The Five Commanders of the Legion

The Legion does not have a chain of command in any ordinary sense. It has the tower, and it has whatever the tower leaves standing in a place it wants held. Those are the commanders: five individuals, one per territory, each of them left in charge of something the Legion needs and each of them ruined in a specific way by being left there.

Every one of them carries double the health of the ordinary trooper who would otherwise be standing on that level, and every one of them is the last level of their map. Beating a map means beating its commander. There is no way around them.

They get harder in order, and they get worse in order. By the time you reach the tower you have met four versions of the same warning.

The Legion’s quartermaster. He runs the mine and the factory that forge every weapon the Legion carries, and he has never lost a shipment. He fights in the red dust of the foundry floor, and he fights like a machine that has been told to work faster.

Crimson is the least changed of the five, which is the point of him. He was a quartermaster before the war and he is a quartermaster now. The Legion did not have to do anything to him. It just had to point him at a bigger order book.

Something went wrong in the forest. The Legion dumped its waste in the groves and the trees took it personally — the whole wood is sour now, and Blight walks it. He was the Legion’s chemist, and whatever he mixed into the soil is in him too.

He is the first commander who is genuinely hard to look at, and the first one whose fight feels personal rather than administrative. The difficulty steps up here and stays up.

Every ration the Legion eats comes out of one factory, and Glacier owns the recipe. She keeps the ovens running at a temperature that would kill an ordinary soldier, and she has not left the floor in years. Her blood runs cold enough to frost the glass.

She is the hardest commander before the frontier, and the fight is a long one — she is the first boss who punishes you for rushing rather than for playing badly.

Beyond the last outpost the land is rubble, craters and a sky the colour of a bruise. Void was posted out here to watch the horizon, and something out there watched back. He does not speak, and he does not stop coming.

Void is the hardest fight in the campaign outside the tower. He is the one people write in about, and the one that makes the run from three lives to none feel like a real possibility.

The Legion’s founder and its last word. He built the first foundry, wrote the first conscription order, and has run the war from his tower ever since. He is the largest thing the Legion has ever made and the only one of them that has never been beaten.

He is the eighth level of the fifth map. There is nothing after him.