Captain Alberico knew that he would die unremembered. After running away from his noble house at the tender age of sixteen, he had spent his meagre allowance on bribing himself into the lower ranks of the Valiant Vagrants, one of the many mercenary regiments under provisional contract with the iron crown. The fact that he had be severed from his noble lineage was so obvious that it didn't bear stating. There was no honor in being a mercenary, and he doubted that anyone in his family would bear to mention his name despite his fast (and profitable) rise to company captain over the last decade. No - even if news of his impending demise reached his family, he was sure that it would be filed to some quiet, unremarkable corner of his father's study to be gazed upon in faint disappointment rather than grief.

However, the disapproval of his family bothered him somewhat less than the fact that none of his beloved men would remember him either. Twenty paces to his left, he watched as a cluster of veteran handgunners convulse and fall as they stepped out of cover briefly to fire at the distant treeline. Like dozens more of his men laying dead in the grass around him, they had been transfixed by a cluster of shimmering disks for little more than an eyeblink. Alberico cursed, fired his powder handgun, and cursed again as he reloaded. He was the one who took the contract earlier that week, and he felt a crushing wave of guilt as he remembered boasting about his pay alongside the rest of his boys as they made brief stay in nearby Pinemoor. At the time, his confidence had seemed justified. The contract was a brief patrol through a rural farming town where there had supposedly been a rash of unexplained disappearances. The bulk of the work - if there was any work to begin with - would be done by the pair of knights that the Vagrants were assigned to accompany. They had certainly seemed competent as they boarded their massive mounts, each a hundred-ton monster of wrought iron and salvaged machine-flesh. Alberico had no doubt they would be more than a match for any brigand band or beast moldering a rural corner of the kingdom.