Homesteading in a fantasy world

On an otherwise unremarkable road that was slowly being reclaimed by nature, I watched as three armies and the leaders of three nations met to make an alliance. Now, this wasn't just a defensive alliance or to get access to each other's trade markets; no, this was a proper alliance with each nation cooperating to help the others to the best of their abilities.

There were a few reasons why this location was chosen, but the main reason was that after we sign this alliance agreement, we would march and conquer a couple of city-states. This was quite crucial. These city-states separated the other two nations and would make trade almost impossible for them.

United Freeholds would also get one of those city-states, the most northern one and our first target. But not only that, we would get claims on quite a lot of land towards the east until we reach the border of a nation that we haven't been able to contact, and quite a lot of land towards the south where one of our alliance nations stands.

The huge southern forest, where we got many of our refugees, would now officially be ours to claim. This would be incredibly useful because, as a nation, we didn't actually have that much forest; most of our land was in the grass fields.

One of the reasons for this alliance was that nation we couldn't contact, but the other reason was the other alliances further south. They were a lot larger than any one of our nations, but combined, we were a more serious threat that most didn't want to haphazardly attack.

Our soon-to-be allied nations were a lot more populous than us, but the nations towards the south had an even larger population. I was incredibly glad that we had gotten a lot of refugees from other places through the portal, but honestly, we needed many more to keep our nation functioning.

I was watching the large tent, where we were going to have the signing when I felt a disturbance to my right. I nodded to that disturbance and felt it disappear from beside me. This morning, I dreamed of a particular movie I had seen, and when I woke up, I thought more about what we were doing and how we were protecting the people here. Honestly, we were all a bit naive, but I guess that’s to be expected because none of us had actually ever done anything like this.

Thinking back on it, I didn’t understand why we thought having three arms with us meant that everyone here would be safe and we could do things without being disturbed. Now, however, our assassins' guild and spies were all over the place.

As suspected, they would have been easily able to assassinate key figures which would, of course, cause this alliance to not happen. While I was quite confident in my abilities, even I had protection, even though I didn’t like it.

Basically, if they managed to seriously hurt or kill me, this deal would not happen because the other nations needed a general with my abilities to help them win against the city-state and act as a deterrent to anyone else who would try to attack us.

The signing itself was incredibly boring, and the only thing that kept me awake was imagining ninja-like attackers that I needed to discover and defend against.

The other nations' leaders were still a bit sceptical about if I could deliver what I had promised, but they still signed the alliance agreement because of the other things the United Freeholds could offer them. The next day, I was given command of all of the armies here.

Compared to the United Freeholds' army, the other ones lacked discipline, but at least they had competent fighters, and my abilities quickly helped organise them so I could use them to the best of their capabilities.

We marched on the first city-state, and even before we made it there, the town was ours. Elite Vikings had already infiltrated and killed the leadership, so when we arrived, the gates were already open, and we could just march in and claim ownership of this town and the nearby region where almost 4,000 people lived. This was almost a 40% increase for our nation’s population.

A contingency of our legion and leaders for this new land had already been brought with us and were left here as we continued to march forward. The people we had conquered didn’t really mind it as the leadership that was in place wasn't that good, and we brought quite a lot of food with us.

The harvest this year had been quite good, but I was a bit sad that we needed to do it in a hurry as I needed to be on this excursion. Many of the people here would be sent back to the capital so the land here could support the reduced population better.

Usually, doing a campaign just before winter was a bad idea, but our combined armies and my ability to lead an army should make this a swift campaign. I didn’t mess around this time and was completely serious and professional the entire time, as I had many eyes on me from different nations, and they weren't going to see any weakness coming from me.

A few more of the city-states, which were actually more like town-states, we were able to conquer using the same tactic as the first one. But for the proper city-states, of which there were three, we needed to actually fight to conquer them.

I held nothing back and used tactics I knew worked back in Earths medieval times, which I modified just a bit to accommodate the different abilities and magics of this world. Many times, I heard words describing me as brutal and ruthless. But I did what I needed to do so we would lose as few soldiers as possible while causing maximum damage to the enemy.

Many of the city-states, who prepared for a long siege, found their walls crumbling and being overrun by Legionnaires and allied troops. We still lost a lot of good soldiers, but that was the cost of war.

We even had a singular open field battle where the remnants of a few city-states allied together to actually have a numerical advantage over us. However, that didn’t help against our firm lines, archers, and the cavalry unit which were all boosted by my abilities.

It was still a long fight, lasting three days, where at noon we'd gather in the field and fight for a few hours until our men were too exhausted to continue.

I’m guessing that they wanted to retreat after the first engagement, but if they did that, we could've just run them down. I respected that they chose to stay. They probably hoped that they would be able to break through our lines, but on the third day, their army's morale finally broke. Many started to run away or surrender.

It was the last major fight of the campaign that lasted almost two months. Afterwards, I wasn’t called brutal and ruthless but instead a genius and a brilliant tactician. If they only knew that most of what I knew about this type of battle, I had learned from books about ancient warfare back on Earth.

While we returned triumphant, we still had many military funerals, and quite a lot of new names were added to the memorial stone in the Forest of Remembrance. Still, by all accounts, it was a really successful campaign with minimal losses and a lot of territory gained, which had quite a lot of population. That was one of the more important reasons why this entire thing happened.

I was quite tired from the entire thing and was just reminded once again that I didn’t like large-scale battles, but for some stupid reason, I was really good at them. And I couldn’t rest easy knowing that more soldiers would have died if I wasn’t leading.

Hopefully, there will soon come a time when a better general is found, so I won't have to act in that role any longer. Unfortunately, I had a gut feeling that that won’t happen for quite a while.