My planet is infested with Goblins

Chapter 64: The Green Tide

At dawn, the Viridian Expeditionary Army stopped looking like one army and began spreading much larger. Columns that had spent days concentrated around forward camps separated according to the orders issued the previous night, each moving toward a different road, farming district, river crossing, or cluster of settlements.

To a distant observer, it might have looked as though the goblins were dispersing after their recent victories.

Grand Marshal Rakhar Veyr knew the opposite was happening. The army was no longer concentrating its strength in one place.

Instead, it was spreading that strength across the eastern province until every important road and settlement lay within reach of Viridian soldiers.

Rakhar stood outside the forward command camp as the first formations departed. Scouts rode ahead in small groups, followed by light infantry and then the main bodies of each column.

Supply wagons moved behind them, while smaller occupation detachments remained ready to split away once important positions were secured. Some columns numbered five hundred soldiers, others only three hundred, but all had clear boundaries and routes.

No formation was permitted to advance so far that neighboring columns could not support it within reasonable time. The intention was not to scatter the army. It was to spread controlled pressure everywhere at once.

The first objectives were the roads. A country might possess walls and castles, but armies, taxes, food, and messages still traveled along roads.

Rakhar had ordered every major intersection seized before the columns wasted time on minor villages. By midmorning, reports were already arriving from the closest sectors.

A roadside post with fewer than thirty Caldris guards had been abandoned before the first goblin scouts reached it. Another position farther north attempted to hold a narrow crossing with forty soldiers and a wooden barricade. The Viridian commander there brought ranged troops forward, forced the defenders away from the barricade, then sent infantry around both sides. The fighting lasted less than an hour before the survivors fled west.

Goblin banners replaced the Caldris markers almost immediately.

Occupation soldiers stayed behind while the main column continued.

That pattern repeated across the countryside.

Villages closest to the routes reacted in different ways. In some villages people fled before Viridian arrived, leaving doors open, cooking fires cold, and livestock wandering between abandoned buildings. Others remained occupied because the people living there had nowhere else to go. Farmers stood beside their homes and watched several hundred armed goblins march into places that had never seen more than a handful of professional soldiers at one time.

The first commanders to enter such settlements followed Rakhar’s orders closely. Local guards were disarmed. Any weapons stored in communal buildings were collected. Granaries were counted rather than emptied, wells were placed under guard, and the largest buildings became temporary occupation posts. Soldiers were forbidden from simply seizing livestock or breaking into homes without orders.

Not everyone liked that restriction.

A young Viridian infantryman protested when an officer stopped him from taking two chickens from an abandoned yard. "They ran away. Nobody owns them now."

The officer struck the back of his helmet with two fingers. "The empire owns everything we secure for the campaign. If you eat tomorrow’s supplies today, you can cry to the quartermaster why the rest of your unit is hungry next week."

The soldier looked dissatisfied but stepped away from the chickens.

Rakhar’s vision was already becoming reality.The province was valuable precisely because it remained productive. Fields full of grain were more valuable than burnt to the ground.

Mills were more useful turning grain than collapsing in flames. Cattle could feed soldiers for months if managed properly or feed one company for a few days if slaughtered carelessly.

Resistance, however, was treated differently.

Near the village of Harlowe, fifty local militia and guards had barricaded the main road between two rows of stone houses. They had heard about the goblins, but the stories reaching them were inconsistent. Some claimed the invaders were small raiding parties.

Others insisted an entire Caldris army had been destroyed. The local captain chose to believe the smaller stories because the alternative meant surrendering or leaving their homes without a fight.

He changed his mind when more than four hundred Viridian soldiers appeared beyond the fields.

The human defenders stood behind carts, timber, and overturned wagons with spears and hunting bows. The Viridian commander examined the barricade, sent scouts through the fields on both sides, and gave the humans only enough time to understand that they were surrounded. When the defenders refused to abandon their position, ranged troops moved forward.

Arrows and bolts forced the militia behind cover while goblin infantry advanced from three directions. The humans fought hard once the first Viridian soldiers reached the barricade, but there were too few of them. A section of the wall was pulled apart from the side. Goblins entered between the houses. Within minutes, the barricade was being attacked from behind as well as from the road.

The fighting ended quickly.

By midday, Harlowe had an occupation garrison.

The main column continued west.

Earlier in the invasion, a village resisting Viridian would have required scouts, planning, and a meaningful commitment of troops. Now such resistance barely slowed the operation.

Rakhar had enough soldiers moving across different routes that one stubborn settlement could be surrounded, reduced, and left behind without halting the other columns.

The difference lays in their numbers.

Caldris began feeling that difference everywhere at once.

Refugees poured toward the fortified towns and Eastwatch. Families loaded carts with bedding, food, children, and tools before abandoning homes that had belonged to them for generations. Livestock clogged the roads. Some civilians passed directly between

Viridian-controlled positions because the goblins did not stop them unless soldiers were hiding among them or the carts carried military supplies.

