We reached the ambush point — a stretch of highway pinched between a collapsed overpass and a drainage ditch, the kind of terrain a supply convoy couldn't avoid and couldn't easily maneuver in either — a little after noon. Colonel Reyes's intel said the Free faction hit the last convoy right here. We spent four hours setting up to make sure they didn't get a second clean shot.
Ian put Ralph and Alex on the overpass with a clear line down onto the road. Dustin took the ditch side, hidden well enough that I lost sight of him after the first ten minutes. I stayed with the convoy itself, in the third truck again, weapon under a tarp, doing my best impression of a bored soldier.
The trap sprung a little after four in the afternoon.
It started quiet — a truck up ahead, disabled, blocking the road, a woman waving her arms for help beside it. Textbook. Our driver slowed anyway, because command had briefed us on exactly this trick and we needed them to think it was working.
The moment our lead truck stopped, six people came up out of the ditch on both sides, weapons raised, moving with the kind of discipline that told me this wasn't their first convoy.
"Everybody out, hands where we can see them, and nobody needs to get hurt!" The woman by the disabled truck had dropped the helpless act the second our wheels stopped, an assault rifle already up and steady.
I climbed out slow, hands loose at my sides, and let myself get a good look at who we were dealing with. Six visible, which meant more hiding — Free faction convoy raids never ran thin on backup. Their leader was a lean man near the front, dark hair buzzed short, a burn scar running from his jaw down into his collar. He had the look of someone who'd been in charge of people long before the trumpets sounded.
"Silas Kane," he said, like he could feel me trying to place him. "You're new. I know most of the regulars who run this corridor."
"Vanguard Squad," I said. "You've probably heard of us by tomorrow, if you live that long."
Something flickered across his face — not fear, more like recalculation. "Cole's little project. Didn't think he'd have you running convoy duty this soon."
"Consider it a warning shot."
Kane's eyes flicked past me, to the overpass, to the ditch, doing his own quiet math. Whatever he found didn't seem to reassure him. "We're not here to fight your whole army over some canned beans and antibiotics, kid. We're here because our people are dying of infections your side has a cure for sitting in a warehouse doing nothing."
"Then ask," I said. "There's a process."
"There's a process if you're already inside the wire." His voice sharpened. "You think the army's handing out medicine to people who didn't sign up to bleed for them? We tried asking. We got told to enlist or starve."
I didn't have an answer for that, because it was probably true, and I didn't have time to feel bad about it, because that was the exact moment Ralph's fire lit up the overpass and the ambush stopped being a conversation.
Kane's people scattered for cover as Alex dropped down from above, sword already dark with mana, cutting between two of them before they'd finished registering that the overpass wasn't empty. Dustin's gravity field caught a third mid-sprint and slammed them face-first into the asphalt hard enough to leave a person-shaped divot.
I didn't reach for my deagles. Kane was watching me too closely, and something about the tired, furious honesty in what he'd just said made me hesitate half a second longer than I should have.
He used that half second to close the distance and put a knife an inch from my throat.
"You've got good ears," he said, low, "but you're still soft. That's going to get you killed one day."
I brought my forearm up, mana already gathering, and knocked the knife wide before it found skin. The counter I threw after it caught him in the ribs hard enough to send him staggering back three steps, gasping.
"Or it's going to get people like you to stop before they finish the sentence," I said. "Yield. Nobody else has to die over medicine."
Kane looked past me — at Ralph and Alex mopping up the last of his people, at Dustin standing over the man he'd flattened into the road — and made the calculation every smart person eventually makes when the math stops favoring them.
"This isn't over," he said, backing toward the tree line. "You tell Cole — hoarding medicine while people die outside the wire isn't going to end well for him. Not forever."
He was gone into the trees before I could decide whether to let him go. I let him go anyway. Four of his people were down, two dead, two wounded and now our prisoners. That felt like enough of a message for one day.
Ian jogged up beside me, lightning still crackling faint along his knuckles. "You let their leader run."
"He wasn't wrong about the medicine," I said, and left it at that.
Ian studied me for a second, like he was deciding whether that was going to be a problem. Then he clapped me on the shoulder. "Good instincts. Report it anyway — command's going to want to know Kane's out there making speeches about hoarding. That's the kind of thing that gets people to start listening."
I didn't tell him I already agreed with the speech. Some things you kept to yourself even when the mission was over.