Soon after we adjourned our meeting with the mayor, we were back home to get dressed up.
When I met up with my father at the front yard, I was wearing some slightly oversized leather armor with a shortsword strapped to my side.
When all the troops, along with a few hunters who were paid for their tracking skills gathered, we mounted up and made our way southwest to Millfield Village.
Along with me and my dad, were 4 of his knights, 50 men at arms, 3 hired hunters, and a supply wagon with camping gear because we would be camping the night before we reached Millfield Village.
As we left Glenfell and trotted along the road with men marching behind our horses, it soon hit me that this was my first time venturing into the wider world beyond the safety of the town walls, and it scared me a little.
In the 6 years of my existence in this world, after comparing it to my previous life and even the kids I see in town in this world, I can safely say I have a pretty sweet life. I was born into a noble family, I have parents who seem to love each other and are not just together for political convenience, and I do not have to work to make ends meet like I see some kids in town need to do.
So now that we are going to face off against some goblins and who knows what other fantasy bullshit, I am a little scared about what I will be facing, even with a bunch of armed men backing me up.
Compared to the assassination attempt on my family's life, this time I am the one who is willingly putting myself in deliberate danger. I could have told my dad that I did not want to go on the subjugation mission, but seeing that I am the next in line to be Baron, I thought it prudent to see how it is done.
After a few hours of travel, the hired hunters pointed us to a clearing that was regularly used for setting up camp for the night.
As the subjection force pulled into the clearing and started setting up camp, Dad stopped a bunch of men from setting up the big tent for me and Dad. Instead, Dad picked up 2 extra normal tents that all the men were using and moved to the open area in the middle of all the men setting up their own tents.
"Ok son, this is your first time camping out, so it is as good a time as any to teach you how to pitch a tent." Dad said as he passed me a rolled-up tent with its tent pegs tied to its side.
Hehehe… Oh, I know all about pitching tents, in fact, I do it every morning… But in all seriousness, in my previous life, I heard about other kids going on school-organized outdoor camping trips, and being a home-schooled kid, I did not get to experience outdoor camping before, it did not help that my previous parents were not outdoors people, so I took this opportunity to live out some of the missed experiences from my previous life.
We started with Dad's tent first, he explained to me the proper steps, measurements, and knots to use as we tied and hammered the tent pegs into the ground.
Next was my turn to set up my own tent. The outcome was… less than satisfactory… even with Dad's verbal coaching, it ended up looking like it would collapse to a stiff breeze. Dad later went through my mistakes and fixed them with me, and after a few more minutes of fiddling around, I was the proud owner of my first tent.
By this time, the call for dinner sounded and we ate before turning in for the night.
***
By late morning the next day, we arrived at Millfield Village where we met the village chief, and the news he reported did not make Dad or any of his men happy. The chief reported that the goblins had gotten bolder since sending the report to Glenfell, and now the goblins were targeting their livestock.
Besides reports of 2 goats and a dog being killed by goblins, the news that made the subjection force frown was the number of goblins that took part in the raid on their livestock, which numbered somewhere about a dozen goblins.
After walking away from the chief's house, I asked my Dad, "What's wrong Dad? There are only a dozen goblins, and we have more than 50 armed and armored, what is there to fear from just a dozen goblins? Besides, from what I read in the bestiary at home, goblins do not seem all that impressive."
Dad looked at me and sighed, "Son, that bestiary at home only tells you about their basic characteristics, they do not tell you their social behavior or structure. If a goblin nest is capable of sending out a dozen goblins to get food and even dare to come near villages and kill livestock, that tells us that they are either truly desperate, which I highly doubt unless we are experiencing a drought, or in the more likely case, they have an evolved goblin."
Ok, I am going to need to get my hands on a more descriptive bestiary when I get back, so I asked, "What do the goblins having a evolved goblin have to do with this situation? And what are evolved goblins anyway?"
"Well, son, from what has been studied of goblins so far, due to their quick rate of reproduction, when a goblin nest gets too big and there are too many mouths to feed, they will fight and the losers split off to find new hunting grounds, so seeing a dozen goblins at a time is a pretty significant chuck of a normal nest, and they would not risk that many bodies in 1 area unless they had alot to spare. So the only way for a goblin nest to get big enough to have enough numbers to spare is for an evolved goblin to take charge and keep all the goblins in line.
As for your second question, evolved goblins are goblins that for some unknown reason evolve into a more advanced form of goblin. It could be a Hobgoblin, which in a sense is just a bigger and stronger goblin that is almost the size of a grown man compared to the child-sized average goblin. Or it could be a Goblin Shaman, they are only slightly bigger than an average goblin… but can wield magic like you can." Dad explained as he whispered the last part about magic to me.
Dad continued, "I just hope that if this is a big nest with an evolved goblin, that evolved goblin has not been evolved for very long. Because if given time, an evolved goblin mating with normal goblins will have a chance of producing evolved goblins from birth, and when the nest gets big enough with a decent number of evolved goblins, that is when they get bold enough to start wiping villages like the one we are in off the map in their ever-growing need for food, and to them, we are food."
Wow, the more Dad explains goblins to me, the more I understand why we treat them like pests, if we do not nip them in the bud, they will spread like a plague. This brings the question to my mind, the bestiary I read said that goblins can be found in almost all environments, so what happens if goblins go unchecked in the untamed wilds?
When I brought this question up with Dad, he explained, "We do not need to worry about goblins in the wilds, natural predators usually do a good job of culling their numbers. It is in tamed lands like ours that we need to worry about, we have chased out most of the dangerous predators that may cause us great harm, but those same predators also keep the goblin population in check, so now that the goblins' natural predators are gone, it falls to us, the ones who tamed the land, to keep the goblin population in check.
But as history shows, from time to time, due to negligence or sheer bad luck, a goblin nest is left unchecked, and eventually, after the nest gets big enough, A Hobgoblin or Goblin Shaman would evolve into a Goblin Lord or Goblin Mystic. That is when towns and cities get wiped off the map."
In the last part when talking about the Goblin Lord and Goblin Mystic, Dad said with haunted eyes, "Have you ever faced a Goblin Lord or Mystic before Dad?" I asked.
Dad focused his eyes and said, "Not personally, it was in my knight days with the Order. We caught a goblin horde led by a Goblin Lord early before it could do any serious damage to the kingdom, but that is a story for another time. I need to make preparations. Go check your own gear while I muster the troops."
Seeing that this situation was getting serious, I did as instructed and double-checked my gear while waiting for orders to move out.