“Some people are just, like, it was as if the deities themselves *made* them for the purpose of war. These rare people would go on and become the storied generals and leaders of their times, lest they be the unfortunate ones who were struck down by fate in the prime of their lives.” - Milias Iylhab, Military historian from Levain, circa 607 FP.

Despite being the firstborn son of a Ducal Couple, Nestor Ambroglio da Nunez realized at an early age that courtly intrigue and the often-suffocating amount of formality nobles were regularly subjected to were not for him. He came to that realization when he received his first toy sword at four, and knew from that point onwards that he wanted to be a warrior more than anything.

It was not a decision well-received by his parents – his mother the Duchess had been sickly since young and couldn’t follow the family’s traditional martial training, while his father was a more typical “soft” noble from the south-west – but at the same time one that his grandfather greatly approved of. Nestor’s old grandfather had been a more traditional border noble, who fought on the front lines in his youth as a knight, and held little to no respect for the more “soft” kind of nobles from the inner regions.

Young Nestor took to his grandfather’s training regimen like a fish to the water.

During his time in the Royal Academy at Oleynuos – the place where young nobles were schooled in the various arts deemed necessary for them – he garnered a reputation for himself in two very different ways. On the one hand, he was considered a rural boor from the outskirts by many of the others, due to his poor knowledge in matters like poetry, dancing, debates, and the fine arts.

On the other hand, he also handed every single one of his detractors their asses on silver platters come sparring time.

Nestor was widely renowned to be the best swordsman in his generation of noble youths, while his scores in classes related to military tactics and strategy was always at the very top, an undisputed champion in those subjects. His only close rival and friend during his academy days was Andrea of house Utghwes from Dvergarder, with whom he shared a friendly rivalry that lasted to the present day.

All the people he humiliated back at the academy would have been horrified to learn that the sword was not even Nestor’s weapon of choice. He only had to resort to it because even a practice version of his favored weapon would have been too risky to use in spars.

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As he rushed together with his personal knights, with the First Legion of Algenverr all around them, men and women who had gone through his exacting demands and forged themselves into elites, Nestor felt nothing but exhilaration. He felt truly alive with the blood pumping through his veins while he ran – on foot, as Algenverr’s knights were typically used more as heavy infantry – together with his men, clad in armor no different than theirs, indistinguishable to anyone who doesn’t know what to look for.

He and the knights were right at the very front. They were the best of his soldiers, well armed and armored, and as such, had the best chance of breaking through the enemy formation. They were the point of the chisel, for which the First Legion formed the body and the hand holding it. Like a proper edge, they plunged through the enemy formation from the flank and kept going.

Nestor himself led from the front. They had already gone through the Warforged on the right flank of the Kolitscheian formation, and a short distance from them, directly ahead, was the center of the enemy formation. They were still engaged with the troops from Jonkver at that moment, while in the distance, their left flank was engaged with the rest of Algenverr’s troops.

Before he embarked on his assault, Nestor had sent a signal for the Fourth Legion at their rear to circle around and strike the enemy formation on their left flank, coordinating their assault with the Fifth Legion, in order to pincer the enemy forces between Nestor’s own offensive on the right flank and theirs. He calculated that the Fifth Legion must have started their own assault by then.

By that point of the battle, they would just be the final nail on this coffin the Kolitscheian army had been pushed into by their maneuvers.

With a loud cacophony of arms and armor clashing into one another, the knights and the First Legion of Algenverr crashed into the right flank of the Kolitscheian center. Their opponents reacted late, clearly not expecting their right flank, anchored by their fabled Warforged, to be defeated so swiftly. That allowed the Algenverrian assault to pierce deep into their ranks before they could even turn to face the new threat.

Together with his knights, Nestor was in the thick of the action. He wielded a shorter polearm that had a long spearhead at the top, a beak-shaped pickaxe-like spike on one side, and a hammerhead on the other, using the strange weapon with practiced moves. It was a skill born from countless hours of practice and spars, something he had done from his childhood days.

One of the Kolitscheian soldiers thrust a spear at the young Heir to Algenverr, but Nestor caught the shaft of the spear between his weapon’s hammerhead and spearhead, pushing it away with ease. He followed up the push by bringing his weapon down on a vicious swing, the beak-shaped spike on the other hand landing point-first on the opposing soldier’s helmet.

The pointed end of the weapon concentrated the force of the blow into a single spot and pierced through the metal plating of the helmet, digging deep into the unfortunate soldier’s brain.

A second soldier swung an axe at Nestor while he tried to extract his weapon from his dead opponent’s skull, but Nestor parried the blow with the shaft of his polearm. He then wrenched his weapon out using his whole body, sending it into a swooping arc that forced his assailant to defend himself. While the enemy soldier blocked the blow with his own weapon, he was unprepared when Nestor stepped in close and used the short spike at the butt end of his weapon to jab at his throat.