Chapter 143: Fifteen Years of War

Chapter 143: Fifteen Years of War

The first city disappeared from Noah’s map before Round Six had completed its first planetary year.

It had not literally vanished, because the river still curved around the northern district and fragments of the old walls remained visible beneath the smoke, but the place Noah remembered no longer existed.

Draeven had bombarded it for eleven days before entering. Viridian reinforced the defenders twice, evacuated most of the civilian population, and continued fighting through the ruins until the regional command finally ordered the remaining troops to conduct a tactical retreat.

Several weeks later, the city became a battlefield again. That cycle soon became common across the major fronts as settlements were lost, contested, abandoned, reclaimed, and destroyed so thoroughly that controlling the roads passing through their ruins eventually became more important than controlling the cities themselves.

Noah stopped measuring Round Six by territory and began measuring it by formations.

A Viridian army entered one campaign with eighty thousand soldiers and emerged months later with less than half that number.

Reinforcements arrived, officers reorganized the survivors, and within another season the same army existed again under the same name despite most of its original soldiers being dead.

The designation survived even when almost everyone who had first carried it no longer did.

Varkesh repeated the same process on an even larger scale. Noah watched one regiment disappear during an assault on a Draeven artillery complex, only for the imperial government to recreate it six months later using recruits from three provinces.

The reconstructed regiment received the old banners and whatever surviving veterans could still serve as officers.

Those banners had already outlived several generations of soldiers carrying them.

By the end of the first year, Noah understood that Draeven possessed nearly every battlefield advantage except one.

No matter how many goblin formations were destroyed, there always seemed to be more goblins available to form another army.

The realization did not comfort him because numbers did not make the losses less real. One Draeven armored position outside a Varkesh city survived four separate attacks and turned the surrounding approaches into fields of bodies.

The first assault cost nearly two thousand goblins, while the second killed more than three thousand.

The third failed before reaching the defensive perimeter, and only the fourth attack finally reached the vehicles from two directions and destroyed enough crews to collapse the position.

Fewer than three hundred Draeven soldiers died there. Varkesh buried more than nine thousand.

The imperial commanders knew the exchange was terrible and attacked anyway. Every Draeven soldier lost was permanently removed from the round, while the goblin empires could continue drawing replacements from populations measured in tens of millions.

That arithmetic began shaping strategy in ways Noah disliked watching. Commanders increasingly planned operations around how many soldiers they were willing to spend for a permanent reduction in Draeven strength.

Some attacks were designed with the expectation that the first formation would almost certainly be destroyed.

Noah never ordered such a doctrine, because the war itself had created it.

By the second year, large cemeteries had appeared outside nearly every important front-line city.

By the third, some of those cemeteries had been abandoned because the front had shifted across them and continued farther inland.

The destruction spread unevenly across the planet. Viridian’s southern heartland still contained regions where schools opened and markets operated each morning, while provinces closer to the main campaigns became chains of refugee settlements connected by military roads.

Varkesh lost several major industrial districts to bombing, forcing factories elsewhere to absorb relocated workers and machinery.

Skargrim’s mountains filled with settlements far larger than they had been before the war as families from valley cities fled toward mining towns, fortresses, and isolated agricultural communities.

Luminous suffered a different collapse along the coast. Ports that had once connected the western continent’s trade network became military harbors protected by earthworks and scattered workshops, while several were abandoned after repeated attacks made repairing them pointless.

Noah watched one Luminous coastal city burn for three days after an ammunition district caught fire.

He remembered the same place centuries earlier when its first stone docks had been constructed and merchant vessels had begun gathering around the harbor.

Now aircraft crossed above the burning waterfront while refugees left through roads crowded with carts, wounded soldiers, dismantled machinery, and whatever possessions families could still carry.

The city remained on the map, but the civilization that had once occupied it had been pushed elsewhere.

The years continued, and Draeven changed with them. The surviving invasion forces stopped behaving like armies expecting a short campaign and began reorganizing captured regions into occupation zones.

