A Time of Tigers - From Peasant to Emperor-Chapter 1105 Movements of the Battle Board - Part 8
1105: Movements of the Battle Board – Part 8
1105: Movements of the Battle Board – Part 8
“Do I have your permission to go on without my Commander, Captain?” Kaya asked, seeking his permission to train.
“If you’ll eat that breakfast that Pauline has delivered on the way over,” Oliver said.
“You will need its fuel if you’re to reach for new heights.”
The young man bowed at that.
“Thank you, my Lord.
I shall not let you down.”
He hurried away at almost a full sprint as he said that.
There was excitement in his every step.
“You’ve given him hope, my Lord,” Verdant noted.
“There was a time, I do recall, when you would have hesitated to do such things.
To give men that nudging that they require.
I wonder if he noticed that it was not merely your words that were pushing him?”
There had been Command in Oliver’s voice.
Only Verdant had properly realized it.
Oliver only knew it himself after the fact.
It was an instinct now, at times.
Claudia’s voice would enter into his head, and he would see a direction that he could push, a way in which a man might improve, and he was unable to stop himself from jabbing, and giving that offering.
“It still makes me shudder to do,” Oliver said, gritting his teeth.
He felt sick.
His words he did not regret, but that his Command had reached ahead of him – he didn’t like that.
He didn’t like the way it attempted to change the direction of a man’s heart, even if it was for his benefit.
After all these years, the truest toying with another man’s progress still gave him nausea.
“My Lord, I do not think you need to resent it so,” Verdant said.
“I have said it many times before, and I do not doubt that you tire of hearing it.
But, what you do is not some grand sin.
You do not meddle in matters that are not your own.
You are merely offering suggestion, though I do suppose that it is a suggestion of a higher sort than most.
A man can still refuse it.”
“Only if his heart is aligned completely in the opposite way,” Oliver said.
“And yet it rarely is, and your advice most often works.
You’re able to bring about a progress in them that normal men would not be able to achieve on their own… At least, not without a greater length of time,” Verdant said.
“And that strikes me as exactly being the problem,” Oliver said.
“The laws of progress are not something to be cheated, or scammed, they’re very likely to bite back.
Their balance is irrefutable.
If I meddle too much, who knows what sort of damage I will be causing?”
“Cowardice,” Ingolsol said.
It was not his domain, but Claudia’s, and still he resented not using it.
“If you’ve the power, make use of it.
If not, you’re just a coward.
That’s all it is, mortal.
I grow tired of your little chirping.”
“You are not committing any sort of grave sin,” Claudia seconded.
“Just because you see it… It would be a sin to ignore it, wouldn’t it?”
Their encouragement in this realm was unified.
It was true too that it wasn’t as if it was a power that was omnipotent.
It wasn’t as if Oliver had a large degree of control over it.
Inspiration would strike him at times, and he would be able to see.
At other times, he wouldn’t be able to.
Unless a man already had the conditions in place for Oliver to make a nudge of a suggestion, nothing would be done.
He sighed to himself, setting his feelings on the matter aside.
At the very least, Kaya had seemed content with the suggestion.
That, for now, he supposed, was enough.
If it meant that they were to keep their men alive for a while longer, that would be even better still.
“It intrigues me, my Lord, that for your men, you withhold this degree of interference, but for yourself, you are willing to do the most dangerous of things in order to ensure that you grasp for even the slightest degree of progress.
Suppose there was a man like you, but even higher, who could grant you the same nudgings as you granted Kaya, would you not wish for him to do so?” Verdant said.
“To meddle in my fate?” Oliver said.
“It is not fate, my Lord, but progress,” Verdant said.
“Those seem the same two things, but you have corrected me more than once by stating that they are indeed different.”
“I would at least want such a man to ask me first,” Oliver said.
“And if he can’t?” Verdant said.
“You have said to me that you could not either, for it would change the matters.
If you knew it to exist, then it wouldn’t have the same effect, would it?”
“…” Oliver went quiet.
“I do not understand it at all, Verdant,” he said.
“These laws that limit us, and that we reach or regardless.
I would love to hold it as a universal truth that progress is always good – at least when it concerns a man.
And I did, for the longest time, until my own progress came to bite me.
It is a dangerous game,” Oliver said.
“There’s much to it.
Far too much for me to treat it lightly.
Progress of the most extreme sort, without the most carefully laid foundations… It is dangerous.
Yes, that might very well be a maxim I can hold closer to the truth.
Progress for a man universally might be a good thing, supposing that he has the foundations already in place to support it.”
“How could that not be the case, though?” Verdant said.
“How could a man cheat these laws in order to get progress without the foundations to deliver it?”
“Men manage,” Oliver said.
“But it isn’t long before the balancing scales point out the mistake that they’ve made and come for retribution.”
“…It would seem that I do not understand this matter as well as I had previously thought,” Verdant conceded.
“Nor do I, Verdant,” Oliver said.
“I think to understand it properly, to the highest degree, one would cease to be a man, and he would entirely be like that of a God.
All things would be available to him, and his mortality would be a mere suggestion.”
