WEAPONS: crossbows, sword, knives
OTHER EQUIPMENT: thingys
FIGHTING STYLE: something, something

something coming soon...

Scorch is good-looking and, to the annoyance of everyone who ever had the misfortune of meeting him, he knows it.
He is of average height, but he is fit, and thanks to his constant training, muscular in all the right places. He even moves with the confidence of a well-trained warrior. His skin is several shades darker than what could be considered white, but Scorch is not sure what kind of heritage he has. His hair is sun-kissed brown or blonde depending on the season or the lighting. (But it’s always a disheveled mess, regardless of season or lighting.) His eyes have a peculiar reddish-terracotta color—Scorch likes to think they make him look dangerous.
He has scars pretty much everywhere on his body. (Half of those cuts and injuries probably wouldn’t have left a scar if he hadn’t refused to go to the infirmary with them.) He has an earring in his right ear: it is made from a fang of the dragonwyrm he killed on his Masterhunt. It’s always a good conversation starter—especially with the ladies. There is also his golden tooth: he got into a barfight with a man about twice his size, and after the first punch (which knocked him off his feet), Scorch told the guy: "ya hit like a lil' girl!". He didn't say anything after the second punch, his mouth was full of blood. Worth it.
His signature grin rarely leaves his face; Scorch always looks like he’s only seconds away from saying something vulgar—and this assessment is usually correct.

doesn't know when to give up: No, literally. This is not a figure of speech with Scorch. "Giving up" is just not something he considers as an option in any given situation.

fear seems to be an foreign concept to him: Dangerous situations don't faze him, on the contrary, the rush of a hunt, that's what he lives for. Preparation is optional—improvisation is more fun anyway.

no pain tolerance: Scorch is not good with pain. Before the thrill fades away, he barely notices it; after that, however... well, he tries not to embarrass himself by acting like a child. He is not always successful.

tender like a gutpunch: One could call him honest... though most people would describe him as "incredibly rude". It requires conscious effort for him not to voice whatever nonsense is on his mind, and for him, most situations aren't worth this effort.

possesses the emotional awareness of an outhouse: Scorch is just not good at emotions. Not good at feeling them, and not good at expressing the ones that somehow still find their way to him. During his adolesence he was never allowed to freely express himself, and it shows. He prefers to avoid situations where feelings could possibly be involved.

does have a soft side: But if one spends the better part of his life being told it's a weakness to root out, he won't be all too keen on showing it off. And yet guess which tough guy finds time to visit the orphanage he grew up in every couple of months, just to bring gifts to the kids living there?

”Should've named 'im Roach, 'cuz the
bastard's refusing to die!”

Scorch doesn't remember his parents' faces. He doesn’t remember if they screamed as their flesh melted in the fire that devoured their home village, Xy, and erased it from every map of Nm.
After the blaze died down, many theories arose about its origins, but everyone—commoners, nobles, and knights alike—agreed on one thing: it was no natural fire. A natural fire doesn’t melt the stone foundations of houses. A natural fire doesn't burn for three days and three nights even after consuming every living and lifeless thing in its vicinity.
Only a handful survived the "Inferno of Xy". And, as if they all took an oath of silence, none of them ever spoke of the night when their world went down in flames.
Scorch doesn’t remember the fire after which he was named. No wonder—he was only around two years old when the knights found him among the charred ruins of a house, covered in soot but otherwise unharmed. He wasn’t crying. For the next few years, he didn’t make a sound at all.
He doesn’t remember, but sometimes, on lonely, moonless nights, the overwhelming smell of smoke creeps up on him, and in those moments, he can almost see white ash and cinders falling from the sky. It looks like snow.

