A/N: well, the Insyaa Update just dropped. There’s been some more lore update there that I’m getting into. But you may as well call this the Greenskin Update considering just how many orcs and goblins got mission trees while the dwarves got just one update. And one of those orcs specifically get buffs every time they fuck over a dwarf. Like they get buff points each time they genocide the dwarves. That is a sin in and of itself.
-VB-
Debauchery Foothold
Chapter 6 (NSFW)
-VB-
Alan
Azkasad
1440
About a hundred of my mercenaries and I slowly marched into Azkasad, and I wasn’t surprised by the lack of soldiers along the border.
After all, I had spent the last few months decimating all goblin presence in the region.
“So what’s the plan, boss?” Atu asked from my left. The half-goblin stood as high as my shoulder, and dressed in some of the best half-man sized medieval armor I was able to commission: tightly woven shirt and pants, gambeson, chain mail, leather chestplate and pants, tabard, greaves, shin guards, and helmet. He carried a pair of war axes.
“The plan is as simple as I said before,” I replied. “We hit hard, fall back, harass them during the night, don’t stay in one spot, and don’t let ourselves get cornered.”
I saw Atu glance at the other halfsies like himself behind him. A few of the mercenaries were also elves, humans, and half-elves. “You think they can do it?” he asked me.
“They can. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have brought them for the campaign. They went through endurance training. Really, that’s what I want out of them more than them being able to shoot their bows or master their swordsmanship. Hold a spear, know how to follow orders, and don’t get left behind because you’re a stick or a fatso.”
My apprentice(?) snorted. “And if they can’t?”
“Then I get their ass out of the fire, mark them down, and when we return, put them through so much training that they will beg me for mercy… but I will not grant them any,” I replied loudly for everyone to hear without directly looking at them.
A few of the mercenaries laughed. A few chuckled nervously.
They knew I was serious as hell’s own fire. Anyone who failed to live up to my minimum expectations would go back to Nesru Fort and expect to get put through a shit ton of training. I paid for their food, their clothes, their housing, and everything else. I expected a minimum return.
Atu seemed satisfied with my answer and marched alongside me silently.
---
It was now night and we’d camped in one of numerous valleys here. And while my mercenaries cooked their meals and lit fires, I was scouting by teleporting around.
I stopped at one of the snowy peaks, and looked down at the mountain forest we were marching through.
If I had to compare the hills and mountains of Azkasad - and the Harpy Hills, to be specific - to somewhere specific, then I would say that it was close to mountains of coastal California. Specifically, the Northern Coast Ranges where there were redwoods, pines, and oaks.
The Serpentsreach Mountains acted as a barrier for rain to fall down en masse onto Bahar and Harpy Hills regions like what the Himalayas did for Northern India. Coupled with water that came down from snow melt from the peaks of the mountains, this region was surprisingly wet despite the fact that, just one Texas away to the south, there were Middle East and Egypt-like riverlands and deserts.
So our march took us through densely forested valleys and crags, sparsely vegetated but thickly snowy high passes, and rugged mountainsides.
And as we made our way through the areas I had mapped, we were closing in on the expected path of the Greysheep army.
Azkasad, as I’ve described it before, was a very mountainous province. This meant that there were only so many routes an army of several thousand could take to reach their target of the Kingdom of Azka-Evran.
The first was the narrower, longer, and scenic route called Erumnan Valley around the northern edge of the province along the edge of the Serpentsreach.
The second was the wider and shorter valley, called Azzan Valley, connecting the largest city in the province to Nesru Fort; there used to be a human/elven settlement there, but the goblins kind of enslaved most of the people, leaving the empty shell of the city to be settled by the goblins.
And we were one valley which ran parallel to the Azzan Valley.
So why were we here instead of over there?
Because this was a better place to be for our attacks.
I finally spotted what I was looking for.
There, close to the river, were pillars of smoke. Many of them. Tents as well. Shabby tents.
I looked more closely and …
I grinned.
I’d found them.
It was the Greysheep Goblin’s army.
I looked at my camp on the other side of this mountain and the three pillars of smoke coming from three larger fires used for mass cooking. I then looked back at the goblins’ base camp and saw at least twenty times that many.
“Two thousand at the very least?” I hummed. “Maybe five thousand?”
Whatever the number was, they felt safe and weren’t expecting any attacks here. Why would they be spread so thin and wide otherwise?
I teleported back to my camp, and just as I had ordered, most of my mercenaries were ready.
“I need fifty volunteers for a night raid!” I shouted, making most of them jump up, not having realized that I’d been among them.
I got those volunteers quickly.
See, the way my mercenary company worked, for the hired swords, was that there was a base pay they all got: enough to keep their gears maintained, eat okay food, and occasionally get new clothes. It was not enough to do a lot with.
The way most of them could get more money was by participating in battles and getting confirmed kills.
Atu got up as well. He pulled his axes out and waited.
I gestured for them all to gather up on me, and they did in a semi-tight circle.
“This is how we are going to do this. We are going to teleport in, kill as many of them as possible, set fire to anything we can find, and then teleport back out. But for you to teleport back out, you must be within ten arms’ length of me,” I spoke up. My arm was … a little under three feet. So thirty feet was a good distance for me to grab all of them and get out of the fight. “We will only be there for ten minutes! You know how long that is! If you are unsure, then just light things on fire around me! Are you ready?!”
They all thumped their spears, chestplates, shields, or whatever else that they used.
“Good. Face outward. We will jump in ten, nine, eight, seven …!”
The mercenaries quickly fanned out, forming a loose circular perimeter around me.
“Six, five, four, three…!”
Atu took a deep breath in, and I felt him flaring his demonic power. Veins started popping up and flaring like hot wires all over his skin.
