Dominic led the assault on the south side, while Commander Dax led the north side.
The Dagos Army had left one camp of guards in place on the east side of the river, at the entrance to the canyon, but there were only ten men, all drunk, and none on guard duty when Dominic arrived.
"Pistols are quieter." He whispered as the strike team spread out.
None of the Dagos soldiers even saw their death coming.
From across the canyon, Commander Dax signalled that they had also cleared the guards, and that they were settling in to wait for the next convoy to cross the river.
"You know, I’m almost starting to feel bad for them at this point. They’re stretched so thin, and the country is in so much worse shape than we thought, it feels like we’re bullying them, not the other way around." Princess Alexis noted as they prepared to intercept the next convoy along the road, which was already coming into sight on the horizon.
Dominic didn’t reply right away, but as they watched the convoy cross the river, he couldn’t help but agree with her assessment.
A single soldier wearing a Dagos Army coat was enough to assure the soldiers that all was well, and the convoy didn’t even space themselves out for safety.
Their steam trucks were overloaded, so they had chained them together, allowing the light ones at the front carrying nothing but their officers to pull the others up hills.
Because an extended chain was just more failure points, they were nearly bumper to bumper when the mortars began to rain down on them, and the majority of the force never even made it out of the trucks.
With the transports disabled, the riflemen launched volley after volley into the survivors, until nothing moved in the valley.
"Good work, gentlemen. Send down a cleanup crew and have a pair of trucks hooked to the front to pull the scrap off the road. All rifles, keep ready. There might be soldiers hiding in the vehicles." Princess Alexis ordered.
The bodies of the Dagos vehicles were over ten metres long and slender, looking more like a hybrid of a rail car and a carriage than the shorter, tractor-based vehicles that were more popular in Cygnia.
But that gave the passengers a better chance of survival when the vehicle was disabled by mortar fire. There were so many obstacles between a blast at the front and passengers in the back that there were chances for them to escape relatively unharmed.
The bravest would have gone out to fight, but many might still be hiding in the wreckage, and destroying it any further would only make it harder to remove from the roadway.
Their time was limited, so some risks would need to be taken, but the cleanup crew would have to be careful.
"Come out with your hands raised, and we will let you leave. We’re not interested in killing all of you and needing to bury the bodies." One of the cleanup crew called.
After a few seconds, a group of soldiers in blood stained uniforms, kicked open the door of a truck and made a run for it, headed east up the hill.
That wasn’t the direction they came from, but the one that they were going.
Why they thought that might be better was a mystery to Dominic, but from his vantage point he could see when they cleared the gorge and turned south, running inland.
That was an even worse decision.
Everyone in that direction had already starved to death, and the wells were mostly dry.
But when more of the survivors joined them, the Regiment simply let them run. Even if they turned back west at some point to cross the river, they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about the ambush for days, and there should be two more convoys tomorrow.
The cleanup crew banged on the side of all the damaged trucks, and a few heavily wounded stragglers emerged at the windows, unable to leave under their own power.
The cleanup crew took the time to find medical kits and either help them bandage their wounds or let them do it themselves, then gave them a pack and sent them on their way.
The soldiers looked suspicious at the generosity until they saw that the Regiment’s trucks were towing everything away. This wasn’t a simple robbery for food, they were being picked clean to arm a bandit group.
The Dagos vehicles were pulled off the road after the bodies that had made it outside were loaded.
There was still some destruction, but not as much as Dominic had expected, and everyone settled in to wait for the next convoy and loot this one, looking for anything worth taking.
They would scrap and burn it when they left, but first they wanted to make sure that they had all the food, usable magitech and other valuables out.
The Regiment was getting exceedingly efficient at the process, and when the scout whistle, the call of a Great Horned Owl, which wasn’t native to Dagos, alerted them to movement along the road, they were already finished.
This second convoy was actually well guarded, and Dominic called for Princess Alexis to join them when he saw the fancy heraldry on the vehicles.
"Is that someone important? Like, important enough not to hit his truck with a mortar?" Dominic whispered.
Alexis sighed. "Yes, he’s important enough not to hit with artillery. You really do need to learn all the livery symbols one day. That is the Viscount Boscom. His army has nearly a hundred thousand men, and his home city numbers over half a million.
He’s definitely important, even if he’s not generally considered quite close enough to take the throne for himself.
Not counting the Princes that we have in custody, and the ones we killed in the first phase of the war, Viscount Boscom is the next in line for the throne if he wants it. We need him, or whoever is in that carriage, alive."
Dominic sent the hand signal to the other side of the gorge, and everyone moved into position, ready to stop the convoy, which was surrounded by soldiers.