Homesteading in a fantasy world

I went and greeted the army command and the Chief and let them know what was happening closer to the enemy. Then I started to explain my plan in further detail about making the dam and what that meant.

At first, there was a lot of pushback because we didn’t have the workforce as every goblin was working on making supplies for the war effort. But I dissuaded their worries quickly by showing that we had a huge workforce currently just training. The dam will be a simple one, just a lot of rocks piled up to bring up the water level.

This will also be quite a good exercise for them all. I only hope that I will be able to delay the advance enough so we can finish building it and the water will have time to build up before the big battle begins.

After inspecting the troops and directing the start of the dam build I chose the first batch of troops that will be accompanying me to set up the ambushes.

The ambushes themselves needed goblins that were quick and nimble so we can retreat quickly enough after the ambush to not be pulled into an extended fight.

With some of the commanders and troops, we made our way to the forward camp where we set up and did some special training until our supply lines could make it here. Getting us the weapons and food to keep up the continuous ambushes of the enemy scouts.

On their free time, all the troops were ordered to collect food from the forest or destroy it if it was too troublesome to collect fast. Non-combat goblins helped as well with this and as time went on more of them stayed in the forward camp.

More information trickled in, and it seemed that they would soon be moving out, but I gave commands to the infiltrator to start causing trouble and to make it look like they were accidents.

With a few of their food storages going up in flames and water supplies that were being contaminated by freak accidents the big march was halted and the tension seemed to be rising within the enemy encampment.

A lot of them wanted to continue with the aggressive sabotage but I ordered them to slow it way down and focus on collecting information until they were ready to start to move out again. If we continued, they would figure out a lot quicker that something was very wrong, and I did not want to lose access to all the information we were getting.

It took a few more days until I felt that the forward camp was well enough supplied to start pushing the smaller enemy scout parties back.

I wanted to accomplish a few things with this move, but the main thing was to make our presence known so that they will know that they will not have an easy fight. But I also wanted to focus on the tensions inside the enemy encampment.

Our main focus will be on the forces of the encampment that hosts the army. Less attention will be put on the other two encampment forces, but we will still attack those scouting parties as well. As for the tribes, we will not touch any of them. This way we can create the most amount of discontent and disorganisation.

The ambushes themselves at the start will be simple ones as the scouting parties often used the same trails. They used them so much that small roads began forming in the forest. All we had to do was find a place that had a lot of bushes or other ways to cover our presence. Then we spring up and throw all the spears at them and run if needed.

The first ambush was intense as every goblin was eager yet nervous. We stayed in the bushes for 3 hours before our target finally arrived. There were 10 goblins and as soon as they were in place, I gave the signal and our force of 20 sprung up and throw in mass killing or wounding them all. We quickly killed the survivors and looted everything useful.

We were extremely successful. I broke in every group by going with them on their first ambush. After a few days, there were no longer any small scouting parties as bigger and bigger groups were sent out and further out as well.

We were still successful but now most of the time we needed to run away. But the group that was approaching was different, that is why I was on top of a tree camouflaged so I would seem like I was a part of the tree.

The big group of goblins belonged to the fire camp. We gave every different goblin force a name and the fire camp belonged to the encampment that hosts the army. This will be our biggest ambush yet as two ambush groups were gathered here. Luckily the second one was close enough to join.

There were 100 goblins in the scouting party and unfortunately, we only had 43 here and there was no way of getting more quickly to this location as this was quite the perfect place for an ambush.

In this ambush, I was the start if I attacked everyone else was supposed to attack. But as they got closer, I found a big problem they had elites among them and even worse a shaman was with them.

I let them come closer and closer until they walked past the place where we were supposed to ambush them. The best choice here was to let them pass, the enemy had too much firepower and elites that made the ambush too dangerous.

I let them get closer and stayed as still as possible. The problem was they moved underneath the tree I was hiding in. The shaman was in the centre, and as I waited, he moved almost underneath me. I couldn’t let this opportunity go to waste.

I had learned a lot during my time here, and one thing was how to hide most of the glow of an ability. Thanks, in part to what I learned from the dungeon core but also silent arrow that didn’t have as strong of a glow as other abilities have.

So, I started to slowly charge my javelin and kept pumping more and more energy into it. The shaman was getting suspicious as she started to look around more and more. I waited and then when she started to look up, I moved and throw as fast as I possibly could from this awkward position.

This shaman was good and in a split second she was able to make a magic barrier appear, but she didn't have time to make it strong enough to withstand my attack. My javelin shattered her magic barrier and skewered her, killing her instantly.

The next moment I jumped as close to the edge of the goblin group as possible. In my hand was my two-handed sword which was quite excellent in cutting down goblins. As soon as I landed among the goblins, I used an ability-powered swing to give me the room needed to continue my escape. I had an opportunity to escape at this moment, but as I looked around I couldn’t.

My troops didn’t listen to my words before the fight. While they did throw all the throwing spears, they didn't escape as they saw me surrounded, they choose to fight to save me.

I could still escape but how could I leave my troops to get killed? So now I started to push forwards and started to be as flashy as possible and cause as much hurt as I could so the elites that were moving towards the troops will join the rest and move toward me.

It worked too well as most of the elites moved towards me and they looked angry. It seems that some of the elites had abilities and for the rest, their evolutions and stats looked good making them be close to my level of strength if I didn't have any abilities.

What kept me in the fight and even able to return damage was my huge list of abilities and energy control. Still, they pushed me back until I felt the heroic stand ability awaken. The burst of power was incredible and gave me the edge I needed.

Slowly I started to win as I found opportunities to hurt or kill them or use the mistake they made to punish them. The regular goblins soon stopped trying to help as they got killed easily and as time went on more and more moved to fight my troops.

As the elite numbers diminished, I was able to start to overpower them. My troops had done excellently and were able to start to push back quite hard as well. I stopped conserving my energy and started to burst my energy usage to extreme levels when needed. That way I was able to finish the last of the elites quickly and then move into the rear of the enemy and start killing them off as well. Soon after they broke and started to run. We cut down as many as possible.

This was the longest engagement in the war and this fight was not without death on our side. But with the shaman's and the elite’s death, we gave a serious blow to the enemy. I gave some quick first aid, but we needed to move fast as this fight would have notified everyone around.

We got our wounded, dead and all the loot we could carry and headed back to the waypoint and then further on towards the forward camp.

As we made it back to the forward camp, turns out that we weren’t the only ones that were hit hard. One of the other goblin team was also hit. Unfortunately, they also ran into a shaman that unleashed magic towards them as they escaped. Both our teams suffered about the same amount of casualties.

Luckily our contingency plans worked well enough so they were able to make a safe retreat while keeping our forward camp location hidden. What surprised me was the medical tent that had popped up. I quickly took the wounded I was caring there and ordered the others to do the same. There will be no break for me as I quickly started to help anyone hurt.