Eternal
If the Eternal Dominion ever does decide to attack, it’ll be better if your best soldiers are already assigned to the northern borders rather than having to scramble to pull them back from the east. You also figure the conscripts can put in their time exploring the eastern wilderness along with defending the few settlements you currently have there right now.
When Brenda enacts conscription there is a lot of grumbling as was expected, but nothing more. Many of the conscripts are just glad you aren’t assigning them to the northern borders after hearing all the scary things about Edgar and his “baby eating” army. They won’t just be there without any supervision either, as you’ll still have a few veteran officers overseeing the situation.
Months pass a life goes on as usual, and you begin to get reports on the eastern wilderness. Most of the scouts say that there is evidence of other denizens living further east. In fact there seems to be a small tribal war going on between four separate groups. Two of those are human barbarian tribes, one them is elven, but much wilder than what you know of them and the last one is a race you’re not familiar with called the Slin. They’re apparently reptilian in nature though, similar to the kobolds, but much larger and meaner.
All of them save for one of the human tribes have been hostile to your scouts. Your scouts report that most attacks were accompanied by slurs and curses against the Empire. Even the Slin have been reported to utter a few recognizable insults in their strange reptilian tongue.
You can only guess that all of these folks at one time came in contact with the Empire and it wasn’t a good experience. Makes sense they would mistake you for Empire troops as well considering that all your troops are either still wearing the same armor or very similar armor. Some of the veteran officers are even still wearing the same insignias. Sort of like you do actually.
You’re very disappointed by the reports you’ve been getting on the various skirmishes your soldiers have had. Most of them involve heavy losses or in some cases outright defeats! Most of the conscripts apparently just aren’t cut out to handle these savages, they’re still too green and they also lack the desire to fight in the first place.
The problem is worse than just losing soldiers though. Most of these were young males and females, sons and daughter taken from their homes that didn’t want to be soldiers in the first place. Predictably there is peasant backlash from this.
Not willing to risk any more soldiers, you immediately order a halt to the scouting and make the decision that you’re going to have to go oversee things personally. Normally you wouldn’t mind this since you were getting bored lately, but you don’t like the circumstances to why you have to do it.
Brenda certainly hopes you can fix things, because while keeping the peasants in line through force is a time-honored tradition, it isn’t really helping things right now. You can’t afford to have a full-scale revolt over this. What you’d like to do is wipe out every single one of those tribes as soon as possible before they can unite against you, but you know you can’t really do that without either toughening up the conscripts or taking your vets off the northern borders and since that really isn’t an option, you’re going to have to toughen up the recruits.
The first thing you do is gather all your officers assigned there and reprimand them, stating if they were doing their job properly, you wouldn’t have to come here and do it for them. You might’ve even had some of them executed for incompetence, but you really can’t afford to lose anyone right now.
Second of all you have a new camp built near one the eastern Nalin villages. This is where all the soldiers are going to be housed and training until further notice. Soldier rotations to be stationed at the few eastern settlements will be implemented. But most importantly a whole new training schedule is going to be put into action. You need to get these folks to start thinking the right way. It is your hope that in a couple of months, they start shaping up into the solider you need them to be.
The first few weeks go pretty horrible. Your rigorous and harsh training causes some of the conscripts to go from low morale to suicidal. After three deaths, one of your officers claims you’re pushing them too hard and you’re going to have to ease up.
“Captain Talger isn’t it?” you ask.
“Yes sir.”
“You did serve under the Empire didn’t you?”
“Yes sir, for many years until we…uh seceded.”
“You remember what the punishment was for questioning a superior’s decisions?”
“…yes…yes I do sir.” He says in a very worried tone.
After a moment of silence, you tell him to follow you outside to the training grounds.
You and Captain Talger walk to the middle of the grounds where several people are training, if they aren’t you tell one of your other officers to call everyone to the grounds immediately. When everyone arrives, you address the crowd.
“It has come to my attention that I may be training you lot too hard. This has been told to me, by Captain Talger here and he may have a point.”
Talger looks slightly surprised to hear you say that, he also relaxes a little.
“I understand that many of you do not want to be here. I also understand that many of you are not naturally killers. Few are. Most of you would just like to go back home and live nice little safe lives. And contrary to popular belief, I actually can understand that as well.”
You walk over to a nearby weapon rack and examine a few swords, taking one of fairly good quality. You begin to speak again.
“However, that’s not going to happen.” You say and throw the sword to the ground near Captain Talger’s feet.
“Captain pick up the sword.”
“Sir?”
“I SAID PICK UP THE SWORD!” you shout.
Talger immediately picks up the sword. You see him tremble a little, but manages to keep it together. The crowd looks on anxious to see what will happen next.
“Good, now attack me.” You say and draw your own blade.
