I know that our Sergeant is more competent than the three choices we left behind... but I don't know how much of a read on his character I can recall.
If you had chosen to explore Noringia instead of going to the officer's club with Elson, you would've met Lanzerel sooner. Perhaps the following dialogue from that alternate route might help you gain a better understanding of our senior NCO.
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You turn to see a tall, brawny man in his late twenties sporting some of the most impressive sideburns you have ever seen. He wears a rather ill-fitting Dragoon uniform and carries a lit torch in his right hand. He approaches with a brisk swaggering gait, a shotgun slung over his shoulder.
"Cornet Castleton, I presume?"
When you answer in the affirmative, he sketches a quick salute. "Sergeant Solhammond Lanzerel. Your captain told me to find you. Not safe to be doing that alone, not after dark. We've whipped most of these moose-shagging bastards well and good, but some aren't so easily cowed. A few of them still have it in their heads that their overlords may reward them if they draw a knife across one of our boys' throats every few days or so."
Suddenly, the alleys seem to have grown a lot more menacing. The town is now more than dark: it is in shadow. Every corner and every house seems more threatening now that there is the possibility of a hidden ambusher with a knife hiding in the shadow of every stray barrel or fence.
"If you don't mind, sir. I'll show you where the officers are billeted."
The two of you make idle conversation as you walk across town. You feel assured that while any lone idiot might attack a single unprepared Tierran, two soldiers armed with weapons and a lit torch would give any would-be assassin pause.
"I was one of the first men to land on Antari soil four months ago," boasts the Sergeant. "I'm — was, Second Battalion, Fourth Regiment of Foot."
Come to think of it, the man does seem less at ease with his uniform jacket than a sergeant with some years' service would have any right to be. If he had, up until very recently, worn the burnt orange of the line infantry, that would certainly explain his discomfiture.
"I've some advice to offer you lad, if you'll have it."
[X] "Of course!"
[] "If I need advice, I'll ask for it."
Lanzerel gives a rough grin. He stands up a bit straighter as he speaks.
"Alright lad, you want to stay alive out here, remember this: The Antari aren't hares on your father's estate. They aren't foxes, they aren't wolves, and no matter what they'd have you think, they aren't bears. They're folk: thinking, breathing folk, and we've just invaded their homeland."
Lanzerel takes a deep breath as he pauses for a moment, as if he were about to say something truly distasteful.
"We lost fifty men storming the heights outside the city, another thirty digging saps to the walls. When we finally led the King's army into the city, we left two hundred men dead behind us. There wasn't enough of Second Battalion left to reform into a company. They sent the officers back to Aetoria to put together a whole new battalion, and left the rest of us up here for the other regiments to gobble up. Some captain in your regiment was told I could handle a horse, so they gave me this jacket and told me I was one of them now."
You are quite shocked by the Sergeant's recounting of his regiment's woes. To have had a battalion of six hundred fighting men reduced to less than forty was not something you had expected out of a single minor assault against a decrepit castle town. Lanzerel sees your expression in the guttering torchlight, and his mouth hardens to a thin slash across his face.
"You're shocked. I can tell. You saw those pathetic walls. You can imagine how many guns our fleet trained on them. They weren't what did it. Those walls were breached three hours after we finished our siegeworks. Do you know what did?"
[X] "A hundred Church Hussars, with flaming swords in hand and angel wings unfurled, ready to sally?"
Lanzerel laughs, a short, barking and scornful thing. "Saints bedamned, you've got an imagination, lad! No. Not a single one of those damned Antari winged hussars was seen that day."
[X] "A perfectly placed ambush: by a dozen expert marksmen?"
Lanzerel shakes his head with a grim chuckle. "If only. That's what we'd come in expecting. If it'd been an ambush, we'd have flushed them out in minutes."
[X] "A powerful banecaster, eighth or ninth calibre, calling up lightning and flame?"
Lanzerel says something impolite under his breath and makes the sign of the Red Martyrs with one hand, an old folk tradition to ward off the scrying of powerful casters.
"No, sir, nothing like that. The Antari place even more value on baneblood than we do. Instead of just following the celestial mandate and all-hailing banebloods as lords, they actually set the most powerful casters as overlords over the most powerful fiefs. The most powerful baneblood we found in this town was all of six years old. We sent him south last month. He'll fetch a ransom, but not for being some sort of banecasting prodigy."
[X] "I have no idea."
Lanzerel shakes his head. "You've probably got two or three maybes dancing in your head: ambushing soldiers or Church Hussars or something. No, it was nothing like that at all.
[X] "The townspeople, given courage and aggression by the fact that they were defending their homes?"
Lanzerel nods, the pain in his face obvious. You feel as if you had just told your favourite schoolteacher that his wife was cheating on him.
"Aye, that's right, sir. It was the townsfolk. When we broke in, the few professionals guarding the city who hadn't already deserted pulled back to the castle. We didn't face no soldiers at that breach, or even at the walls."
Lanzerel pauses for a moment, gathering another breath.
"No soldiers, just folk, like the ones back at home. Tapsters, bakers, tailors, smiths; them and their wives and their children. Half the bloody town turned on us as we came through. They shot at us with heirlooms and hunting pieces, they hacked at us with saws and dirks and saints-damned eating knives. They threw stones and bricks and cobbles and anything else they could lay hands on and—"
You almost know what he is going to say next. You have seen the burned wreckage which stand as the sole remnants of much of the town, you remember the huddled remnants of the former populace, sheltering in the shadow of the shattered walls.
"We killed them, damn near as many as we could, and they killed us. By the time we cleared the breach and the rest of the army came through, there was barely anybody left standing, under our colours or theirs."
Suddenly, the narrow street along which you and Lanzerel were walking along opens to a great mass of darkness. The town square, which had seemed so open and inert that afternoon, now seems a roiling expanse of vengeful shadows. You step along briskly as the chill night wind tugs at your jacket. Lanzerel pays it no notice, having long since grown used to this cold and bitter country.
"Lad, if you forget everything I've told you today, remember this: the Antari will fight us every step. Every single one of them will fight us if they've half the chance. Man, woman or child, they come at you with a blade or musket, you don't hesitate. You cut them down. If you've a soft heart, you have no place in this war or any other."
The Sergeant stops in front of a large stone building. "Here we are, just go through the door. G'night, sir."
With that, Lanzerel snaps off another salute and waits for you to return it before leaving you at the entrance to what you assume must be the impromptu officer's barracks.
