Standing Eight

*“Outta the way, it's my birthday.”*— Standing Eight
**Eight** (Japanese "*八さん*", *Hachi-san*) was the a wandering sellsword who would later be recruited into the Company. He was frequently drunk and belligerent, but was an expert at close-range combat.

## History

### Early Life

Born without a name to a town drunk and a courtesan, Eight was practically raised at the mercy of his hometown. He would learn to perform all sorts of odds and ends for food as he grew older, going from assisting in farming as a child to helping the local smiths and builders as a teenager. He also learned to fight from a very young age, settling disputes and driving off theft with his fists, helping him harden his physique even further. This, combined with his abusive upbringing, lead to the development of quite the nasty temper. Naturally, he attracted the attention of people looking for enforcers.

Setting out into the wider world, his wide array of applied skills saw him pay his way across the Sanzian Archipelago, working wherever honest hard labor (and perhaps some violence) was needed. In his times at sea, he saw much of the cruelty of pirates performed on innocent locals. As the Helu Empire had conquered and unified Sanzi at the time, there wasn't much to be made in legal law enforcement, a line of work taken up mainly by nobility. Seeing few other meaningful options, he decided to cast his lot in with mercenary guilds across the country. With the unique skill of being able to craft custom armors and weapons from scrap metals, he made a name for himself and was able to cast his lot in with many fighting bands. Through the prime of his life, he fought with the hope of making serious progress against the pressing pirate hordes.

At the same time, Kaisha Lan, a former Imperial concubine, had managed to establish dominance over other pirate bands, finally managing to command them all under the banner of Blue Company. Unable to contend with her fleet, Sanzi was forced to pay tribute to her and overlook her heinous acts. Eight was infuriated by this, taking it upon himself to lead several mercenary clans in assaults on pirate camps. To his dismay, he would repeatedly find himself the only survivor of these battles, due to his combined hardiness, personal skill, and largely ineffective leadership. Disillusioned, he retired from fighting alongside others, and moved along the coasts of Vista as a lone enforcer.

For the length of his thirties, he traveled along the coasts of al-Hikman, selling himself as a hardened mercenary. Becoming a quagmire of small city states after harsh sacking by the roaming Sanzi armies a couple generations prior, there was much in the way of work for soldiers of fortune in this region. However, Eight found his most lucrative years working under an up and coming merchant king, known to his friends as Usu. Though he did not have his own lands and cities to speak of, Usu managed to become influential solely through controlling armies from behind the scenes, and reaping the profits from it. Eight, already losing his optimism and discarding previous scruples, learned much in the way of manipulating his enemies in his time working for the Merchant King.

Crossing over into his forties, Eight avoided the disputed Cynedom-Eucaria coastline, and settled in the booming Cynedomian port city of Mifune. Finding his niche, working for both sides of the warring merchant families there, he had become complacent simply wasting away the rest of his years spending his mercenary stipend on booze.

### Vistan-Haze Crisis

Eight was an instrumental part of the defeat of the Haze.