Talger nearly speaks, but stops himself. He realizes he doesn’t really have any options in this. He closes his eyes for a brief moment presumably to calm himself and then approaches you.
He attacks you with some skill and nearly manages to hit you, but ultimately you are the superior warrior and you stop holding back. You manage to smash his face with the pommel of your own sword. His nose nearly explodes into a mass of blood, but before he falls, you grab his sword arm and break it, causing him to drop his weapon and cry out before tumbling to the ground.
You kick the sword away and address the crowd again.
“You see this? This man knew he was facing potential death and he did not run away. He faced it like a soldier and tried to do his best. He showed true dedication. You all should be so brave. That’s all I’m asking, it is not such a difficult lesson to learn.”
You look down at Captain Talger who is trying hard not to scream out in any more pain and is having a hard time breath due to his bloody nose.
“However, this man also spoke out against me…Captain Talger are you ready for your sentence?”
“…(wheeze)…argh….(wheeze)…I…acce…(wheeze) accept…”
“Your life will serve as a lesson to the rest, you will have an honorable burial.” You quietly say and bring your sword down on his chest killing him instantly.
The crowd remains silent as you draw out your sword from Talger’s body.
“Learn from this man’s bravery and dedication…but also learn from his mistakes. DO NOT FUCK WITH ME! You all WILL become proper soldiers and you WILL serve Nalin with nothing less than your best! If you do not, none of you will leave here alive. For anyone thinking about suicide I suggest you just come down here now and let me kill you so I’m not wasting my time training you fucking grub worms! Oh and in case you all want to get cute and unite by walking down here together as a group, I suggest that you don’t if you value your lives, because I have no problem killing every last one of you by myself if I have to! I’ve destroyed entire villages of werewolves including their young, it’ll take me even less time to lay waste to you pathetic shitheads.”
You continue your rant.
“Let me make this clear you maggots, we have enemies to the east of us, that won’t fucking hesitate to rip your guts out and eat them. Do you really think if you all just go back home they’re going to leave you alone? No, they’re going to eventually advance westward and invade all those nice little peaceful homes you all so desperately want to go back to. You want a nice safe home, well you’re going to need to earn your keep and fight for it. You either die in here or die out there; it’s your choice. The big difference is out there you have a chance against those fucking savages. In here with me? You’ve got none. So I suggest you all start getting your shit together now, I don’t want to repeat this lesson again.”
You take you leave and head back to your office, leaving everyone to ponder your words.
A few days later there is an improvement in performance. Still a few suicides here and even some training deaths, but its just the weak being culled from the heard as usual.
When Brenda enacts conscription there is a lot of grumbling as was expected, but nothing more. Many of the conscripts are just glad you aren’t assigning them to the northern borders after hearing all the scary things about Edgar and his “baby eating” army. They won’t just be there without any supervision either, as you’ll still have a few veteran officers overseeing the situation.
Months pass a life goes on as usual, and you begin to get reports on the eastern wilderness. Most of the scouts say that there is evidence of other denizens living further east. In fact there seems to be a small tribal war going on between four separate groups. Two of those are human barbarian tribes, one them is elven, but much wilder than what you know of them and the last one is a race you’re not familiar with called the Slin. They’re apparently reptilian in nature though, similar to the kobolds, but much larger and meaner.
All of them save for one of the human tribes have been hostile to your scouts. Your scouts report that most attacks were accompanied by slurs and curses against the Empire. Even the Slin have been reported to utter a few recognizable insults in their strange reptilian tongue.
You can only guess that all of these folks at one time came in contact with the Empire and it wasn’t a good experience. Makes sense they would mistake you for Empire troops as well considering that all your troops are either still wearing the same armor or very similar armor. Some of the veteran officers are even still wearing the same insignias. Sort of like you do actually.
You’re very disappointed by the reports you’ve been getting on the various skirmishes your soldiers have had. Most of them involve heavy losses or in some cases outright defeats! Most of the conscripts apparently just aren’t cut out to handle these savages, they’re still too green and they also lack the desire to fight in the first place.
The problem is worse than just losing soldiers though. Most of these were young males and females, sons and daughter taken from their homes that didn’t want to be soldiers in the first place. Predictably there is peasant backlash from this.
Not willing to risk any more soldiers, you immediately order a halt to the scouting and make the decision that you’re going to have to go oversee things personally. Normally you wouldn’t mind this since you were getting bored lately, but you don’t like the circumstances to why you have to do it.
Brenda certainly hopes you can fix things, because while keeping the peasants in line through force is a time-honored tradition, it isn’t really helping things right now. You can’t afford to have a full-scale revolt over this. What you’d like to do is wipe out every single one of those tribes as soon as possible before they can unite against you, but you know you can’t really do that without either toughening up the conscripts or taking your vets off the northern borders and since that really isn’t an option, you’re going to have to toughen up the recruits.
