Wasn’t there at least one other time where “failure means death” turned into “guess we might as well just try to take over”?

Time I’m thinking about was when an emperor had summoned some warlords to be there by x date or die and one group realized they weren’t going to make it by the date, so since they had their armies with them anyways, they just pivoted from answering summons to invading/conquering. Not sure that one worked out though.