Despite the discordant little incident of players ignoring orders, Isaac's Caravan still won the skirmish without a single death. One unlucky fellow did get hit across the back by a javelin during the fight.
Yes, that javelin had been thrown by someone on his own side. Luckily, it hit him sideways rather than point-first, or the consequences would have been unthinkable.
Lin Ruoyu and the other five charged out to pursue the mounted bandits, but in the pitch darkness, they did not get far before coming back.
Still, the six returned with a trophy... a horse with no injured legs, though the wire had cut more than a dozen gashes into its body, leaving half of it soaked in blood.
Chris came over to inspect it. The horse was in poor condition, all skin and bones, even thinner than the draft horses that had been pulling the caravan's wagons for two months.
Chris had never shortchanged the caravan's livestock, whether they walked on two legs or four. They all had their fill of food and drink at every meal, and everyone who could eat meat got meat.
The meat might not have been particularly good quality-it was frozen-but it was still meat. At worst, it was not very fresh. There was nothing else wrong with it.
The draft horses and donkeys got concentrated feed at every meal, plus two extra feedings at night. They never went without soybeans, eggs, or oats.
Isaac came over, took one look, and spotted the problem.
"These mounted bandits were either on the run, or they'd only recently stolen this horse from a farmer."
"Why not ask them? Look, I brought them back."
Home Alone grinned, then abruptly reached behind his back, pulled out three severed heads with their eyes still staring wide, and tossed them at Isaac's feet.
As a veteran, Isaac was not frightened. Instead, he crouched down and picked up the heads one by one, carefully studying their faces.
"What are you looking at?"
Chris walked up behind Isaac and asked curiously. He found the man's behavior rather creepy.
"Checking whether I recognize anyone."
Isaac sighed and casually tossed the heads aside.
"So, did you find anyone you knew?"
"One. Brand, a former colleague from the regiment next to ours. He was an excellent dragoon NCO. I never thought he'd become a mounted bandit."
Chris scratched his head and craned his neck to look at the heads rolling away.
"Um... since this bandit was someone you knew, shouldn't you bury him?"
"What would I bury him for? Once he became a mounted bandit, he should have been prepared to die without a grave."
Isaac dismissed Chris's suggestion. He turned and waved to his men, issuing orders.
"Light the torches. Once they're lit, musketeers, keep shooting the bandit corpses in the trap zone. Make sure they're dead for good. Everyone else, go back to sleep. Sentries, stay on watch."
"Boss, it looks like some horses are still alive over there. Shouldn't we rescue them?"
"We'll deal with it tomorrow. Human lives matter more than horses."
Isaac was firm. And so, apart from the light of the rekindled campfires and the six players, none of the caravan's hands left the wagon formation all night.
When dawn came and the sky grew light, Chris took charge of the cooking, making three large pots of meat soup and boiling three pots of dried noodles. Only after everyone had enjoyed a hearty meal did they begin cleaning up the battlefield.
These two days truly were unlucky ones for Isaac's Caravan, however. The caravan hands had barely entered the trap zone and recovered two rolls of wire when another dense clatter of hooves came from the distance.
"Fuck!"
Chris, who was scraping the bottom of a pot with a large iron ladle to get the stuck noodles off and feed them to the donkeys, reacted first. He dropped what he was holding and swung the flintlock off his back into his hands.
"Hoofbeats! The fucking mounted bandits are back! Quick, get your guns!"
Isaac had been sitting on a little folding stool, burping after his meal. Chris's words startled him into leaping up and rushing to the edge of the wagon formation, where he raised a brass telescope toward the far end of the road the hoofbeats were coming from.
After looking for a good while, Isaac sighed.
"They aren't mounted bandits... it's the goddamn Bohemian Patrol Unit. Cavalry in blue uniforms. Regular army cavalry.
"Connie, hide, quick! Don't let them see you!"
"Isn't that pretty much the same as running into mounted bandits?"
"At least with this lot, we don't have to fight for our lives. We couldn't fight them anyway."
They really could not. There was no way to win. Nearly a hundred Bohemian Cavalry were riding toward them, dressed in blue canvas uniforms and tricorn hats, each carrying a short-barreled musket and a saber.
They rode swiftly up and surrounded the wagon formation. Isaac approached them of his own accord, raising the documents in his hand as he walked.
A cavalry captain mounted on a tall horse rode out from among the others. Looking down from his saddle, he gave the papers in Isaac's hand a casual glance.
"All right, a legitimate caravan. So, you know the rules?"
"I do. A third of the cargo."
Isaac sighed and tucked the documents back inside his coat.
"Since you know the rules, I won't make things difficult for you."
Satisfied with Isaac's compliance, the captain waved his cavalrymen off their horses. They entered the wagon formation and began picking through the caravan's goods.
"Hey, a lot of people died here, huh?"
"Mounted bandits. They attacked last night."
"Captain, I found Brand! His head's here!"
"Take it. There's a good bounty on that fellow. Take it."
"Hmm, what's this?"
Still mounted, the captain pointed his saber at the wire the Bohemian soldiers had dragged out of the bushes and addressed Isaac with a haughty snort.
"It's concertina wire. It helped us slow down the bandits' attack."
"Hmm... not bad. I'll take it."
The captain and his cavalrymen behaved only a little better than the bandits. Aside from not killing anyone, they swaggered off with all the bandits' heads and a third of the caravan's goods.
Salt, leather, homespun cloth-all the most valuable goods were loaded onto the Bohemian Cavalry's horses and carried away.
Fortunately, the caravan's animals were all draft horses, beneath the notice of the haughty Bohemian Cavalry. Otherwise, they would have led a few of those away too.
They might have had no interest in the draft horses, but one cavalryman took a liking to the three large pots the caravan had used to cook breakfast that morning. He did not mind that they had yet to be washed, cheerfully tying them up with rope and carrying them off on his back.
As they departed, Lin Ruoyu and the other players glanced back at the ravaged wagon formation, then turned to watch the Bohemian Cavalry swagger away. They all had a scathing remark stuck in their throats, unsure how to get it out.
"Fuck me, they're so disciplined."
"Yeah, they didn't even bother killing civilians and passing them off as enemies for credit."
"Still, can troops who act like that really fight?"
"Who knows? Don't assume every army in the world is the People's Liberation Army. It's already the twenty-fifth century, and the armies of those European and American countries aren't necessarily any more disciplined than these feudal cavalrymen."
PS: The storyline in the Bohemian Empire is about to end. Next up is the Kingdom of Bagnia storyline.
Before you continue