The first thing you do is gather all your officers assigned there and reprimand them, stating if they were doing their job properly, you wouldn’t have to come here and do it for them. You might’ve even had some of them executed for incompetence, but you really can’t afford to lose anyone right now.
Second of all you have a new camp built near one the eastern Nalin villages. This is where all the soldiers are going to be housed and training until further notice. Soldier rotations to be stationed at the few eastern settlements will be implemented. But most importantly a whole new training schedule is going to be put into action. You need to get these folks to start thinking the right way. It is your hope that in a couple of months, they start shaping up into the solider you need them to be.
The first few weeks go pretty horrible. Your rigorous and harsh training causes some of the conscripts to go from low morale to suicidal. After three deaths, one of your officers claims you’re pushing them too hard and you’re going to have to ease up.
“Captain Talger isn’t it?” you ask.
“Yes sir.”
“You did serve under the Empire didn’t you?”
“Yes sir, for many years until we…uh seceded.”
“You remember what the punishment was for questioning a superior’s decisions?”
“…yes…yes I do sir.” He says in a very worried tone.
After a moment of silence, you tell him to follow you outside to the training grounds.
You and Captain Talger walk to the middle of the grounds where several people are training, if they aren’t you tell one of your other officers to call everyone to the grounds immediately. When everyone arrives, you address the crowd.
“It has come to my attention that I may be training you lot too hard. This has been told to me, by Captain Talger here and he may have a point.”
Talger looks slightly surprised to hear you say that, he also relaxes a little.
“I understand that many of you do not want to be here. I also understand that many of you are not naturally killers. Few are. Most of you would just like to go back home and live nice little safe lives. And contrary to popular belief, I actually can understand that as well.”
You walk over to a nearby weapon rack and examine a few swords, taking one of fairly good quality. You begin to speak again.
“However, that’s not going to happen.” You say and throw the sword to the ground near Captain Talger’s feet.
“Captain pick up the sword.”
“Sir?”
“I SAID PICK UP THE SWORD!” you shout.
Talger immediately picks up the sword. You see him tremble a little, but manages to keep it together. The crowd looks on anxious to see what will happen next.
“Good, now attack me.” You say and draw your own blade.
Talger nearly speaks, but stops himself. He realizes he doesn’t really have any options in this. He closes his eyes for a brief moment presumably to calm himself and then approaches you.
He attacks you with some skill and nearly manages to hit you, but ultimately you are the superior warrior and you stop holding back. You manage to smash his face with the pommel of your own sword. His nose nearly explodes into a mass of blood, but before he falls, you grab his sword arm and break it, causing him to drop his weapon and cry out before tumbling to the ground.
You kick the sword away and address the crowd again.
“You see this? This man knew he was facing potential death and he did not run away. He faced it like a soldier and tried to do his best. He showed true dedication. You all should be so brave. That’s all I’m asking, it is not such a difficult lesson to learn.”
You look down at Captain Talger who is trying hard not to scream out in any more pain and is having a hard time breath due to his bloody nose.
“However, this man also spoke out against me…Captain Talger are you ready for your sentence?”
“…(wheeze)…argh….(wheeze)…I…acce…(wheeze) accept…”
“Your life will serve as a lesson to the rest, you will have an honorable burial.” You quietly say and bring your sword down on his chest killing him instantly.
The crowd remains silent as you draw out your sword from Talger’s body.
“Learn from this man’s bravery and dedication…but also learn from his mistakes. DO NOT FUCK WITH ME! You all WILL become proper soldiers and you WILL serve Nalin with nothing less than your best! If you do not, none of you will leave here alive. For anyone thinking about suicide I suggest you just come down here now and let me kill you so I’m not wasting my time training you fucking grub worms! Oh and in case you all want to get cute and unite by walking down here together as a group, I suggest that you don’t if you value your lives, because I have no problem killing every last one of you by myself if I have to! I’ve destroyed entire villages of werewolves including their young, it’ll take me even less time to lay waste to you pathetic shitheads.”
You continue your rant.
“Let me make this clear you maggots, we have enemies to the east of us, that won’t fucking hesitate to rip your guts out and eat them. Do you really think if you all just go back home they’re going to leave you alone? No, they’re going to eventually advance westward and invade all those nice little peaceful homes you all so desperately want to go back to. You want a nice safe home, well you’re going to need to earn your keep and fight for it. You either die in here or die out there; it’s your choice. The big difference is out there you have a chance against those fucking savages. In here with me? You’ve got none. So I suggest you all start getting your shit together now, I don’t want to repeat this lesson again.”
You take you leave and head back to your office, leaving everyone to ponder your words.
A few days later there is an improvement in performance. Still a few suicides here and even some training deaths, but its just the weak being culled from the heard as usual.