Joachim Mercenti

Joachim Mercenti is a human male from Araducia and a direct descendant of Holy Lord Maurice Mercenti. He was raised in House Mercenti, son of Warlord Darius and Lady Talaithe III, until the House was raided and destroyed by the enigmatic criminal syndicate known as Starhawk. He was kidnapped and sold into arena slavery in the Strongholds of the Northern Territories at the age of 11. At 17, he orchestrated rescue with the anti-slavery organization Calandus, based out of Marcellus, and joined their ranks to help stamp out forced slavery throughout Skylessia.

Summary
Joachim's personality swings wildly depending on which of two personae he's using at a given moment. Most see him as a hot-tempered and unlearned, illiterate berserker who hits things first and asks questions later. This is the facade he developed to prevent anyone from guessing his noble heritage and ensure his captors vastly underestimated his intelligence; his natural persona, on the contrary, is quiet, intense, and calculating, constantly weighing a situation and its possible outcomes and assessing those around him. He's not afraid to use people as tools to further his own ends and protect himself, and would rather use deceit over brawn if given the chance. Although he tries to avoid letting his allies come to harm if he can help it, he has no moral qualms with killing anyone who stands against him and would choose his own life over so-called friends; years of being forced to fight and kill for petty entertainment have crushed out mercy and compassion.

Appearance
Tall, broad-shouldered and well-muscled, Joachim is imposing at best and outright intimidating at worst. His angular face sports a squared jaw, thin lips and low eyebrows set over narrow blue eyes that seem stuck in a permanent vague frown. White hair runs in the family; his is more of a dirty gray, falling to the middle of his back, the trimmed ends uneven but kept neatly combed. Unruly bangs usually hang over one eye or the other, depending on which hand he last used to push them aside. He wears a knee-length crimson jacket rather than a shirt, left open in front to reveal the bandages wrapped around his torso which conceal old battle scars that never properly healed. When traveling or expecting combat, he adds a heavy black belt to hold a skinning knife, his short-handled iron axe, home-brewed poisons, healing salves, and whatever else he may need. A pair of bandoliers secure his pauldrons and hold his jacket partly closed where they cross his chest; his shepard and any equipment too heavy for his belt hang from these. A heavy spiked gauntlet and vambrace on his right arm serves for both offense and defense, and black trousers plus black knee-high leather boots with several buckles up the sides complete the usual ensemble.

Biography
Born into the lineage of Holy Lord Maurice Mercenti and his warlord descendants, Joachim had impossibly large boots to fill from the very start. Life as the descendant of a national hero from the Demon Wars set him apart, elevated him well above the common peasants and led him into a life of education in combat, statesmanship and an expectation of greatness that seemed to be largely based on his physical resemblance to the ancient paintings of the Holy Lord himself.

Even with this reputation to uphold, Joachim took it with good grace. He was a quiet child, but a thoughtful one, and even at a young age knew that the only way he was going to get out of his ancestor's shadow was to forge a name for himself. He applied himself to his education, but a deep-rooted resentment of the expectations set for him caused him to be as much of a troublemaker as he could manage without shaming his family or causing them to entirely lose their faith in his capacity to follow in his father's footsteps and become the next Warlord; he wanted to set himself apart from his ancestor's reputation, not ruin his own.

But life changed dramatically the day before a routine political visit to a neighboring territory in Araducia. His family's home was invaded by well-organized thieves who made short work of the guards. Joachim's parents, skilled mages in their own rights, did their best to escape while protecting their eleven-year-old son, but the last he saw of his father was to see him impaled on a wall by a sword; his mother, brought down and raped in front of him while his personal bodyguard was overwhelmed by the attackers. It was the last thing he saw before he was knocked unconscious and taken from the remains of his burning home.

He regained sense on the way to the Strongholds of the Northern Territories. Although he tried to escape, fear made him panic, and a few severe beatings knocked the will to fight out of him. He was brought to an informal arena of sorts, where he joined a number of other children and young teenagers who had been similarly torn from their homes and thrown into this hellhole to fight for nothing more than barbaric entertainment. It was a tremendous shock to the boy who had just days before gone from being concerned only with what petty annoyances might come of the latest meeting with the other warlords, to watching his direct family and home be ravaged before his eyes.

