A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor
Chapter 1897 - 1897: An Inland Kraken - Part 9

Tiberius knew the truth of it. It was fortune, not struggle, that had found them where they were. For Tiberius alone, it was the true path of building. His own two hands, brick by brick, he'd used what he had around him to craft his way. He did not shy away from cruelty as others did. He acknowledged it to be necessary. Why ought a man to obey, if he did not fear you? What was power, without the cruelty that was to come with it?

It was that resoluteness that made him stand his ground. Him, of all people. He knew that his struggle was pointless, if he did it in the same way that they did. Where they simply stood there and swung, dead-eyed, praying to the Gods. But Tiberius did not struggle vainly, for even if the claws of the Pandora Goblin did not kill a man in an instant, they still had the poison to contend with.

He drew up, and made his two thousand men circle. They, under direct command of the Emperor, a servant of Pandora. A tactic as strong as a fork. It ought to have been unassailable. But Tiberius dwelled in other laws. Its unassailability, and its certainty – that was the very thing that made it weak. He moved his men simply to put them into motion. He didn't attempt to avoid the fork, or the strength of the charge. Instead, he moved into it. He offered his flank to Blackwell, who dove into it greedily, chopping apart men and horse with that glaive of his, and he offered his front to Karstly, who's want for his head was so strong that it might have crystalized into something physical, like a deep red ruby.

Closer and closer they came. A speed that was impossible to overturn. The strength of their particular style of fighting. All that was Stormfront, all that was honour, and all that was Claudia. Karstly's blade came closer and closer. Blackwell allowed him it. He needed not to kill Tiberius himself. "GO!" He bellowed, roaring it, a bear standing on its hind legs, intoxicated by the violence of it all, thrilled with victory. Tiberius could not move away from it, nor could he acknowledge it.

Man after man Karstly sliced through. The strength of his will, all that time that he'd spent in the forest, making deals with ghosts and spirits and faeries – anything that his mind could conjure up to lend strength to his sword. He'd signed away his life for this very moment. A man impossible to thrust aside. An arrow guided with absolute certainty.

Suddenly, he was through. Tiberius was right in front of him. An unhelmeted man, simply wearing that towering crown of his – a ridiculous thing it was. More ostentatious than the feathers of a peacock. It would do nothing to protect him.

Tiberius raised his sword to block the coming strike, but Karstly was quicker. Tiberius thought himself to be merciless and cruel, but Karstly in that moment was crueller. His sword slashed across Tiberius' cheek, and then down towards his neck, coming back out again to sever a good chunk of that white hair that Tiberius wore so long.

Then Karstly was flashing past, unable to slow himself, slamming into more of those heavily armoured cavalrymen that Tiberius kept so close to him.

"GOOD ARM, BOY!" General Blackwell roared, losing his formality for his excitement. He saw the blood that came, and he saw the way Tiberius slackened in the saddle, his head drooping, as if someone had cut the strings of it, and yet still not losing his crown.

Karstly, however, knew the truth of it. "Not deep enough…" he cursed. But his sword had reached Tiberius once, and it would reach him again. He knew that for a certainty now. That creature that had seemed so impossible, as a phantom in the fog, forever unreachable by human hands – it was now right there before him. In a position where he could no longer dodge. He could no longer even look up. He seemed to have fainted there and then, at the first wound that he had ever received.

With Samuel's help, and with Blackwell buying further attention, Karstly drew a harsh turnabout, risking himself to sword strikes in the process, all so he could get a second charge. He put the heels to his horse again, gaining speed, his trajectory true, determined to finish the job this time. One strike had weakened him, immobilized him. The other would take his head.

"WHOSE!?" Tiberius' eyes flashed open with a suddenness, filled with what Karstly could only describe as madness. Or was it malevolence? Or was it both? A hatred so acute, that it seemed as if the man would go any distance to see it enacted. Indeed, something that he had only seen so before in goblins.

Yet, from Tiberius, it carried that much more weight. It made Karstly recoil in the saddle, as if invisible tendrils held him in place. He would not admit it out loud, but he had to admit it in the confines of his own heart. That emotion that he'd just felt – that was fear, wasn't it? Fear for a creature so much larger than he. And how was it that he had wounded such a creature already? How was it that his sword had touched his cheek? Even in doing it, it seemed an impossibility… Even in having achieved it, he was made to doubt it. That man whom, from the start of the battle, had always seemed to make cruelty the highest of his priorities.

Why was it too, that the resistance had increased all of a sudden? Those walls of men that they'd pierced through so easily before now seemed to drain Karstly's speed as he tried to gain that charge. To near Tiberius now was like trying to pierce into the eye of a storm. Those men fought with a viciousness that he found it hard to get past. Blackwell too found himself difficulty placed. Those men that he'd had with him all the way, they'd vanished, swallowed up by something or other.