A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Pick your shots," Blackwell said, changing the orders for his men, when he heard the approach of Broadstone. He supposed that the two could work together, for a more effective means of dealing with the enemy. One could wound, and confuse, and Blackwells archers could kill.

Skullic had his archers dealing with them in the same way as before. They needed not to be ordered towards urgency, for they knew the magnitude of their enemy already. They shot high, making use of a steep parabola, landing their arrows almost vertically on tops of the heads of their enemies. That, it seemed, was the most effective way of piercing through that plate, and they were allowed the satisfaction of a good few hundred of them falling beneath that assault.

But once more, those soldiers were fearless. For every man that they lost, they did not quicken their pace, or charge faster. They kept the same steady jog of a juggernaut, advancing steadily, and closing up any gaps that might appear along the way. Somehow, it was almost worse for the fact that they had dealt them wounds. For how quickly they recovered from them, and how little it seemed to mean to them, even when they lost men, they seemed to grow larger from it.

"These are a troublesome number," Blackwell murmured to himself, from the back of his horse, as he considered the men that Tiberius still left in reserve – almost half his army there, ready and waiting. From across the battlefield, Tiberius met his gaze, as if seeing through him, and those men that Blackwell had attempted to predict the movements of were set to moving as well.

Tiberius brought up his own archers. A good five thousand of them. The perfect ingredient for besieging an army that had set itself well entrenched upon the hill. If they'd had another day, Blackwell would have seen stakes planted and ditches dug, but alas, that was a problem for a different lifetime, when they had been surprised with an early attack.

Ten thousand plate infantry, five thousand archers, two thousand lightly armoured spearmen, and then the rest were made up in a heavy cavalry, where even the horses were armoured, some three thousand strong. The lightly armoured spearmen, it seemed, were there simply to put down the threat of cavalry. They were a tactical piece, more than anything. It was enough to reassure any of Tiberius' opponents at a glance that his army was not a hastily put together thing. He'd built it to suit his style of combat, and to deal with any of the battlefield problems that he might have foreseen being put together.

The strength of their equipment wasn't the only reason that they were menacing. There seemed a strength in their training as well, or at the very least, in their discipline. The level of order they could maintain even under the constant storm of arrows that they were being bothered with was immensely praise worthy. Their willingness to sacrifice themselves too for the good of the army, as demonstrated in the attack against Skullic, that too might have been praiseworthy, if it didn't seem so downright sinister in the process.

Even if most Generals were to gather up the unbelievable mass of plate armour needed to successfully armour ten thousand infantrymen in the fashion that Tiberius had seen his armoured in, they wouldn't have been nearly as effective as Tiberius' were. Plate saw a man's stamina quickly sapped. It wasn't the sort of thing that you wished to decorate the entirety of your army in. Some of you men were required for the talk of endurance, and they were required to move from one point to the next rather quickly, especially if the opposing General was of a strategically sound mind.

Those ought to have been weaknesses that Blackwell could attack. He ought to have been able to outmanoeuvre Tiberius on account of the slowness inherent in those troops that he had seen sent forward. But something stopped him from giving the orders. A sense of foreboding of some sort. Something that his instincts detected that his eyes could not, warning him that he could not play his usual game of cat and mouse with Tiberius. That there could be no process of feeling the opposing General out – to do so was to expose himself to weakness, and just a moment of weakness was all Tiberius needed to put every single one of them down.

Yet, it wasn't as if Blackwell could do nothing, with those heavy infantry marching forward, so menacingly, set to tie them up in the same way that Skullic had been tied up before. And now there was Tiberius circling around behind them with the rest of his army, carrying along with him the threat of continuous bowfire. That would see their position was lost. It would see their entire battle lost.

Stunned, Blackwell had the same thought, and the same premonition, for the second time that battle. If they did not move perfectly, against this foe that they ought to have been evenly matched against, already, they would be set to losing. In the second move of their engagement, the same line was set to repeat itself, just as they had almost been outdone by the single thousand man strong move that Tiberius had opened up the battle with.

He was pushed towards action, for to stand still was just as dangerous as moving, if not more so. They needed to hold their lines, indeed, but they also needed to do more than that. It wasn't enough to simply repel the enemy, for they would soon enough allow for the flank side attack that Tiberius threatened. And with those heavy cavalry of his, a flank side attack would be a devastating thing indeed. It could, once again, see them to the point of total defeat.

Swimming in those churning waters, it was only Blackwell's instincts that he had to guide them, as those heavy boots of the enemy hit the bottom of the hill, and they began to thunder upwards, as fast as the weight of their armour could allow for them.