Mercenary
He fights for whoever's paying — until one day, for reasons he won't quite explain, he doesn't.
The mercenary hero is the genre's professional violence on contract: a man with a sword, a company at his back, and a price for the work. Glen Cook's Black Company, Logen Ninefingers between allegiances, the assorted free swords of any Joe Abercrombie battlefield, Conan when the kingship hasn't found him yet — the archetype works because mercenary status puts the hero outside the moral economies of the genre's kings and orders, and forces every loyalty to be chosen, not assumed.
The appeal is the unsentimental competence and the slow turn. Expect grim battlefield realism, contracts gone bad, brothers-in-arms more real than any cause, and the deep satisfaction of watching a man who has sold his sword discover something he won't sell. The best of these books let him keep his cynicism right up to the moment it costs him. This is the archetype for readers who want their fantasy hero in it for the money — until he isn't.
- Grim battlefield realism
- Loyalty chosen, not assumed
- Brothers-in-arms over cause
- Cynicism that finally cracks
