Chapter 126: After the Crown Falls

Chapter 126: After the Crown Falls

The capital had barely settled under goblin occupation when Rakhar Veyr began issuing orders for the rest of Caldris. There was no pause for ceremony and no attempt to gather every army around the captured city.

Rakhar divided the remaining work according to distance and urgency, sending formations north to finish isolated strongholds, west toward the provincial roads beyond the heartland, and south toward the armies still withdrawing from their old defenses.

The first changes came quickly as news of the capital’s fall began reaching commanders who had spent months waiting for relief.

Some reports arrived from exhausted riders who had escaped before the city was fully surrounded. Others came from merchants, refugees, or soldiers who had seen goblin banners above the walls with their own eyes.

In places that had been cut off for months, the effect was immediate because the possibility of another royal army suddenly disappeared.

Several northern fortresses had continued resisting because their commanders believed one day the tide might turn in their favor. Once confirmation came that the capital had fallen, a few garrisons surrendered within days, handing over their gates and weapons in exchange for their soldiers being spared.

Others refused and prepared for one final defense. Skargrim commanders surrounding those positions no longer needed to wait for large reinforcements, because siege crews that had supported the northern advance could now be redirected toward the remaining forts while occupation troops secured the roads around them.

One fortress resisted for six more days on a rocky rise overlooking a narrow road. Its defenders still possessed enough food to remain inside for months, but the land beyond the walls had already become goblin territory and no relief column could realistically reach them.

The Skargrim commander avoided repeated ladder assaults and instead brought siege engines close enough to batter the lower wall.

After several days, one outer tower collapsed and a breach began opening near the road. When the garrison realized there would be no relief and no safe retreat, its commander finally surrendered.

The soldiers marched out without banners and stacked their weapons beneath goblin supervision.

Their surrender freed another Skargrim formation to move elsewhere, and the same process repeated across the surviving northern pockets.

Farther south, central Caldris was being cleared in much the same way. During the advance toward the capital, Rakhar had bypassed several fortified towns because stopping for them would have slowed the main armies, but those settlements now found themselves surrounded by roads and countryside already under goblin control.

The first central stronghold attempted to resist until Viridian siege crews arrived from the capital. Its commander had expected another long siege, but the sight of organized goblin formations approaching along roads that once connected directly to the royal city changed the calculation, and negotiations began before the first catapult fired.

Another town chose differently and fought for four days. Its defenders held the walls and gates with discipline, but no neighboring army came, no road reopened, and no message promised relief.

Goblin engineers prepared their approach methodically until the commander realized that continued resistance would only delay the inevitable.

By the end of the second week, the central sector no longer contained any position large enough to affect Rakhar’s movement.

The west therefore became the next major concern, and several goblin armies left the capital region along separate roads rather than advancing as one mass.

One force followed the principal highway west, while another moved northwest through market towns and provincial roads.

A third angled southwest to prevent the western forces from linking easily with the surviving southern armies, creating pressure across a wide front before the humans had even decided where to concentrate.

Local commanders reacted as best they could. Western nobles gathered retainers, provincial garrisons abandoned smaller towns for stronger ones, conscripts were collected around river crossings, and surviving officers tried to build a regional command structure from forces that had never expected to fight together.

For nearly two weeks, messages moved between western commanders arguing over where the main stand should be made. Some wanted to concentrate around the largest provincial city, others preferred river crossings farther east, while several argued for abandoning exposed territory and forcing the goblins to advance deeper before a major battle.

No agreement came quickly enough, and Rakhar’s columns continued moving while the western commanders debated their strategy.

A town on the main road prepared for an attack that never came because Viridian scouts found a secondary route through farmland to the south and simply moved the main army around it.

A fortified bridge farther west did see serious fighting. Caldris soldiers held it through one day of attacks, but on the second morning scouts reported that Skargrim troops had crossed upstream and were already advancing toward the road behind them, forcing the defenders to withdraw before sunset.

Each retreat gave the goblins another junction and pushed the human commanders farther west. By the end of the first month, the western leadership finally assembled the largest field army it could gather from provincial troops, noble formations, conscripts, surviving professionals, and garrisons pulled from abandoned towns.

The force was large enough that Rakhar stopped to study it rather than bypass it casually. The humans formed across a wide plain broken by low hills and irrigation channels, anchored one flank against a river, and placed their strongest infantry along the roads leading toward the provincial interior.

Rakhar answered by spreading his army wider rather than driving directly into the center. The first serious fighting began on the northern flank, where Skargrim formations pressed the Caldris line while Viridian troops advanced closer to the center and forced the defenders to keep substantial reserves nearby.

The humans held during the first day. On the following morning, another goblin force appeared farther south, compelling the western commander to extend his line or risk having the entire position turned.

He chose to extend, and the battle continued for several more days. Caldris fought well enough to avoid immediate collapse, but without prepared fortifications every shift in Rakhar’s formations demanded another response and gradually stretched the human line across more ground.

The turning point came when Skargrim troops captured a low ridge north of the main road.

Crossbowmen established themselves on the height and began pressuring the human flank while additional infantry moved through ground previously hidden from the Caldris center.

The western commander committed part of his reserve to recover the ridge. Rakhar responded by ordering a heavier attack against the opposite side, forcing the humans to divide their attention at exactly the moment their reserve was already moving north.

