A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1793 - 1793: Supposed Victories - Part 4

Even if he did rush, though, once more there were problems. He knew not the precise state of enemy troop placement beyond the gates. He'd virtually be going in blind. He had to build up his own idea of Tavar's placements through the reports that he received, and occasionally through the arrows and boulders that were cast into the air.

Tavar's strategy was dynamic though. Such things were not reliable. Where once there might indeed have been a thousand bowmen, now there could simply be a wall of spears, a trap for Oliver to race into.

Oliver paused with a sudden realization. He looked back on his men, as if understanding something. He found those two men that had dropped their helmets before, and he wondered if, perhaps, they had felt the pressure that Oliver had only just recognized.

Just like Oliver was looking for an opportunity to get at Tavar, so too, did he finally understand, Tavar was looking to lure him into a trap. The arrows in the air, then the boulder that had misfired right into the city itself – they were far too performative. They were subtle, indeed, but performative enough that they would get Oliver's attention.

He stopped dead then, and suppressed a shiver. Was Tavar that effective? Was he that good at leading men on? Was it Tavar's carefully selected path that Oliver was now wandering down? He had to suppose that it indeed was. He'd been pulled along like a puppet on a string. If he had been more impatient, even ever so slightly, he would have succumbed to Tavar's subtly already. He'd have opened one of those gates, and gone charging into whatever trap Tavar might have set.

For the first time, Oliver felt as if he understood what the force was that Hod so feared. After all, Tavar was busy doing battle with Hod and Blackthorn atop the walls, and yet, he'd still found the time to decipher where Oliver was, and what his role was. He'd had to have understood all that from the start if he was setting traps for him.

Oliver pulled off his own helmet now, and scratched his head, forcing his army to a halt behind him. He wondered whether he was just being paranoid, but the sense of building anger in him told him that it wasn't mere paranoia. It was a genuine sense for what was. Even as a boy, Oliver had been well aware of the slimy sensation of being manipulated, or being guided in a particular direction. It made his skin crawl, and made him hate whoever had afflicted him with that feeling.

Childish though it was, Oliver loved his freedom. He hated those that attempted to force him in a particular direction, or limit him somehow. So deeply set was that desire, that both Blackthorn and Hod had noted it within a short while of working with him, and given him the freedom that he currently enjoyed now.

Oliver gritted his teeth. That little something was stirring in him. Anger of the purest sort. Privilege – that's what his current position was. His allies had allowed him a position of the utmost freedom and privilege and told him to do what he wanted, to the best degree that he could, and despite that, Tavar had dared to try and limit him, and try and guide him, as Greeves might, in that dreadful slimy way that he had.

His eyes were golden now, almost purely so. It was Ingolsol that had taught him that worth of himself, and the arrogant refusal to ever truly be under another man's thumb. It was Ingolsol's teaching, but the feeling that now came with it was not purely that of Ingolsol. It contained traces of him, as if it were Ingolsol's pupil, but it was another creature entirely – one that was becoming increasingly familiar to Oliver.

When Oliver looked along the walls now, he did so with a scanning purpose. He drank in the position of the troops there, and he felt his chest swelling with meaning. Before it had been a forced endeavour, he'd had to push his memory to the fullest, to the point that it almost hurt his head to keep track of it all. Now he was a black hole of wanting, none of it was quite enough for him. It swam towards him by its own will, and it organized itself, once more, as if by its own will.

Oliver clenched his fists around his reins, as he looked through it all. Hod, he'd thought to have the advantage. But that was a ploy now, he supposed – even if he again supposed he might be mad in guessing it, and that he might be seeing something that wasn't there, for who was he to see through it such a degree? But he thought he had the sense of it. Tavar was holding back to a degree. There was something lingering and dishonest. His men didn't seem to be pushing forward with all the strength that they had available to them. There was a sense that they were waiting for something, and trying to provoke something.

Hod too, apparently, had recognized that, for the soldiers that he employed had the same sort of sense. Though men fought, and men died, they didn't do so with the reckless certainty of men that knew victory very much depended on them, in that moment. They did so merely as a continuation of a process.

It was something that made Oliver frown. Both sides were fighting as if they were disguised as someone else entirely. The battlefield seemed to be going in one way, but beneath the surface there were little currents that seemed to be closer to Hod and Tavar's true intentions – but even they didn't scratch at the full heart of the matter.

He didn't think that logically he could decipher them entirely. He could only operate on a sense for them. The best he could define of Tavar's strategy was that it involved luring him into a trap. The him of yesterday, he knew, would very well likely have dove into such a trap. He had almost felt the urge to do it just moments before – but the feeling in his chest had not stirred in its entirety, as if doubting something. It was with a flash of relief that Oliver saw he had avoided a rather tragic potential fate. He'd barely done anything at all, and yet he had wandered so close to an absolute demise.