Chapter 117: The King’s Edict

Chapter 117: The King’s Edict

Fourteen days of relentless fighting had failed to break the Caldris defensive line, but the cost of holding it was becoming impossible to hide.

The northern, central, and southern defenses remained intact, and every major road into the kingdom was still blocked, yet the armies occupying those fortifications were steadily shrinking beneath the repeated goblin assaults.

Companies that had entered the battle at full strength now contained hundreds of empty places. Provincial regiments were being combined after casualties reduced their combat effectiveness, while junior officers took command of formations whose captains and senior commanders had been killed.

Soldiers carrying wounds that would normally have earned weeks of recovery were returning to the line after only a few days because commanders could no longer afford to leave every injured veteran behind the front.

Reports from the north described the same fortified hills being attacked repeatedly by Skargrim and Viridian formations. Goblin units withdrew only for fresh soldiers to replace them hours later, forcing exhausted defenders to remain close to their positions even when the battlefield temporarily quieted.

The line continued holding, but reserve companies originally intended for later stages of the war were already filling gaps in the forward defenses.

The central reports were worse. Repeated bombardments had destroyed sections of the original defensive works, leaving royal troops to fight behind hastily rebuilt earthworks made from timber, packed soil, broken carts, and pieces of ruined palisades.

Several breaches had already forced Caldris to commit professional formations that the royal command had intended to preserve for a possible decisive battle deeper inside the kingdom.

The southern defenses remained more stable, but the cavalry that had dominated the open approaches during the opening days was steadily weakening. Horses were difficult to replace, experienced riders were being killed, and goblin crossbow formations had learned how to protect advancing infantry from repeated mounted attacks.

Dispatches from all three commands carried the same demand for additional manpower.

King Aldren of Caldris sat at the head of the royal council table while reports covered nearly every available space before him. Red markings spread across the campaign map, showing depleted formations, damaged fortifications, and reserve units that had already been transferred forward.

Senior officers, ministers, and representatives of several major provinces surrounded the table. None attempted to treat the continued survival of the defensive line as proof that the danger had passed, because the casualty records made the true situation obvious.

One of the senior commanders shifted several markers from the reserve positions toward the central defenses and explained that regiments intended to remain untouched until the goblins committed their main reserves were already fighting.

Another officer pointed toward the north, where several formations had been reduced so heavily that combining them was the only way to keep them operational.

The King listened without interrupting as the military leadership presented the larger problem. The goblins had lost far more soldiers than Caldris during the two weeks of battle, but the difference offered less comfort every day because their enemy possessed millions of troops and continued receiving additional formations from the east.

Caldris did not have an endless supply of trained soldiers.

The kingdom had already endured nearly two years of warfare across several invasion fronts. Provincial armies had been destroyed, rebuilt, and sent back into battle.

The counteroffensive against Mira’s Burrowkin had consumed additional manpower, while soldiers recovered after the northern, southern, and western invaders withdrew had barely reorganized before being transferred toward the goblin defensive belt.

The royal commanders agreed on the same conclusion. If the casualty rate continued, the fortifications might remain physically intact while the army defending them slowly disappeared.

A retreat had already been considered, but the defensive line was performing exactly as intended. Goblins were dying in enormous numbers whenever they crossed open ground, entered prepared ditches, or tried forcing their way through narrow breaches. Abandoning months of construction would surrender that advantage and allow the enemy’s superior numbers to spread across wider terrain.

Caldris therefore needed to hold the line, and holding it required replacing the dead faster than the normal military system could manage.

Several ministers warned that the ordinary provincial quotas had already been pushed close to their limits. Governors had released professional troops, local reserves, and militia formations while trying to retain enough soldiers to defend their own cities and maintain order behind the front.

King Aldren turned his attention toward a sealed wooden case resting beside his chair. The authority represented by the documents inside had not been invoked on such a scale during his reign, and the older members of the council immediately understood what he was considering.

The Imperial Edict of Conscription allowed the crown to bypass ordinary provincial recruitment procedures during an existential war.

Governors could be ordered to provide men directly, local nobles could be compelled to surrender retainers and levies, and towns and villages could receive mandatory quotas based on population.

The measure would provide the manpower the army needed, but it would take those men from farms, workshops, roads, merchant houses, mines, and families throughout the kingdom.

A treasury minister warned that the coming harvest was already threatened by wartime disruption and that removing hundreds of thousands of additional workers would reduce food production while increasing the number of soldiers the crown needed to feed.

The King accepted the warning without changing his decision. Economic stability would become irrelevant if the defensive line collapsed and the goblin armies reached the interior provinces, so he ordered the edict prepared and distributed throughout every region that still recognized royal authority.

Royal scribes began preparing copies before the council fully dispersed. Each document carried the King’s seal and ordered governors, nobles, magistrates, and local councils to identify able-bodied men suitable for military service and provide them according to quotas calculated from population.

Provincial authorities retained some freedom in deciding how the burden would be distributed locally, but failure to provide the required numbers would be treated as defiance of royal wartime authority.

Couriers were instructed to travel without waiting for ordinary administrative schedules, carrying the edict toward provincial capitals, market towns, noble estates, and distant villages.

