I hadn’t exactly become a Mercenary with the intent to one day lead my own company but that isn’t to say I never thought of such a possibility, years down the line. While my uncovering of the fake grave and the letter and money within added an extra impetus and provided half the fund necessary to at least register a mercenary company it did not necessarily advance the timetable for it.

Also, the cost involved in registering a company was only a fraction, admittedly a large one but still only a fraction of the total cost of actually setting one up. Never mind the fact that as a lowly corporal, I wasn’t aware of a third of the things involved in actually running a mercenary company.

At the same time, however, I was intrigued by it all and there and then decided to try for it as soon as possible. Whether the vault if it even existed contained nothing, nought but a near worthless personal memento of one man’s life, further instruction or Telondian knows what I was determined to find out. The outlines of a five plan quickly developed within my mind and while it needed further work and would no doubt face various revisions before its final goal was achieved I was more or less satisfied with it.

If the lieutenant survived he would take command of the Brothers n Arms Mercenary Company and one or more lieutenant positions would open up in the company. While the likelihood of me filling one of them was low I thought the position of Sergeant would be securable then in a year or two’s time a lieutenant’s position in the company or another if necessary. After another year or two, I would form my own company and proceed from there.

On the other hand, if the Lieutenant didn’t survive the company would likely follow and I would have to find a sergeant position elsewhere and take it from there.

An individual’s future is impacted by more than just his past and present you also have to figure in those of others and this as I stated earlier using different wording is what led me to become a mercenary in the first place. Before I go on with the story of my present or perhaps it would be better to refer to it as my recent past I would like to dwell on my past for a moment.

As stated when my father's employer Count Connor Mackle died his heir Rodger fired him but the reason for this wasn’t because of anything he had done, well not really. Rather it was due to an assumption and a promise not to correct this assumption. Now you might say a promise is easily broken and under the right circumstances even the best of men can do so, if the price of not doing so is too high, as long as they are willing to pay the impact it will have on their honour and self-image.

However, a promise backed up by a system or more precisely the system set up by Telondian is not so easily broken and the price is a hell of a lot higher and in this case, my father mustn’t have felt the circumstances called for breaking the promise he and others no longer living had made. His previous employer's heir had made this assumption based on a series of events and his interpretation of them.

Some of these events he had witnessed first hand and others he had only second or third-hand accounts to rely upon. Give the same information even I might have come to the same conclusions so I can’t really blame him for it. At the same time, I cannot stop myself from thinking about what he might have done to my mother if she hadn’t predeceased his father and thankful that he hadn’t gone further.

This assumption was that my mother was his father's bastard and he had forced his wife to employ her as a personal maid which had caused great anguish to her over the years. So much so that one of his father's knights had once challenged him to a duel and that perhaps it had later contributed to her early death.

The promise had been made to the heir's mother and you can guess the reality behind his assumption. My father had only told me this on his deathbed a year or so after his dismissal and only after I had made the same promise he had himself. At the time I had thoughts of one-day having revenge but I quickly dismissed them but I am sure that if my father's death would have been avoided if he had still been employed it would be a different matter.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Shortly before my father's death, we had developed the plan that lead to me making the two bets and securing the future of my brother and sister. He's on another planet far away from Talondia and she's a companion/chaperone to the third daughter of a baron.

As for me well I became a guard for a mid-ranking lord by the name of Sir Samuel Brookfield of Brookfield Manor and for a while, I was happy and content, then the son of his late first wife’s brother Sir Michael Fenwick of Red Wolf Manor died and suddenly the future of my employers eldest son Michael looked brighter. I and several other guards were quickly dispatched to escort his heir and the younger spare James to attend the funeral. While they were there it would have been important for them to create an opportunity for the elder to make a good impression on his now heirless uncle.

If things had gone well then it would have been likely that on down the line once the uncle died his namesake would have inherited Red Wolf and his younger half-brother Brookfield. Whether both would end up holding fealty for their respective lordships directly to the same Count as their father and uncle currently did or the younger would hold fealty to him indirectly via his elder was uncertain. It would depend on when or even if the elder advanced from an E Rank noble to a D Rank one or not. Yes, a feudal system in a world with a system like ours is a far more complex thing than in one without.

Well since I am now a mercenary you can imagine things did not go well. We were ambushed on the way by bandits or people disguised as bandits and I was lucky to get out of there with my life never mind that of my young charge James. My employer however thought otherwise and he promptly dismissed me and had me blackballed from working as a guard. I am sure an attempt to blackball me by a mere Lord would not have stuck so Count Rodger Mackle or someone else had to have backed him up. With the surviving brother not being related to the elder's uncle all hope of improving his family's circumstances had vanished so I kind of understand why he did what he did but I can never forgive him for it.

I tried countless times to find employment as a guard to a lord but to no avail. I had decided to try my hand at guarding merchant caravans or even ships when I got caught up in a dispute between two lords employing mercenaries. One of the companies involved was the Brothers n Arms Mercenary Company and the other was the Bloody Clock Mercenary Company. I stayed behind and once the dispute was settled in favour of the lord employing the Brothers I joined up with them as a private, becoming a bonded member of the mercenary guild in the process.

That was later in the campaign season and I was only involved in one month-long contract that year. During my first full campaign season with them, we were involved with four short-term contracts and one longer-term one and I experienced being captured by the enemy for the first and so far only time on the last contract of the season.

It was one of those thankfully rare three-way disputes between Lord Sir Richard Welke of Bantree, Lord Damien Falcurf of Holly Tree Court and Beatrice the Widow of Lord Sir Gerald Caster of Cuttington Hall. It had all started when Gerald had died owing the other two quite a bit of money with no real means of paying it back. They had both quickly set about trying to recoup something, the only way they felt was left to them, hiring mercenaries and raiding Cuttington in search of loot. Where the widow got the funds to hire us in turn and why the captain took the job in the first place I do not know and now with him dead probably never will.

Whatever the truth of it was, just two weeks into the job I had been sent on foot with corporal Pollock and two other privates to search for enemy patrols. We had orders for one of us to report back as soon as one was sighted. Well, we sighted not one but two sizeable patrols and both of them headed in the direction of the Manor and us right in the middle of them.

By all rights, we should have gone to ground and waited for them both to pass us by but Pollock was a by-the-books kind of guy and he ordered the other privates to quickly make their way back to the manor and report the sighting. That’s when things really began going down the toilet, not only were they spotted but also the corporal and myself.

Everyone else managed to get away but not myself, I caught my foot on an old rabbit hole or something and was promptly captured. I wasn’t tortured or anything, the mercenary guild has strict rules preventing this on most occasions. However, I wasn’t released until the dispute was settled five weeks later.

After my first full campaign season, I was promoted to corporal to replace Pollock who had gotten himself killed while I was a prisoner. I like to think I did a good job on the two contracts we did before this one but as they say on the mercenary path you are only as good as your last fuckup.

Our last contract had been a bandit eradication one that turned into the kind of gig that mercenaries both love and hate in equal measure. The bandits that had been plaguing our employer's lands for months simply vanished into thin air and we saw no action.

Enough of that time to get back to the present.