Fortified headquarters appeared inside major cities, roads were widened for military traffic, and local airfields began supporting operations far from the original landing areas.

Goblin civilians remained behind those lines in large numbers and gradually created another front.

A warehouse containing Draeven fuel burned in occupied Viridian during the fourth year.

Investigators executed suspected resistance members afterward, yet another depot burned two months later.

In Varkesh, workers forced to repair military trucks began installing defective parts that failed during later operations.

Skargrim resistance cells collapsed tunnels beneath roads that had taken months to construct, while Luminous dockworkers leaked shipping schedules to goblin raiders operating beyond an occupied port.

Noah had never commanded those resistance movements into existence. His civilization was fighting even in places where organized armies had disappeared.

By the fifth year, the goblins’ numerical advantage began revealing its limits. New soldiers still arrived in enormous numbers, but experience could not be reproduced as easily as another body.

A lieutenant who survived two campaigns might suddenly command a battalion because everyone above him had died.

A battalion commander could find himself responsible for tens of thousands within a year despite never receiving the training such responsibility would have required before the war.

Training periods shortened as the front demanded more replacements. Weapons production struggled to keep pace, and some recruits entered service carrying equipment older than they were.

Noah saw one Viridian formation preparing for deployment and realized that most of its soldiers had been born after Round Six began.

They had no memory of the world before the invasion because war was the only world they had ever known.

Research progressed alongside them, slowly enough that each achievement felt small compared with what was being destroyed.

The first standardized goblin firearms entered limited service during the sixth year, but they remained heavier than Draeven rifles, slower to manufacture, and less reliable under poor maintenance.

Varkesh fielded several locally designed artillery pieces soon afterward. Their range remained inferior, yet they allowed goblin armies to answer some Draeven positions without moving enormous siege weapons into exposed terrain.

Skargrim developed more effective explosive mines while Luminous produced short-range radios in small numbers.

None of those technologies transformed the war because every improvement remained surrounded by problems the goblins had only recently learned to recognize.

A division equipped with new firearms could still be destroyed by aircraft. A goblin artillery battery could still be located and eliminated by Draeven counterfire, while a primitive radio mattered only when enough formations possessed compatible equipment.

Noah stopped expecting one invention to rescue his civilization. The technological gap was shrinking by fragments while the war consumed entire regions.

Years eight through ten became the darkest period of Round Six. Draeven reached cities that had once seemed safely removed from the invasion zones, turning provincial capitals into front lines and forcing millions of civilians deeper into surviving territories.

Some roads became permanent rivers of refugees. Noah saw families traveling beside soldiers too exhausted to help them while military wagons moved toward the fighting with ammunition and returned carrying wounded.

One Varkesh city contained nearly twice its prewar population because so many displaced goblins had gathered behind its defenses.

Food was rationed long before Draeven soldiers came within a hundred kilometers of the walls.

Another city was evacuated voluntarily over six weeks. Its population left while the army dismantled useful factories, removed archives, and destroyed machinery too large to transport, leaving Draeven to occupy an empty city without fighting a major battle.

Noah considered that one of the more intelligent victories of the decade. The goblin commanders had finally stopped confusing destruction with courage.

By the eleventh year, entire regions existed mainly to support the war. Agricultural provinces sent nearly everything they produced toward military depots and refugee centers, while mining districts operated continuously to provide metals for expanding wartime industries.

Children grew up knowing recruitment officers would eventually arrive. Veterans returned home missing limbs and discovered that the districts they remembered had changed beyond recognition while they were away.

Noah could still see the civilization surviving beneath the damage. He could also see the war consuming more of its structure every year.

Draeven was experiencing a different kind of exhaustion because its original one hundred thousand soldiers had no replacement population behind them.

Pilots killed in crashes stayed dead, and experienced tank crews lost inside cities could not be replaced by recruits arriving from another world.

Artillery pieces began surviving longer than the crews trained to operate them. By Year Twelve, Noah saw tanks abandoned despite repairable damage simply because no replacement crews were available nearby.