The result was exactly what Rakhar wanted.

The countryside became emptier while the cities became overpopulated.

Small Caldris garrisons also began making decisions before the goblins reached them. An isolated watch post north of Eastwatch withdrew its sixty soldiers during the night after seeing Viridian campfires in three directions.

A small administrative town farther south evacuated its professional guards toward a larger walled settlement, leaving only militia behind. When the first goblin column arrived, the remaining defenders surrendered their weapons rather than attempt a battle they knew they could not win.

Rakhar ordered his commanders not to chase withdrawing garrisons unless there was a clear opportunity to destroy them without delaying the occupation. If the humans fled behind stronger walls, then they had already surrendered the roads, bridges, grain, and settlements they were supposed to protect.

A soldier trapped inside a fortified city was no longer a hindrance to the plan.

The overlapping columns made even organized withdrawal dangerous. In the afternoon, scouts discovered nearly two hundred Caldris soldiers moving south toward a fortified town. They had abandoned an exposed district after hearing that Viridian formations were approaching from the east. Their commander believed he had enough time to reach the walls before the goblins caught him.

He had not understood how many roads Viridian already controlled.

A northern column learned of the movement first and altered course. Another formation approaching from the southeast did the same. The humans noticed the first goblin scouts and immediately left the road, trying to move through farmland instead.

They escaped the first column.

Then they saw the second.

The Caldris commander turned west again, only to discover another goblin patrol watching the nearest bridge.

He did not wait for the trap to close. The human force broke into smaller groups and scattered toward the woods, abandoning the idea of reaching the town together.

Viridian forces did not chase every fragmented squads. The objective had already been accomplished. Two hundred organized soldiers became several frightened groups moving independently.

Farther north, another column encountered the first fortified town too strong to take casually.

Stone walls surrounded the settlement, and several hundred defenders occupied the towers. The Viridian commander inspected the approaches, remembered his orders, and refused to assault.

Instead, his soldiers moved around it.

Roads were blocked.

Nearby villages were occupied.

Scouts established positions watching each gate.

Goblin patrols began appearing along the fields surrounding the walls.

The human defenders waited for ladders, siege engines, or a massed infantry assault that never came.

By evening, the town still belonged to Caldris, but everything immediately around it did not.

Its soldiers could stand on the walls and see goblin banners on the roads they had used that morning.

The town had become an island.

Reports from across the province accumulated so quickly that Rakhar’s staff stopped reading every minor settlement name aloud.

Instead, they categorized the results. Three crossroads secured in the north. Seven villages occupied along the southern agricultural route. Two bridges captured intact. One bridge damaged by retreating Caldris soldiers but repairable. A grain district under Viridian control. One fortified town contained. Several small garrisons withdrawn west.

The map inside Rakhar’s command tent changed hour by hour.

Green markers spread away from Brackenford along roads and river valleys.

At first they appeared as isolated points.

Then the points connected.

A captured bridge linked with an occupied farming district. A northern road post connected two separate columns. Southern patrols established regular movement between three villages and a mill complex. By sunset, the Viridian-controlled territory no longer looked like scattered positions. Large sections were beginning to join into one continuous region.

Rakhar stood over the map as another messenger placed a marker near Eastwatch.

"The containment force reports no major sortie."

"Small movements?"

"Mounted patrols near the western gate. Nothing larger than that."

Rakhar nodded.

Eastwatch remained untouched.

Six thousand goblins were positioned around its approaches, but none had been ordered against the walls. The city’s defenders could see enemy patrols outside and camps forming in the distance, yet the attack they were preparing for never came.

Instead, refugees kept arriving.

A family entered Eastwatch carrying news that three villages had been occupied.

Another group reported goblins controlling a bridge.

Soldiers from a withdrawn road post arrived saying they had seen Viridian columns moving north and south rather than toward the city.

By the end of the day, the pattern could no longer be mistaken.

The goblins were not rushing the capital.

They were taking the province around it.

Rakhar looked at the spreading green markers and allowed himself a moment of satisfaction.

The first stage had moved faster than expected because Alaric’s destroyed counteroffensive had left too few professional troops in the open countryside to challenge the occupation.

That advantage would not last forever. Caldris would eventually adapt. Larger forces might appear. Neighboring regions might send soldiers.

For now, Viridian still controlled the pace of the war.

"Continue tomorrow," Rakhar ordered. "No column stops because today was easy. Secure the gaps between sectors. Hold what we take."

The staff acknowledged him and began preparing the next set of orders.

Outside, darkness settled across the province.

Viridian campfires burned at crossroads that had belonged to Caldris that morning. Goblin patrols walked along captured bridges.

Occupation detachments stood inside villages while larger formations camped farther west in preparation for another day’s advance. Fortified human towns remained visible in the distance, their walls still standing, but the land between them was changing hands with remarkable speed.

Rakhar looked once more at Eastwatch marked at the center of the map.

It remained untouched.

For now aleast, but soon.

Around it, the countryside was beginning to turn green.

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