Outside Tar Fort's south gate, the entire valley had become a battlefield where the Carnford Army purged the remaining enemy and hunted down the fleeing.
The mountains and fields were filled with slaves and captives fleeing in all directions. Terrified by the preceding battle and the collapse of the Saurons, they had broken free of their bonds and, like a startled flock of sheep, ran weeping and screaming toward the slopes on either side and anywhere that looked like it could offer shelter.
All organized resistance from the Sauron soldiers had completely vanished. Only scattered individuals and small units remained, fighting like trapped beasts in desperate final struggles.
Rank after rank of Carnford Musketeers marched forward in neat, cold formations, stepping over the mountain-like heaps of shattered wagons, scattered chests and cages, and corpses in the valley.
They were in no hurry to spread out and hunt down every fleeing enemy. Instead, like a moving wall of death, they steadily wiped out the Sauron remnants still on the road, those trying to regroup or put up stubborn resistance, with orderly volleys of precise and lethal gunfire.
Puffs of white gun smoke rose one after another. Each time the shots rang out, another stretch of the road was strewn with fallen Saurons.
Other, more nimble squads, led by their officers, began climbing the slopes on both sides to hunt down the Sauron soldiers who had fled into the woods and the routed troops trying to hide, giving them no chance to reorganize or lie low for long.
Behind a relatively open pile of rubble near Tar Fort's south gate, the last group of some twenty or thirty of the fiercest and most loyal Sauron elite soldiers clustered tightly around their leader, Ulf.
Most were Ulf's personal guards and veteran soldiers from