When training began, he was at first too traumatized to function. But several more beatings and a growing sense of frustration and hatred came to fuel him beyond the shock and despair. He picked a spare axe as his weapon of choice, and quickly found that those of his fellow trainees he couldn't overpower, he could outwit. Those he couldn't, he learned from. The first year of training wore on, with Joachim proving himself to be a capable fighter and taking every chance to find a means of escape. It proved beyond him. Nonetheless, he did learn one vital piece of information: The identity of his kidnappers. They were an underground organization known only by the enigmatic code-sign "Starkhawk," specializing in slave trade and blackmail and this arena's primary suppliers of combatants. Joachim wasn't certain what that entailed. On his second year, he would learn the hard way that it meant he would fight to the death against his fellow prisoners in front of a public audience to whittle down to the ones most capable to come out on top.

Joachim was appalled. At first, he refused; he had befriended some of these people over the past year and it horrified him to consider fighting them in such barbaric conditions. How could such a practice still exist in this day and age? But in the arena, when it came down to him versus his opponent, he locked his emotions behind a cold barrier and went to savage lengths to preserve his own life. Sometimes he had no choice but to kill. Other times, when his control slipped and he couldn't bear to take their lives, he crippled his opponents; realizing they would only be considered useless and put to death anyway stomped out the last shred of mercy he had left. This was a nightmare world. He couldn't escape it; the only way to cope was to kill his emotions and go with it.

By the end of that initial round, he was one of three deemed strong enough to join the arena's full ranks. He was tossed in with other, older prisoners, those with more experience, most of whom had lost their desire to get out. Joachim himself was on the borderline of despair. In a few weeks, he'd slaughtered most of those he'd come to consider as companions, if not necessarily friends; but he knew that a mistake had to come eventually. Given time, he would find an opening. This couldn't go on forever. Someone from Araducia had to have found where he was by now; his life and heritage were too important to simply be forgotten! Rescue or escape, even as his life of constant arena combat against humans and demons alike started in earnest, he held to that slim hope. He refused to end up like the men around him who'd had the spirit of life battered out of them.

Years passed, and Joachim grew, watching and waiting. He got taller and stronger, and began relying less on cunning and more on brute power to overcome his opponents; before long, he adopted the facade of the hot-tempered and unintelligent gladiator, putting on his best act to convince his handlers that he had regressed to the point of childish raw emotion and lost his penchant for creativity. They gradually bought into it. Only a select few choice allies, those who still had the spark and will to escape, knew the truth, and Joachim ensured they were trustworthy enough to go along with his ploy. After four years, he'd long ago ruled out rescue. If he was going to get out, it would be entirely on his own merit.

By age 17, the noble child was long gone, replaced by the calculating warrior. His intelligence was well hidden behind the false mask of a temperamental manchild, and it was this facade that at last gave him the opening he needed. A lapse in guard caused by careful arrangement of the pawns in the massive chess game the arena had become to his analytic mind gave him the narrow opening to snatch a sheet of paper, write down a message and hand it off to a certain prostitute. All he had to do from there was wait, and hope he'd played his cards right. Two weeks later, salvation came when a swarm of unidentified agents swept through the arena. Prisoners were released and given the option to leave and find safety or help fight; Joachim chose to fight. The entire slave operation was dismantled in a matter of hours, and the arena itself blasted to rubble by mages.

Joachim soon learned that he had been lucky enough to find an informant of this organization rather than an arena informant; previous attempts by prisoners before him had met with the instigator being put to death, the doxies that serviced the fighters normally employed by the arena managers and sworn to loyalty for a high paycheck. Now free at last thanks to his paranoia and cautious judgment in choosing those worthy of his trust, Joachim faced a decision: He could return south to Araducia and reclaim his heritage; he could join the other rescued prisoners and receive some aid from the organization to readjust to society and start a new life for himself; or he could join his rescuers and help to stomp out the rest of this operation.

To him, the choice was simple: He couldn't return to Araducia when his last memories were of his family being slain before his eyes, and he had grown too accustomed to constant battle to return to a life of peace after experiencing such atrocity firsthand. The only option that made any sense at all was to accept a place with his saviors to both prevent his story from repeating, and - more pressing to his mind - to find and personally crush his kidnappers and family's killers with the strength they had unwittingly given him.

He presently still lives in the Strongholds, where he maintains his fighting skill with the occasional demon hunting between missions to weed out the human corruption that seems much more pressing to his eyes than any threat by demons. He retains the persona of temperamental berserker to prevent anyone from making the connection to the missing Warlord's heir. His ancestor may have built a reputation as a demon slayer, but his influence had done nothing to stop humanity's cruelty in the future; Joachim is determined that's the superior path, and he fully intends to take it.