A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1735 - 1735: An Iron Curtain - Part 5

Oliver had already hacked down more than a dozen men, even leaving as many for the peasants behind him as he was. The initial adrenaline of battle began to die down into something that was more settled. When he looked behind him, he could see the peasants breathing heavily, for how frantically they had begun. He did his best to set an example in that regard, and see them calmed.

"STEADY NOW!" He shouted. "STEADILY SEE THE WHEAT CUT DOWN!"

It was grim language for the battlefield, but it was a language that those peasants understood. One could not cut through a harvest of wheat all in one go. One had to exert themselves measuredly, bit by bit, and see the job carefully done, lest they exhaust themselves in an instant. Those men, slowly but surely, began to do the same. They trimmed the men in front of them as they had once trimmed wheat, and they made themselves a reliable force.

The tide that had swam against the Ernest defenders settled slightly in that. The blood for the peasants was like water to a tree in a drought. It was the nourishment that they needed. Blackthorn's five thousand, and Oliver's own veteran men had borne the brunt of the charge for the first spans of battlefield action, but now, all of Ernest's fifteen thousand defenders began to wake up, and move as one.

Tavar acknowledged the change. It was like seeing oil run through the threads of some great bit of machinery. Tavar had seen the mechanics in some of these foreign clocks that particularly eccentric nobles saw imported. Gears upon gears – machinery complicated enough that he would never know where to begin in understanding it. The defenders of Ernest were much the same. A bit of oil, and the smallest gears began to turn the largest ones. The more time that passed, the more those oddly shaped pieces, of all those strange different sizes, seemed to slot so easily together. They made themselves rather mighty for it.

"Peasants, you say," King Germanicus said, in that deep booming voice of his, from just beyond the walls, as he watched the progress of the battle. "Same peasants that we saw marching? The same that we saw in those villages?"

"The very same," Tavar said. "A feat indeed that Oliver Patrick has pulled. In seeing them gathered at all – but in seeing them sharpened as he has."

"You sharpen them even more," Germanicus said. "You give them experience."

"There is no choice in that," Tavar said. "If we could not overwhelm them in one charge, such is what was bound to happen. They've been made soldiers of. A good army, fifteen thousand strong. That is the simplicity of it. We had only need erase in our minds what they were before – for the weakness that we supposed we might find in them no longer exists."

Germanicus grunted. "I would rather fight them as they are now, than as they were before."

"Good," Tavar said. "Then we are in agreement, Germanicus. I do not believe that is any reason to hold off your advancement any longer. You may take what men you wish with you, and join the fray, as soon as you see fit."

"…You are a strange man, General Tavar," King Germanicus said, looking at him. "You allow me my want, so easily? Do I not carry responsibility now? Do you not wish to have me safe, behind these lines, where no arrows can reach me?"

"Will you fall to the likes of an arrow, King Germanicus?" Tavar asked evenly.

Germanicus gave a bear's ruthless grin. "Not even to a thousand of them. I'm glad it is you that I fight with. Yes. Perhaps becoming King wasn't so bad after all. You do not even make me wait. You show me the strong in front of me, and you allow me to chase after them."

"Who is it that you intend to chase? Oliver Patrick, or General Blackthorn?" Tavar asked.

"…Blackthorn smells the same as me," Germanicus said, pulling up his resting warhammer from the ground in front of him. "I will pay him a visit."

"Then go, and accept the elite that I send with you," Tavar said.

So encapsulated in their own battling they were that they did not see the approach of Germanicus. None but those highest in command, whose senses, naturally, had to exist beyond merely the enemy in front of them. Who had been trained to keep track of their own men, during the fury of battle, naturally too learned by the same virtues to keep track of the enemy.

Even in doing so, as Oliver had learned to, it was not until Germanicus had all but reached Ernest's walls that he finally realized his approach. That weakness that Dominus had pointed out all those years ago, in Oliver's singular focus on that which was in front of him, was something that he had long since struggled to remedy.

With so many men gathered in front of him, and the suddenness of Germanicus' arrival, Oliver felt his eyes grow gold in sudden irritated alarm. He cut a man through with such brutality and swiftness, that the corpse still stood for a moment, even after being cleaved completely in half. It was a fact that those nearest the dead man could not fail to escape.

Stormfront men they all were. They ought to have been allies. But in the span of an instant, such a thing was forgotten. What they saw in Oliver Patrick was only the monstrous. They that had fought so valiantly to come forward suddenly took a step back, by some unspoken command, only barely mumbled by the slight patter of Oliver's lips.

The other Patrick men were on them in a second. The peasants pushed them right to the wall's edge, and they fought them off the side of it, sending a good few tumbling.

"URAHHHH!" The turnaround brought cries of jubilation, filled with might. It had been a good while since they had managed to get their section of the wall clean of men. It seemed a feat, given the sheer number of them that kept coming, that they'd managed to do it at all.