A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1869 - 1869: Fighting the Void - Part 1

"His own lacking competence," Karstly said without a degree of mercy. "He doesn't understand Tiberius to even the slightest degree. He's there, simply fighting shadows. At this rate, he's a detriment to all of our men. He'll see the battle lost for us before it can even properly start."

"I imagine they're starting to doubt themselves a little bit now," Tiberius said. "They certainly seem uncertain. Why is it, my dear enemies, do you find yourselves so stunned? Why is it, do you find your flesh eaten away, mighty beast of twenty thousand that you are, by a mere mosquito, a thousand men strong?"

He phrased the question as if it were a good natured enquiry, and the tone of his voice certainly seemed to suggest so. But the maliciousness of the smile that he wore bespoke of something else. The nastiness of a man that knew exactly how to extract the purest form of suffering from someone. The sort of man that had found only that hobby to entertain himself, during his long time in Wyndon prison, much to the distress of the men and women that the Wyndon King continued to send his way.

It was the closest that Queen Asabel had ever been to a battlefield. The closest that she had ever been allowed to be. She had seen them unfold at times from a distance, but never like this. This was something that she felt most intimately embroiled in. She was close enough to see the pain on the faces of her soldiers as they fell in her name. So too could she feel their building distress, as the monster that called himself Emperor Tiberius, without explanation, ate his way deeper and deeper into their ranks.

The thousand strong detachment of soldiers that he'd sent out had barely been whittled down to eight hundred, and for all their sacrifice, they'd made it high upon the hill that Asabel and her soldiers saw fit to see defended. They were on flat ground now, and had been for some time. They kept their formation good and proper, despite being almost entirely surrounded. From them, there was not a hint of panic, nor fear. The most primary of their concerns seemed to be maintaining the positioning of those banners. They didn't just ensure that they never hit the floor, they made sure too that the same square shape in their deployment was eternally maintained, as if conforming to the whims of some rather stroppy artist.

All the while, Tiberius simply watched, unmoving. Queen Asabel could not make out his face entirely, but she could well imagine him to be smiling. It was as if a poison was eating through them, and they knew not the cure. She wondered if that too was how those men who had encountered the Pandora Goblin had felt, when the slightest wound had seen them torn apart. And then she frowned at her wondering. It had been a very long time since she'd thought about the Pandora Goblin – what on earth could have made her think about such a thing then, and draw comparisons, as if it were the most natural thing in the world?

Then she realized, it was the very banners that she stared at. They evoked nothing in her mind as strongly as the image of the Pandora Goblin. Simply a monster beyond all fathoming, the sort of sigil that you forgot the exact shape of as soon as you tore your eyes from it. The only thing you remembered was the fact that it was beyond comprehension – terrifying, and beyond comprehension, those two things together. And most certainly, was Emperor Tiberius that.

She watched the desperate struggle of Skullic, as if it were she, dressed in the armour of a General and wielding a sword in his place. She felt his anguish, and his anxious depression mount, as he found no purchase and no means of overturning the mounting dreadfulness of their position. They were getting eaten apart, and there seemed to be naught that could be done about it. She looked to the other Generals, wondering if they would move to help, knowing very well the desperateness was written on her face, yet she found herself imploring anyway.

But Blackwell and Broadstone wore the same troubled, yet pitying looks, and they could show no signs of movement. Karstly looked readier, but his look was one of disgust. He saw Skullic, and he saw only failure. Queen Asabel wanted to cry out that it was not so. She could feel Skullic's efforts, as he tried to find solid land from within that void. She understood not battle, but she did understand determination, and Skullic had it in spades. He fought wide eyed, as if his wife were there right next to him, and it was she that he was fighting to protect. And still, he could find nothing. Blackwell could not move to reinforce him, nor Broadstone, nor could they allow Karstly to move. For these were still a mere thousand men. They still had another nineteen thousand and Emperor Tiberius himself to contend with. To over-commit resources here and now would be to lose the battle from the start.

It was Skullic who bore the immensity of that burden. If he couldn't deflect the first of Emperor Tiberius' blows, then by his own failings, the battle would be lost. That was how the others saw it. Forty thousand men were there, watching him, from both sides of the battlefield, seeing him frantically struggle, as if he had never commanded a day in his life. There could be nothing more humiliating than that. She could practically see the terror start to build in him, as the strength that he had always thought that he'd had was taken from him, bit by bit. In the process, his men started to weaken as well. Their morale fading, against that mere thousand strong enemy.

Shockingly, they were right there, on the edge of breaking. Their five thousand strong flank – or what had been that, now it was reduced by a good six hundred men – and the mighty young General that commanded it, so overturned, by a simple straightforward advance of infantrymen. And if they fell, like a tower of cards, the rest of Blackwell's army would fall. It would all be over and done with, in a matter of minutes, by just a single move.