A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor

"Gadar, send the men that have been touched by the oil well away from the walls," General Talon said. "Get another group down with rags to mop up the worst of it… But damn it all, there's not enough time to deal with it properly.

What an irritating thorn to have, just when the battle was about to get good…" He lamented, but in the same instant, he breathed out a long breath, and braced his legs beneath him.

BWWAAAAAAAAAAOOOMMMM!

The battleram slammed home with vicious authority.

"GO! GO! GO!" Oliver said, urging his men to move more violently than he'd had intention to. He could see a giant bald man atop the wall, after all, marching with a massive grin on his face, as he carried a pot of oil the size of a cauldron.

The men didn't need telling twice. They spared quick satisfied glances for the gate, and what they had done to it – the two doors were bowed quite significantly in the centre – and then they took their shields, and began to beat a hasty retreat.

Just as every man put the cart a step behind them, the oil jar landed, drenching the centre of the battleram as thoroughly as would be expected.

A torch followed soon after, but the men weren't around to take looks at that. They ran backwards as fast as they could, their shields held in front of them to fend off arrows.

It was a panicked, disorderly mess, but somehow, through a miracle, only a single man managed to get snagged by an arrow, and even then, the wound was shallow and he tore the broadhead straight out with an irritated expression.

Only when the men had retreated far enough that they began to once again form a wall with their shields did Oliver breathe a sigh of relief.

"Gods be damned, Nila," he grinned. "You've given us what we needed."

The second Oomly's torch landed, the mistake was realized. For one, the giant man had thrown down far too much oil for the likes of a single battleram. It would have burned their own gate regardless. But augmenting that mistake, was the trap that Oliver and his men had carefully laid. Two dozen jars of oil exploded all at once, coughing up a ball of fire that made it as high as the top of the wall.

Here, the Gods must have seen fit to favour Oliver and his men, for what they hadn't planned worked to their favour anyway. The oil splatters left by the man that Nila had slain caught fire as well, immediately setting a handful of men to flame, as it spread to the oil on their own clothes. But so too was there a wall of fire dividing their wall in two.

A more perfect opening gambit it would have been hard for Oliver to imagine. After all, there was only so much he could control. Nila's brilliance wasn't something he'd planned to bet on, and yet it had pulled through regardless. It was the first spark of their true advantage, the first spark of what they'd dared to believe would pull them all the way to a mighty victory.

The men bellowed their cheers, but few knew just why their plan had succeeded as overwhelmingly as it had. Jorah found himself staring at the red-haired girl, and the carnage that she'd managed to so effortlessly amplify.

She was cheering just as loudly as the rest of them, wearing a wide fox's smile, showing all of her teeth. It was odd, Jorah thought, to find something so beautiful, right in the heart of combat. He had to look away, lest she catch him blushing.

The fire caused more havoc than Oliver would have dared hope. After all, setting aside Nila's contribution, he hadn't really known just how much carnage twenty-four jars of oil could create. It had been guesswork, and more than a bit of hope, but the end result was something overwhelming.

The battleram burned as though angry. The flames roared like the screams of the dead, burning high, hot, and fast. Even the protective coating that the fort gates had been covered in was useless. As they watched, the treated wood was scorched, and the fire wormed its way deeper, to the dry core, where the flames soon became all but unstoppable.

Oliver's slave men were screaming beastial cheers, right from their souls. They'd felt how close they'd come to tragedy. They'd walked that thin tightrope, and they'd come up immensely rewarded for it. More adrenaline it would be hard to find anywhere in the world.

It was all Oliver could do to stop himself from screaming out and joining them. His fist was clenched, and his emotions were overwhelming.

'Yes! Yes! Yes!' He said, with untold enthusiasm. They needed this, more than anything. After yesterday's setback, this was the exact sort of start to battle that they needed to recover. The flames burned away the icy resistances, and as far as Oliver was concerned, they set him and the Macalister General back on to even footing.

"Burn them all!" Ingolsol cackled. "What beautiful fire! How she dances!"

"To hear you, of all people, talk of beauty…" Claudia said, stunned.

"But of course I know beauty, wench. I merely find it not in you," Ingolsol responded, ever quick to go through Claudia's throat.

Now Oliver was forced to wait. There was nought they could do whilst they waited for the flames to take their effect. Instead, it was the Macalister's turn to move.

"Suffocate the flames!" General Talon ordered, calm, but energetic in his ordering. "Gadar, see to it that we regain connection with the rest of the wall. Deprive it of air, and it'll stop soon enough. Stop the fools with buckets of water, they're only going to make it worse."

"As you wish, my Lord," Gadar said. They'd already had to watch five men burn to death, as their comrades fled them, afraid of catching the touch of oil themselves. Now, as if to rob them of further morale, a good half of their wall was cut off entirely from the command line, and chaos was bound to ensue.