strike, charging the man head on, with all the courage of an honoured knight. It was to the point that the other bodyguards held back, allowing their comrade the dignity of his duel.

And yet, instead of crossing swords with the man, at the very last second, Karstly simply wheeled past him, and drove his sword through the chest of the Third Boundary man beyond him, and then with another strike, he took care of another Third Boundary man.

Samuel had to sigh. Such was Karstly's nature. He would stop at nothing to make his foes look like fools, and indeed, scrambling to turn his horse around, unable to match the frightening speed of Karstly's built up charge, that Fourth Boundary bodyguard did indeed look like quite the fool.

"WHAT DISHONOUR! YOU COWARD!"

"I think coward to be the wrong term," Samuel said, slamming his sword toward the bodyguard's side, before he could join the fray, and cut off a Karstly that was already closing in on General Satorius.