A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

Chapter 634 Annihilation - Part 1

Oliver narrowed his eyes, removing the plight of the kidnapped villages from his mind as he made a quick evaluation of the terrain. They'd put the backs of their camp up against a small ciff, about twenty feet high. It was unscalable, but it grew less steep towards each side. It would be possible to get around it if the bandits ran. They'd clearly intended it as a windbreak, or something of that sort.

To catch them all at once, it would likely be best to come at them from both sides, Oliver reasoned. Make it so their only retreat option was back towards the edge of the forest, where the rest of the soldiers would be stationed.

Even then, it seemed unlikely that they would kill every man. As long as they eliminated their capacity as a fighting force, though. He judged that would likely be enough.

Satisfied, he turned to run after the others.

They'd come back quicker than Sergeant Major Northman had assumed they would. He knew the boy had said an hour, but he doubted that they would get it done that quickly. Not with that mass of forest to search. He'd been content to leave them to it, allow the men to rest before they moved in to crush the foe.

Yet, here they were, less than an hour later, emerging from the trees with the hardened expressions of victorious men. Northman fancied that, after so long spent leading men, he could tell whether their mission had been a success or a failure just from the looks of their faces.

A good soldier wouldn't look gleeful about accomplishing a mission. That much was expected of them. There should be nearly no reaction to victory of that sort. But defeated men, they always came crawling back looking wounded, their tails between their legs. There was no hiding the shame of defeat.

"Well?" Northman said, as Oliver drew nearer.

All the work lately had been getting harder, but this took the cake by a considerable degree. Northman couldn't tell what his General was thinking most of the time, but the only thing saving his pride on this mission was the acknowledgement that General Skullic likely expected something of this sort to happen. He hadn't expected Northman and his men to be able to do it alone.

"Fine," Northman said, "that'll do. How many men do we want to take? Seventy? Thirty out front?"

"I'd go seventy, aye" Rofus said. "With surprise on our side and with our men being better quality, we should trample them with seventy."

"Fifty," Oliver said firmly. "And we put the other fifty where they can be seen by those fort men."

"Your reasoning?" Northman asked.

"You have not tested me yet in battle, Commander," Oliver said respectfully. "But with an army at my back and the chaos in our favour, I am at my most effective. We can afford to leave twenty men behind. It would allow us to immediately commence an attack on the fort once we return and make camp there come dusk as you planned."

From anyone else, it would have been an outrageous statement. Enough to laugh at. No one was laughing then, though. They'd stopped laughing the moment he killed those archers. Then they'd started listening, the moment he'd mentioned the men waiting in the woods to ambush them.

They realized, for a certainty, that the boy they'd been gifted wasn't a mere gimmick. He wasn't the product of tall tales, nor merely the victim of politics, ending up where he was out of punishment. Of course, both things played a part in it – but they knew for a certainty that their General had stationed him there for a reason. The cunning General Skullic expected him to be useful.

Useful enough that he could save his men from casualties. Skullic hated incurring casualties on these small-scale skirmishes.