"Best of luck."

"Back to our original topic, do you have a ballpark for how long it'd take under expected conditions to hit a target and regroup?"

"I'm afraid that also depends on the circumstances, sorry. If you can storm it by force, most places take less time to clear than the grey garrison did, but if you have to siege somewhere with clerics they can hold out as long as they have food and ammunition. And demons don't need to eat, which means if you can't storm somewhere they're holding the battle lasts however long it takes to pick off the defenders or break down the walls. In this situation in specific... anywhere you don't feel confident forcing your way in safely I'd advise withdrawing and either avoid it or come back with reinforcements, and anywhere you can attack should be done inside an hour."

"Oh, I like that answer substantially better than some of the range I considered likely. Travel time to a likely spot?"

"Anywhere more than a day from the army is a lot harder to reinforce or support, and I definitely wouldn't advise going more than two days ride unless you're bringing a regiment along with. ...I'm tempted to advise you to stay closer than that, but you'll have a better sense of what benefits you're expecting to get from a given fight."

"Field experience, command experience, one less den of cultists."

"All important things, but not worth your life to go ranging afar from the army to get. The casualty - and disappearance - rates of unsupported detachments in the wound is high enough to make a hellknight think twice."

"Right. So where are we going, or who should I ask?"

"Major Ansger is in charge of the scouts, though last I heard he was off on patrol so you might need to talk to his adjutant. The report from this morning is that they've seen signs of cultists at Sinner's Rock, Haakon Ridge, and Fivetrees, but I don't know the dispositions there."

She has a map of the wound on her, though the details drop off sharply the further it gets from the wardstone barrier. Two of the locations are en route towards Iz, a sign of desperate and foolish cultists or someone trying to throw off the trail, while the third is up the Sellen and off slightly on one of the smaller tributaries.

"How long's his patrol?"

Irabeth looks at the sun.

"I'd guess an hour and a half from now, unless there were delays."

"Well, I'm not in that much of a hurry."

Then she can be rewarded for her patience with information! The camp at Haakon ridge appears to no longer be around - apparently it was either a temporary encampment or they got spooked by the crusader scouts - but the other two are still where they were last seen. Sinner's rock is probably the best first target, since there are only about 40 guys there and none of the people on lookout duty seemed very alert. Her soldiers take a while to get ready for a the trip, but thankfully she can get started on that before he gets back and it's only about two hours before she can set off riding with one of the new-muster cavalry companies.

She doesn't have a horse, is the done thing to ride double with somebody or borrow one? She's ridden before but with completely different tack and horse-training paradigms.

They can get her a horse; it's not that they're free but she's the knight commander.

She practices on her horse a little bit and puts it in paper barding. When's her detachment ready to move out? Anybody else coming along besides a bunch of soldiers who, while each infinitely unique and valuable in their own way, do not have portraits?

Not unless she'd like to request anyone! Her second in command for this mission is the second cousin of a count, which is closely related enough to open doors but not enough so that he's important in his own right; there are 6 first clerics along for blessings and channels, and two paladin archers whose goal is to discourage any Nabasu or Vrock who get it in their heads that they don't have to be scared of the dragoons. It's rather understrength on magic compared to an equivalent Chelish or Galtan formation, but that might not be obvious to someone who has never seen such units in action.

She certainly hasn't! She issues everybody a paper tag with their name and role embossed on it so she can track them by domain sense.

Off they ride.

This is slightly unusual but not even remotely the most weird thing a golarionite general might do, so they'll go along with it without issue.

Despite the fact that it's a various ominous name for a location in demon territory, nothing about Sinner's Rock seems particularly foreboding. There's a tall pillar of stone reaching up over a hundred feet around the surrounding ground that marks the locale, but the cultists are apparently not directly under it; instead they've made camp in a depression a few hundred feet off that offers some protection from the northerly winds. 

She would like them alive where that is reasonably safe, to be questioned and executed in an orderly fashion rather than simply butchered; she has encountered cultists who like taking hostages and announcing that the hostages are the real cultists, and it's a primitive tactic but if you were in enough of a hurry it might misguide your blade. For the same reason they are accepting surrenders. Let's try to surround them like so.

Then her soldiers will ride around into the requested positions. The dragoons dismount and string their bows, the clerics cast Bless and Magic Weapon, and then-

One of the biggest advantages of cavalry, second only to their strategic mobility, is how quickly they can cover ground when they're in a rush. There's only a handful of moments between when the suddenly-panicked lookout frantically shouts a warning at her arrival and when she and the lancers reach the lip of the depression. Laid out below them is a haphazard array of tents and makeshift shelters, each seemingly set without a single thought for the location of their fellows, and a few dozen men frantically scrabbling for weapons. There's a number of scythes and glaives, of course, but less so than usual for a group of cultists of this size; many of the weapons they're reaching for are instead crossbows, spears, swords, and daggers. There are not any demons immediately obvious.

Ky stays on her horse; her domain sense reaches far enough that there's no advantage to being on foot (she's not faster than a horse yet, and in particular isn't fully used to being faster than a normal person yet, though admittedly she's also not used to riding). Paper lance with a forked tip, aimed at pinning cultists to the ground so she can cocoon them, off-hand (she no longer has a real "off-hand") wielding the angel blade at anyone who attacks her or her horse from the other side.

Then she and her soldiers can ride them down! There's a horrible moment where one of them channels close enough to catch her in the radius, but while it's surprisingly painful for her it proves much more effective on their own comrades; some of them drop on the spot. One of her soldiers got knocked off his horse, but the enemy was unable to exploit this to go after him while he was down and he's able to gingerly get his feet back under him. Two of the horses, however, are dead; one from the channel, and another from a lucky hit from a glaive that cut straight through the spinal cord. There are no more cultists attempting to fight back.

She hops off her horse to go about tightening cocoons. "Is it worth dragging the dead horses back, do people eat them in this country?" she asks her second-in-command.

"I don't have much of a taste for it myself, it's leaner and tougher than I like. But in general, certainly."