“Two, one -!”
Then we teleported.
---
General Gozak sighed as his elf slave bobbed his head up and down Gozak’s shaft.
He hated having to lead an army.
It got him away from his home, the politicking, and, most importantly, all of his lovely slaves.
In his opinion, slavery, when it wasn’t being done to him, was great.
He got to do things that he can’t do to anyone else. More importantly, he didn’t have to lift a finger to make money, because his slaves would do it for him. Of course, this meant that his slaves were an important part of his household and shouldn’t be neglected.
Like this boy. He was a soft little thing who knew so little about the world. He spent all of his childhood doing little things like drawing water, helping his mama in the kitchens, and frolicking about doing … boy things.
Well, that obviously wasn’t going to do. His slaves, especially his slave men, needed to be tough and strong.
Which was why Gozak brought him along for his campaign that the dastardly elves started. Of course, to ensure that the little boy didn’t get uppity about killing a few humans and his fellow elf masters, the boy needed to take it from Gozak and be reminded of his place in life.
And then he heard it.
Whistles.
And then shouts and screams.
He got up from his seat, pushing the bottom boy aside, and walked out of his tent.
“What the fuck is going on here?! Did someone touch the dung bombs agai-?!”
And then he froze.
Because standing in front of him was a human.
A tall human.
A tall human with a white hood.
A tall, hooded human with a bladed staff.
A human who has been massacring his people.
“Y-You -!” he hissed out.
The human turned and looked at him.
He waved his hand.
And everything lit up underneath Gozak.
He looked down.
There was a circle of fire underneath him.
Fire rushed up.
And then everything burned.
-VB-
The Baharkandi Reconquest War opened up not with battles in the border provinces between Azka-Evran and Marblehead but in the Greysheep province of Azkasad. Marquess sil Noqatsil had indeed hired a war wizard, who led his own mercenary company. War Wizard Marris took to the field and struck deep into Azkasad, leading a night raid into Greysheep Clan’s main army.
During the raid, he slew not only the general in charge but close to a quarter of the warband leaders. Combined with destroying half of their supplies, the Greysheep Clan suddenly found itself wholly without any offensive capabilities and even a loss of their defensive capability. Worse, War Wizard retreated with minimal losses on his part, leaving the Greysheep goblins shocked and horrified in the dead of the night with their camp burning along with supplies and leaders.
And he did not stop at one night raid, though the first had struck the hardest. He struck them again and again and again. His timing was also random. Sometimes, he would attack in broad daylight, raining down ice and fire. At other times, he would stick to his night raids, killing patrols and sabotaging supplies. Once, he simply made noise for seven nights straight along the outskirts of the Greysheep army’s camp, never attacking but also not allowing them to rest.
After a month of War Wizard Marris and his mercenaries terrorizing the goblins, Marquess sil Noqatsil’s private army arrived to take over the military operation. By that point in time, the Greysheep Clan’s army had been thoroughly burned, frozen, starved, and harassed so much that they couldn’t even offer the Sun Elf marquess a single battle in their own territory, merely skirmishing as they retreated from Azkasad.
The kingdom as a whole saw this opportunity and redoubled their efforts against the Marblehead Goblins. With the Greysheep occupied and on the backfoot, they could afford to not worry about their eastern border.
Both War Wizard Marris and Marquess sil Noqatsil officially protested. The latter wrote letters to the capital while Marris openly criticized the kingdom after returning to Nesru Fort, finding it bereft of defenders; they had been forcefully called upon by the king to join the western offensive.
Had either of them been anyone else but who they were, they would have been jailed and executed for standing up against royal authority. However, Marquess sil Noqatsil was one of the first elven nobles to stand with the king and thus the king could not afford to punish her.
And Marris was a war wizard.
Pissing off a war wizard was akin to unleashing a gnoll horde at the heart of your empire: fatal, devastating, and no one came out of it unscathed.
And so, the king said nothing about the war wizard’s open criticism, especially so because he was on the other side of the country fighting off the Greysheep Goblins.
But it did cause problems that the king did not see at first.
The king’s preparation, mainly in the form of hiring mercenaries but more importantly digging up as much gold as possible, had caused an unseen disaster in the making: inflation. One must understand that during the Age of Monsters, inflation was often not a big problem for most realms because most realms experienced, at most, a 1% inflation annually and sometimes even consecutive years of deflation when physical currencies made out of precious metals were lost, disasters caused mass deaths, and so on. So any realm that experienced inflation beyond a 1 or 2 percent would sooner or later suffer an economic crisis of their own making.
And, as far as we historians could determine, inflation in the Kingdom of Azka-Evran had, by this point in time, reached as high as 10% in major population centers.
Between the anger of the neglected east, the inflation, and wars that left the people - mostly humans - feeling naked and weak, resentment brewed.
And War Wizard Marris’s open criticism started a domino.
A very strong anti-elven domino.
-VB-
A/N: if it wasn’t clear to y’all, Bahar is the equivalent of the Middle East. And in the current decade, there is 1) a past history of two decades of civil wars followed by an ongoing monster invasion, 2) monster invasion that has conquered roughly half of the region, 3) a heretical human kingdom instigating a religious war that is directly adjacent to the Kingdom of Azka-Evran, 4) a new war was started and all sorts of military power was pulled from each settlement, leaving many of them less defended than before, 5) the gold used to fund this new war is now causing an inflationary crisis, and 6) a war wizard, which is something generally respected and feared due to the local’s stance on magic, is now instigating criticism of the royal government.
Oh, and yes, we are doing a bit of time skippies through the war, only touching relevant bits, so that we won’t be stuck in the goblin wars for like 10 chapters.