A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1841 - 1841: The Quietest Battlefield - Part 6

Hod had the privilege of seeing the battle from above, and the privilege of seeing the stalemate that was beginning to occur, along with the huge disparity in numbers. Ten thousand men, or more, was what Blackthorn held at the gate, the entire remnants of Tavar's army. As far as Hod could tell, Tavar had entirely abandoned further attacks on the walls, but for the risk that they still might happen, Hod had to keep men stationed there. Once more, it was a threat that they were made to respond to, rather than actual physical action.

The same was true of the prisoners that they held, those that Oliver Patrick had elected to keep, along with the man capable of binding them all together, in a single dangerous force. That General who had gone half-mad with his defeat, and the Prince Hendrick who still saw it as his duty not to acknowledge the fact.

Dangerous elements, Oliver had kept dangled there, and to other men, they would have seemed nothing less than liabilities, but for a man as dexterous as Hod, he delighted in their existence. When there existed problems as obvious as that, things that he had to defend, at all costs, he knew the battlefield better than any other. He could feel the pulling, and he knew Tavar's intentions. It was far too tempting. The very ingredients of the battlefield were based on it. Tavar could not hide what he wanted, and for the fact that Hod knew what he wished to do, he could set a dozen traps for the instant that he had done so.

Tavar's current formation seemed an acknowledgement of that. The fact that he chose to defend, despite being the numerically superior side. He invited them to attack him, to give their best, so that Hod's potential was revealed, and dedicated to a single area, and that any would be traps were gotten rid of in advance.

They circle Tavar still further, three different forces, glaring at different sides of him, in Verdant and Oliver, who seemed very much one and the same, and in Blackthorn, a force entirely of himself, who gave his back so willingly, for the same reason that Hod enjoyed having his weaknesses – Blackthorn invited a man that would dare to attack him in the rear, for he had all the certainty in the world, with his reckless Black blood, that he would see them pay for that fact.

Tavar paid all of them just enough attention that they could not move without feeling weighed down by his gaze. The smile on his face seemed an unnatural thing, given his position. He was not a man to take excessive pleasure in the battlefield, but Hod could see that grin regardless, as broad as the horizon, a man well and truly delighted with what had been put in front of him.

He'd lost Germanicus, and still he could smile like that. Few could understand the reasoning behind that.

But what Tavar saw when he looked at those men that surrounded him, and so longed for his head, was overwhelming strength – strength that would lead the Stormfront into the mightiest of futures. Strength that could put a man like him on the back foot, and actually threaten to tear him down from the throne that he'd sat for so many years.

Every single one of those men, including Lord Blackthorn, was a student of his. Blackthorn more briefly than the rest, for he had been present when Tavar had been given his position at the head of the Academy, in the last two years of his schooling. He'd seen what they were all like at the Academy, and there was a part of him that was delighted in what they'd become. Even now, in this very battle, they were growing beyond themselves, and learning.

Such was Tavar's contradiction. He'd given his vow as an educator, and had given his life along with it – he'd found far more meaning in that than he'd ever found on the battlefield. His colleagues had been horrified by his absence, given his innate talents, but though strength had come easily to him, it had not filled Tavar's heart with meaning, in the same way that other men had.

But so too had Tavar given his vow of loyalty to the High King. In one battle, did Tavar fulfil both oaths. He set to teach them all one final lesson, before he saw his duty to the High King fulfilled.

"So, I bid you, students of mine, show me everything that you are."

They danced around him, slowly, carefully, so many different minds, so full of individualism, all aiming for the same man. He was a single old polar bear, and he had a good deal of men with him, but the fact remained that these were hungry wolves, all of them biting at him, looking to take a piece of his flesh.

Where he had supposed there to be three, suddenly there was four, and then five. More men, with the same cruel intentions of seeing the torch passed came at him. There were so many different strategies to deflect, all at once, and Tavar only had his trusted Colonels to rely on. Men that he hadn't fought alongside in decades. His fighting, in the end, from inside that castle of his, was the fight of a King on the frontlines. If he were to secure victory for the High King, he would have to do it off the back of the greatness of his own strategy.

And what a problem did he present. They could not rush in for fear of him. They knew what sort of man that he was. Forty thousand men, positioned to Tavar's taste, ready to move whenever he gave them the order. He had his thirty thousand man strong castle, with the formation that he had built, and he had those ten thousand men by the gate, ready and waiting to plunge through Blackthorn's rear.