The Unexpected - Part 12

They cheered his name, for the sake of the competition. He saw the looks of awe, of fright, of overwhelm. They had witnessed a battle to the death. They had come for what should have been a swift execution by Oliver's hand, but they had stayed for what had ended up being a bloody contest of endurance.

Oliver spied Blackwell, ever stern, the man seemed to have pulled himself together. Karstly didn't look terribly dissatisfied either, though Oliver could quite well imagine that, between the two of them, they were trying to decide whether such a hard-fought contest was a good thing for their war effort. The peasantry had enjoyed the show, but would they understand just how high the fighter Gar had stood, or would they simply degrade Oliver's strength to make sense of it?