The western army did not collapse all at once. Its retreat began on the southern wing, where several conscript formations lost contact with neighboring units during a repositioning and started falling back before their officers could restore the line.

Nearby commanders withdrew their own units to prevent isolation, causing the movement to spread across the formation.

By evening, the western field army was abandoning the plain in several large columns, and Rakhar sent fresh troops after them while the rest secured the battlefield and roads.

Part of the western force escaped toward fortified cities, but what survived no longer operated as one regional army.

That defeat altered the direction of the western Caldris, because towns that had been waiting to see whether the field army could stop the invasion now had to make decisions on their own.

Some continued preparing for defense while others opened negotiations before goblin forces reached their gates. One provincial capital surrendered after its governor received confirmation that the field army had been defeated and that two nearby towns had already accepted occupation.

Goblin troops entered in formation, secured the gates, armories, granaries, and administrative buildings, then continued west.

Another city resisted for more than a week behind stronger walls, hoping enough survivors from the field army would reach it to strengthen the defense.

Some reinforcements arrived, but not enough to alter the balance. Once siege engines appeared and Skargrim formations closed the northern road, the commander surrendered before the wall was breached, preserving the garrison rather than sacrificing it in a siege with no prospect of relief.

By the middle of the second month, western Caldris was collapsing faster than Rakhar’s officers could mark every change on their maps.

The southern campaign was unfolding at the same time, and the surviving southern armies had already begun abandoning their old positions rather than wait to be surrounded.

They moved deeper south in organized columns, trying to preserve enough strength to form another defense around stronger towns and rivers.

Rakhar refused to let them settle easily and sent goblin forces down the northern approaches while another column pressed from the northeast.

Formations coming through the western campaign gradually angled south as well.

The southern commanders understood the danger immediately, because remaining too long in one place risked creating the same kind of encirclement that had destroyed the central army.

They therefore kept moving and surrendered large stretches of territory without attempting another continuous front.

Several towns received orders to defend themselves without expecting a field army to remain nearby, while others opened their gates once the main Caldris formations passed them heading farther south.

A large river delayed the goblin advance for nearly a week. Caldris destroyed one bridge and fortified another, forcing Viridian engineers to search for alternative crossings while Skargrim scouts moved along both banks.

The defenders held the main bridge through several attacks, but scouts eventually found a crossing miles upstream.

Goblin infantry crossed first in small numbers, and engineers improved the banks until larger formations could pass.

The southern defenders withdrew before that flanking force reached their rear, leaving the river behind as another abandoned line. By then, the difference between retreat and disintegration was beginning to appear across the remaining southern armies.

Some commanders still controlled disciplined formations, but others had lost contact with neighboring forces. Noble troops began returning toward their own lands, and conscripts deserted in greater numbers as news of the capital’s fall and western collapse spread farther south.

Rakhar’s armies exploited the gaps between them. One goblin column pushed toward coastal roads, another followed the main southern highway, and a third moved through the interior toward towns connecting the southern provinces with the west.

The humans could still fight effectively in isolated places, but they could no longer coordinate across the region.

While those campaigns continued, the last northern and central pockets were being removed one by one under local goblin commanders.

A castle that had resisted for months surrendered after its commander received proof that the western field army had been defeated. A central town opened its gates when goblin occupation troops arrived with prisoners taken from nearby roads, while other strongholds had to be stormed after shorter sieges.

Each surrender or capture released more soldiers for occupation duty elsewhere. By the final weeks of the second month, western Caldris had ceased functioning as an independent military region, with goblin garrisons holding its major roads and administrative centers while human forces survived only in scattered cities and castles.

The southern sector followed soon afterward. Several commanders negotiated surrender once goblin forces appeared from both the north and northwest, while others continued withdrawing toward the farthest southern districts without enough coordination to form another unified front.

Marcus Hale still existed somewhere among the surviving Caldris formations, but he no longer commanded anything resembling the army that had once held the central defenses.

The men around him were survivors and remnants drawn from units destroyed over months of fighting, leaving him capable of choosing where to resist without being able to influence the wider direction of the war.

Near the end of the second month, Rakhar received a new campaign map in the former royal capital. The east was completely occupied, while across the north only a handful of isolated strongholds remained under observation or siege.

The center had been cleared around the captured capital and its roads, while most of the west was under goblin control with scattered fortified cities still holding out beyond the main routes.

In the south, organized resistance had fragmented into separate pockets as goblin armies advanced through roads that once connected the provinces to one another.

Rakhar studied the map for a long time because there was no longer a continuous front left to break.

The markings showing active resistance had become small and scattered across mountains, castles, southern towns, and distant provincial roads.

None of those positions possessed enough strength to threaten the occupation as a whole, though each could still cost lives if handled carelessly.

Rakhar therefore divided the remaining armies among the pockets and allowed local commanders to decide whether each position should be negotiated with, bombarded, contained, or taken by force.

Outside the capital, goblin messengers departed in every direction carrying the next set of orders.

The roads beneath them now crossed a kingdom whose armies had once fought across multiple sectors but had been reduced to disconnected islands of resistance surrounded by occupied territory.

The war for Caldris had changed completely by the end of those two months. It was no longer a struggle between great armies or continuous defensive lines, but a systematic clearing of the scattered positions that remained.