The men around them began to transform. The encirclement that they'd endured suddenly grew tighter. They were lucky to have changed their formation when they had. Oliver doubted that they'd ever manage to steal any movement from it again. The men had solidified themselves as solidly as cement. With the General's authority, Inka augmented his own Command, and he gave the men a target – Oliver Patrick, he said, though he knew not his name. 'The man that cut me. The man that seeks to best me – drag him from his horse, and let his blood stain these dusty paths.'
"FORWARD, FIRYR!" Oliver said. He spoke to the man, but his words were for the whole of the army. They could have endured in the wedge formation that they were sitting in, but they struck out again, with the fierce pride that the Patrick troops had built. Even surrounded by forty thousand men, they would not simply wait for their fate to come to them, they would reach out with bloody hands and take it.