Since Scorch’s true identity was never uncovered, and no wealthy benefactor descended from the high heavens to take him in, the boy was eventually placed in an orphanage. This orphanage was located in a peaceful monastery called Cape Credence, run by the nuns of the Darian Sisterhood.
For the first few years, the sisters thought he was mute. Then they wished he was mute. And, if possible, paralyzed as well. At least from sunset to sunrise.
During his time at the monastery, Scorch did everything in his power to test the sisters’ patience. There was, for instance, that time when he stole a bottle of red wine from the kitchen and climbed to the top of the bell tower to drink it in peace. He was around ten, and he hadn't anticipated that, after emptying the whole bottle, he’d be too drunk to climb down. In her fury Sister Margareth forgot all about her debilitating fear of heights and personally dragged Scorch back down.
Later, in his teenage years, Scorch had to help out a lot around the monastery. Most of the work assigned to him was physical labor that the aging nuns were too frail to do on their own. Turns out, he is a talented hunter, but a terrible cook. When his gruel gave the whole monestery severe food poisoning—well, he swears that he didn't do it on purpose! And he's sorry!
Overall, his childhood was a relatively happy one: he played with kids his age, and the sisters—although a bit too strict and a lot too religious—were always good to him.

In a particularly harsh year, when a devastating flood washed away all the monastery’s crops (and nearly its chapel as well), the sisters were unable to pay the protection fee owed to the Hunter’s Association (another branch of the Darian Order). And when the Hunters arrived to collect their due, they refused to leave empty-handed. They decided that if the sisters couldn’t pay in gold or produce, they would settle for labor instead. Ignoring the nuns’ protests, the Hunters selected a few of the older boys to take with them—the Association always had use for more servants.
Scorch was about fifteen years old when he was taken from the only home he ever knew.

It could have been worse. After being put into service, Scorch was provided with food and lodging, along with a few silvers here and there for his efforts. The work wasn’t that much harder than what he had been doing back at the monastery.
He could've lived his whole life like this. If the pay had been better. And if he could ignore the disdain in the Hunters' eyes. They didn’t treat him like a dog... mostly because they actually valued their hounds. Scorch wanted to wipe those condescending smirks off their faces. He wanted it so bad.
Eventually, the opportunity presented itself.
The First Hunt was an annual trial organized by the Association, whose results determined who got to become the next bunch of novice Hunters. To pretend they respected Darian’s teachings about equality among mortals, the Hunters allowed both nobles and commoners to enter. But everyone knew that the trial was just formality, and that commoners rarely became novice Hunters. Not because they lacked the necessary skills—it was an open secret that noble families rigged the trials, and got away with it.
This had been the norm for centuries. In recent times, the Association was made up almost entirely of the third and fourth sons of noble families, who had little use in the political scene but could still earn fame and recognition as Hunters.
The First Hunt always started on the day of the autumnal equinox, but the participants often arrived days or even weeks in advance—with their respectable families. These noble families swarmed the Association’s grounds like pests, forcing servants to work themselves half to death catering to their endless whims.
Scorch was just enjoying a rare few minutes of rest—leaning against the wall of the Association’s main building, smoking the cheapest tobacco one could find on the market—when one of those third sons approached him.
”Are you here to sign up too?” the boy sneered, seeing that Scorch was wearing a servant's uniform. He must have thought himself particularly clever when he added, ”Though, I assume, you would have to learn how to write first.”
On another day, Scorch might've ignored the cheap taunt, but not then and there. He’d been up before the sun and had hiked for two hours to fetch crystal-clear spring water for some noblewoman who refused to wash her face in anything else. Then he was reprimanded because the water warmed up on his way back. The whole fiasco happened before his workday even started. He had no patience left for this brat.
“Y’know what, ya asswipe? I am here to sign up.”
And then he did.

The trial was a three-day-long hunt, and the boys who brought back the largest kills over the course of it became novice Hunters.
The noble parents, to ensure their sons’ places, often planted deer or wolf carcasses on the hunting grounds for them to claim as their own prey, and bribed the Association to look the other way. So, the commoner kids had to abide by rules only applying to them, and they didn’t even have access to the fancy hunting equipment the noble brats were provided by their families. Moreover, Scorch, as a servant, had to work throughout the three-day trial, and only got to participate during his (very limited) free time.
That's why no one pretended to be surprised when, on the final day, sometime before sunset, Scorch walked out of the forest empty-handed... up until he shouted at them: “I can't bring the damn thing back! It's too big.” And to the horror of everyone present, he led them to the body of the biggest stag the judges had seen that year.
Of course, Scorch was accused of cheating, of stealing the kill of a more talented… more noble boy (several suddenly claimed to have shot the animal, including “asswipe” himself), but the evidence was undeniable: the poor-quality arrows, the only ones Scorch could afford, were still lodged in the stag’s body.
Nobles and Hunters were equally frustrated when they had to declare Scorch the absolute winner of the First Hunt. Not even a boy with a peasant’s name—a boy with no name at all! They were frustrated, but not too worried. Because commoner kids rarely became novices—but almost never lived to be initiated into the Association.