Within days, the command reached communities that had previously experienced the war mainly through taxes, casualty notices, and military columns passing along distant roads. Royal officials read the edict in public squares while scribes opened household rolls and began compiling names.

Nobles inspected their estates and counted men who could be released from agricultural work. Guilds received demands for apprentices and laborers, while village elders were forced to determine which households would surrender sons, brothers, husbands, or fathers to the army.

The effects appeared almost immediately. Fields that had once been worked by several members of a family were left to fewer hands, workshops lost apprentices who had spent years learning their trades, and merchant companies surrendered drivers and guards normally responsible for moving goods between provinces.

Local construction slowed as laborers disappeared into recruitment centers, and provincial officials began worrying about future harvests, road maintenance, and tax collection. The crown accepted those problems because the defensive line needed soldiers more urgently than the kingdom needed economic stability.

Temporary training grounds appeared outside provincial capitals and large towns. Old parade fields became camps filled with recruits, while unused warehouses and public buildings were converted into barracks.

Veterans too injured for frontline service were reassigned as instructors alongside retired soldiers and older officers who still possessed enough battlefield experience to teach basic discipline.

There was no time to transform the conscripts into professional soldiers. Training concentrated on the minimum skills required to function inside prepared defenses, including holding formation, using spear and shield, obeying officers, responding to missile attacks, and remaining at defensive positions when goblin siege engines began firing.

Those assigned to bows and crossbows learned enough to operate their weapons from behind fortifications. Others practiced carrying ammunition, repairing damaged barriers, evacuating wounded soldiers, and replacing men who fell along the palisades.

Caldris commanders also understood that forming entire regiments from inexperienced recruits would create units likely to break during their first serious attack. Surviving veterans were therefore distributed among the new formations whenever possible, allowing professional companies reduced by casualties to receive hundreds of conscripts as replacements.

Experienced sergeants were placed over newly created squads, while officers who had survived the previous two weeks taught recruits what goblin attacks actually looked like.

Their lessons focused less on elegant battlefield theory and more on what men needed to do when thousands of goblins advanced toward a damaged position under continuous siege fire.

The first reinforcement columns began marching toward the defensive line before many recruits had spent more than a few weeks under arms. Their equipment reflected the urgency of the mobilization, because some carried proper weapons and armor from royal stores while others received repaired shields, older spears, padded protection, and equipment gathered from provincial armories.

The roads toward the front soon developed two opposing streams. Newly conscripted soldiers marched east toward the fighting while wagons carrying wounded veterans traveled west toward hospitals and recovery camps.

The recruits watched men pass with bandaged faces, missing limbs, bloodstained uniforms, and splinted arms, receiving their first clear understanding of what awaited them at the defensive line.

The wounded looked back at the fresh columns and recognized that many of those marching east would soon occupy positions left empty by men who had already died.

The defenders welcomed the reinforcements despite their lack of experience. Depleted companies finally began filling their empty ranks, exhausted veterans gained opportunities for real rest, and secondary trenches that had been thinly occupied received enough soldiers to become functional again.

The central defenses received the largest share because they had suffered the heaviest pressure during Rakhar’s repeated assaults.

Northern commanders received enough replacements to rebuild several reduced formations, while the southern line used new infantry to reinforce road positions and release experienced troops for mobile reserves.

Across the battlefield, goblin scouts quickly noticed the change. Human columns appeared behind the defensive line almost every day, new camps expanded around rear positions, and sections that had shown signs of weakening suddenly contained larger concentrations of soldiers.

Prisoners and intercepted information eventually confirmed what the scouts suspected. The King of Caldris had ordered mass conscription throughout the remaining kingdom, and the first newly raised formations were already entering the defensive system.

Rakhar received the report while preparing another cycle of attacks. He immediately understood that Caldris was attempting to replace the manpower the goblins had spent two weeks grinding away, but the change did not alter his orders.

The northern attacks continued against rebuilt hill positions, central siege engines resumed pounding defenses repaired only days earlier, and southern armies pressed against fortified roads now occupied by men who had never seen a goblin before reaching the front.

Noah observed the new formations filling the defensive belt and understood what King Aldren had chosen. Caldris was no longer relying only on the army that had survived the previous campaigns, because the crown had begun turning the remaining population of the kingdom into replacements for the line.

The decision could buy Caldris time, but every soldier sent east had been removed from somewhere else. Farms, workshops, roads, trade networks, and provincial administrations would all weaken if conscription continued long enough, while the army itself would need more food and equipment to support the growing number of recruits.

The King had accepted that price because the alternative was allowing the defensive army to disappear through attrition.

As evening settled over the battered northern, central, and southern defenses, another column of conscripts marched toward the line while carts filled with wounded veterans traveled in the opposite direction. The two streams passed each other along the same roads, carrying fresh manpower toward the fighting and the human cost of that fighting back toward the interior.

Caldris had answered Rakhar’s war of attrition with the only reserve large enough to keep the defenses alive. The line was no longer being sustained only by the soldiers who had begun the battle, because the crown had started feeding the manpower of the kingdom itself into the growing meat grinder.