Some aircraft remained grounded to preserve their surviving pilots and fuel. Draeven formations that had entered the world at full strength were merged together after casualties made their original organization impossible to maintain.

The decline remained slow, but it was unmistakable. The goblins continued paying horribly for every reduction in Draeven strength.

A Draeven regiment trapped outside a Skargrim valley city fought for nearly two months before collapsing. More than forty thousand goblins died eliminating fewer than two thousand invaders.

Luminous destroyed an important airfield during the thirteenth year after repeated night attacks finally reached its runways and fuel stores.

Nearly an entire regional army was lost during the operation, but Draeven aircraft activity across that front fell sharply the following month.

The victory mattered, and the empty barracks left behind mattered just as much. Noah could no longer look at one without thinking about the other.

By the fourteenth year, Noah had begun avoiding casualty totals unless he needed them for a decision.

Millions of soldiers were dead across the four empires, while millions more had been wounded and many would never return to military or civilian work.

The population remained large enough that the goblin species faced no danger of extinction. The society supporting those numbers was becoming far more fragile.

Food shortages appeared in several provinces as medical systems became overwhelmed. Factories sometimes lacked workers despite military exemptions because skilled craftsmen had been killed during bombings or drafted years earlier.

Some schools operated only a few months each year, and several universities had become military research institutions in everything but name.

Noah had wanted pressure strong enough to force progress, yet Round Six was erasing the distinction between pressure and destruction.

The fifteenth year arrived without ceremony after only fifteen days had passed outside Noah’s planet.

Inside the world, an entire generation had already grown up beneath continuous war.

Noah widened his awareness until all four empires entered his view. There were cities he could no longer recognize because some had become fields of ruined masonry crossed by military roads while others remained inhabited despite missing entire districts.

Ports stood beside sunken vessels and broken docks. Farmland surrounding several fronts had become cratered wasteland covered with abandoned trenches and rusting machines, while cemeteries stretched beyond old city boundaries.

The four empires still existed and their governments still issued orders. Their armies continued marching and their temples still carried Noah’s name, but survival alone no longer meant the civilizations remained healthy.

Noah opened the academy status display and studied the number remaining from the original invasion.

A little over forty thousand Draeven soldiers were still alive, meaning nearly sixty thousand had been killed during fifteen years of war.

The number should have represented progress. Instead, Noah found himself calculating what eliminating another forty thousand might cost.

A bombardment began against a Viridian city while he was still staring at the figures. The city had already been rebuilt twice during the war, and the newest defensive district contained buildings younger than some of the soldiers preparing to defend them.

Shells struck the eastern neighborhoods while goblin formations moved toward secondary positions.

Before Noah could shift his attention fully toward the battle, the academy interface changed and displayed a communication request from the assessment supervisors.

Noah recognized the authority attached to the request and accepted it. The voice that answered belonged to one of the senior instructors monitoring the assessment, and the teacher spoke without offering congratulations.

"Noah, fifteen days have passed since Round Six began, which means your planet has experienced fifteen years of continuous war."

The instructor paused while another explosion rose above the Viridian skyline and continued only after Noah remained silent.

"You have already demonstrated survival far beyond what we normally expect from a first-year civilization. Difficulty Five does not require you to destroy your planet to prove that point."

A second faculty member joined the communication before Noah responded.

"More than half of the invading force is gone, but your civilization is approaching structural damage that may take generations to repair even if you end the round now."

Noah said nothing because his attention remained on the city below. He could see young Viridian soldiers entering positions once occupied by formations that no longer existed, while another column of civilians moved toward evacuation routes behind them.

The senior instructor finally asked the question the faculty had apparently been discussing without him.

"Noah, do you intend to surrender Round Six and stop the assessment?"

The battlefield continued beneath the silence that followed. Another artillery barrage rolled across the horizon while Noah looked over fifteen years of destruction without giving an answer.

The instructor spoke once more before the connection ended.

"If you continue, you may still defeat the remaining Draeven forces, but you need to decide whether there will be enough of the civilization you built left to make that victory worth having."