Brutal pragmatism!
It’s not supposed to be fair, Tabetha reminded herself as she shoved a spear between the crawling man’s shoulder blades. By now she knew how to kill a man quickly, that way. It’s just supposed to work without keeping you up at night after.
It helped that these were no-account slaver trash, the kind that’d happily grow fat on snuffling up the Dominion’s leavings. It helped even more when she saw how each slaver cage had an inset cuff at each corner. The badlands raiders were getting worse every week. She’d like to think that was the Dominion’s fault, too, but that was wishful thinking. Some people just needed even the littlest excuse to go bad.
At least there weren’t many slavers to kill (Tabetha had never heard the word ‘euphemism,’ but she wouldn’t have trusted it if she had). The two cages full of ‘slaves’ had each gotten the oil-pots Dallin had brought along to the ambush. They were going to burn the wagons anyway, and they no longer had to worry about rescuing anybody, so why not? The same went for the horses. It was just too risky to steal them without checking first for Dominion tracking magic, which they didn’t have time for.
And they were never going to be taking prisoners.