A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 817: Looking For Weakness - Part 2

The walls showed no signs of weakening at all points around it. There was only one gate as well, and that gate faced their own encampment. It didn't seem liable to get opened any time soon either.

Nor did it seem like it would be easy to break, especially not if one was set to use a battering ram – with the hill in the wall, it would be impossible to even reach the gate, much less generate the speed needed to give the gate a good hit.

They looped around twice, and the fort was just as depressing to Oliver as it had been the day before. 'How the hell do I get in that'? He thought to himself. It wasn't like Fort Dollem, where it was practically flat, and they could just run straight at it.

Nor did it seem likely that he could trick the enemy into showing weakness – not if he was as good a General as Skullic and Hod predicted he would be.

Only on the third loop around did they finally deviate from the path that Northman and Cormrant had taken. Ever so slightly, the subtlest little tug on the reins, and Oliver brought his horse a short distance up the hill. His men followed, the pack sticking close to him.

It was difficult to suppose what the archers might have been thinking, but they were indeed watching, as evidenced by the torches that silhouetted them. There must have been a good fifty men assigned to watch, all of them waiting for an opportunity to send an arrow their way.

Little by little, Oliver crept up, looping around the fort as he went, so that no one single man could keep his eyes on Oliver's party at all times. They rose up around the hill, and soon enough, entered into arrow range.

The arrows that should have come were silent, and if they didn't realize that they could yet make the shot. Nila didn't make the same mistake. Before they could realize the fact that the enemy was already in range, Nila had lined everything up perfectly. With the slightest twang, a man's life was taken.

The cry of agony, followed by the shouts of outrage, highlighted the fact that she'd hit her mark, even if the light was now poor enough that it was hard to tell.

Then, the arrows started to come that way. A whole way of them puckered up into the sky, and fell down the hill towards them. By that point though, as they'd agreed on beforehand, the horses were already descending the hill and were well out of range. The signal had been the sound of Nila's shot – they needed no more than that.

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"Good work, Nila," Oliver said, when they were quite clearly in safety's reach. He made a point of pausing just out of range, so that the enemy could still see him as he had a conversation with his men.

"It was only one of them," Nila tutted. "Had I known they would be so blind, I would have fired off two."

"That was your first time shooting from a horse?" Blackthorn asked quietly.

"Hm? Of course, it was. No one in Solgrim has a horse… Well, come to think of it, Greeves does… Maybe I should get him to let me borrow it?" She murmured.

Blackthorn wasn't the only one looking thoroughly bemused by how quickly Nila had picked up such a skill. She'd caught the man right in the eye, exercising the true extent of her normal accuracy, and she'd managed to do that just as easily from unsteady footing as she had from elsewhere. If there was a clearer sign of talent, Oliver did not know of it.

"True, it wasn't enough," Oliver said, pulling them back to Nila's earlier point. "But it was enough. By the end of tomorrow, this hill – even if not the fort - shall belong entirely to us."

…

…

The next day continued on much the same pattern. Oliver put the men to work performing mock battles. He kept an eye on them as he did so, acknowledging the changes that were taking place. Slowly but surely, the slaves were finding themselves. There was camaraderie being established. They smiled more frequently, and they talked more often.

The boundaries between them and Skullic's soldiers were slowly dissolving as well, though it would be a stretch to say that the camp was unified.

"Are they done?" He asked, turning to one of the Sergeants in charge of fortifying the encampment. He'd been given a task the previous day, and now Oliver could see a pile of the results.

"Some of them are, Captain," the man responded, scratching his chin, "though I can't say all of them are… Nor can I be too sure that they're what you want. It's hard to get wood processed so quickly, you see, and I ain't done nothing like this since I left my dad's carpentry shop ten years ago."

"They look good enough," Oliver said, picking up one of the objects in question – a wooden plank, as big as a man, fortified with two thin crossbeams, and composed of a good four smaller planks, laid next to each and nailed together. In other words, it was a large, primitive shield, as big as a man.

"I do suspect they are too big though, Captain. I don't think we can fight with these," the man said, scratching his head. He was one of the few that had been kept to the same task throughout the entirety of yesterday, whilst others had been given different tasks.

"They aren't meant for fighting. They're for building," Oliver said.

The man gave him a searching look, as though trying to find out what he meant by that. The idea must have occurred to him, for his troubled look broke into the smallest of smiles. "Oh, if that's what you're after, then I think they'll do just fine. They'll stop arrows at the very least, but you sure as hell ain't going to want to carry them for long."