A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1773 - 1773: The Head of House Patrick - Part 4

He hated it again. When he found himself standing still for far too long, he hated himself all the more. Who was he to dare to stand there like that, as if what he faced was naught at all?

He watched one of those boulders of men begin to crumble. He'd predicted with his eyes that they could last for a while, but the reality quickly dealt out a crueller hand. Tavar's strategy found cracks that Oliver could not perceive logically, and the end was set about more quickly than he could imagine.

Then there was Germanicus, already at the top of the eastern wall now, throwing his warhammer around with that disgusting ease of strength that he seemed to have been born with.

By standing still, Oliver had only allowed the situation to worsen. Gar and the Minister of Blades fought on without him, but surely they weren't exactly feeling optimistic when they saw their General standing frozen in place like that.

He wanted to move, desperately, but now he wasn't sure if he was moving simply to move. An ordinary action was no longer allowed of him. Something had seized him and declared that it would not let him go until it did what he wished.

Something told him that he had already given in, that he'd fallen victim to a sense for the wind, and now it was the wind and its certainty that he had to trust. There was nothing else for him, for he'd already given it all away, and that creature did delight in that fact.

"This is so stupid…" Oliver said, cursing at himself. His feet were taking him towards the stairs, away from combat, leaving his men in an even greater position of desperation. They were doing bad enough with him, and now without him, assuredly, they would soon enough crumble.

Yet there he was, taking the stairs down, two at a time, as if it was the most natural thing in the world, as if it was the most sane of all the strategies that he'd ever delivered. He'd simply disappeared from battle, without a word to Gar, without a word to the Minister, without a word to his men. Like a boy tired of his schooling, he'd just vanished - and now he was racing through the empty streets of Ernest as fast as his legs could take him.

He did it at a sprint, to the fullest of his capacity, so that in the shortest amount of time, his lungs were already heaving, and his heart was burning. Another stupidity beyond stupidities. The more he tried to think not to do them, the more he did them. He descended into a panic that it appeared he couldn't escape from. He was an awful, dreadful clumsy mess.

The plan - if one could call it that - was to sprint across from the southern wall to the eastern wall as fast as he could, rather than taking the walkway around through the men. He supposed there would be an element of surprise in that - or at least, he did for a split second, before his years of battlefield experience tore that idea apart.

Now all he saw was foolishness. All his saw was all that he had given away in pursuit of a whim. The northern wall would crumble, more likely than not. Tavar wouldn't miss that opportunity to push forward in his absence. And it wasn't even as if he had managed to reach the eastern wall particularly quickly. He'd pushed himself to the highest sprint he could manage, clearing the distance in a short couple of minutes, but even that was too long compared to the damage that Germanicus was already inflicting.

The King had secured a solid foothold on the middle of the eastern wall, and what had Oliver gained in return apart from wasted time, and the sacrificing of the southern wall that he was meant to be defending? Nothing at all.

He felt flush with embarrassment. A General he was meant to be, and this was the sort of blunder that he engaged in? Where was the care - it was fundamentally childish. For all his experience, and all that the higher-ranking officers had come to trust him, this was what he engaged in?

When he ascended those stairs of the eastern wall, he did so half-exhausted. He was so out of breath from exerting himself that even the stairs presented a challenge. "Fool! FOOL! FOOL!" He cursed himself, wanting to crawl into a hole and die for what he'd done. He couldn't believe his stupidity. He'd worked on controlling his impulses for years, for all the trouble that they'd gotten him into. Now, in the middle of a battle where they were barely hanging in the balance, he'd indulged in another one, and cost them so much.

So, he didn't know why it was, a part of him - though the largest majority of him raged in abashed embarrassment - was so certain? So delighted?

The worse the situation seemed, the more excited that part of him was. The more clumsily he went about it, and the more he felt like giving up for all that he'd blundered, the more prominent that part of him was.

He took the stairs as quickly as he could. He could hear Germanicus above him, and he could feel the terror that he was causing amongst the troops through Ingolsol's sense of it. Everyone was terrified of him. The Colonels in charge there could not even think of matching him - and it was them that Germanicus hunted so ruthlessly. He had already slain a pair of them, and was rushing onto his third.

'This is soooo bad,' Oliver thought to himself, his heart sinking. 'I'm so stupid.'

He came to the top of the stairs, and what greeted him was not a pleasant sight. The level of destruction that Germanicus had been able to enact in just a short few minutes was otherworldly. It was less a foothold that he had created, and more a whole country. He had already conquered the stairs in their entirety - the only thing stopping him from descending straight down them was his own want for blood. That, and now Oliver Patrick who stood there.