The target was drawn on maps created by astral projections of scouts that explored the geography of the Ashida continent.
It had plenty of plains, hills, valleys, rivers and mountains. And it was huge. Conquering it kilometre by kilometre was going to take ages.
That ineffective approach would take so much time that Father will be able to send another army, much larger than Malevolence's force, and she still won't conquer enough to say that she did a good job preparing for this army's arrival.
But she had a lot of experience and knew that it's best to start conquering places from their key points.
The key point of this part of the Ashida continent was a large mountain on the foot of which stood a large human city, the new capital of the Vardish Empire (the last one succumbed to a plague). More notably for Malevolence, this mountain fed a large river that went through a third of the continent.