Those who only got into the Association solely because of daddy’s money dropped out within the first few years. Dropped out or dropped dead. The Hunters might have been corrupt, but they were just as demanding. They couldn’t allow some brat who can't differentiate between the sharp and the dull end of a sword to sully their reputation.
Of course, that didn’t mean Scorch was treated fairly. Far from it.
The hostility didn't stop with his peers: his instructors were no better. He was often punished for the smallest mistakes or blamed for misdeeds other novices committed. There wasn’t a week when he wasn’t involved in some kind of fight. He won some. He lost most.
After a while, he realized that if he was going to be punished either way, there was nothing stopping him from actually committing the offenses. If he was going to be in a fight anyway, he might as well throw the first punch. He got used to working three times as hard as everyone else for a third of the recognition. He got used to... being fucked over.
When the novices had to prove their survival skills by staying alive for weeks in the wilderness, Scorch was given faulty equipment. He noticed almost immediately that his food supply was moldy. His tent gave out on the second day in the middle of a snowstorm. He only survived because he stumbled upon a bear’s cave and took quick care of its previous resident. The smile froze on his instructor’s face when the novice, they sentenced to a miserable death, returned from the trial wrapped in a bear pelt worth a small fortune. Scorch was short on money then—and always has been since—but he never sold the pelt that made his instructors nearly choke on their tongues.
And when the remaining novices were gifted mounts, the others received trained warhorses from the Association’s own herd, while Scorch was given… a moose. It was played off as a joke, but he never received a non-joke mount. Well, after a lot of trial and error (and some fractured ribs), Scorch managed to somewhat tame the moose. He named her Pinecone because she ate a lot of… pinecones. The Hunters didn’t realize how intimidating a rearing, kicking, half-wild moose could be in the wrong hands until it was way too late.
Scorch was unstoppable, and even after being held back at every opportunity, at twenty-one years old he was ready to complete his Masterhunt.

His task for the Masterhunt was to kill a dragonwyrm that had been terrorizing northern villages. First, it ate their livestock. Then, their shepherds and lumberjacks.
Scorch knew that the Association never sends less than five Hunters to deal with an adult dragonwyrm. They sent him alone. They expected him to give up on the mission or die trying.
His Masterhunt was scheduled to wintertimes as a final act of “fuck you,” but it gave Scorch a stupid idea. Dragonwyrms were creatures of fire, making them bad—real bad—at swimming.
It took a few days to drill holes into the ice of a frozen lake, and baiting the wyrm to said lake was practically a suicide mission.
In the end, the stupid plan went a bit too well. The great beast thrashed around in the water as the ice caved in under its weight. And while struggling to stay above the surface, the wyrm managed to shatter the ice under Scorch too.
First, he almost drowned. Then, he almost froze to death.
Scorch doesn’t remember how he got to a nearby village in the delirious state he was in, but after a few days of rest and recovery there, he went back to the lake with a few villagers and fished out the wyrm’s carcass. Scorch let the villagers keep the valuable body of the beast—he only needed its head as proof.
When he got back to the Association, his higher-ups weren’t far from experiencing a full breakdown: they not only had to initiate a common-born nobody into their ranks, but they had also made him something of a local folk hero by sending him after a dragonwyrm alone.
His jealous peers did attempt one more assassination against Scorch, but they found his bed empty, as he was down in the nearby town, celebrating his new title with a girl or two.
He was initiated the next day.

Since the initiation ceremony, the higher-ups have been trying to ignore Scorch altogether, so he started taking the troublesome but low-paying bounties. He is steadily gaining popularity among the commonfolk.
The Hunters too are finally starting to realize how big of a problem this man could pose. And problems need to be dealt with.

”Y'know, sometimes I feel like
he's surviving purely outta spite...”